Titolo della tesi: Hart Crane: poesie, prose e lettere. Per un approccio critico e teorico alla traduzione
Thesis Abstract in English
Although Harold Hart Crane has long been considered as one of the major American modernist poets, he seems to stimulate limited critical and academic debate, being subjected to wide different views. In Italy his poetic production has been scarcely investigated and scholarly contributions related to its translation are limited to some of his poems, remaining fragmentary and mostly unavailable. The aim of this thesis is to develop a translation proposal from English into Italian of the complete poems and selected letters and prose of Harold Hart Crane, retracing the crucial points of the author’s biographical, artistic, and intellectual itinerary in the cultural context of the age, focusing on themes, images, and stylistic qualities underlying Crane’s production, diving into its polysemic, and associative quality. To reach this objective a flexible theorical and methodological approach has been adopted, in order to share cultural aspects, differences and dissimilarities in Crane’s work, while benefiting from the support offered by corpus linguistic methods and information technology. Moreover, the attempt to find a new sense of Crane’s poetry, its meaning and value. has been pursued in the light of new contextual studies conducted by Paul Mariani (1999), Clive Fisher (2002), Brian Reed (2006), Gordon Tapper (2006) Daniel Gabriel (2007), Langdon Hammer (2011), Niall Munro (2015) Francesca Bratton (2022, 2023), while drawing on the close reading tradition of Crane’s work established mainly by R.W.B. Lewis (1967), Herbert A. Leibowitz (1968), Sherman Paul (1972), and Margaret Dickie Uroff (1974). This thesis focuses entirely on Crane’s complete poems, in the belief that these works reflect his major intentions, excluding fragments and unfinished poems. After an introduction which explains the aims, objectives, and the expected outcomes of the present research, this dissertation expands on studies related to the author’s life and production, to his cultural background and to theorical-practical considerations and reflections on the translation into Italian of his poetic and prose production. The structure of this thesis is as follows: Chapter 1 explores the intellectual itinerary of the poet through a biographical perspective, introduces his production and literary sources available, and reviews existing literature; Chapter 2 illustrates the main characteristics of Crane’s production and his composition method: “The Logic of Metaphor”; Chapter 3 focuses on the poet’s cultural background; Chapter 4 examines the methodological frames used; Chapter 5 elucidates the translation process relating to procedures adopted. Following the translation of a wide selection of poems by Hart Crane printed in parallel text. The dissertation concludes with future perspectives on Hart Crane’s studies.