Leopardi in Scotland: poetry translation as the affirmation of national identity

Despite being Italy’s most important 19th-century poet, Giacomo Leopardi has achieved scattered recognition abroad (Ceaser and D’Intino, 2013), especially among general readers. Nevertheless, his poems have received multiple translations in several languages over the centuries. In the Anglophone literary landscape, a considerable number of translations have been produced in the Scottish area, particularly into minoritarian languages such as Scots. Scots holds a peculiar position in the national life of Scotland: in popular thought, it is often mistakenly perceived as a dialect, and a corrupted form of English (McClure, 2009, p. 13); linguistically, however, it can be regarded as a language (Millar, 2023, p. 4), since it is internally stratified in social and local variations (McClure, 2009, p. 14), and has also been the medium of a flourishing literary tradition (ibid., p. 29). Against this backdrop, this presentation shall contrastively compare a selection of translations from Leopardi’s poetry composed by Scottish translators in both English and Scots. Unlike the English-language translations included in this paper, the ones in Scots present creative stylistic solutions, as well as being rich in references and allusions to the Scots literary tradition. In the light of this preliminary observation, the paper aims to shed light on the following aspects: a) how the representation of Leopardi’s poetry in Scotland was highly influenced by the Scots literary tradition; b) how translation approaches and solutions greatly varied between English and Scots translation, even in the case of poems which were rendered in both languages by the same translator. The paper concludes with the observation that whilst translating into English represents a mere vehicle for the dissemination of Leopardi’s poetry in Scotland, poetic translation into Scots carries a cultural and political load, serving as a medium for the affirmation of Scotland’s linguistic and literary identity.