UD‘s sister-in-law, Joanna Soltan, reads Sonnet 90. In Polish.
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Sonnet 90
Then hate me when thou wilt; if ever, now;
Now, while the world is bent my deeds to cross,
Join with the spite of fortune, make me bow,
And do not drop in for an after-loss:
Ah, do not, when my heart hath ’scoped this sorrow,
Come in the rearward of a conquer’d woe;
Give not a windy night a rainy morrow,
To linger out a purposed overthrow.
If thou wilt leave me, do not leave me last,
When other petty griefs have done their spite
But in the onset come; so shall I taste
At first the very worst of fortune’s might,
And other strains of woe, which now seem woe,
Compared with loss of thee will not seem so.
November 9th, 2009 at 11:19PM
…in the 1992 Słomczyński translation.
Which uses gently archaic language, and skilfully preserves both the tone and the rhyming scheme.
Possibly for the sake of rhyme and scansion—though in a Slavic language this might be inevitable without jarring, almost lawyerly vagueness—it introduces quite surprising grammatical markers, such as attributing male gender (which would also apply to the Deity) to the addressee, and future indicative to the final “loss.”
Anyway, what a lovely reading—and a cool idea at the linked blog.