The Translator’s Invisibility

Because this is a foreign text that refuses the romantic aesthetic of transparency which has long dominated Anglo-American poetry, it makes any pursuit of simpatico difficult if not impossible for the English-language translator. “L’idea centrale” is not a congenial poem to bring into a culture that prizes individuality and self-determination to such an extent that intentionality and self-expression decisively shape its reflections on language and poetry. The continued dominance of these individualistic assumptions in contemporary Anglo-American culture inevitably makes De Angelis a minor writer in English, marginal in relation to the major English-language aesthetic, the transparent expression of authorial experience. Indeed, the dominance of individualistic assumptions makes translation itself a minor genre of writing in English, marginal in relation to writing that not only implements the major aesthetic of transparency, but bears the authorial imprimatur. Because transparent discourse is perceived as mirroring the author, it values the foreign text as original, {290} authentic, true, and devalues the translated text as derivative, simulacral, false, forcing on translation the project of effacing its second-order status with a fluent strategy. It is here that a Platonic metaphysics emerges from beneath romantic individualism to construe translation as the copy of a copy, dictating a translation strategy in which the effect of transparency masks the mediations between and within copy and original, eclipsing the translator’s labor with an illusion of authorial presence, reproducing the cultural marginality and economic exploitation which translation suffers today.[2] I was definitely attracted by the difference of De Angelis’s poetry, even if it upset the Anglo-American translation practices that my friend had described so lyrically. Yet this difference was forcing me to set new goals for my work. What could I hope to achieve by translating De Angelis into English? What theory would inform my translation strategy and govern my choices? Certainly, I could defer to the prevailing cult of the author and make my translation of “L’idea centrale” as fluent as possible, perhaps with the vain hope of edging the poem closer to transparency. Some progress in this direction can be achieved if in line 12 of the translation the verb “were” is inserted before “hissing,” minimizing the fragmented syntax and giving more definition to the meaning, or if the verb “came” in the first line were given a subject, even one as vaguely defined as “it.” Of course, adding “were” and “it” would not go very far toward making the text transparent, but they would at least mitigate the grammatical uneasiness usually provoked by the omission of a subject or verb in an English sentence.

My English version, however, refuses fluency. Taking its cue from De Angelis’s own aesthetic, my strategy can be called resistancy: it seeks to reproduce the discontinuity of De Angelis’s poem. And the translation is no doubt more discontinuous with the omission of a subject and a verb. Resistancy was also at work in my effort to heighten the abruptness of the line-breaks, their effect of forcing the reader to change expectations. In line 1 “scent,” so vaguely defined that it can entertain the possibility of pleasantness, replaced two earlier choices, “smell” and “odor,” both of which carry strong negative connotations and so gave too much of a foretaste of the ominous “alcohol,” reducing the latter’s power to evoke surprise and fear. The line-break allows “scent” to release its various possible meanings, making its juxtaposition with “alcohol” a bit more jolting. Similarly, an earlier version of {291} line 9 began with “carelessly,” but this was ultimately replaced by the more resonant “absentmindedly,” which seems not only inexplicable in the context of “gift,” but rather alarming: since the gift carries the important cognitive associations of “center,” it offers the reader the promise of intelligibility, of some light shed on the title—which, however, the idea of absentmindedness quickly betrays.