Alex Cocker’s Say, Spirit presents translations of Michelangelo’s sonnets, but with a catch: each sonnet is translated three times by three invented heteronyms, getting progressively queerer in the process. With its lyrical, funny, tender and intellectually playful performances of voice and translatorship, Say, Spirit probes the “trans” in translation through an investigation of language-in-motion’s resistance to binary structures of thought and identity. Alongside the sonnets themselves – each presented in the original Italian and in three different Englishes – Cocker’s mock-scholarly prefaces and “Footnotes from the Plato” look beyond the transgressive circulations of translation to encompass paratextual games, Michelangelo’s androgynous sculpture, and the queering of language itself.
Printed in Bristol in collaboration with local risograph studio 16 Tonne Press on recycled Malago white with transclear inners. Cover letterpressed on recycled Bier Weizen card using an Adana 8x5. Each of Tara Lee’s four linocuts, based on Sophie Cocker’s illustrations of Michelangelo’s sculpture, feature on the cover of 25 copies. The four editions are called, therefore, Night, the Libyan Sibyl, the second Ignudo, and the Dying Slave.
Bios: Alex Cocker recently completed a doctoral thesis on the representations of non-binary genders in modernist literature at the University of Sheffield, and they show absolutely no signs of moving anywhere else anytime soon. Say, Spirit (Girasol Press, 2021) is their first collection of poetry, but more is underway. When they are not writing, they might frequently be found cooking, climbing, or pretending to be other people.
Dan Eltringham is a scholar, poet and translator based between Bristol and Sheffield currently working on a comparative project, Translating Resistance. His monograph, Poetry & Commons, is forthcoming with Liverpool University Press and his poetry and translations have appeared in a range of journals and anthologies. A chapbook of his translations from Alonso Quesada’s Scattered Ways was published by Free Poetry (Boise, 2019) and his poetry collection Cairn Almanac was published by Hesterglock Press (Bristol, 2017). With Leire Barrera-Medrano he co-edits Girasol Press, a small publisher that explores handmade poetics and experimental translation.
Girasol Press (www.girasolpress.co.uk) is a (very) small publisher interested in experimental and collective approaches to translation, and the tactility and radical slowness of book-arts and antiquated print technologies (such as their trusty Adana 8x5). Recent publications include Say, Spirit, Sheffield-based poet Alex Cocker’s experimental translations of Michelangelo’s sonnets, which tease out questions of androgyny, queer desire and the “trans” in translation, and Jukub: Poems from Chiapas for the Reverse Conquest, a trilingual volume of poems in the Indigenous Mexican languages Ch’ol and Tsotsil, as well as Spanish and English. The next Girasol title will be Desde la cárcel / Inside, translations of prison poetry, letters and drawings by Argentinean political prisoners held during the military junta.