The Translator’s Invisibility

The fragmentation of subjectivity in the Italian text is its strongest and most striking point of resistance. The voice (or voices?) is apparently engaged in a strange lover’s quarrel, both bitter and very abstract, where desire is structured by conflicting modes of representation, but ultimately breaks them down. Although never defined as a distinct identity, with a definite age or gender, the quarrelsome voice at the opening sets up an opposition between two concepts of “love”: the first, judged false or inauthentic {298} (“plagio”), is governed by “somigliarsi” (literally “resembling each other”), by an identity or sameness between the lovers; the second, implicitly favored by the voice, is an alternative governed by difference, or deviation, the invention of new “expectations” (“attese”). Yet the Italian text is already undermining this second alternative with “attese,” which can also mean “delays,” an ambiguity that submits the hopefulness of “expectations” to jaundiced skepticism. In fact, the quotation that begins “tu sei ancora lì” (“you’re still there”) can easily signify the introduction of a different voice, suggesting that maybe the one who hurled the accusation of “plagio” should be changing its expectations, that maybe the accuser should be abandoning any search for authentic existence, any effort to avoid the dishonesty of imitation, because desire always has contradictory determinations, frustrations, “delays.”

The insistent questioning proceeds to the Nietzschean argument that love is yet another form of the will to power, where two lovers are locked in a struggle for dominance and each can disprove (“confuto”) the other’s representation of their relationship, imposing a “world” that “will be true” for both. At this point, the voices lose what vague definition they may have acquired as the text unfolded, and the two conflicting positions of intelligibility are finally abandoned by the last voice, which implicitly calls for silence, full of expectation for another, still unspoken “word” that will construct a new subject-position for “the body,” a new representation for the biological “force” that threatens the linguistic basis of every relationship. The indeterminacy of the phrase “appoggia a sé la parola” (“leans the word against itself”) points to the contradictory interaction between language and desire. If “itself” is read as the “force” (or “body”?—another indeterminacy, perhaps less consequential here because of the connection between “force” and “body”), the “word” receives support from, or “leans […] against,” the “force” as the meaning of a linguistic sign depends on the linkage between signifier and signified. Thus, desire is seen as driving language use, but also as depending on such use for its articulation. Yet if “itself” is read as “the word,” in the sense of language in general, the “force” also “leans the word against” another word, circulating a chain of signifiers which defer the signified, throwing it into internal division. Here it is possible to glimpse Lacan’s fundamental idea that desire is simultaneously communicated and repressed by language (Lacan 1977).

{299} The resistancy of the translation reproduces the formal discontinuity of De Angelis’s poem by adhering to its line-breaks and syntactical peculiarities. A fluent strategy could easily iron out the syntax, for example, by correcting or completing the sentence fragments—in line 7 with the substitution of the verb “lean” for the participle “leaning”; in line 10 with the insertion of a verb phrase like “go by” after the fragmentary “opaque houses.” The translation, however, reproduces De Angelis’s challenge to transparent discourse by using broken constructions which have the effect of throwing the reading process off-balance, aggravating the already difficult problem posed by the shifting positions of intelligibility, the dislocation of voice.

It is in the quotations that the translation is most abusive of the foreign text. To mimic the drama of this situation, I sought to make the opening forcefully colloquial, inserting the abrupt dashes and fracturing the questions in line 4 by omitting the auxiliary “do.” Yet since my reading construes this text as a poststructuralist meditation on the relationship between language and desire, I sought to increase the philosophical abstraction of the English: “resemblance” replaced the more ordinary, and more concrete, phrase “resembling each other,” which is actually closer to the Italian “somigliarsi.” The mixture of colloquial and philosophical discourses in the translation reproduces but somewhat exaggerates the similarly discordant materials of the Italian text, its combination of concrete and abstract diction.