Il linguaggio del trauma, poesia e ripetizione. Tradurre Elegie del Quattro giugno di Liu Xiaobo.

Translation in itself is an act of repetition. The translation of the poetry collection Niannian liusi 年年六 四 (June Fourth Elegies) by Nobel Peace Prize laureate Liu Xiaobo 刘小波, died in 2017 under surveillance regime after numerous years of imprisonment, is an act of repetition and preservation of trauma. The poems included in the collection, written on each anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre, spanning twenty years from 1990 to 2009, form a ‘lyrical synthesis of rare balance’ between political denunciation and ritual song, a poetic sharing of human suffering. The elegies sometimes repeat almost unchanged over the years, as noted by the English translator Jeffrey Yang: «Whole lines in a later elegy are even repeated verbatim from an elegy written years earlier. This fatigue, however, can be said to mirror the static sameness of blank memory».3 In my talk, I will explore the main strategies of my translation of the collection into Italian (Lantana 2013), including some references and comparisons with the English translation of the work. In my reflection on the translation, I ponder the meaning of the text in relation to trauma and the contradiction between poetry/translation as a compulsion to repeat the trauma and poetry/translation as salvation from oblivion.