Translating Satirical Poetry: Leopardi’s Palinodia in English

Abstract

This article investigates the translation of satirical poetry using Leopardi’s Palinodia as a case study. The rationale behind the necessity to conduct an investigation of this kind lies in a twofold observation. Firstly, despite being an important part of the author’s oeuvre, Leopardi’s satirical works have never been scrutinised from the perspective of translation. Secondly, unlike other text genres, poetry conveys irony through specific stylistic and rhetorical devices which are particularly challenging in translation. However, satirical poetry is a little explored genre in humour translation theory. As a result, the specific challenges and techniques inherent to the rendition of humour in this text type are understudied in the literature. Against this backdrop, this article contrastively compares a series of English-language poetic translations of the Palinodia with the aim to identify the strategies adopted to transpose poetry’s ironic features across linguistic-cultural barriers. To address the paucity of studies focussing on satirical poetry from a translational perspective, the paper also advances a series of translation techniques specifically suited for the rendition of this literary genre. Special emphasis shall be given to the rendering of apostrophes and vocatives, epithets, hyperbatons, enjambments and foreignisms as well as the conflation of different types of lexicon and linguistic registers which are employed in the ST for satirical purposes. The translations analysed include those composed by Townsend (1887), Bickersteth (1923), Nichols (1994), Tusiani (1998) and Galassi (2010). The paper concludes with the observation that whilst the ST semantic and lexical features can be translated into the TL by using general translation techniques, the transposition of prosodic and syntactic devices call for tailored translation solutions.