The Translator’s Invisibility

The sequence recreates isolated moments of insight, stripped of their nonessential elements. Everything else in the story is told by implication, and the reader must participate in the reconstruction of the human drama by projecting his or her own private associations to fill in the missing elements of the narrative.

(ibid.:16, my italics)

{280} It is remarkable how Gioia repeatedly locates the formal elements that earned Montale the tag “hermetic”—only to explain away their existence, to “fill in” the cracks of the broken text. In Gioia’s assimilation of Montale to mainstream poetics, the most important thing is to maintain the continuity of the poet’s representation of his experience, insuring the coherence of the poetic subject and its control over the act of self-expression. Hence, Gioia’s translation strategy is designed to make versions that “would move naturally as English-language poems,” “always preferring the emotional clarity and narrative integrity of the whole poem in English to the lexicographical fidelity of the individual word,” departing from Montale’s lineation so as to “integrate the transposed elements tightly into a new whole” (ibid.:21). The departures, however, are not seen as inaccuracies or domesticating revisions, but as more intimate fidelities, showing that Gioia is really simpatico with Montale, “faithful not only to the sense but also to the spirit of the Italian” (ibid.:22). Here it becomes clear that the translator’s feeling of simpatico is no more than a projection, that the object of the translator’s identification is ultimately himself, the “private associations” he inscribes in the foreign text in the hope of producing a similarly narcissistic experience in the English-language reader.

The effect of mainstream poetics on Gioia’s translations can be seen in his version of the sixth Italian text in the group:

La speranza di pure rivederti
m’abbandonava;
e mi chiesi se questo che mi chiude
ogni senso di te, schermo d’immagini,
ha i segni della morte o dal passato
è in esso, ma distorto e fatto labile,
un tuo barbaglio:
(a Modena, tra i portici,
un servo gallonato trascinava
due sciacalli al guinzaglio).

(Montale 1984a:144)

I had almost lost
hope of ever seeing you again;
and I asked myself if this thing
cutting me off
{281} from every trace of you, this screen
of images,
was the approach of death, or truly
some dazzling
vision of you
out of the past,
bleached, distorted,
fading:
(under the arches at Modena
I saw an old man in a uniform
dragging two jackals on a leash).

(Montale 1990:35)