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 writers 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 Ravels 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.
Eugene Ostashevsky is a Russian-born American poet and translator. He was born in Leningrad, grew up in Brooklyn and is now based in Berlin and New York. His last full book of poetry, The Pirate Who Does Not Know the Value of Pi, was translated into German and won the 2019 International Poetry Prize of the City of Muenster. Ostashevsky teaches at the Liberal Studies program at New York University; he has also served as the Siegfried Unseld Visiting Professor at Humboldt University; the Dorothea Schlegel Writer-in-Residence at Free University, and as a DAAD Berliner Künstlerprogramm fellow.
* The first UK publication of this award-winning Russian-born American poet and translator * Deeply serious and yet highly entertaining, these translingual poems explore the effect of non-native language on emotion and experience * Poetry that engages with other languages but also reflects upon itself - words, idioms, and sentences are recontextualised to convey the experience of non-nativeness * Includes four sonnet cycles dealing with the relationship between interpretation and emotion; bringing up children in a foreign language; foreign-language processing of inherited historical trauma; and translation
