Tradurre poesia dopo Auschwitz. "Todesfuge" di Paul Celan

Paul Celan’s Todesfuge (Death Fugue), considered as the Guernica of German literature, was firstly published in 1947 with the title Tangoul Mort (Death Tango), i.e. in Romanian, the second mother tongue of the poet, who was born in a German-speaking Jewish family in Chernivtsi. The German version of the poem only appeared in 1948 and it is itself an interesting case of (self-)translation from the Romenian into German, thanks to wich Paul Celan challenged the limits of his two mother tongues in “writing poetry after Auschwitz”. This paper aims, on the one hand, at investigating Celan’s linguistic and rethorical choices in writing his Todesfuge and, on the second hand, at comparing them with the rethorical strategies privileged by the best-known Italian translators of the poem. Also with respect to the poetry of Nelly Sachs, who deeply influenced the lexical and rethorical choices of the Romanian-born German language poet and translator, the paper highlights the ethical and aesthetical limits of “translating after Auschwitz”.