MESSAGES OF W. SH.
MESSAGES OF W. SH.

Summary/Abstract: Each of the five poems from Gyula Kodolányi’s Messages of W. Sh. is titled by a corresponding number from Shakespeare’s sonnets, and in Messages, phrases from Shakespeare’s sonnets recur both in Shakespeare’s English and in Kodolányi’s Hungarian translations. Kodolányi’s Hungarian sonnets are seeded by these translations from which the Hungarian poetry grows. Or, to change the metaphor, as Shakespearean English and phrasing recur in Hungarian, they offer an impulse or pneuma, a spark that gleams in the verse. “Sparks gleam in me”, Kodolányi writes near the beginning of Messages.

• Details
• Contents