The Translator’s Invisibility

The sort of fidelity Wesleyan’s reader preferred was evidently to the canon of transparency, which here includes univocal meaning and smooth prosody. But my translations aim to be faithful to the linguistic and cultural differences of the Italian texts, their characteristic discontinuity, the neologisms, syntactical shifts, staccato rhythms. The reader’s example was taken from De Angelis’s poem “Antela,” whose experimentalist gestures begin in the title: a neologism combining “antenati” (“forebears”) and “ragnatela” (“spider web”). My version is entitled “Foreweb.” The abruptness of this poem, the dizzying succession of cryptic images, would demand considerable rewriting to produce fluent English. It would be easier, as Wesleyan evidently decided, to reject the entire manuscript.

C’è un crimine
non so se commesso o visto
in un tempo senza stile, come un’aria
di blu e di buio, che mosse
la destra. O qualcuno
che, morso dalla carie, urla.
Allora anche la mosca di pezza dà
voli indiscussi e anche
un ginocchio ferito nel calcio d’angolo
ricuce il maschio con la femmina.

(De Angelis 1985:46)

{302} There is a crime
I don’t know whether committed or witnessed
in a styleless time, like a breeze
blue and dark, which moved
the right hand. Or someone
who, bitten by caries, screams.
Then even the rag-fly makes
unquestioned flights and even
a knee hurt in the corner kick
stitches male back to female.

P’s anonymous reader likewise expected an assimilation of De Angelis’s experimentalism to transparent discourse. The reader’s comments on specific translations reveal an insistence on immediate intelligibility, criticizing archaism and polysemy in favor of current English usage. My use of the word “plagiary” in “The Train Corridor,” for example, was called “really obsolete and obscure.” This reader, like the one for Wesleyan, also recommended revising the Italian text, even when it contained a recognizable rhetorical device: “the discontinuity (anacoluthon) between lines 2 and 3 seems excessive, however justified by the original; a little glue seems needed.”

My translations signify the foreignness of De Angelis’s poetry by resisting the dominant Anglo-American literary values that would domesticate the Italian texts, make them reassuringly familiar, easy to read. And this is the reception that the translations continue to get. A selection was included in a 1991 anthology, New Italian Poets, a project that was initially developed by the Poetry Society of America and the Centro Internazionale Poesia della Metamorfosi in Italy and later edited by Dana Gioia and Michael Palma (Gioia and Palma 1991). The anthology received a few, generally favorable reviews in American, British, and Italian periodicals. In Poetry Review, however, while reflecting on the cultural differences between British and Italian poetry, the reviewer singled out (my translations of) De Angelis as an example of these differences at their most alienating:

One feature that clearly distinguishes many of these poets from their British contemporaries is a freewheeling associative imagery which doesn’t feel obligated to explain itself—sudden transitions, lacunae—or to situate itself in a familiar time and place. This is at its {303} most irksome in Milo De Angelis, whom Palma, introducing him, suggests the reader should approach “with openness and sensitivity.” If this is accomplished, the reader will be “moved by feelings and insights that, however ineffable, are genuine and profound.” I did my best, but was left unmoved.

(McKendrick 1991:59)