Alexander Pushkin's Novel Eugene Onegin in Translations by Ettore Lo Gatto

This research investigates the translations of Alexander Pushkin's novel Eugene Onegin by the Italian Slavist Ettore Lo Gatto. He translated the novel into prose in 1923, but 14 years later he offered Italian readers a new poetic version of the masterpiece, which was in hendecasyllable (traditional Italian meter). The author considers the problem of selecting the form for the translations in the context of the Italian tradition of translation (prosaic translation of poetry); the dynamics of Lo Gatto's translation strategy: "I wanted to defeat my own aversion to poetic translation in general, to defeat it with my own poetic translation"; the transformation of the original's composition; the potential of Lo Gatto's prosaic and poetic translation for conveying the richness of meaning in Pushkin's text (analysis of such elements of the novel's text as thematic iteration and a game with the reader). Eugene Onegin was published twice (1833, 1837) during Pushkin's life in the versions that were exactly as written by the poet himself. This indicates that the text is definitive. However, in both translations by Lo Gatto, at the level of composition, we can observe a number of discrepancies with Pushkin's definitive wording. In the prosaic translation, Lo Gatto swaps parts of the composition and includes fragments from the early and draft editions of the novel. In the poetic translation, the deviation from the definitive text is the inclusion of the translator's commentary directly into the text, so that there is a merging of the translation and the commentary. Lo Gatto's recourse to the previous editions and drafts of the novel, their introduction to the translations, and his desire to comment on the text show the intention of the translator to convey the meaning of Pushkin's novel to the Italian reader, an audience that was totally unfamiliar with it, accurately and as fully as possible. But his recourse to this material also demonstrates the problem of the translator's perception of the boundaries of the definitive literary text. The second, poetic translation by Lo Gatto reveals his desire to overcome the impact of the national tradition of translation and come as close as possible to the original, to create an equivalent translation. However, the prosaic translation commentary inside the poetic text demonstrates that although Lo Gatto overcame his "own aversion to poetic translation in general" by creating his own poetic translation, he could not overcome the feeling of the communicative and informative insufficiency of the poetic text. At the same time, the poetic translation of the novel testifies to the opposite: its richness exceeds that of Lo Gatto's prosaic translation.

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