'Enraptured by the versioning bug,' Robert Sheppard confesses of
his virtuosic variations of Petrarch's third sonnet, 'I was off on
one.' With comic verve, he deftly refunctions some of the finest
sonneteers, Petrarch himself, and those of 'The English Strain':
Wyatt and Surrey, 'the first reformers' of English poetry, and John
Milton, exemplary political poet. None is safe from Sheppard's
comedic appropriations of their works and days. Wyatt spies for a
British foreign office that fluxes between the Henrician court and
Tory high command. Surrey is a chinless wonder of aristocratic
chivalry, the marvel of the French killing fields (and Norfolk
dogging sites). Mordant humour and irony continue in Sheppard's
'trans translations': of Charlotte Smith, the Petrarch of Petworth,
witnessing strange happenings on the Downs, and Barrett Browning,
Mistress Elizabeth of her Wimpole Street penthouse and the clued-up
'mistress' of a clownish politician. The dominant satirical theme,
the national strain surrounding that once novel word 'Brexit', is
almost picked up casually in the sequence 'It's Nothing', where
Sheppard delicately and deliberately fails the attempt to speak in
his own voice. He's more at home in his homemade 100-word sonnets,
as he nails Brexit in a neat couplet: 'they've got our country back
for us/ and now they want it for themselves'. As you read this
book, be warned: between poetic worlds, between sonnet and
transposition, big laughs and little truths are lying in wait for
you. Tom Jenks wrote of some of the sequences in this book:
'Sheppard here expands further the boundaries of translation, the
transposition of historical events to contemporary circumstances
being not just incidental to the translation process, but an act of
translation itself.' Geraldine Monk in The Robert Sheppard
Companion informs us: 'Sheppard's writing is rough, rude, quirky,
serious, learned, and never afraid to be humorous. In short it is
as irreverent as it is relevant.'
General
| Imprint: |
Shearsman Books
|
| Country of origin: |
United Kingdom |
| Release date: |
February 2021 |
| Authors: |
Robert Sheppard
|
| Dimensions: |
229 x 152 x 9mm (L x W x T) |
| Format: |
Paperback
|
| Pages: |
136 |
| ISBN-13: |
978-1-84861-746-9 |
| Categories: |
Books
|
| LSN: |
1-84861-746-1 |
| Barcode: |
9781848617469 |
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