Back-Translation, Stile, Intertestualità

Intertextuality wreaks havoc on established translation practices, or at least on those that envisage back-translation as an ideal way of verifying the validity of translation as a linguistic act of decoding and recoding. Intertextuality highlights the fact that the translated text is relatively autonomous, and brings into play the inquisitive, hermeneutic, and creative contribution of the reader-interpreter, who cannot ignore the cultural and historical complexity of the act of translation. Intertextuality urges us to think of the source text and its style as a cohesive, unique and complex fabric in which the intratextual constraints, i.e. its formal, metrical, and grammatical elements, are intimately intertwined with the explicit or implicit intertextual constraints. Through references to three literary examples (Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, Twain’s The Jumping Frog, Pound’s Canto VIII), this article aims to show how various strategies employed in the translations of intertextuality by different kinds of translators (poets, linguists, philologists, critics, etc.), incessantly shape the source text, in a constant process of distancing and resuming that does not subtract but adds ; a process that is not a loss but a vital movement, necessary for the life and afterlife of the text.