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Angelo Maria Ripellino e il 'suo' Lènin di Majakovskij
Alessandro Niero2020
The article analyses the way Angelo Maria Ripellino translated in 1967 – fifty years after the October Revolution! – Vladimir Mayakovsky's long poem Lenin for the Turin publishing house Giulio Einaudi. Judging by the words spent by Ripellino in his Preface to the book and in a letter about Lènin he sent to one of the editors of Einaudi, Guido Davico Bonino, the translation appears to be an intriguing example of work carried out not as the personal choice of the translator, but as a gentlemen agreement between him and the publisher (a sort of social'nyj zakaz, a "social commitment" fulfilled by Ripellino, who at that time was known as the best interpreter of Russian poetry of the first part of the 20th century). Despite this unfavourable circumstances and, consequently, a presumable low degree of congeniality between the translator and the translated one, Ripellino's work is extremely interesting as it reveals an approach to poetic translating that is strikingly...
