The Translation of Repetition in Shakespeare’s Sonnets

Abstract

While formal features constituting the outer form of the poem in Spanish, such as the stress pattern or the rhyme, are usually the most evident to the reader and may be particularly relevant to the translator, other mechanisms based on repetition are essential in the rhythmic configuration of the poem. Based on a corpus of sixty-two Spanish translations of Shakespeare's Sonnets, this article analyses how anaphoras, alliterations and parallelisms have been translated and highlights the significant role that some of these figures play in the target poems.