Summary: | This article focuses on the translation of short forms. It starts from the idea that any translator is a double translator, since he must be able to render both the natural language and the artistic language of the text (s)he has to translate. Once this premise is acquired, typology – understood as the form through which the text manifests itself – comes into play. The author focuses on a genre typically associated with Romanticism, the fragment; its translation does not require the application of a method, but the concrete exercise of an art: the fragment imposes and, as it were, directs its own translation. A similar link between typology and way of translating can be found in all short forms. In order to prove it, the text analyses various short forms, ranging from a minimum to a maximum of authorial presence: from the total absence of the author (as in proverbs) we come to the exclusive presence, to the solitude, of the author (as in aphorisms, when they are written without thinking about a future publication).
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