Baudelaire, The King of the Rainy Country, translating by Edna St. Vincent Millay, Flowers of Evil (NY: Harper and Brothers,

Questa della traduzione si sta traducendo in una vera follia!Una delle ennesime versioni di Spleen ...  vedi SPLEEN by Nichola Moore PDF  e Scoop.it/t/tradurre-poesia

A rainy country this, that I am monarch of, —

A rich but powerless king, worn-out while yet a boy;

For whom in vain the falcon falls upon the dove;

Not even his starving people's groans can give him joy;

Scorning his tutors, loathing his spaniels, finding stale

His favorite jester's quips, yawning at the droll tale.

His bed, for all its fleurs de lis, looks like a tomb;

The ladies of the court, attending him, to whom

He, being a prince, is handsome, see him lying there

Cold as a corpse, and lift their shoulders in despair:

No garment they take off, no garter they leave on

Excites the gloomy eye of this young skeleton.

The royal alchemist, who makes him gold from lead,

The baser element from out the royal head

Cannot extract; nor can those Roman baths of blood,

For some so efficacious, cure the hebetude

Of him, along whose veins, where flows no blood at all,

For ever the slow waters of green Lethe crawl.

TRANSLATING POETRY: READING AND CONVERSATIONS. II Giornata. Casa delle letterature, Roma, 4 maggio 2012 /

On Friday afternoon in the courtyard of the Casa delle Letterature, in Rome’s historic center, an audience sat under the orange trees listening to poetry being read aloud in Italian and in English. A fountain contributed its own quiet music, as falling water caused the maidenhair fern to tremble; from time to time, gulls from the nearby Tiber laughed overhead; and church bells loudly called people to evening prayer. But for those who were listening, nothing really broke the spell of a beautiful May afternoon, and of poetry itself.

TRANSLATING POETRY reading of English and American poems and their translations into Italian

Sarah Arvio and Antonella Anedda. (Photo: Gerardo Gaetani)
Sito AARome

SNOWY MORNING BLUES by Charles Simic, trad. Nicola Gardini, tratta da Club Midnight, Adelphi

Una poesia di Charles  Simic che bene esprime la "solitudine" del traduttore...




Il traduttore è lettore e critico.
Porta lenti spesse
mentre guarda fuori dalla finestra
i campi e i cespugli innevati
che sono come un foglio di carta
coperto di scarabocchi veloci
in una lingua che sa abbastanza bene
senza saperne una sola parola,

se non quello che gli occhi distinguono
e il cuore intuisce della sua estraneità.
Che pace adesso, neppure il lieve
fruscio di una pagina voltata
in un dizionario senza parole, bianco,
di cui il traduttore possa valersi
prima che le eventuali parole
diventino oscure nel buio che scende.

     
The translator is a close reader
He wears thick glasses
As he peers out the window
At the snowy fields and bushes
That are like a sheet of paper
Covered with quick scribble
In a language he knows well enough
WIthout knowing any words in it.

Only what the eyes discern
And the heart intuits of its idiom
So quiet now, not even faint
Rustle of a page being turned
In a white and wordless dictionary
For the translator to avail himself
Before whatever words are there
Grow obscure in the coming darkness.