Exercises in Rhyme. A Quatrain by Yves Bonnefoy and a Few Paradoxes

by Valerio Magrelli

An extract from a forthcoming book, this article analyses a specific aspect of poetic translation: the problem of how to reproduce rhymes. The text develops from a single example, a quatrain specially composed by Yves Bonnefoy for a German primary school. The aim is to show what happens if one tries to reproduce both the poem’s metric and its monorhyme. The article illustrates two alternative solutions, each of which gives rise to a couple of Italian versions of the French original.