Un frammento sul fiume. Il Kubla Khan di Coleridge in Italia

Coleridge’s Kubla Khan is a poem that poses a great number of problems for translators both for its nature as an oneiric fragment and for its incredible braiding of metrical, phonetic and rhythmic motives and techniques. Studying the reception of the text in Italy is a way not only to see how the text has acquired different meanings in the various versions and interpretative perspectives of the translators, poets, and scholars, but also to trace the variations in the concept of poetry and poetic taste in Italian culture over time. After an introduction tracking Coleridge’s fortune in Italy and a brief analysis of the source text, the essay considers a number of translations, from the renditions by Mario Praz (1925), Maria Luisa Cervini (1931) and Mario Luzi (1948), to the translation by Marcello Pagnini (1988) – who points out the fundamental importance of Coleridge’s prose premise of the poem as an integral part of the composition – and the recent version by Edoardo Zuccato (2018). Keywords: Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Kubla Khan, Translations, History of translation in Italy, Poetics.