The Translator’s Invisibility

Tarchetti’s plagiarism was not so much copyright infringement as a violation of the individualistic notion of authorship on which copyright is based. As Martha Woodmansee shows, copyright laws recognize the writer’s ownership of a text insofar as he is its author or originator—“that is, insofar as his work is new and original, an intellectual creation which owes its individuality solely and exclusively to him” (Woodmansee 1984:446). This notion of authorship assumes romantic expressive theory: the text is seen as expressing the unique thoughts and feelings of the writer, a free, unified consciousness which is not divided by determinations that exceed and possibly conflict with his intention. The author is assigned the sole and exclusive copyright because his subjectivity is taken to be a metaphysical essence which is present in his text and all its copies, but which transcends any difference or change introduced by formal determinations, like printing and binding, language and genre, and by economic and political conditions, like the publishing industry and government censorship. The very idea of authorial copyright, however, confesses the possibility of change because it is designed to control the form and marketing of the book by licensing reproduction and repressing change that is not authorized. Copyright opens up a contradiction in the individualistic notion of authorship by demonstrating that such law is suspended between metaphysics and materialism, acknowledging the material contingencies of form, the possibility of its difference from the author, but enacting its transparency with the metaphysical assumption of authorial presence.

{166} Tarchetti’s plagiarism violated this notion of authorship not by merely copying Shelley’s tale, but by translating it. Because his plagiarism was a translation, it introduced a decisive change in the form of the original, specifically in its language; his assertion of authorship simultaneously masked this change and indicated that it was decisive enough to mark the creation of a new text which originated with him. Tarchetti’s plagiarism covertly collapsed the distinction that an individualistic notion of authorship draws between author and translator, creator and imitator. Yet because his plagiarism remained undiscovered and unrationalized—at least until today—it continued to support this distinction; it did not reflect or contribute to any revision of nineteenth-century Italian opinion concerning the aesthetic and legal status of translation. All the same, the fact that Tarchetti’s plagiarism was covert did not in any way mitigate its violation of authorship—nor its effect as an eminently foreignizing translation practice. Because his Italian translation was a plagiarism, it was especially subversive of bourgeois values in the major language. On the one hand, Tarchetti’s text flouted bourgeois propriety and property by fraudulently exploiting the process of literary commodification in the Italian publishing industry; in this way, his plagiarism exemplified the nonconformist tendency of the scapigliatura to identify with socially subordinate groups, particularly the worker, the poor, and the criminal, professing a dissident refusal of the dominant by affiliating with the subcultural (Mariani 1967). On the other hand, Tarchetti’s text deterritorialized the bourgeois fictional discourse that dominated Italian culture precisely because it was a plagiarism in the standard dialect, because it passed itself off not just as an original Gothic tale, but as one written originally in the Italian of Manzonian realism and therefore foreignizing in its impact on the Italian literary scene.