The Translator’s Invisibility

The resistant strategy is also evident in a tendency toward archaism in the translation, specifically the dated quality of “plagiary” and “confute” in place of the more contemporary usages, “plagiarism” and “refute.” These archaic words make the quotations more unusual and distancing to the English-language reader, drawing attention to themselves as words and thus abusing the canon of transparency. The word “plagiary” is particularly useful in producing this effect: it introduces a point of polysemy which opens up a metacritical register vis-à-vis the foreign text. The Italian “plagio” signifies the action or instance of literary theft, the practice or the text, and would ordinarily be translated into English by “plagiarism”; the Italian for the agent, “plagiarist,” is “plagiario.” My choice of “plagiary” condenses these words and meanings: it can signify either “plagiarism” or “plagiarist,” the action or the agent, the text or the subject. Combined with “resemblance” in the translation, “plagiary” becomes a pun which in itself brands any {300} relationship based on identity as a crime against personal autonomy and individuality, a Heideggerian inauthenticity, a person-theft, conjuring up its Latin root plagiarius—kidnapper. But since “resemblance” also defines a mode of representation exemplified by transparent discourse, the pun on “plagiary” interrogates the subjective illusionism in transparency, its fiction of personal presence, its person-lie. The English lines, “plagiary/of resemblance,” at once valorize and demystify the concept of authenticity, locating within the strident voice at the opening a different, alien voice. The strain of archaism in the translation, finally, temporalizes De Angelis’s poem, suggesting that cultural forms governed by “resemblance” are situated in the past, static, unwilling to admit difference and change, but also that De Angelis’s concept of the subject as determinate process departs from the individualistic evocations of older, romantic and modern poetry. The archaism in the English version goes beyond the foreign text by adding a metacommentary on its form and theme.

III

Resistancy is thus a translation strategy by which De Angelis’s poems become strange to the Italian poet, as well as to the Anglo-American reader and translator. It is certain that De Angelis will not recognize his own voice in the translations, not only because his ideas and texts would seem to make such a way of reading unthinkable for him, but also because he is unable to negotiate the target language. Although he works with many languages, including Greek, Latin, French, German, and different dialects of Italian, he finds English difficult to master and can read my translations only with informants, usually native Italians who have studied English. When he does this collaborative reading, moreover, he sometimes discovers what I have been arguing, that my English loses features of the Italian texts and adds others which he had never anticipated.

The resistant strategy of my translations gives them a different, and perhaps more intense, strangeness in the target-language culture. They have enjoyed varying success with English-language readers since the late 1970s. Most of them have appeared in literary magazines, appealing to editors whose aesthetics normally diverge, both mainstream and experimentalist—although my translations have also been rejected by as many magazines.[4] The complete manuscript, a selection from De Angelis’s poetry and critical prose, {301} has received many rejections from American and British publishers, including two university presses with noted translation series— Wesleyan and P (for “prestigious”: the editor at this press would not permit me to identify it). The anonymous readers’ reports for these presses, written in 1987, show quite clearly that my resistant strategy was strange because it abused the transparent discourse that dominates Anglo-American poetry translation.

A reader for Wesleyan acknowledged the “difficulty” of De Angelis’s Italian texts, but felt that

Mr Venuti’s translation makes matters more difficult by being faithful to this difficulty; he has chosen not to choose among the many ambiguous levels of meaning of [De Angelis’s] dense verse. For example, a calcio d’angolo remains a “corner kick,” no more and no less, and, as we see clearly from its placement in the poetic line, no compromise is made for the sake of the sound in English.[5]