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302 The Translator’s InvisibilityThere is a crimeI don’t know whether committed or witnessedin a styleless time, like a breezeblue and dark, which movedthe right hand. Or someonewho, bitten by caries, screams.Then even the rag-fly makesunquestioned flights and evena knee hurt in the corner kickstitches male back to female.P’s anonymous reader likewise expected an assimilation of DeAngelis’s experimentalism to transparent discourse. The reader’scomments on specific translations reveal an insistence on immediateintelligibility, criticizing archaism and polysemy in favor of currentEnglish usage. My use of the word “plagiary” in “The TrainCorridor,” for example, was called “really obsolete and obscure.”This reader, like the one for Wesleyan, also recommended revisingthe Italian text, even when it contained a recognizable rhetoricaldevice: “the discontinuity (anacoluthon) between lines 2 and 3seems excessive, however justified by the original; a little glue seemsneeded.”My translations signify the foreignness of De Angelis’s poetry byresisting the dominant Anglo-American literary values that woulddomesticate the Italian texts, make them reassuringly familiar, easyto read. And this is the reception that the translations continue toget. A selection was included in a 1991 anthology, New Italian Poets,a project that was initially developed by the Poetry Society ofAmerica and the Centro Internazionale Poesia della Metamorfosiin Italy and later edited by Dana Gioia and Michael Palma (Gioiaand Palma 1991). The anthology received a few, generally favorablereviews in American, British, and Italian periodicals. In PoetryReview, however, while reflecting on the cultural differencesbetween British and Italian poetry, the reviewer singled out (mytranslations of) De Angelis as an example of these differences attheir most alienating:One feature that clearly distinguishes many of these poets from theirBritish contemporaries is a freewheeling associative imagery whichdoesn’t feel obligated to explain itself—sudden transitions,lacunae—or to situate itself in a familiar time and place. This is at its