Shakespeare William.Sonnets = Sonnets.Lviv, 1998

“Unrequited beauty is a mournful death, / But requited—life and lives’ creator!”

William Shakespeare. Sonnets = William Shakespeare. Sonnets / translated by Dmytro Pavlychko; foreword by Dmytro Pavlychko; introduction to the commentary, commentary, and arrangement by Maria Havlevych; artistic design by Mykhailo Moskal.

Lviv: Lytopys, 1998. — 365 p.: illus. — ISBN 966-7007-07-3. — Parallel text in English and Ukrainian. Translated from The Sonnets of William Shakespeare (New York: Avenel Books, 1961). The edition was prepared by the Lytopys Publishing House and the Center for Humanities Research of the I. Franko Lviv State University.

Publisher’s hardback binding in dark blue marbled leatherette; gold stamping on the front cover—a double frame and an octagonal cartouche with the bilingual title and the author’s name. Minor rubbing along the edges and corners of the covers, small specks of gold leaf on the back cover. The text block is tight, the paper is white, and the pages are clean. On the title page, Dmytro Pavlychko’s inscription in black ink with a signature, dated May 22; the ink slightly shows through to the verso of the title page. Condition: very good.

Copy with the translator’s autograph. The book has historical and cultural value and is of collector’s interest.

INFORMATION

All 154 of Shakespeare’s sonnets in Dmytro Pavlychko’s translation—with the English original on facing pages and detailed scholarly apparatus. The book opens with a facsimile of the title page and dedication of the first London edition of 1609, “Shake-speares Sonnets. Neuer before Imprinted”—the very one in which the publisher Thomas Thorpe named the mysterious “Mr. W. H.” Maria Havlevych’s commentary occupies pages 206–351 and analyzes each sonnet line by line, while the appendix provides a chronology of Shakespeare’s works from 1592–1601, where the sonnets are compared with plays and poems.

Dmytro Pavlychko (1929–2023) was a poet, translator, and public figure, laureate of the Shevchenko National Prize, and compiler of the first anthology of sonnets in Ukrainian literature, “The World Sonnet” (1983). The sonnet accompanied him throughout his life—both as a form he wrote in and as a form he translated. The book was published in 1998, when Pavlychko was completing his service as the Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of Ukraine to Slovakia (1995–1998). In the foreword, he writes that it was Havlevych’s commentary that found the right key to the image of the Young Man.

The edition was prepared in Lviv together with the Center for Humanities Research of the Lviv University; Mykhailo Moskal’s design repeats the octagonal cartouche with the bilingual title on the binding and title page. This copy bears the translator’s handwritten inscription.