Skip to main navigation menu Skip to main content Skip to site footer
logo inopera

ACROSS THE BORDER

No. 5 (2025): PER ALESSANDRO BROGGI

The Challenge of Imitatio: (Re)Writing Mary Oliver’s Poetry

DOI
https://doi.org/10.54103/inopera/30653
Submitted
January 7, 2026
Published
2026-01-19

Abstract

The article illustrates the work on the first Italian edition of Mary Oliver’s American Primitive (1983, Primitivo americano, Einaudi 2023) locating it within the theoretical frame of George Steiner’s hermeneutic model and of the elaboration of the translating strategy of imitatio. A close reading of the poem Crossing the Swamp shows how two interpretants were used – a redefinition of lyric poetry in our time and an intepretation of a distinctive tradition in US poetry – to guide the translator’s choices in (re)writing Oliver’s poetry.

References

  1. CRISTINA CAMPO, Su William Carlos Williams, in EAD., Gli imperdonabili, Adelphi, Milano 1987, pp. 173-175.
  2. JONATHAN CULLER, Theory of the Lyric, Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA 2015.
  3. ROBERT FROST, Selected Letters of Robert Frost, edited by Lawrance Thompson, Jonathan Cape, London 1965.
  4. ROBERT LANGBAUM, The New Nature Poetry, in ID., The Modern Spirit: Essays on the Continuity of Nineteenth-and Twentieth-Century Literature, Oxford University Press, New York 1970, pp. 101-126 (ed. or «American Scholar», 28, 3, 1959, pp. 323-340).
  5. PAOLA LORETO, La melodia della voce. La lezione americana, «Ricognizioni», 6, 11, 2019, pp. 111-120.
  6. PAOLA LORETO, The Crowning of a Poet’s Quest: Derek Walcott’s “Tiepolo’s Hound”, Rodopi, Amsterdam and New York 2009.
  7. MARY OLIVER, American Primitive, Back Bay Books (Little Brown and Co.), Boston-New York-Toronto-London 1983.
  8. MARY OLIVER, New and Selected Poems. Volume One, Beacon Press, Boston 1992.
  9. MARY OLIVER, A Poetry Handbook: A Prose Guide to Understanding and Writing Poetry, Harcourt, New York and London 1994.
  10. MARY OLIVER, Primitivo americano, a cura di Paola Loreto, Einaudi, Torino 2023.
  11. SERGIO SOLMI, Poeti antichi e moderni tradotti dai lirici nuovi, Il Balcone, Milano 1945, poi in ROSITA COPIOLI (a cura di), Tradurre poesia (L’altro versante), Paideia, Brescia1983.
  12. GEORGE STEINER, After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation, Third Edition, Oxford University Press, Oxford 1998 (ed. or. ivi, 1975).
  13. LAWRENCE VENUTI, How to Read a Translation, Words without Borders: The Home for International Literature, July 1, 2004 <https://wordswithoutborders.org/read/article/2004-07/how-to-read-a-translation/> (u.c. 16.11.2025), republished in Translation Changes Everything: Theory and Practice, Routledge, London and New York 2013.
  14. LAWRENCE VENUTI, World Literature and Translation Studies, in ID., The Routledge Companion to World Literature, edited by Theo D’haen, David Damrosch and Djelal Kadir, Routledge, London and New York 2011, pp. 180-193.
  15. GIAMPAOLO VINCENZI, Per una teoria della traduzione poetica, EUM, Macerata 2010.
  16. Webster’s New International Dictionary of the English Language, Second Edition Unabridged, G.&C. Merriam Company, Springfield 1958.
  17. WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS, The Poem as a Field of Action, in GEORGE PERKINS (edited by), American Poetic Theory, Holt, Rinehart and Winston, New York 1972, pp. 249-253.
  18. WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS, This Is Just to Say, The Collected Poems: Volume I, 1909-1939, edited by Arthur Walton Litz and Christopher MacGowan, New Directions, New York 1991.

Downloads

Download data is not yet available.