Rome's Wreck
Translated from the English of Edmund Spenser's Ruines of Rome
Description:... In Rome's Wreck, Irish poet Trevor Joyce "translates" Edmund Spenser's earlier English translation of Joachim du Bellay's Les Antiquités de Rome [1558] as The Ruines of Rome [1591]. Rather than an interlingual translation, Joyce's is a translation from one English into another, subject to a singular constraint: that it be completely done over into monosyllables. The result is a colloquial yet uncanny undoing of Spenser's work and a postmodern meditation on fame and mortal decay.
Show description