venuti

292 The Translator’s Invisibilityfluent strategy; on the other hand, the translation simultaneouslycreates a resistance in relation to De Angelis’s text, qualifying itsmeaning with additions and subtractions which constitute a“critical thrust” toward it.For example, certain features of the syntax in my translation makeit stranger than De Angelis’s Italian. His first line gives a verb with nosubject—“È venuta”—which is grammatically acceptable andintelligible in Italian because this particular tense indicates the genderof the subject, here feminine, almost immediately leading the Italianlanguagereader to the last feminine noun, which happens to be in thetitle, “L’idea.” English sentences without subjects are grammaticallyincorrect and often unintelligible. By following the Italian closely andomitting the subject, therefore, I was actually moving away from theforeign text, or at least making it more difficult, more peculiar: “Èvenuta” seems fluent to the Italian-language reader, the upper-case “e”showing that it begins a sentence, whereas the grammatical violationin “came to mind” (with the lower case) makes it seem unidiomatic orresistant to an English-language reader—even if this is only an initialeffect, which eventually forces a glance back toward the title formeaning. My translation takes a syntactical subtlety in the Italianversion, the absence of any explicit subject, and distorts it, givingexaggerated emphasis to what is only gently hinted in the Italian: thatthe central idea always remains outside of the poem because it is neverexplicitly stated, perhaps because it cannot be, because it questions anyform of representation, whether in language, or X-rays.In this instance, my translation exceeds the foreign text because ofirreducible differences between the source and target languages,syntactical differences which complicate the effort to produceresistancy. But the excess in the translation can also be seen in the factthat I rendered certain lines primarily on the basis of an interpretationof the poem. Because interpretation and poem are distinct entities,determined by different factors, serving different functions, leadingdifferent discursive lives, my interpretive translation should be seen asa transformation of the poem, grounded, it is true, on informationabout De Angelis’s readings in literature, literary criticism, andphilosophy, but aimed at circulating this body of writing in theEnglish-language culture where it continues to be alien and marginal.For what De Angelis’s poem shows Anglo-American readers, with allthe discomfort of the unintelligible, is that European culture hasdecisively moved beyond romanticism, in both its nineteenth- andtwentieth-century manifestations.