The Translator’s Invisibility

English-language readers will tend to be both “unmoved” and “irked” by De Angelis’s poetry, not only because the extreme discontinuity of the texts prevents the evocation of a coherent speaking voice, but also because he draws on philosophical concepts that remain foreign, even antipathetic, to Anglo-American culture. In a polemical essay published in 1967, Kenneth Rexroth wondered, “Why Is American Poetry Culturally Deprived?” because he “never met an American poet who was familiar with Jean Paul Sartre’s attempts at philosophy, much less with the gnarled discourse of Scheler or Heidegger” (Rexroth 1985:59). Rexroth’s point, that with few exceptions philosophical thinking is alien to twentieth-century American poetry, applies to British poetry as well and remains true more than twenty years later. Among the notable exceptions today are the diverse group of so-called “L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E” writers, such as Charles Bernstein, who has eroded the generic distinction between poetry and essay by drawing on various European traditions and thinkers, including Dada and Surrealism, Brecht and the Frankfurt School, poststructuralism and postanalytical philosophy (1986 and 1982).[6] Since Bernstein’s aesthetic— discontinuous, opaque, anti-individualistic—has earned his writing a marginal position in American publishing, banished to the relative obscurity of the small press and the little magazine, it demonstrates that contemporary American culture is not likely to give a warm reception to a poet like De Angelis, who writes with a knowledge of the main currents in Continental philosophy (Biggs 1990). It is only fitting, then, that in 1989 my manuscript of his work was accepted for publication by Los Angeles-based Sun & Moon, a small press whose list is devoted to experimentalists like Bernstein (and whose financial problems prevented my translation from seeing print until 1994). De Angelis in fact enjoys a considerably more central position in Italian culture: his writing is published by both small and larger presses and is reviewed by noted critics in a wide range of newspapers and magazines, both local and national, little and mass-audience.[7] Perhaps the clearest sign of his canonical status {304} in Italy is that his first book, Somiglianze, was reissued in a revised edition in 1990.

If my translations of De Angelis’s speculative poetry will not be immediately recognizable to the English-language reader, it is also true that I do not recognize my own voice in these translations. On the contrary, my encounter with De Angelis’s texts has been profoundly estranging, and for reasons specific to my situation as a translator in contemporary Anglo-American culture: by making simpatico an impossible goal, the formal discontinuity of the Italian has forced me to question fluency, the dominant translation strategy in English, exposing its link to the individualism of romantic and modern theories of transparent discourse, dislodging me from the position constructed for the English-language translator by his manifold relations with editors, publishers, reviewers, and, as my friend’s advice suggests, other translators. This estrangement can happen because the positioning by which a discursive practice qualifies agents for cultural production does not operate in an entirely coherent manner: a specific practice can never irrevocably fix identity, because identity is relational, the nodal point for a multiplicity of practices whose incompatibility or sheer antagonism creates the possibility for change (Laclau and Mouffe 1985:105–114). A discursive practice like translation seems particularly vulnerable to shifts in positioning, displacements of identity: its function is to work on linguistic and cultural differences which can easily initiate an interrogation of the conditions of the translator’s work. Thus, although the hegemony of transparent discourse in contemporary Anglo-American culture has made fluency the hegemonic strategy in English-language translation, De Angelis’s poetry can still enlist the translator in a cultural contradiction: I was led to implement a resistant strategy in opposition to the discursive rules by which my work would most likely be judged, and yet that strategy, far from proving more faithful to the Italian texts, in fact abused them by exploiting their potential for different and incompatible meanings.