Response to letter to editor

Abstract

This article investigates the evolution of the approach to translating Bulat Okudzhava’s songs into Italian. The first collections of Okudzhava’s poems and songs, published in Italian in the 1970s and 1980s, were characterized by lack of respect toward any formal features of the source text. The translated songs provided an opportunity to acquaint the Italian public with the writer’s work, and were used as didactic material for teaching Russian in Italian universities, but they could not be performed on stage. Since the 2000s, poets and singers have started paying attention to the rhythmic-metrical structure of Okudzhava’s works and trying to reproduce the equivalent form of the source text. This change corresponds to the general trend in the translation of Russian poetry in Italy, with more attention recently being paid to analysing and translating the formal features of the poetic text, in a quest for a “fruitful hybridity” between the source text (ST) and the target text (TT). The first part of the article briefly describes Okudzhava’s first collections of poems and songs, mentioning his famous performance at the Tenco Festival of Songwriting in 1985. The second part examines the disc Alla corte dell’Arbat, released in 2018 by the poet and bard Alessio Lega. The analysis highlights a promising approach to the translation of Okudzhava’s songs, and marks an original technique in the very narrow niche (within the practice of translation) of song translation.