Nell'atelier del traduttore. La sestina "La vida" di Fernando Ortiz

According to Umberto Eco's definition of translation in Dire quasi la stessa cosa, the purpose of literary translation has to be: “costruire un doppio del sistema testuale che […] possa produrre effetti analoghi nel lettore, sia sul piano semantico e sintattico che su quello stilistico, metrico, fonosimbolico, e quanto agli effetti passionali a cui il testo tendeva” (Eco 2006: 16). Considering that the pluricodification of literary texts (Lotman 1978) generates a high concentration of information, and that each work is always a contextualized speech act (Álvarez Sanagustín, 1991: 261-263), it is necessary to make decisions, in order to create an analogous poem, that has to be faithful to the original without forgetting the style and respecting the semantic and structural content; in other words, a text that respects the original communicative effectiveness. The last purpose should be to produce in the reader the same impression that the first poem produced. The translation of a complex poetic structure such as the sestina “La vida”, which emphasizes the tempus fugit topos, implies a deep previous reflection on the metric and the choice of the key words that are repeated in its stanzas. Aware that every translation entails a loss (Hurtado Albir 2007: 639), that the effect is not the same in two different cultures (Eco 2006: 16-17), that we must choose between the invisibility or the visibility of translation (Venuti 1995: 186) and that it is incorrect to explain or conceal more than the original does (Ricoeur 2004: 51), together with the author in 2011 we tried to create another sestina, in Italian, that does not diverge from the prototext semantically, connotatively or stylistically. Our results will be presented here, commenting on the choices and the procedures used to reach the final metatext.