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Simpatico 299The resistancy of the translation reproduces the formaldiscontinuity of De Angelis’s poem by adhering to its line-breaks andsyntactical peculiarities. A fluent strategy could easily iron out thesyntax, for example, by correcting or completing the sentencefragments—in line 7 with the substitution of the verb “lean” for theparticiple “leaning”; in line 10 with the insertion of a verb phrase like“go by” after the fragmentary “opaque houses.” The translation,however, reproduces De Angelis’s challenge to transparent discourseby using broken constructions which have the effect of throwing thereading process off-balance, aggravating the already difficult problemposed by the shifting positions of intelligibility, the dislocation ofvoice.It is in the quotations that the translation is most abusive of theforeign text. To mimic the drama of this situation, I sought to makethe opening forcefully colloquial, inserting the abrupt dashes andfracturing the questions in line 4 by omitting the auxiliary “do.” Yetsince my reading construes this text as a poststructuralist meditationon the relationship between language and desire, I sought to increasethe philosophical abstraction of the English: “resemblance” replacedthe more ordinary, and more concrete, phrase “resembling eachother,” which is actually closer to the Italian “somigliarsi.” Themixture of colloquial and philosophical discourses in the translationreproduces but somewhat exaggerates the similarly discordantmaterials of the Italian text, its combination of concrete and abstractdiction.The resistant strategy is also evident in a tendency towardarchaism in the translation, specifically the dated quality of“plagiary” and “confute” in place of the more contemporary usages,“plagiarism” and “refute.” These archaic words make the quotationsmore unusual and distancing to the English-language reader,drawing attention to themselves as words and thus abusing thecanon of transparency. The word “plagiary” is particularly useful inproducing this effect: it introduces a point of polysemy which opensup a metacritical register vis-à-vis the foreign text. The Italian“plagio” signifies the action or instance of literary theft, the practiceor the text, and would ordinarily be translated into English by“plagiarism”; the Italian for the agent, “plagiarist,” is “plagiario.”My choice of “plagiary” condenses these words and meanings: it cansignify either “plagiarism” or “plagiarist,” the action or the agent,the text or the subject. Combined with “resemblance” in thetranslation, “plagiary” becomes a pun which in itself brands any