William Shakespeare, Marlene Dumas (Illustrator)
Venus & Adonis.
New York/Amsterdam: David Zwirner Books / Athenaeum-Polak & Van Gennep, 2019. Revised edition. Translated, annotated and with an afterword by Hafid Bouazza, illustrated by Marlene Dumas. 9781644230008 151 pages.
Hardcover volume, measuring approximately 7" x 10", is in illustrated dust jacket, new, still in shrink wrap, with parallel text in Dutch and English, and afterword in English.
"At once comic, tragic, and erotic, "Venus & Adonis" (1593) is a poem by William Shakespeare based on passages from Ovid’s "Metamorphoses." This new translation by Hafid Bouazza of Shakespeare’s text is illustrated by Marlene Dumas, the renowned painter celebrated around the world for her highly charged depictions of the human form.
Through a series of expressive ink washes, Dumas paints new passion into the poem—bodies bleed into one another, lips part in sighs of passion, a flower blooms to life. Desire in all its heady intensity is evocatively washed over the pages. As with Dumas’s wider body of work, however, tragedy is not forgotten and is frighteningly played out with equal intensity. The owl, “night’s herald,” as Shakespeare writes, flies jet black across the sky; a wild boar looms like a shadow over Adonis’s suffering, wounded body; black dissolves into gray; and bodies are lost in a sea of ink."