I "Pippo e Peppo" di Giorgio Caproni. Analisi linguistica di un’impresa traduttiva atipica

The history of translation very often manages to intertwine issues and disciplines that are normally unrelated or distant. This is related to the idea of understanding translation, as Walter Benjamin did, as an “attempt at survival” of texts: a survival that often consists of mutations that take place in the passage from one language to another and (in the words of Itamar Even-Zohar) from one system to another. There are initiatives that take such mutations to a new level, to a highly dynamic degree of equivalence that often borders on outright rewriting. In all these projects, the translator’s freedom has a different relationship to the limitations imposed by the text. This essay focuses on just one of these projects: the 1974 translation of Wilhelm Busch’s children’s classic Max und Moritz by Giorgio Caproni, a leading exponent of twentieth-century Italian poetry.