Against Deforming Tendencies: To Open the Italian Language to Rimbaud’s Poems

In his book La Traduction et la Lettre ou l’auberge du lointain, Antoine Berman states that literary translation must respect the “Strangeness” of the source-text to produce an “ethical translation”. Using the expression of the troubadour poet Jaufré Rudel, the author proposes to consider the translational space as a place of welcome for the strangeness of the source-text; translating the “letter” of the text thus means respecting this strangeness. In order to achieve this goal, Berman outlines thirteen “deforming tendencies”, i.e. tendencies to be avoided because they would destroy the “letter” of the text: the Rationalisation; the Clarification; the Expansion; the Ennoblement and the Vulgarization; the Qualitative impoverishment; the Quantitative impoverishment; the Destruction of rhythms; the Destruction of underlying networks of signification; the Destruction of linguistic patternings; the Destruction of vernacular network or their exoticization; the Destruction of expressions and idioms; the Effacement of the superimposition of languages. In this article, we will focus on the analysis and discussion of three deforming tendencies – the rationalisation, the clarification, and the destruction of linguistic patternings – identified in Ivos Margoni’s Italian translation of Arthur Rimbaud’s poem Roman, and will try to show how this alters the “letter” of the text.