Love is in the air! As couples are mooning about and dreaming about how to spend their Valentine’s Day dates, let’s remember how the Old English bard used to attract countless admirers because of his poetic sonnets! Before you think about which sonnet you might want to recite to your lover, or pen them down in a romantic letter, you might want to ‘listen’ to how they might sound like when updated to a Singaporean modernized context! (just for laughs!)

Shakespeare’s first sonnet, one of his best known, is the first of his procreation sonnets. It urges youth to not to waste beauty by not fathering/mothering a child while they are still virile. We call this the SDU anthem.

The original sonnet:

From fairest creatures we desire increase,
That thereby beauty’s rose might never die,
But as the riper should by time decease,
His tender heir might bear his memory:
But thou contracted to thine own bright eyes,
Feed’st thy light’s flame with self-substantial fuel,
Making a famine where abundance lies,
Thy self thy foe, to thy sweet self too cruel:
Thou that art now the world’s fresh ornament,
And only herald to the gaudy spring,
Within thine own bud buriest thy content,
And tender churl mak’st waste in niggarding:
Pity the world, or else this glutton be,
To eat the world’s due, by the grave and thee.

Our Singaporean translation:

Wah! You si beh chio ah!
Must faster make baby, ‘coz baby born sure very pwetty,
So when you grow old liao, people look at your baby then can remember you young that time was a chiobu or yandao!
But then nowadays a lot of young men they love themselves, don’t care about others.
They only care about looking into the mirror long long, si beh hiao.
Marry earlier, or else next time sure regret never take that HDB subsidy to faster get married to make baby.
Now you young have a lot of energy, budden next time grow old already no chance liao,
because you never live a full life, waste a lot of time,
never make baby then suddenly mati already. - Next page

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