Ermeneutica del tradurre: alcune osservazioni su traduzione, interpretazione, improvvisazione

Hermeneutics of Translating: Some Observations on Translation, Interpretation, Improvisation. This paper aims to offer some observations on the translation process from a broadly understood hermeneutical perspective. Starting from my own experience as translator of philosophical books from German or English into Italian, and relying on observations on this particular and, so to speak, delicate human practice offered by Franco Volpi (one of the main Italian translators of Heidegger’s works), Hans-Georg Gadamer and Walter Benjamin, I first highlight the complex nature of the translation process, fascinatingly oscillating between such seemingly opposite but actually mutually related poles as fidelity and freedom, identity and otherness, familiarity and foreignness, etc. On this basis, I then examine the question of the role played in all forms of translation (including the translation of a philosophical or a poetic text) by the component of interpretation that, freely following intellectual suggestions deriving from such different authors as Gadamer, Willard Van Orman Quine and Donald Davidson, is apparently present in the translation process. This especially proves to be important in order to emphasize the constitutively “imperfect”, “incomplete” and “indeterminate” (i.e. not absolutely perfect or complete, not fully determinate and univocal, but rather open and plural like all the experiences and practices of such limited and finite beings as the human beings) nature of translation: that which, however, must not be conceived of as a lack or a deficiency, but rather as a richness and a potential source of constant improvement. Finally, inspired by some remarks of Ludwig Wittgenstein on “language games” and “forms of life”, I suggest to understand translation as a human practice that, as such, surely presupposes the knowledge and mastery of a definite set of rules but is never merely reducible to the latter, since the correct use or application of the rules presupposes capacities that cannot be acquired thanks to other rules but rather derive from experience, practice, know how, sensitivity and a certain indefinable tact that must guide the good translator in a similar way (although surely not identical way) as the good improviser, as masterfully exemplified by great jazz musicians.