Il sonetto n° 74 di W. Shakespeare e le traduzioni russe di S. Ja. Marsak e B. L. Pasternak

Shakespeare's Sonnet 74 and the Russian Translations by S. Ya. Marshak and Boris Pasternak ABSTRACT The essay presents a parallel reading of Shakespeare's Sonnet and two Russian translations in a comparative perspective. The poetic form of the sonnet allows for a textual analysis of a work that has strong internal cohesion and can be studied as an independent unit. The choice of these two translations is based on the consideration that the two Russian authors knowingly used the translation as an artistic opportunity at time when the Soviet regime strongly limited the artists' free expression. Using Gasparov and Tarlinskaya's work as a starting point, the author suggests to break the verses of the original into "rhythmic-semantic segments" (segmenti ritmico-semantici) which coincide, for the most part, with the hemistich. They represent the reading tools not only for the translations, but for the sonnet itself. Thanks to this method, the degrees of distance between the texts come to full light. The analysis pays special attention to the structure of the strophe and of the rhyme. In this context, the two translations of Shakespearean distich prove to be clues into the possible readings of the Russian texts and into their interpretation of the Shakespeare's sonnet.