In Eugene OstashevskysThe Feeling Sonnetshis fourth collection of poems words, idioms, sentences, and poetic conventions are dislodged and defamiliarized in order to convey the experience of living in a land, and a language, apart. The book consists of four cycles of fourteen unrhymed, unmetered sonnets. The first cycle asks about the relationship between interpretation and emotion, whether we feel the feelings that we call ours. The second cycle, mainly composed of daughter sonnets, describes bringing up children in a foreign country and a foreign language. The third cycle, called Die Schreibblockade, German for writers block, talks about foreign-language processing of inherited historical trauma, in this case the siege of Leningrad from 1941 to 1944. The fourth cycle is about translation. The sonnets are followed by a short libretto, commissioned by the Italian composer Lucia Ronchetti, about Ravels interaction with Paul Wittgenstein over thePiano Concerto for the Left Hand.

Format: Paperback
Published: USA, 2022
Publisher: New York Review of Books
Pages: 105
Language: English
ISBN 10: 1681377020
ISBN 13: 9781681377025