The Translator’s Invisibility

I was profoundly attracted by my friend’s remarks. No doubt this attraction was partly due to his cultural authority, his command of publishers and his growing list of awards, the sheer success he had achieved with his translations. But he also offered a sophisticated and rather lyrical understanding of what I wanted to do, a position of identification for me as translator, someone I could be when translating—i.e., my successful friend, but also, in the process, the author of a foreign text. I followed this advice, and as chance would have it I came upon an Italian writer who is roughly my own age, the Milanese poet Milo De Angelis.

Born in 1951, De Angelis made his precocious debut in 1975, when he was invited to contribute some of his poems to L’almanacco dello Specchio, a prestigious annual magazine centered in Milan and published by one of Italy’s largest commercial presses, Arnoldo Mondadori Editore. The title of the anthology, literally “The Almanac of the Mirror,” asserts its claim to be a representative literary survey, but the title also connects it with Mondadori’s long-standing series of poetry volumes, called Lo Specchio, whose editorial policies the anthology seems to share: both print recent work by canonized twentieth-century writers, foreign and Italian, along with a few newcomers. The issue of L’almanacco to which De Angelis contributed also included poems by Eugenio Montale and Pier Paolo Pasolini, as well as Italian translations from the poetry of various foreign writers, Russian (Marina Tsvetayeva), German (Paul Celan), and American (Robert Bly). De Angelis’s first book of poems, called Somiglianze (“Resemblances”), appeared in 1976 from the small commercial press Guanda, noted in the 1970s for its list of innovative contemporary {276} writing. These two titles, the assertive mirror and the tentative resemblances, raised a range of questions about the possibility of simpatico translation, questions about representation, canon formation, and literary publishing, which continue to haunt my encounter with De Angelis’s poetry.

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As I followed De Angelis’s success in Italy, I quickly saw that he couldn’t match it in the United States and England, at least not today. The current canon of twentieth-century Italian poetry in English translation hasn’t yet admitted his kind of writing, doesn’t find it simpatico, and has in fact constrained my attempts to publish my translations. At the center of this canon is Eugenio Montale (1896–1981), flanked by several other Italian poets who exhibit a stylistic affinity with his poetry or who received his admiration in essays and reviews and, in some cases, his recommendation to publishers. At the margins are the successive waves of experimentalism that swept through Italian poetry in the post-World War II period and gave rise to poets like De Angelis. Montale’s canonical status in Anglo-American poetry translation, I learned, cast a shadow of neglect over the legions of Italian poets who followed him.