This article analyses some of the difficulties that translating what we could loosely define poetic texts can pose, focussing in particular on the rendering of the figures of speech as well as, given the texts I selected as my corpus, the visual and the communicative elements that characterise poetry. Indeed, for my analysis I decided to focus on the rhymes of Dr Seuss (born Theodor Seuss Geisel in 1904), the American writer, poet and cartoonist who, during the second half of the twentieth century, created a small universe (often referred to as Seussville), inhabited by strange creatures able to give birth to the most peculiar and spectacular of situations. His work, which clearly belongs to the genre of children’s literature, is extremely rich both from a formal/linguistic and content perspective. As we shall see below, however, it can also be categorised as the kind of “non-sense literature” that, while being often expressed in verse, occasionally finds expression in prose too, as for example with Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking Glass (1871), two works that combine the two branches of literary nonsense that derive from folk tradition and the court poets respectively

Translating the Poetry of Dr Seuss / Canepari, Michela. - STAMPA. - (2014), pp. 257-298.

Translating the Poetry of Dr Seuss

CANEPARI, Michela
2014-01-01

Abstract

This article analyses some of the difficulties that translating what we could loosely define poetic texts can pose, focussing in particular on the rendering of the figures of speech as well as, given the texts I selected as my corpus, the visual and the communicative elements that characterise poetry. Indeed, for my analysis I decided to focus on the rhymes of Dr Seuss (born Theodor Seuss Geisel in 1904), the American writer, poet and cartoonist who, during the second half of the twentieth century, created a small universe (often referred to as Seussville), inhabited by strange creatures able to give birth to the most peculiar and spectacular of situations. His work, which clearly belongs to the genre of children’s literature, is extremely rich both from a formal/linguistic and content perspective. As we shall see below, however, it can also be categorised as the kind of “non-sense literature” that, while being often expressed in verse, occasionally finds expression in prose too, as for example with Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking Glass (1871), two works that combine the two branches of literary nonsense that derive from folk tradition and the court poets respectively
2014
9788878474338
Translating the Poetry of Dr Seuss / Canepari, Michela. - STAMPA. - (2014), pp. 257-298.
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Utilizza questo identificativo per citare o creare un link a questo documento: https://hdl.handle.net/11381/2718502
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