Migration and Mutation: New Perspectives on the Sonnet in Translation

Spanning four centuries from the Renaissance to today’s avant-garde, Migration and Mutation explores how the sonnet has evolved in and out of translation.

Contributors examine little-studied translation trajectories in the early modern period, such as the pivotal role of France between Italy and England or the first German sonnets and their Italian, French, Dutch and Scottish origins. Essays then shed new light on major European sonneteers In the 19th and 20th centuries, including Shakespeare, Keats, Yeats, Rilke and Pessoa, alongside lesser-known contemporaries and with novel approaches. And finally, contributors explore how translation and adaptation create metaphorical space in the 21st century.

Migration and Mutation also pays attention to the political or subversive dimension of the sonnet, with essays on women, gay or postcolonial reclaimings of the sonnet and recent experiments such as post-Soviet Sonnets on shirts by Genrikh Sagpir. It takes the sonnet out of the confines of enclosed national traditions bringing it into renewed contact with mostly European, but also other, cultures.

Carole Birkan-Berz is Associate Professor of Literary Translation at the Sorbonne Nouvelle, France. She has published widely on the contemporary English sonnet and on poetry translation. Her most recent edited book is Translating Petrarch’s Poetry: L’Aura del Petrarca from the Quattrocento to the 21st Century (2020).

Oriane Monthéard is Associate Professor of Translation and British Culture and Literature at the University of Rouen-Normandie, France. She has also translated many works of contemporary poetry including Stephen Rodefer and Ron Padgett as part of the collective Double Change.

Erin Cunningham has recently completed a PhD on the sonnet in modern and contemporary Irish poetry at King’s College London, UK.