On Rendering Wildness: Choices and Strategies for Translating John Muir’s Essays into Italian

This essay treats the Italian translation of a selection of essays taken from a series of books by American naturalist writer John Muir (1838–1914). The translator considers the peculiarities of Muir’s style and themes and describes the strategies she used in order to render his writing into Italian. In particular, the translator discusses, by using excerpts from the texts as examples, Muir’s complex syntax, use of archaisms and accumulative style, the continual presence of irony and of a strong metaphysical and poetic vein (much consonant with Walt Whitman’s poetry). Much attention is given to the issue of translating the term “wildness,” due to the difficulty of finding an equivalent expression in Italian.