Anna Blume 'attraverso lo specchio'. Traduzione poetica e ricezione testuale in Kurt Schwitters (attraverso Lewis Carroll)

This essay takes Carroll's novel Through the Looking-Glass as a starting point to discuss the experimentation with linguistic material by "Merz" poet and artist Kurt Schwitters. Dwelling on the lyric AN ANNA BLUME! and the reception of the text in Europe after its first publication, the essay will focus on some translation issues starting, in the first place, with the Italian translations. Far from being 'nonsensical', the literature of nonsense, of which both Carroll and Schwitters are major exponents, highlights the rich semantic, sonorous, graphic and typographic multidimensionality of language and emphasises once again how translation, especially the translation of poetry, or more generally the translation of rhymes, word plays and idioms, is comparable to a challenge, to the resolution of a riddle to which the various possible solutions have first been pondered for a long time. However, this is not an impossible challenge as the postulate of poetry's untranslatability states.