A che gioco giochiamo? Tradurre Vitaï Lampada per riflettere su uno scarto culturale

The paper presents a possible translation of the poem "Vitaï Lampada", published by Sir Henry Newbolt, in 1897. His work can be inscribed in the genre of military-patriotic poetry, much in vogue in the nineties of the nineteenth century. The author reached in those years a high degree of popularity, for the tone and the character of his verses, but later fell out of favor - especially with the critics - coinciding with the decline of the imperialist ethic - with which Newbolt is inextricably associated - and with the awareness of the atrocity of the war, resulting from the impact of the first World War. Therefore, a timeworn text, the work of an author who is poorly considered and sometimes derided. Yet, because of the characteristics that make it an object of criticism and sometimes scorn, this poem - as the entire production of Newbolt - is worthy of attention because it is extremely representative of its era, of its mindset, of a cultural heritage that can be judged only when put in its proper context. The paper seeks to show how the translation of poetry can be an intellectual operation which requires a further degree of meta-textual reflection. The idiomatic phrase in the title of the paper - "What game are we playing?", inspired by the famous refrain, "Play up! Play up! and play the game! "- is intended as an invitation to reflect on the specificity of the semantic field of the verb" to play "in the ideological and historical moment in which Newbolt's poem was produced. From this consideration comes the need, for the translator, to bridge - or at least to reduce - the cultural gap between the British and the Italian concepts of "playing the game", especially with regard to the idea of "playing" a sport, and the value the Italians place to sports in terms of education or patriotic.