Sinalefe e scelta del metro nella traduzione poetica dal russo: il caso dell’Onegin

This article examines the role of synalepha (sinalefe) in the poetic translation from Russian into Italian, with particular reference to Aleksandr Puškin’s Evgenij Onegin. While previous scholarship has largely focused on the quantitative expansion of Italian compared to Russian at the level of ‘metrical’ syllables, this study argues that such analyses overlook a crucial factor: the discrepancy between metrical and linguistic syllables in Italian verse due to synalepha. After outlining the linguistic and metrical conditions that enable synalepha in the Italian poetic tradition, and contrasting them with the Russian system—where linguistic and metrical syllables coincide—the article proposes a reassessment of established assumptions about metrical equivalence in translation. Drawing on quantitative analyses of two Italian verse translations of Onegin (by Ettore Lo Gatto and Giuseppe Ghini), it demonstrates that synalepha significantly increases the effective length of Italian verses, often exceeding previously estimated expansion rates. The findings suggest that the choice of metre in translation should account not only for metrical syllable counts but also for the latent expansion afforded by synalepha, which may compensate for structural differences between the two languages.