A Waste of Shame
A Waste of Shame

Summary/Abstract: This is a study focusing on six topological variants of William Shakespeare’s Sonnet 129; the concept of “topologies of culture” is borrowed from George Steiner’s After Babel, and refers to all kinds of transformations that a text – a cultural artefact for that matter – can go through, as a result of various perspectives upon it; topologies thus include paraphrase, translation, parody, burlesque, lampoon, pastiche, adaptation, imitation, parallelism, etc. Our six (types of) variants are: the original sonnet proper, a film that takes its title from the first line, a translation – in fact, two versions – into modern English, a prose translation into Romanian, criticism on the sonnet (five approaches), a Romanian literary version, and its re-translation into English; all together (and many other potential ones) are supposed to provide a complex picture of the meanings that can be extracted from the original.

• Details
• Contents