Poeta-traduttore, traduttore-poeta e studioso: tre punti di uno stesso piano di lavoro

Through a comparative reading of three different Italian translations of a poem by Luis Cernuda translated respectively by Oreste Macrí, Vittorio Bodini and Francesco Tentori, the paper underlines how the translation of poetry should move beyond the antinomies beautiful/ugly faithful/unfaithful and aim instead at developing a motivated work. In order to reproduce a text which, as the original, has the force of a motivation, the literary translator must be at the same time a scholar (who possesses the appropriate critical and philological tools), a translator-poet (who knows the rhetorical tools and how to use them) and a poet-translator (who can free him/herself from strict literal translations and propose instead more creative correspondences).