Put Shakespeare at a Party

Translation Essay From Notes on the Sonnets By Luke Kennard

Abstract

In the fall of 2021, Luke Kennard (Kingston Upon Thames, UK, 1981) won the Forward Poetry Prize with the book Notes on the Sonnets. The book counts nine sections for 154 poems establishing undefinable relationships with Shakespeare’s sonnets referred to in the book title. The poems appear to be prose not properly “poetic”: the influences of the New York School, of Language Poetry, of Prose en prose are evident, but Kennard detaches himself from these movements to find his own way to contemporary prose poetry through a strong use of irony and surreal. After the foreword, Carlo Londero's essay gives with the Italian translation of the first section of Notes on the Sonnets, followed by the schematic and precise translation notes giving back readers the translator’s choices and the necessary or stylistic divergences from the original poems, as well as the textual samplings from Shakespeare's Sonnets dissected in Kennard's Notes.