The Translator’s Invisibility

Although The History of Nourjahad enjoyed some popularity on the continent during the late eighteenth century, when it was translated into French, Russian, and Hungarian, it seems unlikely {181} that Tarchetti knew it. His deletion of any reference to Nourjahad from his translation may have been merely due to his ignorance of Sheridan’s tale. He certainly did not remove it because he was aware of and opposed Orientalist stereotypes, since the same racial ideology surfaces elsewhere in his writing, even when he tries to formulate a democratic cultural politics for Italian fiction. Whatever Tarchetti’s motive may have been, his deletion necessarily affects both the English text and the Italian translation. The mere absence of the allusion at once isolates a node of ideological contradiction in Shelley’s text and erases it, allowing the translation to address class and gender domination in Italy without the burden of racism and despotic monarchy. Yet the absence also points to an antifeminist effect in the translation because of the cultural and social functions that every allusion performs. As Susan Stewart has argued,

the allusive act always bears reference to and creates tradition, [but] it also always bears reference to and creates the situation at hand, articulating the relation between that situation and tradition, and articulating the varying degrees of access available to tradition[,] levels of readership, levels of accessibility to knowledge.

(Stewart 1980:1146, 1151)

Shelley’s allusion to Sheridan’s tale not only announces her own project as a feminist critique of patriarchy, but implicitly constructs a tradition of female authorship and feminist ideological critique, even as the revelation of that tradition conceals its contradictory ideological conditions in both writers’ texts. Shelley’s allusion, furthermore, makes the tradition available to the socially prominent women who read The Keepsake and were singled out by Wollstonecraft as most oppressed by patriarchy. Tarchetti’s deletion quashes this act of feminist traditionalization, entirely blocking the Italian reader’s access to the tradition it constructs.

IV

Tarchetti’s translation sets up two discontinuous relationships, one with Shelley’s tale, the other with Italian culture, which can best be understood with Philip Lewis’s concept of abusive fidelity. In this son of translation, Lewis states, the translator focuses on the {182} “abuses” of the source-language text, “points or passages that are in some sense forced, that stand out as clusters of textual energy,” and attempts to reproduce their abusive quality in the target-language culture (Lewis 1985:43). The translator’s attempt at reproduction, however, simultaneously supplements the source-language text in an interrogative way. This concept of fidelity in translation is abusive because it performs what Lewis calls

a dual function—on the one hand, that of forcing the linguistic and conceptual system of which it is a dependent, and on the other hand, of directing a critical thrust back toward the text that it translates and in relation to which it becomes a kind of unsettling aftermath (it is as if the translation sought to occupy the original’s already unsettled home, and thereby, far from ‘domesticating’ it, to turn it into a place still more foreign to itself).

(ibid.)

Lewis seems to regard abusive fidelity as a strategic choice, at least partly within the translator’s control (“partly” because the choices are contingent, varying from one source-language text to another, from one target-language culture to another). Yet the foregoing treatment of Tarchetti’s translation requires a revision of Lewis’s concept to include translation choices that remain unarticulated and unconscious, and that therefore can support an effect exceeding the translator’s intention. Any of the translator’s moves, in other words, may both reproduce and supplement the source-language text.