Homeopathic tips for a stressed-out poetry translator

Abstract

Quite often a translator of poetry has to deal with difficult texts, which appear almost impossible to translate. A careful, modest and sensitive translator feels (or should feel) a sense of inadequacy when facing this kind of poems. This feeling leads him to a clear awareness of the limits of his "poetic" power, and of the objective and sometimes unbridgeable differences between the languages ​​and cultures involved in the translation process. The upshot is a state of despair, dejection, or melancholic impotence. Moving among digressions, hints for translation therapies and homeopathic remedies, the essay tries to offer a bit of advice to literary translators. It deals specifically with the Italian versions of two texts composed by the American poets e.e. cummings and Billy Collins. The first is characterized by the ambiguous choice of words and its graphic composition; the second by the specificity and cultural importance of its images and figures. Billy Collins then, as in a hall of mirrors, retranslates a second “cultural” Italian version in English.