Journal of Italian Translation

20
Journal of Italian Translation
The Translation of Poetry as an Autonomous
Literary Genre
by Franco Buffoni
“I wonder” asked L. F. Céline in the letter to M. Hindus of May 15 th ,
1947, “ how can they compare me to Henry Miller, who is translated?,
while everything is a question of the intimacy of the language not to mention
the emotional output of style…”
Style, for Céline, was therefore “untranslatable,” just as poetry was
“untranslatable” for Benedetto Croce.
These theoretical positions, which play on the assumption of the
uniqueness and irreproducibility of the work of art, end up denying the
translatability of poetry and “high” prose. Such conceptions are the expression
of an idealism that is particularly outdated nowadays, against
which Italian aesthetics of a neo-phenomenological bent (from Banfi to
Anceschi to Formaggio to Mattioli) have fought for three decades at least
(victoriously, I would say).
It all started with the observation that the dichotomies (faithful/unfaithful;
faithful to the letter/faithful to the spirit; ut orator/ut interpres; verbum/sensus;
“traductions des poètes/traductions des professeurs”) – from
Cicero to Mounin – inevitably lead to a cul de sac, which puts, on the one
hand, the untranslatability of “style” and of the poetic “ineffable,” and on
the other hand, the conviction that it is possible to transmit just the content.
Naturally the fact that it is possible to transmit just the content is a
pure abstraction, but it is where you get starting from both “idealistic” and
“formalistic” assumptions.
I don’t think that the dichotomous situation of impasse changes by
analysing the academic argument between Meschonnic and Ladmiral, alias
between sourciers and ciblistes, or between a naturalizing “target-oriented”
tendency, which would push the text toward the foreign reader “naturalizing”
it, and an alienating “source-oriented” tendency that would drag
the foreign reader toward the text.
According to this kind of thought, the clash between schools of translation
would resemble the one that exists in the world of art restoration: to
show it as much as possible, or hide it as much as possible.
If we set aside the fondness that certain definitions may elicit as opposed
to others, I believe it is clear that — if we continue with a dichotomous
layout — we only add new pairs — like domestication/estrangement,
visibility/invisibility, violability/inviolability to those of previous
centuries: liberty/faithfulness, betrayal/assent, fluency/literalness. This
is what happens with The Translator’s Invisibility of Lawrence Venuti despite
the fact that his constant reference to Schleiermacher and the hermeneutic
school inspired by him is certainly of a very high level.