The Translator’s Invisibility

Tarchetti’s use of parenthetical subtitles (“From the English,” “An Imitation from the English”) appears to glance at the actual nature of his text, but this is misleading: they offer only the vaguest indication of the relationship between his Italian version and Shelley’s tale. Tarchetti did introduce some significant changes: he altered a date, used different names for two main characters, omitted a few phrases and sentences, and added some of his own, all of which amount to a strong transformation of the English text. Nevertheless, in sentence after sentence, paragraph after paragraph, his Italian version is governed by the aim of reproduction: it adheres so closely to the syntactical and lexical features of Shelley’s English as to be less an “imitation” than an interlingual translation. By failing to acknowledge his text as a translation, Tarchetti asserted his authorship of Shelley’s material and therefore committed plagiarism. And it seems certain that he was fully aware of this fact. In 1865, he began a brief but intense period of activity in the burgeoning Milanese publishing industry, first printing his short fiction and serializing his novels in the periodical press, and then issuing them in book form with several large publishers. He was also employed to write book-length translations. In 1869, he published his Italian versions of two English novels, one of which was Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend (1865). In both cases, he was credited as the translator.

Tarchetti’s financial difficulties no doubt figured into his motives to plagiarize Shelley’s tale. The frenzied pace of his writing during the last four years of his life demonstrates that he was producing for immediate publication and payment. A memoir by his friend and {163} collaborator Salvatore Farina shows Tarchetti drifting from one address to another, writing for several periodicals and publishers at once, but constantly poor, shabbily dressed, ill—he died of typhus and tuberculosis. In a letter dated 31 January 1867, Tarchetti complained to Farina about

le mie solite complicazioni economiche […] che ho nulla al mondo, che devo pensare da oggi a domani come pranzare, come vestirmi, come ricoverarmi.

my usual economic complications […] that I have nothing in the world, that from one day to the next I must find some way to dine, to dress, to house myself.

(Farina 1913:37, 38)

The letter referred to Tarchetti’s antimilitaristic novel Una nobile follia, which was currently being serialized in the periodical Il sole (November 1866 to March 1867): “aspetto sempre la completazione di quei drammi dai quali posso avere un po’ di danaro” / “every day I expect to finish these dramas [from the military life] which should yield me a little money” (ibid.:39).

Farina’s memoir suggests a financial motive for Tarchetti’s plagiarism by relating an incident in which his knowledge of English becomes the pretext of a fraudulent scheme. Living for some weeks in a hotel in Parma, but unable to pay the bill, Tarchetti “s’improwisò professore di lingua inglese” / “posed as a professor of English” and

annunziò per la via delle gazzette e alle cantonate di tutte le vie di Parma che, trovandosi di passaggio in quella città, avrebbe dato un corso completo di quaranta lezioni per insegnare la lingua inglese con un suo metodo spicciativo.

announced in the newspapers and on every street corner of Parma that since he was travelling through the city, he would give a complete, forty-lesson course in the English language with his rapid method.

(Farina 1913:34, 35)