Translating wordplay in The Bridge by Harold Hart Crane

Abstract This essay focuses on a new translation of the divisive poem The Bridge by Harold Hart Crane. Published in the United States in 1930 and written during a period of unprecedented literary creativity dominated by T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, the poem encountered many obstacles in its acknowledgment. Although Crane is now considered one of the major modernist poets and The Bridge his masterpiece, the poem was originally judged a failure. The reason for its negative reception depended on many factors: the work did not conform to the canon of the age; the enthusiasm of the author that created excessive expectations; its huge number of puns were difficult to interpret and translate. In Italy the poem was translated at an academic level for the first and last time in 1967 by Roberto Sanesi, although a partial version appeared in a monograph by Pietro Spinucci published in 1966. Both have long been out of print. Considering that the translation process of a text is related to context and time, a new rendering of The Bridge into Italian has been proposed examining its puns. Keywords: pun; translation; paradoxes; analogies; metaphors.