When words go beyond words: Notes on a hermeneutical and sensualistic approach to text and translation in the poems of Kezilahabi and Leopardi

In this paper I propose translation as a main tool for a sensualistic and hermeneutical approach to texts. In agreement with the writer and thinker Euphrase Kezilahabi, who claims that the text has to be considered as a living event, I propose to look at a text not as an object but as a living body. I ague that this approach reduces the distance between the body of the text and that of the reader. Perception can thus be used as a means to know and critique a literary text. I present a multifocal sensualistic analysis based on an analogical idea of knowledge, taking translation as a tool to push the critic to focus on the text word for word (not excluding the paratext or context). The translations discussed here are poems by Kezilahabi and a proposal for a Swahili translation of the poem L’infinito by the Italian poet Giacomo Leopardi.