The Translator's Invisibility: A History of Translation

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other poetic discourses, other poetic subjects, challenging any facile
reduction of the text to autobiography (whether the poet’s or the
reader’s).
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 sièclemovement (“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