The Translator’s Invisibility

Even when it is unique a language remains a mixture, a schizophrenic mélange, a Harlequin costume in which very different functions of language and distinct centers of power are played out, blurring what can be said and what can’t be said; one function will be played off against the other, all the degrees of territoriality and relative deterritorialization will be played out. Even when major, a language is open to an intensive utilization that makes it take flight along creative lines of escape which, no matter how slowly, no matter how cautiously, can now form an absolute deterritorialization.

(Deleuze and Guattari 1986:26)

The major language that Tarchetti confronted was the Tuscan dialect of Italian, the linguistic standard for Italian literature since the Renaissance. In 1840, after more than a decade of research into {161} the question of a national language, Manzoni published an extensive revision of the first version of I promessi sposi which recast it in the Tuscan dialect, undertaking the nationalistic project of unifying Italy through its language and literature, at once situating his text in the Italian literary canon and establishing a linguistic model for fiction which could be understood by most Italian readers (Reynolds 1950). Because Tarchetti’s fantastic narratives were written in the Tuscan dialect, they took the major language on a line of escape that deterritorialized the dominant fictional discourse. He used the Italian literary standard to produce Gothic tales, a genre that was not merely marginal in relation to realism, but that existed in Italian culture primarily as sporadic translations of a few foreign writers, namely Hoffmann, Poe, and Adelbert von Chamisso.[3] Traced with German, English, French, even Arabic texts, Tarchetti’s tales foregrounded what realism repressed, the discursive and ideological determinations of subjectivity. In his foreign-derived, fantastic narratives, the standard dialect was turned into a political arena where the bourgeois individualism of realist discourse was contested in order to interrogate various class, gender, and racial ideologies. Nevertheless, Tarchetti’s Orientalism shows that he did not have his cultural politics entirely under control: his interrogations were democratically directed, but they sometimes repressed the ideological contradictions precipitated by their own materials and methods of appropriating them.

II

Methods of cultural appropriation like translation would clearly be useful to Tarchetti’s project of putting the major language to minor uses. And the deterritorializing effect of this project would clearly make his translations foreignizing in their impact on dominant cultural values in Italian. His most intensive utilization of the standard dialect did in fact occur in his translation of a foreign fantastic narrative, an English Gothic tale written by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. The political significance of Tarchetti’s translation, however, is complicated by the fact that it is a plagiarism of the English text.

In 1865, Tarchetti published a tale entitled “Il mortale immortale (dall’inglese)” (“The Immortal Mortal (From the English)”) in the {162} Rivista minima in two installments, on 21 June and 31 August. The first installment was unsigned; the second bore his name. These appearances indicate Tarchetti’s authorship, and so Italian readers have always assumed, none venturing beyond the supposition that he adapted the fantastic motif of his tale, the elixir of immortality, from two French texts. What Tarchetti actually published, however, is his Italian translation of Shelley’s tale “The Mortal Immortal,” which was first published in the English literary annual The Keepsake in 1833. In 1868, Tarchetti had another opportunity to acknowledge his translation, but he did not: while serving as the editor of the periodical Emporio pittoresco, he reprinted it under his name with a different title, “L’elixir dell’immortalità (imitazione dall’inglese)” (“The Elixir of Immortality (An Imitation from the English)”).