The Translator’s Invisibility

At the same time, Tarchetti’s translation superimposes another class conflict on the English text. This too requires a diminution of Shelley’s bourgeois values. The Italian version reproduces all of those passages which point to the main characters’ financial independence—except the most explicit one: the description of Vincenzo’s and Ortensia’s parents deletes “respectable” and emphasizes “humble,” clearly suggesting that they are not bourgeois, but members of the working class: “I suoi parenti erano, come i miei, di assai umile condizione” / “Her parents were, like mine, of very humble rank” (I:116). Ortensia’s adoption by the protectress thus figures patriarchy as aristocratic domination of the working class. The Italian version underscores this representation by encoding Ortensia’s vain obsessions with aristocratic attitudes. Whereas Bertha, driven by her envy of Winzy’s physical appearance to the paradoxical extreme of disparaging beauty, tells him that “gray hairs” are “much more comely,” and that “youth and good looks” are “despicable gifts” (227), Ortensia expresses an aristocratic sense of social superiority: the Italian version replaces “comely” with “gentili” (“fair,” but also “polite,” “noble”) and “despicable” with “volgari” (“common,” “unrefined”) (I:127, 128). With these changes, Tarchetti’s translation forces Shelley’s tale to address the hierarchical relationship between {177} the aristocracy and the working class, an instance of class domination which her bourgeois feminism represses.

This pressure in the translation to expose forms of ideological mystification also makes itself felt in deletions which remove the Orientalism from Shelley’s tale. Tarchetti omits Winzy’s response to Bertha’s coquettish behavior: “I was jealous as a Turk” (221). Because any particularly violent or aggressive show of jealousy would be comically inconsistent with Winzy’s submissiveness, his assertion can be seen as contributing to the satire of male power built into his characterization. Yet once the feminist significance of the joke is appreciated, the reader is positioned in an another ideology, European Orientalism: the satire becomes intelligible only when the reader thinks that Winzy’s jealousy could never possibly be as excessive as a Turk’s, i.e., only when the reader assumes the truth of the cliché and thus accepts an ethnic slur, drawing a racist distinction between the West as rational and the East as irrational. Shelley’s use of the cliché to support the feminist satire ridicules a gender hierarchy by introducing one based on race.

The absence of this racial ideology from the Italian version might seem insignificant, were it not that Tarchetti omits another, much more complicated Orientalist reference in the English text: an allusion to The History of Nourjahad, an Eastern tale written by the eighteenth-century novelist and playwright Frances Sheridan. Near the beginning of Shelley’s text, Winzy wistfully cites “fabled” instances of longevity which proved much more tolerable than his:

I have heard of enchantments, in which the victims were plunged into a deep sleep to wake, after a hundred years, as fresh as ever: I have heard of the Seven Sleepers—thus to be immortal would not be so burthensome; but, oh! the weight of never-ending time—the tedious passage of the still-succeeding hours! How happy was the fabled Nourjahad!

(Shelley 1976:219)