The Feeling Sonnets

by Eugene Ostashevsky

Slyly funny, inventive, and virtuosic, this new collection from a Russian-American master challenges poetic convention and explores themes of alienhood, translation, and human emotion.

In Eugene Ostashevsky's The Feeling Sonnets, his 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 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 writer’s block, talks about foreign-language processing of inherited historical trauma, in this case the Siege of Leningrad of 1941–1944. The fourth cycle is about translation. The sonnets are followed by a short libretto, commissioned by the Italian composer Lucia Ronchetti, about Ravel’s interaction with Paul Wittgenstein over the Piano Concerto for the Left Hand.

Genres: Poetry

96 pages, Paperback

First published October 4, 2022

About the author

Eugene Ostashevsky is a Russian-American writer, poet, translator and professor at New York University. Ostashevsky was born in Leningrad and then immigrated with his parents to the United States when he was 11 years old where they settled in New York City.

Ostashevsky has a PhD from Stanford University.

His poetry collections, The Pirate Who Does Not Know the Value of Pi and Feeling Sonnets, are published in the NYRB Poets series.

He selected and translated the poems in Alexander Vvedensky's An Invitation for Me to Think, also in the NYRB Poets series, and translated The Fire Horse: Children's Poems by Mayakovsky, Mandelstam, and Kharms, published in the NYRB Kids series.

Reviews

[Michael Reffold · Rating 2 out of 5]

Started out really strong but quickly became tedious, impenetrable and almost incomprehensible to me. The first section was by far the best in my opinion. By the last two, the concept was tired.

[Tom · Rating 5 out of 5]

Lots of word play and puns, more for drawing out the multiple meanings a single word may have, depending on context, than trying to be comedic, especially for a poet who, with his parents, left behind (maybe not so much) the horrible legacy of the Soviet regime. Or, perhaps better stated, the comedic is the flip side to the tragic—the two are inseparable. Punning and word play a la Groucho Marx meets Gertrude Stein, demonstrating the permutations that even the most basic vocabulary is subject to about life, what poetry tries to do, and his daughters—the basics of a transplanted poet finding toe-holds in his new language and how it shapes thought.

For more of my reviews, please see https://www.thebookbeat.com/backroom/...

[Translator Monkey · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ostashevsky's book 'The Feeling Sonnets' will not be for everyone, and I think he understands that going in. But man, when it connects with the targeted reader, it never lets go. Damned whimsical and incredibly insightful in the use of wordplay and puns across the English, Russian, and German languages, comparing and contrasting similar words in each to drive home his point, over and over. This has got to be in my top ten for the year.

[Anton Relin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ostashevsky is, in my opinion, the best living poet. But that’s probably because my narrative of life closely followed his narrenschiff

[Salty Swift · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's all fun and games and semantics and verbiage....until someone gets offended.

[Annette · Rating 5 out of 5]

His poetry always makes me laugh in the most unexpected ways. Really enjoyed the translation sonnets. Wish I knew Russian and German to fully appreciate it, but it's a great read nonetheless.