Journal of Italian Translation - Brooklyn College - Academic Home ...

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Journal of Italian Translation
posed of fragments, notations, things overheard, feelings, memories,
and so forth, each poem creates an energized, self-sufficient
whole. It stands alone, despite the fact that—to note another typical
paradox—virtually all of the poems in Il gatto lupesco are parts of
sequences and therefore have a fragmentary and incomplete nature,
in contrast to the closure of the traditional lyric.
We try to reproduce the energy and drive of the poems, the immediacy,
the zest, the zaniness. We avoid either literalism or paraphrase,
since a doggedly literal rendering of Sanguineti cannot suggest
his verbal effusions, and a translation seeking to generalize his
meaning would have the same limitation. Reproducing Sanguineti’s
compositional energy and linguistic esprit calls for an imaginative
effort, and to enable that effort we allow ourselves a considerable
degree of freedom. We do not associate this freedom with the familiar
category of “imitations” but rather with the idea of translation
as a strenuous, continuous (and never entirely completed) search
for dynamic equivalents. When verbal exploration and play are at
the heart of the original, then the translator must also be an adventurer
in language.
To convey the meaning of the poems is not enough. As Rosanna
Warren argues, the medium of the literary writer, and therefore of
the literary translator, has never been “meaning per se but has always
been the linguistic conditions of meaning: tension, risk, suspicion,
the perilous dance of formal language with and away from
meaning.” We have tried to reproduce the intricate tonal, rhythmic,
and conceptual dance of Sanguineti’s poetry, and we hope our
efforts will suggest why it is important to read this major Italian
poet.