Rappresentazioni mentali e serie interpretative. L’infinito e Alla luna in polacco

Abstract

The article examines the Polish ‘translation series’ of two idylls by Giacomo Leopardi: L’infinito and Alla luna, focusing on selected linguistic and cultural factors behind the translators’ choices. In L’Infinito, one notices a recurrent difficulty in effectively rendering the alternation of the demonstratives questo and quello and the key metaphor of naufragare. In both cases, the purported Polish lexical counterparts fail to produce an adequate mental representation, and as a result the scene constructed by the translators hardly conveys the scene constructed by the author. For their part, the Polish versions of Alla luna display a striking interpretative tradition of the last verse, with the second che in ‘ancor che triste e che l’affanno duri’ understood by all translators in an optative sense (as a wish), rather than in a concessive sense. Having used the variantist approach to show that the intentio auctoris unequivocally provides a concessive phrase and that the intentio operis does not admit the stereotype of masochism (a degeneration of the topos of Leopardi as a Weltschmerz poet), I focus on the intentio interpretis (a specific form of intentio lectoris) and argue that this tradition of translatory infidelity stems not only from the probable reliance of each version on its predecessor(s) (typical of what textual philology calls ‘conjunctive errors’), but also – given the absence of such an interpretative tradition in other languages and cultures – from the Polish translators’s unconscious mental predisposition to accept such a misrepresentation. The roots of this predisposition are to be found in the history of Polish culture as it has been formed – and deformed – since the 19th century, when the cult of suffering became central to it.