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Shakespeare's Sonnets

The author has a long-standing cross-cultural engagement with the research and writing of Oulipo ('Ouvroir de littérature potentielle') in Paris. The group’s innovative poetics exploring constraint, mathematics and permutation, intertextuality and new forms of experimental and homolinguistic translation, has been largely neglected by mainstream Anglo-Saxon poets and fiction writers alike, though traces of it can be found in the work of Iain Sinclair, Tom Raworth, and Christine Brooke-Rose. Terry’s work in general aims to explore and develop the potential of Oulipian writing in English with a view to “making it new”, in Ezra Pound’s phrase. Taking its cue from Oulipo’s research on homolinguistic translation, and their variety of transforming techniques, this book transforms Shakespeare’s sonnet sequence using methods from the “chimera” (where a text is collaged with others) to “updating”. (A full list of techniques is given in the afterword). The book’s originality consists in part in the way in which it draws on avant-garde poetic traditions parallel to but outside Oulipo (from Pound to language poetry), and in part in the scale of the enterprise: here a whole book is translated, leaving many of the Shakespearean themes intact, but refracted and reflected through contemporary culture.