The Infinity of Leopardi in emoji. We have translated the I poetic

A mountain, the face of a newborn baby and the desert. So it is that Leopards would have been able to compose The Infinite if two hundred years ago had the existence of the emoji. Translated already in 27 languages, including Hebrew and gaelic, the long list of foreign languages is now added to the version in emojitaliano: that of emoticons - with lots of vocabulary, syntax and grammar - developed by researchers at the University of Macerata, already known to have 'rewritten' the adventures of Pinocchio and to the Italian Constitution. The trauduzione on Twitter, As has already happened to the story of Pinocchio, this time the work of translation and combination of emoji and words was collective and took place on Twitter, with the help of the community #scritturebrevi. Between old and new critical issues, the work was not easy. “Immediately the challenge of the translation of poetry was presented to our horizon,” says the teacher Francesca Chiusaroli .

At the semantic level the first difficulty was that of finding the pictograms for all the concepts expressed in the original version of the poem. “What is not always easy, he adds, although today the repertoire of emoji provided by Unicode to be very big and diverse”. Then a criticality has ever faced before: to give you the beauty of the poetic language in all its aspects, from the structure of the sentence to the aesthetics of the emoji chosen. The I poetic in emoji “we Wanted to build the Emojitaliano poetic, without however altering the structure of our language - continue Chiusaroli - In the choice of the combinations of emoji and words, we then worked, as always, on the meaning, operating on the level of metaphor and other figures of language for the transposition of the meanings, both concrete and abstract”. So the figure of the planet translates the word ‘superhuman’, while the hourglass and the symbol of the infinite, translated respectively ‘always’ and ‘infinity’. Beyond the hedge, Between the words that gave more hard time to the researchers, there is one for this poetry is fundamental: ‘the hedge’. "A problem that we resolved after you elect to ‘hedge’ one of the emoji in the shape of a tree, the tree with foliage that is more compact”. Not exactly a faithful translation, you might complain, but “just look at other translations of the Infinite to realize that many languages have to develop equally ‘unfaithful’ the concept of the hedge, not having an equivalent language direct available”.