"Il lacerato spirito" di Montale tra ermeneutica e tecnologia: un'esperienza di didattica della traduzione

In the domain of translation studies, hermeneutics has been defined as the “discipline concerned with understanding and explicating what is not immediately intelligible” (According to the Routledge Encyclopaedia of Translation Studies (2011), h). Traditionally, hermeneutics operates within one and the same language and culture whenever “the accidents of time and change”, as the above mentioned definition suggests, have made access to meaning problematic. Even more, hermeneutics can apply to translation across languages and cultures, where it is said to highlight “the contiguity between intralingual and interlingual translating as the negotiation of difference and otherness”. In this latter respect, translating Monatale’s “Il lacerato spirito” into English can certainly be seen as representing an exercise in hermeneutics, which can profitably taken as a case in point to discuss the necessity of a multifocal integrated approach in the taching of literary translation. Not only does this text pose the challenges of a journey into the past and therefore often forces the reader/translator to resort to intralingual translation as the basis for adequate interlingual translation, but it also offers some interesting opportunities to solve specific problems via intersemiotic translation, thus suggesting a contiguity of all the three levels of Jakobson’s view of translation under the hermeneutic effort. This multifocal task can today be supported by the use of technology in an integrated approach to the translation of literary texts that combines a more traditional approach based on the hermeneutic motion, with the use of electronic resources, both as an aid to the interpretation of the source text and to support the production of the target text.