Geneze překladu čtyř Shakespearových sonetů

Drawing on its author’s Czech translation of nearly seventy poems from Shakespeare’s sonnet cycle, which lies at the very crux of the European literary canon, this paper shares a few insights into the workshop of a classical poetry translator. It explores the phonetic, structural, semantic and imaginative complexities of the most frequently translated sonnet sequence, and shows, step by step, the way a translator has to deal with the various features of Shakespeare’s poems if one’s translation is not to lose its poetry. Thus, the translator’s decision making process is discussed here, showing multiple examples of how the Czech rendering of Shakespeare’s individual lines have evolved to form a quatrain, a couplet, or, as in the case of sonnet 64, the complete poem. In a broader sense, the paper argues against the popular remark by Robert Frost that “poetry is what gets lost in translation”.