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286 The Translator’s Invisibilityto renew the Dantesque vein in terms of a sensibility that belongs sopassionately to its own time and strives tenaciously to find anindividual voice—a voice never to be repeated.(ibid.:xx)The modernist translation discourse Arrowsmith recommended mayhave been resistant to certain Anglo-American literary values(“smoother transitions,” “concreteness”), but his rationale for thisdiscourse agreed with mainstream poetics, the romantic valorization ofthe poet’s “voice.” Obviously, Arrowsmith’s translations can do little toquestion the shadow of neglect that Montale continues to cast onItalian experimentalists—like Milo De Angelis.IIThe irony of my situation was not lost on me. In pursuing my friend’snotion of simpatico, I discovered an Italian writer who forced me tosuspect this notion and ultimately abandon it. When I came across DeAngelis’s 1975 anthology selection and then got hold of his first book,what struck me most was the fact that on every level—linguistic,formal, thematic—his poems issue a decisive challenge to a poetcenteredaesthetic. Their abrupt line-breaks and syntacticalpeculiarities, their obscure mixture of abstraction, metaphor, anddialogue give them an opacity that undermines any sense of a coherentspeaking voice. They do not invite the reader’s vicarious participationand in fact frustrate any reading that would treat them as thecontrolled expression of an authorial personality or intention. Whose—or what—voice would speak in a translation of De Angelis’s poetry?Often, I should add, it is more of a question of which voice, since thesnippets of dialogue that punctuate his texts are impossible to pindown to a distinct identity. De Angelis’s poetry questions whether thetranslator can be (or should be thought of as being) in sympathy withthe foreign author. It rather shows that voice in translation isirreducibly strange, never quite recognizable as the poet’s or thetranslator’s, never quite able to shake off its foreignness to the reader.As I began to translate De Angelis’s poems, I became aware that thenotion of simpatico actually mystifies what happens in the translationprocess. Most crucially, it conceals the fact that in order to produce theeffect of transparency in a translated text, in order to give the reader thesense that the text is a window onto the author, translators mustmanipulate what often seems to be a very resistant material, i.e., the