The Translator’s Invisibility

The Italian poem offers glimpses of a hospital setting, ominous with its suggestion of injury and death, but the actual incident is never precisely defined, and the quasi-philosophical reflections on its meaning remain abstruse, only to be further obscured by the sudden shift to dreaming and the disturbing quotation. Not only can’t the reader be sure what is happening, he also doesn’t quite know who is experiencing it. Until the peremptory statement from the “padroni” (“bosses”), the tone is natural yet impersonal, ruminative but not actually introspective, lacking any suggestion that the voice belongs to a particular person, let alone someone who had himself experienced the mysterious physical danger. The text does not offer a coherent position from which to understand it, or a psychologically consistent voice with which to identify. On the contrary, the fragmented syntax and abrupt line-breaks constantly disrupt the signifying process, forcing the reader to revise his interpretations. The opening lines are remarkable for their syntactical shifts and contortions, which compel some synthesis of the details just to make sense of them, but then weaken any closure with the qualification introduced by “nonostante” (“notwithstanding”). Enjambment is contradictory, schizoid, metamorphic. If “il centro” is given “distrattamente,” in what sense can it be described as central? The “padroni” who are “minacciosi” (“threatening”) turn “sibilanti,” an Italian word often used to describe the sound of wind in the reeds, or snakes. The result of the discontinuous form of the poem is that it fails to create the illusionistic effect of authorial presence, demonstrating, with degrees of discomfort that vary from reader to {289} reader, how much transparency depends on language, on formal elements like linear syntax and univocal meaning.

Most interestingly, De Angelis’s abandonment of the formal techniques used to achieve transparency occurs in a poem whose representation of human consciousness clearly rejects romantic individualism. This is the concept of subjectivity that underlies such key affirmations of transparency as Wordsworth’s theory of authorial expression in the preface to Lyrical Ballads (1800): “all good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings” (Wordsworth 1974:123). The same concept is also evident in Eliot’s romantic modernism, his ultimate capitulation to the romantic cult of the author: “[poetry] is not the expression of personality,” wrote Eliot at the end of “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1919), “but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things” (Eliot 1950:10–11). De Angelis’s poem, in contrast, represents consciousness, not as the unified origin of meaning, knowledge, and action, freely expressing itself in language, but rather as split and determined by its changing conditions—waking and dreaming, thought and sensory impulses, meaning and action, medical diagnoses and chance. Thus, whatever the central idea may be, it doesn’t come to mind through the subject’s own volition; it arises only accidentally, through various determining factors over which the subject has limited or no control, like a smell, or the possibility of death.