The Translator’s Invisibility

{278} Book-length English translations of the experimental poetry took much longer to appear (over a decade after the Italian publication) than English versions of Montale’s poems (within three years of his first volume). In the 1970s, Ruth Feldman and Brian Swann did a selected Zanzotto with Princeton, and Paul Vangelisti published his chapbook version of Spatola’s Majakovskiiiiiiij with John McBride’s Los Angeles-based Red Hill Press. Vangelisti and McBride built a small library of Italian experimentalism, with nine books from Beltrametti, Costa, Niccolai, Porta, and Spatola, as well as an anthology that aims to map the movement, Italian Poetry, 1960–1980: from Neo to Post Avant-garde, Porta has been the most translated: five books altogether, including an individual volume from City Lights and a selected from the Canadian press Guernica, rendered by different translators. The poet Ballerini’s Out of London Press issued bilingual volumes of Cagnone, Tomaso Kemeny, and Giovanna Sandri, as well as an anthology that collected essays, lectures, and poems from a conference held in New York during the late 1970s, Thomas Harrison’s The Favorite Malice. Poets associated with the postwar experimentalism, as well as various other contemporary tendencies, are represented in several other anthologies from these years—but they are conspicuously absent from William Jay Smith and Dana Gioia’s Poems from Italy, which aims to be a representative survey of Italian poetry from its medieval beginnings.

To date, roughly twenty English-language books relating in whole or part to the experimentalist movement have been published, mostly by rather obscure small presses with limited distribution. It is no exaggeration to say that you won’t find any of these books in your local bookstore or even in many university libraries, but you will certainly find some of Montale’s books. Behind Montale’s monumentalization in Anglo-American writing lies a very different poetic landscape in Italy, one where he is canonized, to be sure, but which also includes the canonical tendency I am calling, somewhat reductively, “experimentalism.”

No doubt, the different reception of these Italian poetries is due to many factors, cultural, economic, ideological. The fact that Montale was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1975 accounts for some of his cultural capital here and abroad. But it can’t explain the sustained attention given to his poetry by the English-language writers who have chosen to translate it, or the relative neglect bestowed on some forty years of experimentalism. To understand this, I want to suggest, we must turn to the dominant {279} poetics in Anglo-American culture, specifically its romantic assumptions: that the poet is a unified subjectivity freely expressing his personal experience, and that the poem should therefore be centered on the poetic I, evoking a unique voice, communicating the poet’s self in transparent language, sustaining a feeling of simpatico in the translator. Montale’s canonical status in Anglo-American writing rests on his translators’ assimilation of his poetry to mainstream poetics, whereas the postwar experimentalism has been marginalized largely because it resists any such assimilation. The Montale canonized in English is actually a domesticated version shaped by a poet-oriented aesthetic and realized in the transparent discourse of fluent translation.

A case in point is Dana Gioia’s version of Montale’s Mottetti, a consecutively numbered sequence of twenty poems that forms the centerpiece of the 1939 volume Le occasioni. Montale’s contemporaries found these poems obscure, using the term “hermeticism” (ermetismo) to disparage their typically modernist poetics of indirection, their recourse to ellipsis, fragmentation, heterogeneity. In an essay from 1950, “Due sciacalli al guinzaglio” (“Two Jackals on a Leash”), Montale answered his critics by claiming that the “motets” were not obscure, that although individual poems were written at various times, they constituted “an entirely unmysterious little autobiographical novel,” in which he deployed some traditional cultural materials—Dante’s La Vita Nuova, the dolce stil novisti—to represent his intermittent relationship with Irma Brandeis, an American Dante scholar he encountered in Florence (Montale 1982:305). Anglo-American mainstream poetics privileges the poet, so Gioia accepts Montale’s defensive, slyly ironic essay at face value and asserts that the poems “form a unified sequence whose full meaning and power becomes apparent only when they are read together” (Montale 1990:11). Any obscurity is only apparent, an effect of the equally apparent discontinuity of the narrative: