Translating Jacopone da Todi: Archaic Poetries and Modern Audiences

Abstract

I write here as a literary translator, prefacing my own work, but I do not intend to offer yet another belletristic commentary on translation. My aim is to challenge the tendency among contemporary translators to make fairly impressionistic remarks on their practice, on its literary and cultural values, and on the equivalence they believe they have established between their translations and the foreign texts. In adopting this approach, translators actually avoid addressing the conceptual problems posed by translation, inadvertently raising the question of whether any translation practice can ever take these problems into account without a sustained theoretical reflection. Such a reflection, I believe, can enrich practice in ways that have yet to be fully explored. My starting point is a scepticism as to whether cross-cultural understanding is possible in literary translation, particularly when the foreign text to be translated was produced in a remote historical period. Maintaining a strict semantic correspondence to the foreign text, a correspondence based on dictionary definitions, cannot obviate the irreparable loss of the foreign context. Translation radically decontextualizes a foreign text by uprooting it from the literary traditions and practices that not only give rise to it, but make it meaningful to foreign readers who have read widely in the foreign language and literature. This context of production and reception can never be restored in such a way as to provide the reader of the translation with a response that is equivalent to the informed foreignlanguage reader's response to the foreign text.1 For foreign traditions