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Translations belles infidèles. Comments to those of Domenico Tempio's oily compositions
161-182Views:384Belles infidèles is a French expression highlighting a well-known problem in translating from one language to another. This is true especially in the field of literature and particularly in poetry, where the exterior aspects of the words (for example, the harmony of rhymes, the images, the emotional vibrations, the semantic fields, the polysemy, and so on) become substantial and hardly translatable. The essay focuses on some bad translations of some selected verses from the obscene poems by a 18th-century Sicilian dialect poet, Domenico Tempio: they clearly show the translators’ intervention, who took many liberties and betrayed the formulation, the sense and the effect of the original texts. The essay proposes some more faithful translations of them.
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Between description and re-enactment: fantasies of a return to the South in the short stories of Giovanni Verga
Views:207In his works, Giovanni Verga does not depict Sicily through an accurate description of reality, but through a mental representation of the same from the distant city of Milan, where he lives. Beyond the borders of Sicily, modernity devours characters, whose destiny is not described by Verga. He is the only one allowed to move in this space “di là del mare” (lit.“beyond the sea”), from which he observes “dall’altro lato del cannocchiale” (lit. “as from the other side of the telescope”) the “larve” (lit. larvae) that live in the island. The purpose of this article is to show how Fantasticheria, I dintorni di Milano, Di là del mare, and Passato! have as a common ground a process of recreation of Sicily as a place linked to a past that is never coming back, so the island is described from an idealized and nostalgic perspective. Modernity is indeed a condition as irreversible as death, which, in Passato!, appears as a ruthless conclusion of this process of reconstruction.