Thursday 31st March at 6.30 (till 8.00) in E21 at Edge Hill University, Ormskirk, Lancashire L39 4QP

The OULIPO writers have been fascinating readers for many years now, whether through the novels of Italo Calvino or the masterpieces of Raymond Queneau, the teasing novels of George Perec or the poems of Jacques Roubaud.  Experimenting with constraints (‘Write a novel without using the letter e’ or replace every noun with the seventh word after it in the dictionary’, through to complex mathematical systems) they have been slowly changing the way much mainstream writing is written. The results are often hugely funny.

The main practitioners are French and it is appropriate that the best British writer to follow this school is also one of its most adept translators into English.  Now Philip Terry will be visiting Edge Hill for the first time to talk about his versions of Shakespeare’s sonnets. This hallowed work of literature is ransacked and re-written before our eyes. Come and see Philip read from, and talk about the work.

Philip Terry was born in Belfast in 1962. He has taught at the universities of Caen, Plymouth and Essex, where he is currently Director of Creative Writing. His fiction, poetry and translations have been widely published in journals in Britain and America. His books include the celebrated anthology of short stories Ovid Metamorphosed (Vintage, 2000), Fables of Aesop (Gilliland Press, 2006) and the poetry collection Oulipoems (Ahadada, 2006). In 2008 Carcanet published his acclaimed translation of Raymond Queneau’s Elementary Morality. His latest Carcanet collection Shakespeare’s Sonnets was published in 2010.

Sonnet 18

Shall I compare thee to a Smirnoff ad?

Thou art more shimmering, more full of zap;

Icy winds do freeze the Russian steppes,

And vodka’s high hath all too short a date:

Sometime too cold the eye of Yeltsin shines,

And oft is his bleached complexion dimmed;

And every drunk through drunkenness declines,

By cancer of the liver or septicaemia untrimmed:

But thy eternal glimmer shall not fade,

Nor lose possession of that zip thou ow’st,

Nor shall death brag thou sup in his shade

When in immortal lines like these thou glowest:

So long as men can drink and take a piss,

So long lives thine in this.

See also his anthology of English language Oulipo-influenced work at http://ekleksographia.ahadadabooks.com/issuethree/