«Ah sta èstasicuà». Meneghello traduttore di Donne

Su un trapianto inedito di "The Extasie"

Abstract

This article offers a study of Luigi Meneghello's unpublished transposition into vicentine dialect of John Donne's The Extasie. This is one of those linguistic torments that were eventually excluded from the volume Trapianti (Rizzoli, 2002) and that remained at the stage of manuscript drafts, preserved at the Meneghello Fund of the Centre for Studies on the Manuscript Tradition of Modern and Contemporary Authors at the University of Pavia. Within the article, the text of the translation is published and a first analysis of it is carried out, highlighting the various stages of development and focusing on the free manner in which Meneghello adapts the language, semantics and metre of the original text to the vicentine cultural and linguistic system, broadening also – in a bidirectional movement – the expressive potential of dialect, which is renewed in the interaction with Donne's poetic language and enriched with neologisms and casts from English.