The Translator’s Invisibility

Gioia’s version appreciably enlarges the poet’s presence in the poem with several alterations and additions. Montale’s opening lines—“La speranza di pure rivederti/m’abbandonava” (in a rendering that follows the Italian word order and lineation, “The hope of ever seeing you again/was abandoning me”)—get reversed, with the emphasis shifted to Gioia’s “I”: “I had almost lost.” Similarly, the penultimate line contains another first-person reference, “I saw,” which doesn’t appear at all in the Italian text. Gioia’s other additions—“truly,” “vision,” “bleached,” “old man”—show an effort to make the language more emotive or dramatic, to sketch the psychological contours of the poetic subject, but they come off as somewhat stagy, even sentimental (“old man”). In keeping with this emotionalizing of Montale’s lexicon, Gioia uses the phrase “approach of death” to translate “i segni della morte” (“signs of death”), diminishing the element of self-reflexivity in the Italian, its awareness of its own status as “images” and “signs,” and replacing it with a pallid sensationalism. The English word “signs” is currently loaded with various meanings, including a reference to controversial foreign imports in Anglo-American literary theory that depersonalize the text and deconstruct authorship—viz. semiotics and poststructuralism. The avoidance of the word here produces two notable effects: it moves the translation away from contemporary European thinking that would question the theoretical assumptions of mainstream poetics, and it reinforces the focus on the poet’s emotional state, on the (re) presentation of Montale’s poem as (Montale’s or Gioia’s?) self-expression. Gioia’s translation strategy quite clearly seeks to efface Montale’s modernist poetic discourse, to {282} remove the formal elements that made the Italian text so strikingly different to its first Italian audience, and that, if a translator tried to reproduce them in English, would result in a translation just as striking to an Anglo-American reader because of their deviation from the dominant poet-centered aesthetic.

The Italian postwar experimentalism proves recalcitrant to this assimilationist ideology in both form and theme. In its early phase, it was called the “neoavantgarde” for its return to modernist movements like Futurism, Dadaism, and Surrealism in order to develop a highly discontinuous poetic discourse that reflected on its cultural and social situation. In the preface to I novissimi, Giuliani outlined the experimental project as a leftwing cultural politics: language is fractured in a “schizomorphic vision” (“visione schizomorfa”) which simultaneously registers and resists the mental dislocations and illusory representations of consumer capitalism (Giuliani 1961:xviii). Edoardo Sanguineti’s poetry, to take one example, is a frenetic stream of episodes in the poet’s life, allusions to contemporary figures and events, excerpts and applications of his readings in philosophy, literature, psychology, and social theory, punctuated with found language and references to popular culture. The experimentalism in this initial phase circulated widely in magazines and anthologies, a book series with a large trade press (Feltrinelli), and several public meetings that received substantial media attention. And the experiments took varied forms, not only writing that was much more plurivocal and heterogeneous than anything produced by Montale, but also visual poetry and collage, computer-generated texts and performance.

Experimentalism encompasses diverse poetries, and my periodizations and cultural genealogies inevitably give too neat an account (which, moreover, is interested on this occasion, pitched to demonstrate a deviation from Montale). The common experimental thread is the use of formal discontinuity to address philosophical problems raised by language, representation, and subjectivity, resembling in this such contemporary French developments as the nouveau roman and the emergence of poststructuralist thinking, especially in politicized versions, with the Tel Quel group. Indeed, the immense importance of politics to the neoavantgarde has led Christopher Wagstaff to suggest that “when, in 1968, Italy seemed to offer significant opportunities for direct political action,” the movement “saw its raison d’être disappear,” as evidenced by the demise {283} of a central magazine, the increasing affiliations with established cultural and academic institutions, and, most tellingly, a theoretical and practical redirection (Wagstaff 1984:37).