from 33 Sonnets Flattened

Frédéric Forte's 33 sonnets plats, which I've translated as 33 Sonnets Flattened, is a classically Oulipian text, composed of thirty-three flattened sonnets squeezed horizontally on the page rather than displayed vertically. Forte explores the potentiality of one of the oldest western poetic forms and achieves linguistic feats only possible in a flattened space, where meter is pushed aside in favor of an intricate and changing rhyme scheme. The fourteen lines are separated by dots or slashes indicating a sonnet's traditional two quatrains and two tercets, and Forte concentrates only on rhyme, recreating what a sonnet is or has the potential to be. Forte has compared this book to freeze-dried food that expands and takes on its true shape in water—his sonnets take on their full potential when they're read by a reader who recognizes the classical form within the flat space. The difficulty in translating 33 sonnets plats comes from this fidelity to a rhyme scheme that demands a certain musicality, a playfulness that can't be forced, and that loses all power if it comes off as unnatural.

I had to figure out what my goal as a translator of 33 sonnets plats really was. I wanted to preserve the musicality and flow, not necessarily to keep the same words or lines, but to prioritize the rhyme and only that, and let everything else fall into place after. My justification for this is that, for the most part, Forte was not thinking about his lines, about what they would mean to the reader, about what his poem would communicate to its audience. Instead, he often let the rhyme scheme guide him and choose his words for him, and so I had to do the same.