Event details

Speaker: Chiara Benetollo, Princeton UniversityDescription: In June 1957 ¿ just a few months before Feltrinelli published the world¿s first edition of Doctor Zhivago ¿ the Italian publishing house Einaudi released a collection of Pasternak¿s poems, edited and translated by Angelo Maria Ripellino. Overlooked at the time of its publication, Poesie [¿Poems¿] deserves further attention.The volume was the first bilingual collection of Pasternak¿s poetry, and the first collection of Pasternak in any language since 1947. What is more, Ripellino¿s translations stand out as the exemplary result of the combination of critical analysis, poetic creativity, and a conscious effort to mobilize all the resources of Italian literary tradition to render Pasternak¿s poems with ¿a maximum of poetic and philological fidelity¿ (as Ripellino himself claims in his Foreword).By comparing Ripellino¿s work with previous translations of Pasternak¿s poems, I suggest that strategies that apparently depart from the principle of `philological fidelity¿ (such as the choice of verse libre), in reality help the translator preserve key features of Pasternak¿s style (such as figures of sound), while also making the poems more `readable¿ for an Italian audience.Lexical choices serve as a starting point to analyze Poesie in the context of Italian literary tradition. I focus, in particular, on archaisms and Dantesque words: although they lack a direct antecedent in the source text, such words contribute to effectively re-create Pasternak¿s poetic universe in Italian. In my talk, they serve as a starting point to inquiry into the relationship between Italian literary tradition, the style of the source text, and Ripellino¿s own poetic style.Chiara Benetollo is a third-year graduate student in the Department of Comparative Literature (Princeton University). Her research focuses on early 20th-century Russian and Soviet literature. She is interested in the intersection of literature, politics and collective identities, as well as the cultural relations between Russia and Europe (in particular France and Italy).Prior to starting her Ph.D., Chiara earned her Master¿s degree with honors at the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa. Her dissertation addressed the circulation of Russian and Soviet literature in Italy after the Second World War and was based on unpublished materials from the archives of the publishing house Einaudi.Chiara¿s articles and book reviews have appeared in Italian and US peer-reviewed journals, including Italianistica, Stanford Slavic Studies, and Studi Slavistici. She has presented her work in Slavic and Comparative Literature conferences in the US and in Europe.