La sfida della traduzione e la "Critica della ragion pura" in Italia

Kant’s philosophy was considered by his early publishers as the brilliant result of modern Europe’s progress and as a milestone in the history of philosophy. After Kant, it became inevitable and almost obligatory for any philosopher to come to terms with Criticism. This process however was not painless and it generated a heated debate especially in Italy and France, where the new philosophy encountered fierce and widespread opposition. The reception of Kant’s philosophy was strongly influenced by the political, social, religious and cultural unrest of the Napoleonic age, which impacted also on the work of elaboration – both conceptual and linguistic – of the contents of Kant’s work. The work of translators was crucial especially during the first century of this reception, when the scarce knowledge of the German language made it impossible to read the original writings: their reception was at times directly influenced by the degree of translators’ skill, by the selection of works to translate and by the form in which they were presented to the public. The paper focuses precisely on the work of the translators and addresses the linguistic issues – both theoretical and practical – related to it. The translators’ difficulty in understanding certain concepts, the strategies they used to translate a very complex text, their reflections on the peculiarities of the Kantian idiolect and on its semantic and syntactic characteristics offer an important fil rouge to follow both the development and refinement of translation techniques, and the progressive understanding and elaboration of typical Kantian concepts within the Italian philosophical domain.