Szymborska e la traduzione

Abstract

After Wislawa Szymborska became immensely popular in Italy at the beginning of this century, the previous Italian presence of her poetry in the second half of the 20th century has almost been overlooked. On the basis of an accurate research of journals and anthologies of that period, the Author lists 131 translations of 88 poems by 15 different translators, amounting to a potential rich anthology, almost as ample as the first anthology of Szymborska’s poetry published in Italy in 1998. The Author examines these translations evaluating their quality, and sometimes their excellence, comparing some of them to their renderings in different languages. He pays particular attention to prosody and metrics: Szymborska’s free verse results in fact in a specific musicality, depending on the constant presence of classical metres, above all the traditional Polish alexandrine in its various forms. This feature has been neglected in most of the current translations of Szymborska’s poetry.