La traduzione come caso particolare della critica del testo: Adon e Adone

Translation as a special case of textual criticism (on the example of Adon / L’Adone). Starting from the simple (but not always practiced!) assumption that, in the case of the edition of a translation text, philological investigation and ecdotic choices must be preceded or rather accompanied step by step by translation analysis, this study addresses the particular problem of the relationship between translation and textual criticism. Numerous concrete examples are therefore taken from the edition of Adon, an anonymous polish mid-seventeenth-century version of Giambattista Marino’s Adone, preserved in two manuscript witnesses that can only be partially collated, and edited in print in 1993 by the author of this article himself in collaboration with Krzysztof Mrowcewicz. The main thesis here is that, since the relationship between source and target text is relatively reversible, in textual criticism of a translation one can consider the original as belonging to the indirect tradition of the translated text. The source text, in several cases, may therefore intervene, even solidly, as a support in the choices and decisions concerning the restitutio textus. The extent of that degree of relative reversibility will be decided precisely by a preliminary in-depth translation analysis, aimed at defining the type of relationship, which we could define as macro-intertextual, between the original and the translation at the different levels of linguistic expression and, in the case of art texts, stylistic-literary expression. In short, if ecdotics is in essence “an application of the pathology of attention” (Robert Marichal), the attention of the philologist-publisher in such cases must be, so to speak, bilingual (or, depending on the case, even multilingual) and comparative. All the more so in cases such as the one taken here as an example of a translation particularly ‘faithful’ to its original (at various levels, but especially the lexical one), for the philological interventions of the constitutio textus (recensio and choice between variants, conjectures on errors, interpolations, faults and lacunae, divinatio) it will therefore be fundamental to have full knowledge of what can be called the usus vertendi of the translator as well as of the ‘dominant’ and ‘sub-dominants’ of the target text (in the sense intended in his time by Jakobson and the Russian formalists, and then by contemporary Translation Studies) in relation to the procedures and conditioning of various kinds (cultural, linguistic, rhetorical, poetic, psychological) that have guided the translation process and, in cases of manuscript tradition such as ours, also that of any copyists of the translated text.