«Prà¤zise doch ungenau». Tradurre il saggio. Un approccio olistico al saggio poetico di Durs Gru?nbein

The Essay, the «anti-genre» par excellence, describes a neglected research area within the Translation Studies. My thesis develops a holistic approach for the translation of the Essay. Preliminarily it joins literary-philological and linguistic acquisitions within the multidisciplinary theoretical-methodological horizon of an anthropological, literary, hermeneutic & text linguistic traductological paradigm. Through a critical examination of state of the art of both the literary-philosophical Essayforschung and text linguistic studies on the Textsorte essay, the work provides an operative: 1. Localisation of the genre and its main variants (from the specialist essay to the poetic essay) on the prototypical text continuum among the dimensions (scientific, pragmatic, aesthetic) of the Denkhandeln (Thought as Action); 2. Definitio per proprietates of the Essay. On the basis of these operative acquisitions the thesis devises a holistic model for the translation of the genre. The translating model is designed as a process with recursive, interacting phases featuring: holistic reception, hermeneutical and poetic analysis, rhetorical and stylistic analysis, cognitive and linguistic draft, wording and revision. The validity of this model is tested through a highly complex case study, i.e. the translation of the «poetischer Essay» of Durs Grà¼nbein, arguably one of the world's greatest living poets who enjoys large international recognition not least as a new classic of critical-poetic prose. Finally the unpublished Italian translation of Grà¼nbein's Essays Den Kà¶rper zerbrechen and Die Bars von Atlantis is presented.