Venus & Adonis

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. The poem tells the story of Venus, the goddess of love, and her attempts to seduce the hunter Adonis. It is a complex, kaleidoscopic work in which love takes center stage-Venus´s lustful yearning for Adonis ripples throughout, each stanza and line tinged with unrequited longing. As Venus declares, "Graze on my lips, and if those hills be dry, / Stray lower, where the pleasant fountains lie." Like Shakespeare before her, Dumas opens up a seemingly unending flow between light and dark, love and death, pleasure and pain.