The Translator’s Invisibility

{159} Tarchetti’s Orientalist literary history clarifies the political agenda in his use of the fantastic, but simultaneously discloses an ideological contradiction which runs counter to that agenda. The passage shows him actively rewriting his cultural materials so as to transform the Orient into a vehicle for his democratic social vision. Whereas the Arabian tales actually offer glimpses of despotic monarchies, and the geographer Strabo describes the nomadic Arabs as “a tribe of brigands and shepherds” who are less “civilised” than the Syrians because their “government” is not as well “organised” (Strabo 1930:VII, 233, 255), Tarchetti drew on Rousseau’s notion of natural human innocence and perceived only a utopian “comunanza,” a community or fellowship, close to “virgin nature” and not corrupted by the hierarchical social organization of Europe. Tarchetti also represented the Orient as exotic and phantasmagorical (“their burning sky,” “love for the marvelous”), setting his concept of fiction apart from the realist discourse that dominated Italy by identifying with its other, the fantastic. Both these representations of the Orient, however, are clearly Eurocentric: they aim to make Persia and Arabia perform a European function, the regeneration of Italian fiction and society, and they never escape the racist opposition between Western rationality and Eastern irrationality. Tarchetti’s literary history assumed the range of meanings which, as Edward Said has observed, were typical of romantic representations of the Orient: “sensuality, promise, terror, sublimity, idyllic pleasure, intense energy” (Said 1978:118).

This racial ideology, obviously in conflict with Tarchetti’s democratic politics, becomes more explicitly damaging to his project in his closing reference to Strabo, which abruptly reverses the logic of his argument. Tarchetti initially treated Arabian narratives as a mirror of the Arabian social order, a reliable representation of its “laws and customs,” but he concluded in apparent agreement with Strabo’s complaint that these texts reflect little more than an overheated imagination. Tarchetti’s typically romantic Orientalism seems to result in an uncritical acceptance of Strabo’s equation of the East with “love for the marvelous.” Yet Strabo’s point that the “histories” of Eastern countries lack a firm basis in reality renders “uncertain,” not only Arabian narratives, but the democratic images that Tarchetti found in them, questioning his earlier treatment of the novel as figuring a “marvelous world” without social hierarchies. Tarchetti’s citation of Strabo suggests that the utopian world of the novel may be no {160} more than a misrepresentation of its social situation, especially in the case of the Eastern prototypes of the genre. It is worth noting that Tarchetti in effect reiterated this view at the end of his brief tale, “La fortuna di capitano Gubart” (“Captain Gubart’s Fortune”), published the same year as his essay on the novel. After demonstrating the arbitrariness of class distinctions by relating how a poor street musician is mistakenly awarded a royal military commission, the narrator concluded: “Questo fatto comunque abbia una decisa analogia con quelli famosi delle novelle arabe, è incontrastabilmente vero e conosciuto” / “This incident, despite its decided resemblance to those famous ones of the Arabian tales, is indisputably true and well-known” (Tarchetti 1967, I:79). This reference to The Arabian Nights seems designed to satirize Italian social relations as fantastic and therefore irrational, but it can make this satiric point only by assuming the irrationality of Eastern culture and by distinguishing Tarchetti’s narrative as “true.” Tarchetti sought to enlist foreign fantastic texts in the democratic cultural politics he conducted in Italy, but his Orientalism was implicated in the key binary opposition by which Europe subordinated, and justified its colonization of, the same foreign countries whose texts he considered politically useful.

Given the diverse linguistic, cultural, and ideological materials that constituted Tarchetti’s project, it can be seen as what Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari call a minor utilization of a major language: