Sull’immaginazione traduttiva tra poesia e filosofia

Abstract

This essay examines translation as a philosophical exercise by distinguishing two modes of adjacency between language and content in poetry and philosophy. In poetry, form and content converge centripetally toward coincidence, creating an embodied verbal experience that demands faithful recreation of analogous effects in the target language. Philosophy, conversely, operates centrifugally: formulation and conceptualization exceed each other in productive tension, requiring translators to maintain operative conceptual dynamics. These differences generate distinct translative postures: co-authorship in poetry, which reinvents verbal intensity, and performative exegesis in philosophy, which reactivates conceptual work. Rhythm emerges as a transversal principle linking both practices. The essay proposes understanding translative imagination as non-figurative, expressive, and performative – working not through mental images but through patterns of intensity and conceptual resonance that reshape linguistic possibilities in the target culture.