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304 The Translator’s Invisibilityin Italy is that his first book, Somiglianze, was reissued in a revisededition in 1990.If my translations of De Angelis’s speculative poetry will not beimmediately recognizable to the English-language reader, it is also truethat I do not recognize my own voice in these translations. On thecontrary, my encounter with De Angelis’s texts has been profoundlyestranging, and for reasons specific to my situation as a translator incontemporary Anglo-American culture: by making simpatico animpossible goal, the formal discontinuity of the Italian has forced meto question fluency, the dominant translation strategy in English,exposing its link to the individualism of romantic and modern theoriesof transparent discourse, dislodging me from the position constructedfor the English-language translator by his manifold relations witheditors, publishers, reviewers, and, as my friend’s advice suggests,other translators. This estrangement can happen because thepositioning by which a discursive practice qualifies agents for culturalproduction does not operate in an entirely coherent manner: a specificpractice can never irrevocably fix identity, because identity isrelational, the nodal point for a multiplicity of practices whoseincompatibility or sheer antagonism creates the possibility for change(Laclau and Mouffe 1985:105–114). A discursive practice liketranslation seems particularly vulnerable to shifts in positioning,displacements of identity: its function is to work on linguistic andcultural differences which can easily initiate an interrogation of theconditions of the translator’s work. Thus, although the hegemony oftransparent discourse in contemporary Anglo-American culture hasmade fluency the hegemonic strategy in English-language translation,De Angelis’s poetry can still enlist the translator in a culturalcontradiction: I was led to implement a resistant strategy in oppositionto the discursive rules by which my work would most likely be judged,and yet that strategy, far from proving more faithful to the Italian texts,in fact abused them by exploiting their potential for different andincompatible meanings.The challenge which translating De Angelis’s poetry poses toromantic and modern theories of discourse is quite similar to the oneposed by Paul Celan’s writing. In Celan’s speech “The Meridian”(1960), the obscure discontinuity of his and other post-World War IIEuropean poetry—what he calls “the difficulties of vocabulary, thefaster flow of syntax or a more awakened sense of ellipsis”—isassociated with a rethinking of the lyric poem in its romantic andmodern guises (Celan 1986:48). Celan questions the lyric project of