Abstract

Gianfranco Contini (1986) argued that the immediate purpose of philology is to arouse the perception of cultural distance between the observer (the philologist) and the object of investigation (the text). While aknowledging that the only suitable translation for the strophic structure of the “Nibelungenlied” is prose rendering, a balance between the semantic precision in translation and the attempt to reproduce the stylistic features of the original is desirable to avoid trivialising the peculiarities of the poem’s style. This argument is supported by the analysis of a series of technicisms (e.g., nouns, as voget, mœre, etc.), idiomatic expressions (e.g., the formulaic usage of adjectives as wætlîch) and recursive formulae (e.g., lîp : wîp in the “Abvers”), whose translation is particularly challenging.