ABSTRACT
This chapter introduces Edoardo Sanguineti's translation ideology, examines his translations from Petronius, Goethe, classical drama, and his 2006 Quaderno di traduzioni, and reviews his translation methods. It explains Sanguineti's translation philosophy through Lawrence Venuti's foreignizing approach to translation, and shows how the Italian poet-translator's conception of translation both draws on Bertolt Brecht's idea of theatrical alienation and appropriates Walter Benjamin's notion of interlinear translation. Thus the translator, a magician and a deceiver, speaks through the mask of the author he translates and the characters he resuscitates. The Italian poet-translator, in altering and abbreviating the original text, makes the work fundamentally nihilistic and pessimistic. Yet in Sanguineti's choice of elegies and epigrams in the quaderno di traduzioni, his mode of translating Goethe is different: there is no longer parody, cultural adaptation, or extensive colloquial elements. Sanguineti arranged his translations of Lucretius into three thematic categories: Natura, Amore, and Morte.
