Creativity on Probation: on Translating a Nursery Rhyme

The essay begins with a simile between translation and sports. As there are “regular sports” and “Extreme sports”, there are also “regular, everyday translations” and “extreme translations”. Translating tongue twisters, nursery rhymes, nonsenses, lipograms is like taking part in an extreme sport competition. How can we translate, for instance, “She sells sea shells on the seashore”? “Lei vende conchiglie sulla spiaggia” or “Se scii senza scienza sei solo scema” (which literally is something like: If you ski with no skill you are just stupid)?Apparently such translations seem to be useless, or just a work out for other more useful and feasible versions. The analysis of the translating process of a nonsense nursery rhyme by Gianni Rodari leads to a series of reflections about constraints , which are then organized in different categories such as intratextual, paratextual, intertextual constraints, or aesthetics, poetics, ideological, ethic, sociological, economic constraints. It also leads to question the differences among translation, rewriting and adaptation from a phenomenological point of view.