P.B. Shelley’s Ozymandias (1817): A Contemporary Translation from English into Italian

The translation I would like to present comes from my personal interpretation of one of the most popular poems by Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822), i.e., “Ozymandias”. My proposal originates from a contrastive analysis of all the Italian versions translated and published so far, to my knowledge: Roberto Sanesi (Mondadori 1983), Francesco Rognoni (Einaudi-Gallimard 1995), Paolo Bernardini (Eeditrice.com 2000), Franco Buffoni (Bompiani 2002), Gianfranco Palmery (Il Labirinto 2006). My translation occasionally takes some risks in terms of ‘equivalence’, but the main objective of preserving the profound meaning of the source text has never been neglected. To this purpose, the same rhyme scheme and rhythm as the source text have been maintained. This procedure proves to be very important since the ‘semantic equivalence’ of lexicon in poetry is not enough, in most cases, to evoke what the poet means. In particular, also prosody and sound symbolism play a crucial role in this regard. Therefore, by re-translating this poem into a new and alternative Italian version, these two relevant levels of communication have been strictly adhered to.