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.
Translation is a process that involves looking for similarities between languages and cultures—particularly similar messages and formal techniques—but it does this only because it is constantly confronting dissimilarities. It can never and should never aim to remove these dissimilarities entirely. A translated text should be the site where a different culture emerges, where a reader gets a glimpse of a cultural other, and resistancy, a translation strategy based on an aesthetic of discontinuity, can best preserve that difference, that otherness, by reminding the reader of the gains and losses in the translation process and the unbridgeable gaps between cultures. In contrast, the notion of simpatico, by placing a premium on transparency and demanding a fluent strategy, can be viewed as a cultural narcissism: it seeks an identity, a self-recognition, and finds only the same culture in foreign writing, only the same self in the cultural other. For the translator becomes aware of his intimate sympathy with the foreign writer only when he recognizes his own voice in the foreign text. Unfortunately, the irreducible cultural differences mean that this is always a mis-recognition as well, yet fluency ensures that this point gets lost in the translating. Now more than ever, when transparency continues to dominate Anglo-American culture, ensuring that simpatico will remain a compelling goal for English-language translators, it seems important to reconsider what we do when we translate.
Chapter 7. Call to action
The translator is the secret master of the difference of languages, a difference he is not out to abolish, but rather one he puts to use as he brings violent or subtle changes to bear on his own language, thus awakening within it the presence of that which is at origin different in the original.
In the brief but provocative essay “Translating” (1971), Blanchot inverts the conventional hierarchy wherein “the original” is superior to the translation. He considers the foreign text, not as the unchanging cultural monument in relation to which the translation must forever be an inadequate, ephemeral copy, but as a text in transit, “never stationary,” living out “the solemn drift and derivation [“dérive”] of literary works,” constituting a powerful self-difference which translation can release or capture in a unique way (Blanchot 1990:84). This assumes the foreign text to be derivative, dependent on other, preexisting materials (a point made by Sieburth’s decision to render “dérive” as two words, “drift and derivation”), but also dependent on the translation:
a work is not ready for or worthy of translation unless it harbors this difference within itself in some available fashion, whether it be because it originally gestures toward some other language, or because it gathers within itself in some privileged manner those possibilities of being different from itself or foreign to itself which every living language possesses.
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Derrida similarly notes that “there are, in one linguistic system, perhaps several languages, or tongues, […] There is impurity in every language,” and he concludes that “translation can do everything except mark this linguistic difference inscribed in the language, this difference of language systems inscribed in a single tongue” (1985b:100). I am arguing that it is precisely this difference that the strategy of resistancy is designed to mark, the differences among languages, but also within them.