Psychic rhymes and rhythms in translation: Walt Whitman and Mark Strand

Building on recent works in translation studies, this essay considers what happens in a couple of tentative Italian translations of poems by Walt Whitman and Mark Strand; in particular, what happens to a specific feature of their poetic style, i.e. the rhetorical figure of repetition and its relation to the overall rhythmic and semantic pattern of their work. The essay will consider the challenge of rendering rhythm, a vital feature of a literary text, but one which is nonetheless often considered a marginal element by those who believe that translation is above all an act concerned with a mere passage of information. It will also try to show that apparently "irrational" elements such as friendship, relationship, listening, the other, the feeling of language, opacity, embodiment, silence, and the pulsing of the body and mind in the poetic rhythm, should be seriously considered in every theoretical approach to literary translation.