venuti

296 The Translator’s Invisibilitysubversion by the dominated, and it is the dreamer who is“threatening” and “hissing” at the “bosses.” Here the abusiveness ofthe translation enacts an unsettling critique of the Italian text byexposing its privileging of the “bosses,” its implicit representation ofpower and social dominance as transcending the determinations ofhuman action.A strategy of resistancy thus results in an abusive fidelity whichconstructs a simultaneous relationship of reproduction andsupplementarity between the translation and the foreign text. Theprecise nature of this relationship cannot be calculated before thetranslation process is begun because different relationships must beworked out for the specific cultural materials of different foreign textsand for the specific cultural situations in which those texts aretranslated. This makes translation labor-intensive, but alsoserendipitous, with the translator poring over dictionaries,developing many alternative renderings, unexpectedly finding wordsand phrases that at once imitate and exceed the foreign text. “In thework of translation,” Lewis notes,the integration that is achieved escapes, in a vital way, fromreflection and emerges in an experimental order, an order ofdiscovery, where success is a function not only of the immenseparaphrastic and paronomastic capacities of language, but also oftrial and error, of chance. The translation will be essayistic, in thestrong sense of the word.(Lewis 1985:45)Abusive fidelity can be achieved by various strategies ofresistancy worked by various formal techniques, but more oftenthan not the techniques surface accidentally as possibilities aretested, their effects evaluated only after the fact, whenrationalization occurs.The abuses in De Angelis’s “II corridoio del treno” (“The TrainCorridor”), also from Somiglianze, offer another illustration:“Ancora questo plagiodi somigliarsi, vuoi questo?” nel treno gelidoche attraversa le risaie e separa tutto“vuoi questo, pensi che questosia amore?” È buoi ormaie il corridoio deserto si allunga