L’Émoi de l’Autre: traduire la poésie (Leopardi face à Bonnefoy, Jaccottet, Orcel)

Abstract

This article is a corrected and revised version of a paper presented at the symposium “Traduire la poesie: les significations et le sens”, organised by Yves Bonnefoy and Carlo Ossola (Fondation Hugot du College de France, Paris, 5-6 November 2015), the proceedings of which were never published. It proposes to investigate, in the introduction and in the historical-theoretical survey, the lines of development of a school of thought in translation which has always championed meaning, in our own times overcoming defining dualities and “prejudicial objection” in favour of rhythm and form as active features of poetic subjectivity. In the third section, the analysis and comparison between three versions of Leopardi’s L’infinito allows us to draw attention in Jaccottet and Orcel to a tendency towards the imitative tracing of these features, which in the latter’s translation also tend towards the archaic, whilst in Bonnefoy the move away from these formal similarities corresponds to the translator’s poetic imperative, relating to his notion of “traduction au sens large”, and extending also to the poet-translator’s own creative work.