Two versions of the translation of the “Premise” of《没有时间的时间》(Mei you shijian de shijian) by Mang Ke: differences in choices.

In 1969, during the Cultural Revolution, Mang Ke 芒克, born in Shenyang in 1950, went to the lake area of Baiyangdian, not far from Beijing, with his friends and schoolmates Duo Duo 多多 and Genzi 根子. Because of this experience, Mang Ke became a poet. Years later, his long poem 《没有时间的时间》 (Mei you shijian de shijian), composed towards the end of the Eighties, was published in 1990 in Japan in the Japanese translation, and in 1992 in Italy in the Italian translation. The poem is composed of sixteen parts of which the first is a xu 序, a premise. In 2018, the English translation of the “xu” has appeared, together with some excerpts, in a collection of poems by Mang Ke translated by Lucas Klein, Huang Yibing and Jonathan Stalling. This paper focuses on the Italian and on the English translations of the “Premise” and points out some peculiar characteristics of each of the two versions.