Volatilità della poesia: tradurre Moniza Alvi

This article centres on the latest collection by the British poet Moniza Alvi, Blackbird, Bye Bye (2018), devoted to the author’s English mother and Pakistani father. After an overview of her oeuvre, these pages identify in Blackbird a further development of Alvi’s characteristic traits, namely identity-related issues, surreal contexts and aireness of tone – in this collection all coalescing around a dominant ornithological imagery which channels, amongst other things, migratory questions (including death and the afterlife). Resulting from a translation seminar, this article proposes specific solutions to translation issues such as the maintenance of the double (human/bird) semantic connotations, of the coexistence between simplicity and suggestiveness in language, and of the collection’s subtle phonetic patterns.