La traduttologia come ‘stetoscopio’ delle Humanities. Il rigore come missione della slavistica

The achievements of scientific translatology now permit us to move beyond the standard amateur approaches to literary translation that have prevailed in translation practice for centuries. That said, making the transition from the random subjectiveness of past approaches to a new scientifically based scholarly discipline requires that academic translators share with their colleagues, students, and readers their new know-how, providing them with detailed meta-translational information about the specific rules, strategies, and techniques that were employed in the translation process. For a number of historical reasons, Italian Slavic Studies has played a key role in this “revolution of rigour”; nonetheless, a meta-translational reticence continues to endure even among the most exacting Slavic scholars, who often hesitate to confront age-old and unscientific prejudices against formalization. The fact that translators pay more attention to meta-literary data than to metatranslational data is the primary reason that even the most rigorous practice of literary translation is still considered an atheoretical and unscholarly activity rather than an academic discipline. Through the examples of recent projects of Russian verse translation (Puškin and Cvetaeva) into Italian, this article illustrates main problems and perspectives in sharing meta-translational information.