venuti

284 The Translator’s Invisibilitye poi la montagna, un attimo, e tuttii morti che neanche il tuo esiliopotrà distinguere.“Torna subito o non tornare più.”Era questa—tra i salmidella legge—la voceche hai ripetuto all’inizio,la potente sillaba, primadi te stessa. “Solo così ti verrò incontro, ignaranell’inverno che ho perduto e che trovo.”(De Angelis l985:12)We heard the rain and thosewho were returning: each thingin the calm of speakingand then the mountain, an instant, and allthe dead whom not even your exilecan distinguish.“Come back at once or don’t ever come back.”This—amid the psalmsof the law—was the voicethat you repeated at the beginning,the potent syllable, beforeyou yourself. “Only then shall I come to meet you, unawarein the winter which I lost and find.”Knowing the allusion in the title doesn’t much help to fix the meaningof this poem. The pronouns support multiple subjectivities. A wordlike “inverno” (“winter”) sets up a fertile intertextual/ intersubjectivechain: it suggests a key motif in several poets, notably Celan andFranco Fortini (1917–), an Italian writer of politically engaged culturalcriticism and verse who early expressed his admiration of De Angelis.Although De Angelis frequently takes specific episodes in his own lifeas points of departure, his experimental poetics renders them bothimpersonal and interpersonal, thickening the representation with anintricate network of images and allusions that construct relations to