ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the language and style of the Sonetti translated by Angelo Olivieri, Luigi De Marchi, and Ettore Sanfelice, with a view to highlighting the translators' linguistic and stylistic choices, before looking briefly at the twentieth-century translation by Eugenio Montale, in order to outline the "struggle" of rendering Shakespeare's language and prosody into Italian. The language of the first translations was deeply rooted in the Italian poetic tradition, but the literary challenge that stimulated translators to bring Shakespeare's poems to the peninsula also prompted them to rethink the sonnets in the light of contemporary tastes. Nineteenth-century Italian translations of the Sonnets show an interesting leap toward modernity, as far as the language and style of the poems are concerned. In the twentieth century, "wrestling" with the Sonnets became an even more challenging task for Italian translators who attempted to reproduce Shakespeare's poetics.
