As far as I know, Dorothy Sayers is the only 20th century writer who produced a fully rhymed, metrical, terza rima translation of the Divine Comedy in English. It's still in print, and wonderful; it's actually the translation I like best, though there are more than a few forced moves which approach the silly. James Falen, Charles Johnston, Walter Arndt, and Douglas Hofstadter have all translated Eugene Onegin using Pushkin's original 14-line rhymed tetrameter stanza, and all but Arndt's is in print. Vikram Seth used the Onegin stanza in his delightful The Golden Gate, and it's still in print. It's possible there is actually a market for novel-length, full-rhymed, metrical stories.
But I can't think of any others from the last century. Glyn Maxwell's Time's Fool is terza rima, but the rhymes are almost never full. Both of Fred Turner's epics, The New World and Genesis, are unrhymed, as is Andrew Hudgins's After the Lost War. I'm working on one, so far in full-rhyme (snippets here and here), but I'm thinking it might be better to use slant rhyme most of the time and full rhyme for climactic moments, or perhaps for the ends of sections, the way Shakespeare would end a blank verse scene with a rhymed couplet. (Right. Just that way.) But I also think maybe I'm just finding it damned hard to do and looking for a way out. Does anyone know of other examples I could read?
7:34:52 PM
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