40 Sonnets by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 0000000000000
Published: 2021-10-24T17:59:37+00:00

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I ascertained that this reverse translation had been made by some chap who mostly worked on software manuals. The rendering as prose and consequent loss of my immaculate alexandrines I could have foreseen, but as far as I could recall, my original sonnet bore no relation to this poem in any way whatsoever. However, what animated me most at the time – I now find this hilarious – was its facile mise en abîme, and its rather blokey and ludic tone, given I’d quit doing that sort of thing fifteen years ago. And then the real horror began. A friend alerted me to the fact that someone had submitted this garrulous bullshit to some magazine in my name. When I wrote to the editor to protest, she angrily referred me to three other journals where ‘The Version’ had also appeared, each time in a completely different form: one is violently pornographic, and directs the reader towards a number of illegal sites on the dark web; another accuses (in virulently anti-Semitic terms) another poet, by name, of fucking his own sister; another yields an acrostic insulting the prophet Mohammed … My increasingly hysterical protestations fall on deaf ears. Within a week, I hear that I have been dropped from several reading lists, that a Nobel laureate is suing me for plagiarism, that a series of public readings has been cancelled … Now my work is returned from journals unopened, my agent has dropped me, and yesterday I received an email from my publisher saying under the current circumstances we cannot in all conscience continue to support your work. While I dwindle, ‘The Version’ proliferates. I am writing this in the cupboard below the stairs, and the banging on the front door has stopped; I think they are in the house now. A yard away, a man with a voice I half know has just spoken my name. I cannot let him hear me breathe.

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