Translating the Poetry of Dr Seuss

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