The Feeling Sonnets are written in an English that is translingual
not only because it engages other languages but also because it
reflects upon itself in uncertainty as if it were the work of a
language learner. Words, idioms, sentences, poetic conventions are
made strange, dislocated, recontextualised to convey some of the
linguistic effects of the migration experience, the experience of
non-nativeness. The book includes four cycles of fourteen unrhymed,
unmetered, logically Petrarchan sonnets. The first cycle asks about
the relationship between interpretation and emotion: whether 'we
feel the feelings that we call ours'. The second, mainly composed
of 'daughter sonnets', describes bringing up children in a foreign
language. The third, 'Die Schreibblockade', German for writer's
block, talks about foreign-language processing of inherited
historical trauma. The fourth cycle is about translation. A
libretto commissioned by Italian composer Lucia Ronchetti follows,
about Ravel's interaction with Paul Wittgenstein over the Piano
Concerto for the Left Hand. Gwyneth Lewis writes, 'Eugene
Ostashevsky is a multilingual language explorer. His The Feeling
Sonnets are an exhilarating and witty enquiry into the designs that
language has on us as intellectual, domestic and historical beings.
This is poetry as punning philosophy, both entertaining and deeply
serious. This book is a tour de force, turning languages'
spotlights onto speech itself. Yet again, Carcanet is publishing
important poetry.' Born in Leningrad, Ostashevsky grew up in
Brooklyn. He is now based in Berlin and New York. In his last full
book of poetry, The Pirate Who Does Not Know the Value of Pi,
published by NYRB Poets, discusses migration, translation, and
second-language writing as practiced by pirates and parrots. His
previous book, The Life and Opinions of DJ Spinoza, published by
Ugly Duckling Presse in Brooklyn, examines the defects of natural
and artificial languages.
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