Year 32 No. 1 (2024): Issue 1/2024
Articles

Tradurre le poesie di Shelley e di Byron dalle forme italiane: due casi di studio

Valentina Varinelli
Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore

Published 04/02/2024

Keywords

  • terza rima,
  • ottava rima,
  • Ode to the West Wind,
  • Don Juan,
  • translation theory

How to Cite

Varinelli, V. (2024). Tradurre le poesie di Shelley e di Byron dalle forme italiane: due casi di studio. L’Analisi Linguistica E Letteraria, 32(1). Retrieved from https://www.analisilinguisticaeletteraria.eu/index.php/ojs/article/view/591

Abstract

The article analyses contemporary Italian poetry translations of two major Romantic works, both written in an Italian form following Italian models: Percy Bysshe Shelley’s much-anthologised “Ode to the West Wind”, a refined experiment with Dante’s terza rima, and Lord Byron’s unfinished mock-epic, Don Juan, composed in ottave after Luigi Pulci’s example. For the former, I consider translations by Roberto Mussapi, Giuseppe Conte, and Bianca Tarozzi; I then compare Giuliano Dego’s, Tomaso Kemeny’s, and Simone Saglia’s versions from Don Juan. Positing that rendering these poems back into Italian, as it were, poses a unique challenge to the poet-translator, the article assesses the formal solutions each adopted by drawing on modern translation theory. Moreover, whenever a rendition, in line with Italian editorial practice for literary classics, is published with parallel English text, attention will be devoted to the potential implications for the translator’s choices.