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284 The Translator’s Invisibility
e poi la montagna, un attimo, e tutti
i morti che neanche il tuo esilio
potrà distinguere.
“Torna subito o non tornare più.”
Era questa—tra i salmi
della legge—la voce
che hai ripetuto all’inizio,
la potente sillaba, prima
di te stessa. “Solo così ti verrò incontro, ignara
nell’inverno che ho perduto e che trovo.”
(De Angelis l985:12)
We heard the rain and those
who were returning: each thing
in the calm of speaking
and then the mountain, an instant, and all
the dead whom not even your exile
can distinguish.
“Come back at once or don’t ever come back.”
This—amid the psalms
of the law—was the voice
that you repeated at the beginning,
the potent syllable, before
you yourself. “Only then shall I come to meet you, unaware
in the winter which I lost and find.”
Knowing the allusion in the title doesn’t much help to fix the meaning
of this poem. The pronouns support multiple subjectivities. A word
like “inverno” (“winter”) sets up a fertile intertextual/ intersubjective
chain: it suggests a key motif in several poets, notably Celan and
Franco Fortini (1917–), an Italian writer of politically engaged cultural
criticism and verse who early expressed his admiration of De Angelis.
Although De Angelis frequently takes specific episodes in his own life
as points of departure, his experimental poetics renders them both
impersonal and interpersonal, thickening the representation with an
intricate network of images and allusions that construct relations to