Say, Spirit launch: watch here

 

Revisit the launch of our first full-length poetry collection: Sheffield-based poet Alex Cocker’s translations of Michelangelo’s sonnets, but with a catch: each sonnet is translated three times by three invented heteronyms, getting progressively queerer in the process. With its lyrical, funny, tender and intellectually playful performances of voice and translatorship, Say, Spirit probes the "trans" in translation through an investigation of language-in-motion's resistance to binary structures of thought and identity. Alongside the sonnets themselves – each presented in the original Italian and in three different Englishes – Cocker's mock-scholarly prefaces and "Footnotes from the Plato" look beyond the transgressive circulations of translation to encompass paratextual games, Michelangelo’s androgynous sculpture, and the queering of language itself. 

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