The Translator’s Invisibility

As this catalogue of abuse suggests, Shelley’s tale satirizes the patriarchal image of woman that shapes Bertha’s characterization by transforming it into caricature. The fantastic premise of immortality results in an exaggeration of her vanity: as Winzy remains twenty years old and she becomes a “faded beauty” of fifty, “she sought to decrease the apparent disparity of our ages by a thousand feminine arts—rouge, youthful dress, and assumed juvenility of manner” (ibid.:226, 228). The constant concern with beauty that patriarchy forces on women in Wollstonecraft’s critique is magnified into Bertha’s ludicrous, maddening obsession: “Her jealousy never slept,” Winzy relates,

Her chief occupation was to discover that, in spite of outward appearances, I was myself growing old. […] She would discern wrinkles in my face and decrepitude in my walk, while I bounded along in youthful vigour, the youngest looking of twenty youths. I never dared address another woman: on one occasion, fancying that the belle of the village regarded me with favouring eyes, she bought me a gray wig.

(ibid.:228)

Unable to maintain her attractive appearance, Bertha even goes so far as to disparage youth and beauty:

she described how much more comely gray hairs were than my chestnut locks; she descanted on the reverence and respect due to age—how preferable to the slight regard paid to children: could I imagine that the despicable gifts of youth and good looks outweighed disgrace, hatred, and scorn?

(ibid.:227)

Tarchetti’s “L’elixir dell’immortalità” is a rather close translation which perfectly catches the humor of Shelley’s feminist satire, but he also made revisions which go beyond the English text. Some of the revisions suggest a strategy of amplification designed to increase the epistemological confusion of the fantastic for the Italian reader (the {171} italicized words in the Italian quotations below indicate Tarchetti’s additions to the English text). Thus, the translation heightens the marvelous register of Shelley’s fantastic discourse by adding a strong tendency toward sensationalism. Tarchetti followed the English by initiating the fantastic hesitation in the first sentence, with a date that glanced at the Italian reader’s reality, yet he inserted slight changes that intensify the narrator’s amazement:

Dicembre 16, 1867.—È questo per me un anniversario assai memorabile. Io compio oggi il mio trecentoventinovesimo anno di vita.

December 16, 1867.—This is a very memorable anniversary for me.

Today I complete my three hundred and twenty-ninth year of life.

(Tarchetti 1967, I:114)

Winzy’s first expression of doubt about his physical superiority is the simple question, “Am I, then, immortal?” (Shelley 1976:219), whereas the Italian version resorts to a more emphatic restatement: “Ma non invecchierò io dunque? Sono io dunque realmente immortale?” / “But shall I not age, then? Am I, then, really immortal?” (Tarchetti 1967, I:114). Sometimes the amplification produces a melodramatic effect: “belief” and “thought” (226) are inflated into the more stagy “illusione” and “dubbio” / “dream” and “suspicion” (I:126); “sad” (224) is rendered by “pazza” / “mad” (I:124), “fondly”—as in “my Bertha, whom I had loved so fondly” (228)—by “pazzamente” / “madly” (I:129). And sometimes the melodrama tips into the marvelous. When the aged Bertha tries to salve her wounded vanity by telling Winzy that “though I looked so young, there was ruin at work within my frame,” the Italian version turns the “ruin” into a preternaturally abrupt process: “quantunque io apparissi così giovane, eravi qualche cosa in me che m’avrebbe fatto invecchiare repentimente” / “although I looked so young, there was something in me which would make me age all of sudden” (I:130).