The Translator’s Invisibility

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.

(Montale 1987:xxi)

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.

(ibid.:xx)

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.

II

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.