venuti

Notes 323gathered in Montale 1984a. William Arrowsmith was completingtranslations of Cuttlefish Bones and Satura when he died in 1992; JonathanGalassi is currently completing a translation of Montale’s first threebooks. Montale’s Italian texts have also been the object of free adaptationsin English: see, for example, Lowell 1961:107–129 and Reed 1990.2 These reflections on romantic individualism and its degrading oftranslation rely on Derrida 1976 and Deleuze 1990:253–266.3 See also On the Genealogy of Morals:A quantum of force is equivalent to a quantum of drive, will, effect—more, it is nothing other than precisely this very driving, willing,effecting, and only owing to the seduction of language (and of thefundamental errors of reason that are petrified in it) which conceivesand misconceives all effects as conditioned by something that causeseffects, by a ‘subject,’ can it appear otherwise.(Nietszche 1969:45)Deleuze 1983:6–8 offers an incisive exposition of Nietzsche’s “philosophyof the will.”4 The magazines that have published my translations of De Angelis’spoetry include American Poetry Review, Paris Review Poetry, and Sulfur. Thetranslations have been rejected by Antaeus, Conjunctions, Field, NewAmerican Writing, The New Yorker, and Pequod, among others.5 Letter from Peter Potter, Assistant Editor, Wesleyan University Press, 24November 1987.6 For a selection from the writing of this loosely associated group, seeMesserli 1987. For discussions of the theoretical differences between theL=A=N=G=U=A=G=E group and the romanticism which dominatescontemporary American poetry, see Perloff 1985 and Bartlett 1986.7 De Angelis’s poetry has been reviewed in little magazines like Produzionee cultura, in the widely circulated literary tabloid Alfabeta (now defunct),and in mass-audience magazines like L’Espresso and Panorama.Newspapers that have printed reviews of his books include La Gazzetta diParma, La Stampa, and Corriere della Sera.8 Derrida similarly notes that “there are, in one linguistic system, perhapsseveral languages, or tongues, […] There is impurity in every language,”and he concludes that “translation can do everything except mark thislinguistic difference inscribed in the language, this difference of languagesystems inscribed in a single tongue” (1985b:100). I am arguing that it isprecisely this difference that the strategy of resistancy is designed tomark, the differences among languages, but also within them.