The Translator’s Invisibility

Non si voglia dimenticare che l’Italia, unica al mondo, possiede una guida per le case di tolleranza, che i nostri romanzi licenziosi sono riprodotti e popolari anche in Francia, che gli uomini che li scrissero godono di tutti i diritti civili e dell’ammirazione pubblica, e che apparatengono in gran parte alla stampa periodica [mentre] ogni scritto politico awerso ai principi del governo, ma conforme a quelli dell’umanità e del progresso, è tosto impedito nella sua diffusione.

It must not be forgotten that Italy, unique in the world, possesses a guide to brothels, that our licentious novels are reproduced and {158} popular in France as well, that the men who write them enjoy every civil right and public admiration, and belong for the most part to the periodical press [whereas] the circulation of every political text opposed to the principles of the government, but consistent with those of humanity and progress, is immediately obstructed.

(Tarchetti 1967, II:534–5)

Tarchetti’s experiments with the fantastic can be seen as an intervention into this cultural situation: they were developed to resolve the crisis he diagnosed in Italian fictional discourse, the inadequacy of realism to serve a democratic cultural politics. The fantastic answered Tarchetti’s call for a fiction to represent that “marvelous world” of “sensations” which he saw as a remedy for hierarchical social relations and his own social isolation; the freeing of subjectivity in fantastic discourse was a freedom from subjection. Because, in Tarchetti’s view, realism dominated Italian fiction to no politically progressive end, his intervention took the form of writing in a foreign genre opposed to realism, the Gothic tale. Tarchetti’s effort to write against the Manzonian grain in fact projected a revision of the history of fiction, in which the novel didn’t originate in Europe, but in “I’ oriente da cui si diffuse dapprima la civiltà per tutto il mondo” / “the Orient, from which civilization spread through all the world” (Tarchetti 1967, II:524). The prototype of the novel became, not epic or any form of realist discourse, but fantasy, and not the Bible or the Iliad, but The Arabian Nights:

I Persiani e gli Arabi attinsero dalla varietà della loro vita nomade, e dalla loro vergine natura, e dal loro cielo infuocato le prime narrazioni romanzesche, onde le leggi e le abitudini di comunanza sociale e domestica degli Arabi ci sono note e famigliari da gran tempo, e Strabone si doleva che l’amore del meraviglioso rendesse incerte le stone di queste nazioni.

The Persians and the Arabs drew from the variety of their nomad life, and from their virgin nature, and from their burning sky the first novelistic narratives, hence the laws and customs of the Arabs’ social and domestic community have been well-known and familiar to us for a long time, and Strabo lamented that love for the marvelous rendered uncertain the histories of these nations.

(ibid.)