venuti

Simpatico 305personal expression, of evoking an individual voice: the poem “speaksonly in its own, its very behalf,” he states, but it “has always hoped, forthis very reason, to speak also on behalf of the strange […] on behalf ofthe other, who knows, perhaps of an altogether other” (ibid.). The poem,then, does not express an authorial self, but rather liberates that selffrom its familiar boundaries, becoming “the place where the personwas able to set himself free as an—estranged—I,” but where “alongwith the I, estranged and free here, in this manner, some other thing isalso set free”—free from the appropriating power of the speaking “I,”of a personal language (ibid.:46–47). The poem does not transcend butacknowledges the contradiction between self-expression andcommunication with some other, forcing an awareness of the limits aswell as the possibilities of its language.It is this sort of liberation that resistancy tries to produce in thetranslated text by resorting to techniques that make it strange andestranging in the target-language culture. Resistancy seeks to free thereader of the translation, as well as the translator, from the culturalconstraints that ordinarily govern their reading and writing andthreaten to overpower and domesticate the foreign text, annihilatingits foreignness. Resistancy makes English-language translation adissident cultural politics today, when fluent strategies and transparentdiscourse routinely perform that mystification of foreign texts. In thespecific instance of Englishing De Angelis’s poetry, the politicalintervention takes the form of a minor utilization of a major language.“Even when major,” Deleuze and Guattari observe, “a language isopen to an intensive utilization that makes it take flight along creativelines of escape which, no matter how slowly, no matter how cautiously,can now form an absolute deterritorialization” (Deleuze and Guattari1986:26). 8 My translations of De Angelis’s poetry obviously can neverbe completely free of English and the linguistic and cultural constraintswhich it imposes on poetry and translation; that line of escape wouldpreempt any translation and is no more than a capitulation to themajor language, a political defeat. The point is rather that mytranslations resist the hegemony of transparent discourse in Englishlanguageculture, and they do this from within, by deterritorializingthe target language itself, questioning its major cultural status by usingit as the vehicle for ideas and discursive techniques which remainminor in it, which it excludes. The models for this translation strategyinclude the Czech Jew Kafka writing in German, particularly asDeleuze and Guattari read his texts, but also the Rumanian Jew Celan,who took German on lines of escape by using it to speak of Nazi racism