The insistent questioning proceeds to the Nietzschean argument that love is yet another form of the will to power, where two lovers are locked in a struggle for dominance and each can disprove (“confuto”) the other’s representation of their relationship, imposing a “world” that “will be true” for both. At this point, the voices lose what vague definition they may have acquired as the text unfolded, and the two conflicting positions of intelligibility are finally abandoned by the last voice, which implicitly calls for silence, full of expectation for another, still unspoken “word” that will construct a new subject-position for “the body,” a new representation for the biological “force” that threatens the linguistic basis of every relationship. The indeterminacy of the phrase “appoggia a sé la parola” (“leans the word against itself”) points to the contradictory interaction between language and desire. If “itself” is read as the “force” (or “body”?—another indeterminacy, perhaps less consequential here because of the connection between “force” and “body”), the “word” receives support from, or “leans […] against,” the “force” as the meaning of a linguistic sign depends on the linkage between signifier and signified. Thus, desire is seen as driving language use, but also as depending on such use for its articulation. Yet if “itself” is read as “the word,” in the sense of language in general, the “force” also “leans the word against” another word, circulating a chain of signifiers which defer the signified, throwing it into internal division. Here it is possible to glimpse Lacan’s fundamental idea that desire is simultaneously communicated and repressed by language (Lacan 1977).
{299} The resistancy of the translation reproduces the formal discontinuity of De Angelis’s poem by adhering to its line-breaks and syntactical peculiarities. A fluent strategy could easily iron out the syntax, for example, by correcting or completing the sentence fragments—in line 7 with the substitution of the verb “lean” for the participle “leaning”; in line 10 with the insertion of a verb phrase like “go by” after the fragmentary “opaque houses.” The translation, however, reproduces De Angelis’s challenge to transparent discourse by using broken constructions which have the effect of throwing the reading process off-balance, aggravating the already difficult problem posed by the shifting positions of intelligibility, the dislocation of voice.
It is in the quotations that the translation is most abusive of the foreign text. To mimic the drama of this situation, I sought to make the opening forcefully colloquial, inserting the abrupt dashes and fracturing the questions in line 4 by omitting the auxiliary “do.” Yet since my reading construes this text as a poststructuralist meditation on the relationship between language and desire, I sought to increase the philosophical abstraction of the English: “resemblance” replaced the more ordinary, and more concrete, phrase “resembling each other,” which is actually closer to the Italian “somigliarsi.” The mixture of colloquial and philosophical discourses in the translation reproduces but somewhat exaggerates the similarly discordant materials of the Italian text, its combination of concrete and abstract diction.
The resistant strategy is also evident in a tendency toward archaism in the translation, specifically the dated quality of “plagiary” and “confute” in place of the more contemporary usages, “plagiarism” and “refute.” These archaic words make the quotations more unusual and distancing to the English-language reader, drawing attention to themselves as words and thus abusing the canon of transparency. The word “plagiary” is particularly useful in producing this effect: it introduces a point of polysemy which opens up a metacritical register vis-à-vis the foreign text. The Italian “plagio” signifies the action or instance of literary theft, the practice or the text, and would ordinarily be translated into English by “plagiarism”; the Italian for the agent, “plagiarist,” is “plagiario.” My choice of “plagiary” condenses these words and meanings: it can signify either “plagiarism” or “plagiarist,” the action or the agent, the text or the subject. Combined with “resemblance” in the translation, “plagiary” becomes a pun which in itself brands any {300} relationship based on identity as a crime against personal autonomy and individuality, a Heideggerian inauthenticity, a person-theft, conjuring up its Latin root plagiarius—kidnapper. But since “resemblance” also defines a mode of representation exemplified by transparent discourse, the pun on “plagiary” interrogates the subjective illusionism in transparency, its fiction of personal presence, its person-lie. The English lines, “plagiary/of resemblance,” at once valorize and demystify the concept of authenticity, locating within the strident voice at the opening a different, alien voice. The strain of archaism in the translation, finally, temporalizes De Angelis’s poem, suggesting that cultural forms governed by “resemblance” are situated in the past, static, unwilling to admit difference and change, but also that De Angelis’s concept of the subject as determinate process departs from the individualistic evocations of older, romantic and modern poetry. The archaism in the English version goes beyond the foreign text by adding a metacommentary on its form and theme.
Resistancy is thus a translation strategy by which De Angelis’s poems become strange to the Italian poet, as well as to the Anglo-American reader and translator. It is certain that De Angelis will not recognize his own voice in the translations, not only because his ideas and texts would seem to make such a way of reading unthinkable for him, but also because he is unable to negotiate the target language. Although he works with many languages, including Greek, Latin, French, German, and different dialects of Italian, he finds English difficult to master and can read my translations only with informants, usually native Italians who have studied English. When he does this collaborative reading, moreover, he sometimes discovers what I have been arguing, that my English loses features of the Italian texts and adds others which he had never anticipated.
The resistant strategy of my translations gives them a different, and perhaps more intense, strangeness in the target-language culture. They have enjoyed varying success with English-language readers since the late 1970s. Most of them have appeared in literary magazines, appealing to editors whose aesthetics normally diverge, both mainstream and experimentalist—although my translations have also been rejected by as many magazines.[4] The complete manuscript, a selection from De Angelis’s poetry and critical prose, {301} has received many rejections from American and British publishers, including two university presses with noted translation series— Wesleyan and P (for “prestigious”: the editor at this press would not permit me to identify it). The anonymous readers’ reports for these presses, written in 1987, show quite clearly that my resistant strategy was strange because it abused the transparent discourse that dominates Anglo-American poetry translation.
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The magazines that have published my translations of De Angelis’s poetry include