The Translator's Invisibility: A History of Translation

from every trace of you, this screen
of images,
was the approach of death, or truly
some dazzling
vision of you
out of the past,
bleached, distorted,
fading:
(under the arches at Modena
I saw an old man in a uniform
dragging two jackals on a leash).
(Montale 1990:35)
Simpatico 281
Gioia’s version appreciably enlarges the poet’s presence in the poem
with several alterations and additions. Montale’s opening lines—“La
speranza di pure rivederti/m’abbandonava” (in a rendering that
follows the Italian word order and lineation, “The hope of ever
seeing you again/was abandoning me”)—get reversed, with the
emphasis shifted to Gioia’s “I”: “I had almost lost.” Similarly, the
penultimate line contains another first-person reference, “I saw,”
which doesn’t appear at all in the Italian text. Gioia’s other
additions—“truly,” “vision,” “bleached,” “old man”—show an
effort to make the language more emotive or dramatic, to sketch the
psychological contours of the poetic subject, but they come off as
somewhat stagy, even sentimental (“old man”). In keeping with this
emotionalizing of Montale’s lexicon, Gioia uses the phrase
“approach of death” to translate “i segni della morte” (“signs of
death”), diminishing the element of self-reflexivity in the Italian, its
awareness of its own status as “images” and “signs,” and replacing
it with a pallid sensationalism. The English word “signs” is currently
loaded with various meanings, including a reference to controversial
foreign imports in Anglo-American literary theory that
depersonalize the text and deconstruct authorship—viz. semiotics
and poststructuralism. The avoidance of the word here produces two
notable effects: it moves the translation away from contemporary
European thinking that would question the theoretical assumptions
of mainstream poetics, and it reinforces the focus on the poet’s
emotional state, on the (re) presentation of Montale’s poem as
(Montale’s or Gioia’s?) self-expression. Gioia’s translation strategy
quite clearly seeks to efface Montale’s modernist poetic discourse, to