{275} From this chorus of theorists, critics, and translators it seems clear that the idea of simpatico translation is consistent with ideas about poetry that prevail today in Anglo-American culture, although they too were formulated centuries ago, perhaps most decisively with the emergence of romanticism in England. From William Wordsworth to T.S.Eliot to Robert Lowell and beyond, the dominant aesthetic in English-language poetry has been transparency, the view, as Antony Easthope neatly puts it in his incisive critique, that “poetry expresses experience; experience gives access to personality, and so poetry leads us to personality” (Easthope 1983:4–5). My friend’s notion of simpatico was in fact a development of these assumptions to characterize the practice of translation (it was transparent) and to define the role of the translator (identification with the foreign author’s personality).
I was profoundly attracted by my friend’s remarks. No doubt this attraction was partly due to his cultural authority, his command of publishers and his growing list of awards, the sheer success he had achieved with his translations. But he also offered a sophisticated and rather lyrical understanding of what I wanted to do, a position of identification for me as translator, someone I could be when translating—i.e., my successful friend, but also, in the process, the author of a foreign text. I followed this advice, and as chance would have it I came upon an Italian writer who is roughly my own age, the Milanese poet Milo De Angelis.
Born in 1951, De Angelis made his precocious debut in 1975, when he was invited to contribute some of his poems to L’almanacco dello Specchio, a prestigious annual magazine centered in Milan and published by one of Italy’s largest commercial presses, Arnoldo Mondadori Editore. The title of the anthology, literally “The Almanac of the Mirror,” asserts its claim to be a representative literary survey, but the title also connects it with Mondadori’s long-standing series of poetry volumes, called Lo Specchio, whose editorial policies the anthology seems to share: both print recent work by canonized twentieth-century writers, foreign and Italian, along with a few newcomers. The issue of L’almanacco to which De Angelis contributed also included poems by Eugenio Montale and Pier Paolo Pasolini, as well as Italian translations from the poetry of various foreign writers, Russian (Marina Tsvetayeva), German (Paul Celan), and American (Robert Bly). De Angelis’s first book of poems, called Somiglianze (“Resemblances”), appeared in 1976 from the small commercial press Guanda, noted in the 1970s for its list of innovative contemporary {276} writing. These two titles, the assertive mirror and the tentative resemblances, raised a range of questions about the possibility of simpatico translation, questions about representation, canon formation, and literary publishing, which continue to haunt my encounter with De Angelis’s poetry.
As I followed De Angelis’s success in Italy, I quickly saw that he couldn’t match it in the United States and England, at least not today. The current canon of twentieth-century Italian poetry in English translation hasn’t yet admitted his kind of writing, doesn’t find it simpatico, and has in fact constrained my attempts to publish my translations. At the center of this canon is Eugenio Montale (1896–1981), flanked by several other Italian poets who exhibit a stylistic affinity with his poetry or who received his admiration in essays and reviews and, in some cases, his recommendation to publishers. At the margins are the successive waves of experimentalism that swept through Italian poetry in the post-World War II period and gave rise to poets like De Angelis. Montale’s canonical status in Anglo-American poetry translation, I learned, cast a shadow of neglect over the legions of Italian poets who followed him.
English translation of Montale’s poetry began early, with a 1928 appearance in Eliot’s Criterion, and it has continued to this day in myriad magazines and anthologies. It was only in the late 1950s, however, that book-length translations started to proliferate, so that Montale now rivals Dante in the number of versions by different hands to be found on publishers’ lists. Montale brought out seven slim volumes of poetry, all of which have been englished in their entirety or in part, some of them more than once.[1] Individual sequences of poems have frequently been lifted out of these volumes and published as chapbooks. There have been five representative selecteds, a book of autobiographical prose, a slim miscellany of critical prose, and a large selection of essays (some 350 pages). At present, thirteen English-language translations of Montale’s writing are in print. They are published by an impressively broad range of trade, academic, and small presses in the United States, England, and Canada: Agenda, Boyars, Ecco, Graywolf, Kentucky, Mosaic, New Directions, Norton, Oberlin, Oxford, Random House. And the numerous translators include talented poets, scholars, and editors, {277} some of whom are internationally known: William Arrowsmith, Jonathan Galassi, Dana Gioia, Alastair Hamilton, Kate Hughes, Antonino Mazza, G.Singh, and Charles Wright. Italian poets linked to Montale by influence, stylistic or otherwise, have also appeared in a number of book-length translations since the late fifties; Guido Gozzano (1883–1916), Giuseppe Ungaretti (1888–1970), Salvatore Quasimodo (1901–1968), Lucio Piccolo (1903–1969), Sandro Penna (1906–1976), Leonardo Sinisgalli (1908–1981), and Vittorio Sereni (1913–1983). Here too the presses are varied and the translators accomplished: Anvil, Carcanet, Cornell, Hamish Hamilton, Minerva, New Directions, Ohio State, Princeton, Red Hill, Red Ozier; Jack Bevan, Patrick Creagh, W.S.Di Piero, Ruth Feldman and Brian Swann, Allen Mandelbaum, J.G.Nichols, Michael Palma, and Paul Vangelisti. Eleven books by poets who can be described, without too much violence, as Montale avatars in English are currently in print, a couple with essays by him.
Compared to the increasing interest that distinguishes Montale’s reception in Anglo-American culture, other postwar tendencies in Italian poetry have received limited attention. Among them, experimentalism is remarkably underrepresented, given its importance in Italy. In a conservative estimate, approximately fifty poets writing over four decades can be classed in this category, making it a central movement in contemporary Italian poetry. The first wave, sometimes called “I novissimi” (“The Newest”) after the title of an important 1961 anthology, includes its editor Alfredo Giuliani (1924–), Corrado Costa (1929–), Edoardo Sanguineti (1930–), Giulia Niccolai (1934–), Nanni Balestrini (1935–), Antonio Porta (1935–1989), Franco Beltrametti (1937–), and Adriano Spatola (1941–1989). The second wave, which began publishing during the 1970s, includes Nanni Cagnone (1939–), Gregorio Scalise (1939–), Luigi Ballerini (1940–), Angelo Lumelli (1944–), Giuseppe Conte (1945–), Cesare Viviani (1947–), Michelangelo Coviello (1950–), and Milo De Angelis. There are also various other poets whose careers do not coincide with these chronologies, but whose writing is marked by a strong experimental impulse—Andrea Zanzotto (1921–), for instance, and Amelia Rosselli (1930–). The fact that these names are more than likely to be meaningless to English-language readers of poetry is symptomatic of the poets’ current marginality (and perhaps that of any other Italian poet but Dante and Montale) in Anglo-American writing.
[1]
Montale’s seven Italian collections are