The Translator’s Invisibility

The challenge which translating De Angelis’s poetry poses to romantic and modern theories of discourse is quite similar to the one posed by Paul Celan’s writing. In Celan’s speech “The Meridian” (1960), the obscure discontinuity of his and other post-World War II European poetry—what he calls “the difficulties of vocabulary, the faster flow of syntax or a more awakened sense of ellipsis”—is associated with a rethinking of the lyric poem in its romantic and modern guises (Celan 1986:48). Celan questions the lyric project of {305} personal expression, of evoking an individual voice: the poem “speaks only in its own, its very behalf,” he states, but it “has always hoped, for this very reason, to speak also on behalf of the strange […] on behalf of the other, who knows, perhaps of an altogether other” (ibid.). The poem, then, does not express an authorial self, but rather liberates that self from its familiar boundaries, becoming “the place where the person was able to set himself free as an—estranged—I,” but where “along with the I, estranged and free here, in this manner, some other thing is also set free”—free from the appropriating power of the speaking “I,” of a personal language (ibid.:46–47). The poem does not transcend but acknowledges the contradiction between self-expression and communication with some other, forcing an awareness of the limits as well as the possibilities of its language.

It is this sort of liberation that resistancy tries to produce in the translated text by resorting to techniques that make it strange and estranging in the target-language culture. Resistancy seeks to free the reader of the translation, as well as the translator, from the cultural constraints that ordinarily govern their reading and writing and threaten to overpower and domesticate the foreign text, annihilating its foreignness. Resistancy makes English-language translation a dissident cultural politics today, when fluent strategies and transparent discourse routinely perform that mystification of foreign texts. In the specific instance of Englishing De Angelis’s poetry, the political intervention takes the form of a minor utilization of a major language. “Even when major,” Deleuze and Guattari observe, “a language is open to an intensive utilization that makes it take flight along creative lines of escape which, no matter how slowly, no matter how cautiously, can now form an absolute deterritorialization” (Deleuze and Guattari 1986:26).[8] My translations of De Angelis’s poetry obviously can never be completely free of English and the linguistic and cultural constraints which it imposes on poetry and translation; that line of escape would preempt any translation and is no more than a capitulation to the major language, a political defeat. The point is rather that my translations resist the hegemony of transparent discourse in English-language culture, and they do this from within, by deterritorializing the target language itself, questioning its major cultural status by using it as the vehicle for ideas and discursive techniques which remain minor in it, which it excludes. The models for this translation strategy include the Czech Jew Kafka writing in German, particularly as Deleuze and Guattari read his texts, but also the Rumanian Jew Celan, who took German on lines of escape by using it to speak of Nazi racism {306} and Hebrew culture and by exploiting to an extreme its capacity for compound words and syntactical fragmentation (see, for example, Felstiner 1983 and 1984). If the resistant strategy effectively produces an estranging translation, then the foreign text also enjoys a momentary liberation from the target-language culture, perhaps before it is reterritorialized with the reader’s articulation of a voice— recognizable, transparent—or of some reading amenable to the dominant aesthetic in English. The liberating moment would occur when the reader of the resistant translation experiences, in the target language, the cultural differences which separate that language and the foreign text.