The Sonnetist Bertolt Brecht
an Erotic Sonnet Cycle Between Loben (Praising) and Vögeln (Fucking)
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.35699/2317-2096.2025.56580Keywords:
sonnet, eroticism, petrarchism, Bertolt Brecht, Dante Alighieri, Francesco PetrarcaAbstract
Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956) writes in the early thirties a sonnet cycle in which the highly erotic charge is mixed with the poet’s programmatic combativeness and with his radical knowledge of the European literary traditions. Written in the context of a dialogue with the sonnets by Margarete Steffin (1908-1941), Brecht’s sonnets are exemplary of the rather tense, but rich relation between the author and the literary tradition. The aim of this article is to investigate how far Brecht’s sonnet cycle (despite seeming at first sight misplaced in Brecht’s oeuvre) is actually an example of the poet’s poetological coherence by tensioning his relationship with his literary references, specially with Dante Alighieri (1265-1321) in these particular poems. In order to do so, the poem “Das zwölfte Sonett (Über die Gedichte des Dante auf die Beatrice)” will be thoroughly analyzed and translated to the Portuguese as “Décimo segundo soneto (Sobre os poemas de Dante acerca de Beatrice)”.
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