ABSTRACT
This chapter uses a close textual analysis combined with paratextual elements to examine how the translators from the corpus approached the relationship between the author and the addressees. For the purposes of the comparison, it also uses the terms ‘romantic’ and ‘non-romantic’ to describe the types of affection expressed in the Sonnets. Very few of the poems make direct allusion to sexual desire, which is why terms such as ‘platonic’ that have a strong connotative link with non-physical or non-sexual attraction were deemed unsuitable for the purposes of this study. The chapter aims to stress that this comparison does not wish to devaluate non-romantic relationships such as friendship, or to follow the amatonormative assumption that they are invariably secondary to romantic bonds in the hierarchy of human relationships.
