"Don't You Wonder, Sometimes?" Proposta di traduzione della raccolta poetica Life on Mars di Tracy K. Smith

The aim of this dissertation is to propose a translation into English of ten poems extracted from the collection Life on Mars by African American author Tracy K. Smith. Conceptually originating from the death of Smith’s father, an aerospace engineer who worked on the Hubble Space Telescope, the book explores the ways in which the experience of mourning can function as a telescopic lens capable of putting into perspective the grand questions about existence, afterlife and the nature of the divine. The work of translation is preceded by a study of the recent history of American poetry – with a particular focus on circumscribing the literary landscape where Smith’s work came into being – and a close analysis of the book. More specifically, Chapter 1 offers a general framework of the main poetic tendencies that developed in the wake of Modernism and investigates how they influenced the hybrid scenario of contemporary American poetry; subsequently, it zooms on the recent history of African American poetry, and in particular on the post-soul experiences of the Dark Room Collective and the Cave Canem Foundation, of whom Smith was an active member. Chapter 2 provides a brief biography of the author and explores the collection Life on Mars on different levels (genre, structure, meter, themes and style), attempting to highlight the connections that the work entertains with the context previously outlined and the sensible aspects that will successively prove relevant during the translation process. Chapter 3 outlines the selection criteria adopted for the choice of the ten poems that make the object of this work and presents their Italian translations side by side with the original texts. Finally, Chapter 4 deals with notions related to the practice of translating poetry, initially from a theoretical point of view and then focusing on the concrete issues encountered during my work of translation and the strategies applied to solve them.