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1I was familiar neither with Laura E. Richards and her unconventional approach to poetry nor with the richness and relevance of her writing for children. I think the main challenge for an Italian translator of Richards’s “Eletelephony” is to maintain the rhythm Richards gave to her humorous composition that is full of playful rhymes and assonances. Given that Italian is a longer language than English, it was very difficult for me to maintain the rhythm and rhyme in the target text without changing the structure or even the sense of the poem.

2Here is how I went about it. Let’s start with a short list of words in “Eletelephony” whose rendering has been most challenging:
- I have employed “Eletelephony” as a noun. In Italian Elephant is Elefante and Telephone is Telefono, so they are slightly the same. Telephone is of course an instrument allowing people to talk even when they are far away from each other, which, in Richards’s time was very different from the cell phones we use today.

3- Entangled—got caught in something—can be read in two different ways: one associated with a sort of visual “killing” of animals, and even human beings, by machines; the other associated with the pleasure someone could have by being caught into ropes for bondage.
- Buzzed: made a humming sound like a bee.

4I have translated the verse starting with “Dear me!” as “Povero me!,” which in English means “Poor me!” because I think it sounds better in Italian. Then, in the same verse, I have inverted the words “certain quite” in order to maintain the original rhyme scheme. I have rendered “trunk” as “nasone,” which would translate as “big nose” in English, and “telephunk” as “telephone,” which could be “big telephone” in English, to maintain the assonance. Then I have chosen to translate “entangled” as “aggrovigliato,” and rendered “buzzed” as “ronzava” because it perfectly conveys the sense of the sound in Italian. In the end, I have dropped the final “e” of “canzone,” and “telefone” (for “telephong”) and used “canzon,” and “telefon” Instead. In Italian poems, dropping the final vowel in words is very common.

5“My Japanese Fan” is longer and, I think, more complex for its queer meaning, because it describes an exotic Japanese of ambiguous gender. With this androgynous figure Richards is certainly ahead of her times.

6Given that in Italian I could not maintain the rhyme of “woman” and “man” because their translations are respectively “donna” and “uomo,” I have therefore decided to change them into “lei” and “lui” (“she” and “he” in English) to maintain assonance. The reference to the kimono, which ignores anatomical differences between the sexes, is clear with “His clothes.” Here again I have preferred to use an expression which would read as “the clothes of him” in English. I have translated the word “queer” to “strano,” which means “strange” in Italian. In addition, in the verse “is combed” I have dropped the “is,” leaving only the past participle because it would have been too long in Italian. Then I have postponed the following “his” as it was “of him,” and chose “di lui” in Italian. Finally, I have chosen to use an article followed by an adjective—“un gentile”—for the adverb “friendly.”