translation is this lament: you are so far from me—

In celebration of the release of Telephone Journal’s first full-length book, The Sonnets, we’re featuring Uljana Wolf’s translation of William Shakespeare’s Sonnet 61.

From the introduction to The Sonnets, edited by Sharmila Cohen & Paul Legault:

“In this anthology… we have invited 154 poets to each translate one [of Shakespeare's] sonnet from English to English. Of course, we are aware of the many translations of Shakespeare’s works into modern English… We also want to offer a new and contemporary understanding of Shakespeare, but something beyond that of simply breaking through the boundaries of an ever-changing lexicon—our hope was that the contributors would approach the original texts from their multitude of vantage points, that they would board the ship, loot and pillage, break things down, and reconstruct it all in a fashion that would allow us to view multiple dimensions of the original work in a new light, as a new structure.”

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