Journal of Italian Translation

22
Journal of Italian Translation
La Vita Agra (Sour Life), when he describes the building that houses the
library of Grosseto. Previously it had been the teaching house of the Companions
of Jesus, and before the Convent of the Humbled, and even before
the Braidense Library…
By transferring this description to language, you obtain the diode
effect, which is like seeing from high a heap of piled up but transparent
phonetic and semantic layers. This is why I consider the translation of poetry
as an autonomous literary genre, according to a tradition that sees in
its developement Thomas Sébillet in the 16 th century (Mounin reminds us
that, according to Sébillet, translation at that time was considered “parmi
les genres littéraires en vogue”), and Jiri Levy, who in the early Sixties of
the 20 th century published in Prague Umeni Prekladu, a fundamental essay
the subtitle of which is quite meaningful: “Theorie einer Kunstgattung”,
that is to say “theory of a literary genre” .