The article deals with the importance of sight for the translation process, particularly for descriptions. Goethe’s concept of Anschauung, a sort of inner sight, of an intuitive perception, appears very important for the translator, who must re-live the situations he has to translate with his inner eye. An example from Goethe’s “Sufferings of the Young Werther” and of four different translations are presented and commented on.
An further example from Joachim Sartorius’ “Mein Zypern” shows the difficulty of translating the description of a mosaic without seeing the real mosaic.
Moreover, witnessing a scene with the inner eye is important for the reformulation of the tense Präteritum from German into Italian, particularly for the decision of interpreting a scene as a momentaneous or a repetitive one.
In conclusion, translation teaching must encourage students’ awareness that translation is an activity demanding not only language and encyclopedic knowledge, but the activation of sight and probably of other senses too.
