The Translator’s Invisibility

Farina’s rather melodramatic memoir seems to be unduly minimizing Tarchetti’s proficiency in English by limiting it to “pochissimo, appena il tanto da intendere alla meglio Shakespeare e Byron e tradurre ad {164} orecchio Dyckens” / “very little, just enough to attain a rudimentary understanding of Shakespeare and Byron and to translate Dickens by ear” (ibid.:34). Tarchetti’s translation of Shelley’s tale confirms, on the contrary, that he had an excellent reading knowledge of English. All the same, this does not necessarily disprove Farina’s assertion that “non parlava inglese affatto e sarebbe stato imbarazzato a sostenere una conversazione” / “he did not speak English at all and would have been embarrassed to sustain a conversation” (ibid.). Farina notes that the registration for the course netted “una retata magnifica” / “a magnificent haul” (ibid.:35), but Tarchetti gave much fewer than forty lessons:

quando il professore non seppe più che cosa insegnare ai suoi scolari, lessero insieme Shakespeare e Byron e fumarono le sigarette che Iginio preparava sul tavolino all’ora della lezione.

when the professor no longer knew what to teach his pupils, together they read Shakespeare and Byron and smoked the cigarettes Iginio put out on the desk when the lesson began.

(ibid.:36)

This teaching scam was probably more profitable than Tarchetti’s plagiarism. Yet since translation was poorly remunerated in nineteenth-century Italy, with payment usually taking the form of books as well as money, his implicit claim that his text was his creation would have earned him a higher fee than if he had published it as a translation (Berengo 1980:340–346). A financial motive may also explain the curious retitling and reprinting of the text when he took over the editorship of the Emporio pittoresco. The different title and his signature claimed that it was his original tale being published for the first time.

Because the legal status of translation was just beginning to be defined in 1865, Tarchetti’s plagiarism did not in fact constitute a copyright infringement which resulted in a financial loss for Shelley’s estate and her English publisher. By the early nineteenth century, many countries had developed copyright statutes which gave the author exclusive control over the reproduction of her text for life and beyond. But international copyright conventions were slow to emerge, and translation rights were not always reserved for the author. In 1853, for example, a federal court in the United States held that a German translation of Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) which had not been {165} licensed by Harriet Beecher Stowe did not infringe her copyright for the English-language text (Kaplan 1967:29). Although England instituted the first important copyright statute at the beginning of the eighteenth century, in 1851, the year of Shelley’s death, English law did not give the author translation rights. It was not until 1852 that the right of authors to license translations of their published texts was recognized by statute, which limited it to five years from the date of publication (Sterling and Carpenter 1986:103). A general copyright law was not formulated in Italy until the Unification: on 25 June 1865, four days after Tarchetti published the first installment of his translation as his tale, the Italian government gave authors the right to “publish, reproduce, and translate” their texts, although the translation rights were limited to ten years from the date of publication (Piola-Caselli 1927:22, 24, 26).