Suono o senso? Scelte e conflitti nella traduzione della poesia

Given the purpose of translation as a rendering of the uniqueness of poetry, which does not consist in the sum of form and content but their dialectical relationship, this article emphasizes the concept of choice as the basis of translating. A choice that translators are called upon to make whenever, in a textual segment, they spot conflicts between different levels, as exemplified by Efim Etkind in his essay Un art en crise. By way of example, the Italian translations of two very different texts are discussed here: a poem by Charles Baudelaire and one from Chants d’Utopie by contemporary poet Brice Bonfanti who chooses regular verse (the French héndecasyllabe) and a free and persistent use of rhymes. The article focuses on the conflicts that can be found in the original poems and discusses the translation strategies involved by the choice of what James Holmes calls “mimetic form,” which aims to preserve the form of the source text as much as possible