Most interestingly, De Angelis’s abandonment of the formal techniques used to achieve transparency occurs in a poem whose representation of human consciousness clearly rejects romantic individualism. This is the concept of subjectivity that underlies such key affirmations of transparency as Wordsworth’s theory of authorial expression in the preface to Lyrical Ballads (1800): “all good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings” (Wordsworth 1974:123). The same concept is also evident in Eliot’s romantic modernism, his ultimate capitulation to the romantic cult of the author: “[poetry] is not the expression of personality,” wrote Eliot at the end of “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1919), “but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things” (Eliot 1950:10–11). De Angelis’s poem, in contrast, represents consciousness, not as the unified origin of meaning, knowledge, and action, freely expressing itself in language, but rather as split and determined by its changing conditions—waking and dreaming, thought and sensory impulses, meaning and action, medical diagnoses and chance. Thus, whatever the central idea may be, it doesn’t come to mind through the subject’s own volition; it arises only accidentally, through various determining factors over which the subject has limited or no control, like a smell, or the possibility of death.
Because this is a foreign text that refuses the romantic aesthetic of transparency which has long dominated Anglo-American poetry, it makes any pursuit of simpatico difficult if not impossible for the English-language translator. “L’idea centrale” is not a congenial poem to bring into a culture that prizes individuality and self-determination to such an extent that intentionality and self-expression decisively shape its reflections on language and poetry. The continued dominance of these individualistic assumptions in contemporary Anglo-American culture inevitably makes De Angelis a minor writer in English, marginal in relation to the major English-language aesthetic, the transparent expression of authorial experience. Indeed, the dominance of individualistic assumptions makes translation itself a minor genre of writing in English, marginal in relation to writing that not only implements the major aesthetic of transparency, but bears the authorial imprimatur. Because transparent discourse is perceived as mirroring the author, it values the foreign text as original, {290} authentic, true, and devalues the translated text as derivative, simulacral, false, forcing on translation the project of effacing its second-order status with a fluent strategy. It is here that a Platonic metaphysics emerges from beneath romantic individualism to construe translation as the copy of a copy, dictating a translation strategy in which the effect of transparency masks the mediations between and within copy and original, eclipsing the translator’s labor with an illusion of authorial presence, reproducing the cultural marginality and economic exploitation which translation suffers today.[2] I was definitely attracted by the difference of De Angelis’s poetry, even if it upset the Anglo-American translation practices that my friend had described so lyrically. Yet this difference was forcing me to set new goals for my work. What could I hope to achieve by translating De Angelis into English? What theory would inform my translation strategy and govern my choices? Certainly, I could defer to the prevailing cult of the author and make my translation of “L’idea centrale” as fluent as possible, perhaps with the vain hope of edging the poem closer to transparency. Some progress in this direction can be achieved if in line 12 of the translation the verb “were” is inserted before “hissing,” minimizing the fragmented syntax and giving more definition to the meaning, or if the verb “came” in the first line were given a subject, even one as vaguely defined as “it.” Of course, adding “were” and “it” would not go very far toward making the text transparent, but they would at least mitigate the grammatical uneasiness usually provoked by the omission of a subject or verb in an English sentence.
My English version, however, refuses fluency. Taking its cue from De Angelis’s own aesthetic, my strategy can be called resistancy: it seeks to reproduce the discontinuity of De Angelis’s poem. And the translation is no doubt more discontinuous with the omission of a subject and a verb. Resistancy was also at work in my effort to heighten the abruptness of the line-breaks, their effect of forcing the reader to change expectations. In line 1 “scent,” so vaguely defined that it can entertain the possibility of pleasantness, replaced two earlier choices, “smell” and “odor,” both of which carry strong negative connotations and so gave too much of a foretaste of the ominous “alcohol,” reducing the latter’s power to evoke surprise and fear. The line-break allows “scent” to release its various possible meanings, making its juxtaposition with “alcohol” a bit more jolting. Similarly, an earlier version of {291} line 9 began with “carelessly,” but this was ultimately replaced by the more resonant “absentmindedly,” which seems not only inexplicable in the context of “gift,” but rather alarming: since the gift carries the important cognitive associations of “center,” it offers the reader the promise of intelligibility, of some light shed on the title—which, however, the idea of absentmindedness quickly betrays.
By adopting a strategy of resistancy to translate De Angelis’s poem, I have been unfaithful to, and have in fact challenged, the dominant aesthetic in the target-language culture, i.e., Anglo-American culture, becoming a nomad in my own language, a runaway from the mother tongue. At the same time, however, implementing this strategy must not be viewed as making the translation more faithful to the source-language text. Although resistancy can be said to rest on the same basic assumptions about language and subjectivity that inform De Angelis’s poetry, my English version still deviates from the Italian text in decisive ways that force a radical rethinking of fidelity in translation. The kind of fidelity that comes into play here has been called “abusive” by Philip Lewis: the translator whose “aim is to recreate analogically the abuse that occurs in the original text” winds up both “forcing the linguistic and conceptual system of which [the translation] is a dependent” and “directing a critical thrust back toward the text that it translates” (Lewis 1985:43). The “abuses” of De Angelis’s writing are precisely its points of discontinuity and indeterminacy. They continue to exert their force in Italian culture, on the Italian-language reader, long after the publication of Somiglianze. In 1983, for instance, the poet Maurizio Cucchi began his dictionary entry on De Angelis by stating that “pensiero e libertà dell’immagine spesso coesistono nei suoi versi, rivelando una sottesa, insinuante inquietudine, un attraversamento sempre arduo e perturbante dell’esperienza”/ “idea and freedom of image often coexist in his verses, revealing a subtending, insinuating uneasiness, an always arduous and troubling skewing of experience” (Cucchi 1983:116). My strategy of resistancy aims to reproduce this effect in English by resorting to analogous techniques of fragmentation and proliferation of meaning. As a consequence, the translation establishes an abusive fidelity to the Italian text: on the one hand, the translation resists the transparent aesthetic of Anglo-American culture which would try to domesticate De Angelis’s difficult writing by demanding a {292} fluent strategy; on the other hand, the translation simultaneously creates a resistance in relation to De Angelis’s text, qualifying its meaning with additions and subtractions which constitute a “critical thrust” toward it.
[2]
These reflections on romantic individualism and its degrading of translation rely on Derrida 1976 and Deleuze 1990:253–266.