Kostà Xetӕgkaty fra tradizione e traduzione

One of the most notorious difficulties of translating poetry is the temporal, spatial and above all cultural distance between the source and the target language, with respect to the purpose and recipient of the translation. This is especially true for languages that the average Western European reader is unfamiliar with. The eternal question is whether our aim is to preserve the artistic style of the original text or to adapt the translation to the new audience. Another important problem arises when dealing with a text, such as the collection of poems written by Kostà Xetægkaty and first published in 1899 (Iron fændyr), which marks the beginning of the Ossetic literary tradition. This work is based primarily on local folklore and oral tradition within the dominant Russian cultural and linguistic spaces. The paper presents the figure of the poet and discusses some issues and perspectives regarding the translation of his masterpiece into Italian according to the phonological, lexical, and metrical levels.