The Translator’s Invisibility

This interpretation allowed me to solve certain translation problems even as it created others. In line 3, for example, the Italian word “premuroso” can be translated variously as “thoughtful,” or “attentive,” or “solicitous.” I chose to avoid these more ordinary meanings in favor of “careful,” an equally ordinary word that has nonetheless supported a philosophical signficance in English and can bring the text closer to what I take to be its themes: Heidegger’s English translators use “care” to render “Sorge,” the German word with which he characterizes the nature of everyday life (Heidegger 1962:237). Similarly, in line 5, the Italian verb “si sceglieva” is ordinarily an impersonal form which does not require that a subject be specified. English sentences must have subjects, and so “si sceglieva” is often translated into English as “one chose,” or the passive voice is used. Yet since my reading establishes a connection with Nietzsche’s concept of human agency as subjectless action, as {295} will or force, neither a subject nor the passive would do: I resorted to the slightly strange circumlocution, “there was choosing,” and avoided any explicit subject, even in as impersonal a form as “one,” while retaining a sense of forceful action. In both of these examples, the translation lost some of the ordinariness that makes the language of the foreign text especially moving and rich in possibilities—just as the use of “bosses” to translate “padroni” excluded the latter’s patriarchal associations, weakening the psychoanalytic resonance of the Italian.

My interpretation undoubtedly reflects some of De Angelis’s reading and thinking, but the translation solutions which it rationalizes do not make my English version any more faithful to its meaning. No, the interpretation has fixed a meaning, enabling the translation both to go beyond and fall short of De Angelis’s poem. Interestingly, the interpretation also points to a logical tension in the theme, namely the contradiction of Heideggerian authenticity by Nietzschean action. My interpretive translation in effect opens up this contradiction in the poem, foregrounds it, and perhaps reveals an aspect of De Angelis’s thinking of which he himself was not conscious or which, at any rate, remains unresolved in “L’idea centrale.” My interpretive translation exceeds the source-language text, supplementing it with research that indicates its contradictory origins and thereby puts into question its status as the original, the perfect and self-consistent expression of authorial meaning of which the translation is always the copy, ultimately imperfect in its failure to capture that self-consistency. The fact is that the original can be seen as imperfect, fissured by conflicting ideas, by the philosophical materials it puts to work, and the translation has made this conflict clearer.

This interrogative pressure in the translation surfaces in another point of resistance, an ambiguity entirely absent from De Angelis’s poem. Line 10, “and in a dream threatening bosses,” adheres to the word order of the Italian text as closely as linguistic differences permit. But because “threatening” is syntactically ambiguous, applying to either “dream” (as a participle) or “bosses” (as an adjective), the line releases a supplementary meaning which proves especially resonant in the interpretive context that guided my other choices: the “bosses” can also be seen as “threatened” by the nightmarish “dream” of determinate subjectivity, or more generally the agents that direct social institutions are equally determined by the hierarchical relations in which they dominate other agents. The “dream” becomes one of {296} subversion by the dominated, and it is the dreamer who is “threatening” and “hissing” at the “bosses.” Here the abusiveness of the translation enacts an unsettling critique of the Italian text by exposing its privileging of the “bosses,” its implicit representation of power and social dominance as transcending the determinations of human action.

A strategy of resistancy thus results in an abusive fidelity which constructs a simultaneous relationship of reproduction and supplementarity between the translation and the foreign text. The precise nature of this relationship cannot be calculated before the translation process is begun because different relationships must be worked out for the specific cultural materials of different foreign texts and for the specific cultural situations in which those texts are translated. This makes translation labor-intensive, but also serendipitous, with the translator poring over dictionaries, developing many alternative renderings, unexpectedly finding words and phrases that at once imitate and exceed the foreign text. “In the work of translation,” Lewis notes,