The Poetry of Don Quixote. A Translator’s Confessions

Abstract

In the wide panorama of studies dedicated to translation, very rare are those coming from the hands of the translators themselves. This article is intended as the modest contribution of a literary translator moved by the hope that the reader can understand and evaluate some choices made by him in his own Italian version of Don Quixote of Miguel de Cervantes published in 2012 as well as in the re-edition of the translation of the poetic texts published four years later. If translating poetry is always difficult, in the case of Quixote the effort seems to be even greater: through numerous examples, we will try to clarify the reasons (of ‘musical’, semantic or syntactic type), which led to the choice of some solutions with respect to others, solutions always placed in comparison with those of some of the many translators who have faced Cervantes’ masterpiece over the last century.