Igra slov: tradurre il palindromo nei testi russo-sovietici. Difficoltà , strategie, implicazioni culturali.

According to Umberto Eco, translating means “to understand the internal system of a language and the structure of a text in that language, and to build a double of the textual system that, under certain conditions, may produce analogous effects on the reader” (2003: 16). The translator’s task becomes particularly complicated in the presence of figurative language and especially of wordplay (calembour, igra slov), which, according to Bubnov (2002a), is collocated in the wider context of figurative language. Bice Mortara Garavelli (2003: 130) considers these “metagraphs” as “manifestations of figurative poetry”. The problem of the translation of wordplay is particularly acute if considering avant-garde experiments and post-modern texts. Indeed, these works are characterized by a markedly playful attitude towards words, as several critics have outlined. From this starting point, the present analysis focuses on a series of case studies drawn from Russian-Soviet, “modern” and “post-modern” texts. Its aim is to verify their “translatability” into various languages. More specifically, examples of anagram and palindrome will be examined. These devices not only allow an original elaboration of the signifier, but also a rich (and consequent) accumulation of signifieds, a process which is essential for the creation of figurative language. The central part of the paper is dedicated to a comparison between Futurist poets (with detailed reference to Velimir Khlebnikov), modern and post-modern authors (such as Vladimir V. Nabokov and Sasha Sokolov). Finally, the paper discusses the problem of the translation of wordplay both from a theoretical point of view and with regard to the Russian-Soviet cultural context.