Coleridge: poetica e traduzione della Ballata del vecchio marinaio

COLERIDGE: POETICA

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834).

Coleridge wrote the “Lyrical Ballads” together with Wordsworth: the first concerning about supernatural, the second about everyday life; even if he wrote just few poems for this collection (only four), was he to adopt the ballad structure and themes.
His poems find their typical dramatic atmosphere in medieval settings and they are full of mystery and supernatural events; he often writes about distant places and time (exoticism) and gives musicality to his poems through the use of special sounds, words and devices in order to create an unreal atmosphere. The poet took inspiration in a state of trance, of ecstasy, sometimes under the effect of medical opium.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge: riassunto

COLERIDGE IMAGINATION

Coleridge has a particular view of imagination: it’s divided into two parts.

All the people have the primary imagination, the capacity of perceiving the reality through our senses, but only the poets have the secondary imagination, the faculty of recreating images modifying, unifying and idealizing the perceptions. The fancy is a mechanical and logical faculty, inferior to imagination, that aggregates ad associates the images through the use of metaphors, similes and other poetical devices.
© B. WILLEY says that imagination is the mind in its highest state of alertness and insight creativity, it does acts of growth and breaks all it is obvious, it remoulds our perceptions into new living wholes. Instead fancy plays with fixities, it’s a mode of memory, it’s on a higher level than perception and memory but below imagination, it constructs patterns out of ready made materials in a kind of mechanical process.
© G. MARTIN states that the imagination modifies the objects observed for creating unified scenes.

The rime of the ancient mariner: traduzione, parafrasi e analisi

THE RIME OF THE ANCIENT MARINER: TRADUZIONE

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (La poesia dell’Antico Marinaio). Introduction. Facile credo, plures esse Naturas invisibiles quam visibiles in rerum universitate. Sed horum omnium familiam quis nobis enarrabit ? Et gradus et cognationes et discrimina et singulorum munera ? Quid agunt ? quae loca habitant ? Harum rerum notitiam semper ambivit ingenium humanum, nunquam attigit. Juvat, interea, non diffiteor, quandoque in animo, tanquam in tabula, majoris et melioris mundi imaginem contemplari: ne mens assuefacta hodiernae vitae minutiis se contrahat nimis, et tota subsidat in pusillas cogitationes. Sed veritati interea invigilandum est, modusque servandus, ut certa ab incertis, diem a nocte, distinguamus.
Introduzione. E’ agevole pensare che nell’Universo le creature invisibili siano più numerose di quelle visibili. Ma chi ce ne descriverà il genere e la famiglia? E i gradi, le parentele, le differenze e le mansioni di ognuna di esse? Che cosa fanno? Quali luoghi abitano? La mente umana ha sempre aspirato ad avere notizia di tali cose, senza mai conseguirla. Giova comunque, non ne dubito, contemplare nella mente, di tanto in tanto, come in un quadro, l’immagine di un Mondo più grande e migliore, di modo che la mente stessa, assuefatta alle piccole cose della vita quotidiana, non si immiserisca troppo e non resti tutta assorbita nei piccoli pensieri. E però bisogna anche vigilare e saper conservare l’equilibrio necessario a distinguere il certo dall’incerto, il giorno dalla notte.