Giovanni Meo Zilio's philological contributions to the translation of Martín Fierro

Abstract

The objective of this article is to characterize Giovanni Meo Zilio's performance as a translator of Martín Fierro, focusing especially on his philological approach to the study and translation of Hernández's work —a contribution which made it possible for him to produce an Italian version that surpassed the previous three. With this aim in view, and based on Meo Zilio's studies of Hernández, firstly we reconstructed the development of his personal translation strategy. Secondly, we carried out a comparison of source and target text, which allowed us to infer the extent to which Meo Zilio's theoretical assumptions reached his translation practice. In order to counterpoint and enrich this comparative analysis, we also made use of Folco Testena's translation of Martín Fierro, which is the first rendering of the work into Italian and the most widespread to the present day. Thus, we looked into the resulting advancements of the philological approach incorporated by Meo Zilio, as well as some of the translation challenges posed by this work, which are still open to those who decide to undertake the task of attempting a translation into the Italian language.