The Translator’s Invisibility

As I began to translate De Angelis’s poems, I became aware that the notion of simpatico actually mystifies what happens in the translation process. Most crucially, it conceals the fact that in order to produce the effect of transparency in a translated text, in order to give the reader the sense that the text is a window onto the author, translators must manipulate what often seems to be a very resistant material, i.e., the {287} language into which they are translating, in most cases the language they learned first, their mother tongue, but now also their own. Transparency occurs only when the translation reads fluently, when there are no awkward phrasings, unidiomatic constructions or confused meanings, when clear syntactical connections and consistent pronouns create intelligibility for the reader. When the translation is a poem in free verse, varied rhythms that avoid jogtrot meters are needed to give the language a conversational quality, to make it sound natural. Line-breaks should not distort the syntax so much as to hinder the reader’s search for comprehension; they should rather support the syntactical continuity that gets him or her to read for meaning over the lines, pursuing the development of a coherent speaking voice, tracing its psychological contours. These formal techniques reveal that transparency is an illusionistic effect: it depends on the translator’s work with language, but it hides this work, even the very presence of language, by suggesting that the author can be seen in the translation, that in it the author speaks in his or her own voice. If the illusion of transparency is strong enough, it may well produce a truth-effect, wherein the authorial voice becomes authoritative, heard as speaking what is true, right, obvious. Translating De Angelis’s poems demystified this illusionism for me because they so obviously resist fluency, cultivating instead an aesthetic of discontinuity.

Consider a poem from Somiglianze, a programmatic text which gave its title to De Angelis’s anthology selection:

L’idea centrale
E venuta in mente (ma per caso, per I’odore
di alcool e le bende)
questo darsi da fare premuroso
nonostante.
E ancora, davanti a tutti, si sceglieva
tra le azioni e il loro senso.
Ma per caso.
Esseri dispotici regalavano il centro
distrattamente, con una radiografia,
e in sogno padroni minacciosi
sibilanti:
“se ti togliamo ciò che non è tuo
non ti rimane niente.”

(De Angelis 1976:97)

{288} The Central Idea
came to mind (but by chance, because of the scent
of alcohol and the bandages)
this careful busying of oneself
notwithstanding.
And still, in front of everybody, there was choosing
between the actions and their meaning.
But by chance.
Despotic beings made a gift of the center
absentmindedly, with an X-ray,
and in a dream threatening bosses
hissing:
“if we take from you what isn’t yours
you’ll have nothing left.”