What Remains for Translators Is to Do an Honest Translation: A Commentary on Three Translations of Umberto Saba’s “La capra”

Abstract

At times, when one assesses whether a translation is apt or not so much, the evaluation criteria are limited to its legibility or fluency, or else, to its foreignizing or domesticating nature. Nevertheless, following Jiří Levý’s The Art of Translation and his ideas about literary translation, in this work I consider it more fruitful not only to establish the evident characteristics of the text as a starting point, but, above all, the poetics of its writer. For this research I will focus on the Italian poet Umberto Saba (Trieste 1883 – Gorizia 1957) and his most important ideas about poetry and a poet’s craft, especially on his essay “Quello che resta da fare ai poeti,” in which the author asserts that, for poets, the only thing that remains is to write honest poetry. Using Saba’s poetics of “honest poetry” as a starting point, I will try to determine if some of the poetic principles exposed by Saba can be recognized in his poems even after a translation process. For my analysis I will use “La capra”, one of the Italian poet’s most emblematic works, to later present and compare the Spanish translations by Antonio Colinas (1977), Ana María del Re (1989) and Guillermo Fernández (2006).