Montale is undoubtedly much easier for Anglo-American mainstream poetics to kidnap than experimentalism. In fact, it could be said that some English-language translators are responding to the traces of another poet-oriented aesthetic in Montale, “crepuscolarismo,” a fin de siècle movement (“crepuscolare” means “twilight”) that cultivated a private voice in conversational language, producing introspective, slightly ironic musings on prosaic experiences (Sanguineti 1963). This would go some way toward explaining not only Gioia’s effacement of Montale’s modernism, but the recent American fascination with younger Italian poets who seem to be returning to crepuscularism—Valerio Magrelli (1957–), for instance, whom Gioia has also championed and translated (Cherchi and Parisi 1989).
Of course, not all of Montale’s English-language translators put to work an assimilationist ideology. William Arrowsmith’s versions were designed precisely to respect the modernist edge of poems like Mottetti. In the “Translator’s Preface” to The Occasions, Arrowsmith described his method as “resisting” any domestication of the Italian texts:
I have conscientiously resisted the translator’s temptation to fill in or otherwise modify Montale’s constant ellipses, to accommodate my reader by providing smoother transitions. And I have done my best to honor Montale’s reticence, his ironic qualifications, and evaded cadences. A chief aim has been to preserve the openness of the poet’s Italian, even though this has meant resisting the genius of English for concreteness.
Arrowsmith’s intention, however, was to validate, not revaluate, Montale’s canonical status in Anglo-American poetry translation, and so there was no need for him to mention the postwar Italian experimentalism, let alone suggest that it was worth translating into English. Indeed, he believed that
No Italian poet of the twentieth century has taken greater experimental risks than Montale in this book, above all in the effort {286} to renew the Dantesque vein in terms of a sensibility that belongs so passionately to its own time and strives tenaciously to find an individual voice—a voice never to be repeated.
The modernist translation discourse Arrowsmith recommended may have been resistant to certain Anglo-American literary values (“smoother transitions,” “concreteness”), but his rationale for this discourse agreed with mainstream poetics, the romantic valorization of the poet’s “voice.” Obviously, Arrowsmith’s translations can do little to question the shadow of neglect that Montale continues to cast on Italian experimentalists—like Milo De Angelis.
The irony of my situation was not lost on me. In pursuing my friend’s notion of simpatico, I discovered an Italian writer who forced me to suspect this notion and ultimately abandon it. When I came across De Angelis’s 1975 anthology selection and then got hold of his first book, what struck me most was the fact that on every level—linguistic, formal, thematic—his poems issue a decisive challenge to a poetcentered aesthetic. Their abrupt line-breaks and syntactical peculiarities, their obscure mixture of abstraction, metaphor, and dialogue give them an opacity that undermines any sense of a coherent speaking voice. They do not invite the reader’s vicarious participation and in fact frustrate any reading that would treat them as the controlled expression of an authorial personality or intention. Whose— or what—voice would speak in a translation of De Angelis’s poetry? Often, I should add, it is more of a question of which voice, since the snippets of dialogue that punctuate his texts are impossible to pin down to a distinct identity. De Angelis’s poetry questions whether the translator can be (or should be thought of as being) in sympathy with the foreign author. It rather shows that voice in translation is irreducibly strange, never quite recognizable as the poet’s or the translator’s, never quite able to shake off its foreignness to the reader.
As I began to translate De Angelis’s poems, I became aware that the notion of simpatico actually mystifies what happens in the translation process. Most crucially, it conceals the fact that in order to produce the effect of transparency in a translated text, in order to give the reader the sense that the text is a window onto the author, translators must manipulate what often seems to be a very resistant material, i.e., the {287} language into which they are translating, in most cases the language they learned first, their mother tongue, but now also their own. Transparency occurs only when the translation reads fluently, when there are no awkward phrasings, unidiomatic constructions or confused meanings, when clear syntactical connections and consistent pronouns create intelligibility for the reader. When the translation is a poem in free verse, varied rhythms that avoid jogtrot meters are needed to give the language a conversational quality, to make it sound natural. Line-breaks should not distort the syntax so much as to hinder the reader’s search for comprehension; they should rather support the syntactical continuity that gets him or her to read for meaning over the lines, pursuing the development of a coherent speaking voice, tracing its psychological contours. These formal techniques reveal that transparency is an illusionistic effect: it depends on the translator’s work with language, but it hides this work, even the very presence of language, by suggesting that the author can be seen in the translation, that in it the author speaks in his or her own voice. If the illusion of transparency is strong enough, it may well produce a truth-effect, wherein the authorial voice becomes authoritative, heard as speaking what is true, right, obvious. Translating De Angelis’s poems demystified this illusionism for me because they so obviously resist fluency, cultivating instead an aesthetic of discontinuity.
Consider a poem from Somiglianze, a programmatic text which gave its title to De Angelis’s anthology selection:
The Italian poem offers glimpses of a hospital setting, ominous with its suggestion of injury and death, but the actual incident is never precisely defined, and the quasi-philosophical reflections on its meaning remain abstruse, only to be further obscured by the sudden shift to dreaming and the disturbing quotation. Not only can’t the reader be sure what is happening, he also doesn’t quite know who is experiencing it. Until the peremptory statement from the “padroni” (“bosses”), the tone is natural yet impersonal, ruminative but not actually introspective, lacking any suggestion that the voice belongs to a particular person, let alone someone who had himself experienced the mysterious physical danger. The text does not offer a coherent position from which to understand it, or a psychologically consistent voice with which to identify. On the contrary, the fragmented syntax and abrupt line-breaks constantly disrupt the signifying process, forcing the reader to revise his interpretations. The opening lines are remarkable for their syntactical shifts and contortions, which compel some synthesis of the details just to make sense of them, but then weaken any closure with the qualification introduced by “nonostante” (“notwithstanding”). Enjambment is contradictory, schizoid, metamorphic. If “il centro” is given “distrattamente,” in what sense can it be described as central? The “padroni” who are “minacciosi” (“threatening”) turn “sibilanti,” an Italian word often used to describe the sound of wind in the reeds, or snakes. The result of the discontinuous form of the poem is that it fails to create the illusionistic effect of authorial presence, demonstrating, with degrees of discomfort that vary from reader to {289} reader, how much transparency depends on language, on formal elements like linear syntax and univocal meaning.