The Translator’s Invisibility

Tarchetti’s translation, with its formal techniques of marvelous and mimetic amplification, reproduces the key abuse in Shelley’s feminist fictional project, her use of the fantastic to dislocate patriarchal gender representations; and because his translation is a plagiarism written in the standard Italian dialect, it deterritorializes the dominant realist discourse in Italy, where it conducts an ideological cultural practice which is radically democratic, which combats class (aristocratic and bourgeois), gender (patriarchal), and racial (Orientalist) ideologies. Tarchetti’s translation moves are such that they exhibit this political agenda even in instances (e.g. the removal of Shelley’s Orientalism) where they seem to be uncalculated, or at least to lack a political calculation.

The abusiveness of Tarchetti’s translation does not stop with the target-language culture, for it also enacts an “unsettling” ideological critique of Shelley’s tale, exposing the political limitations of her {183} feminism, its failure to recognize the gender hierarchy in the bourgeois marriage and its concealment of working-class oppression and European racism. The paradox of Tarchetti’s translation strategy is that its abuses issue mostly from its manifold fidelities—to the standard Italian dialect, but not the dominant realism; to the syntactical and lexical features, fantastic discourse, and feminist ideology of the English text, but not its bourgeois values and Orientalism. These lacks in Tarchetti’s translation are supplied by another fidelity, to a democratic cultural politics.

More specifically, the attention to class in Tarchetti’s translation provides one example of how his use of the fantastic was designed to confront class divisions that were altered but nonetheless maintained after the Italian Unification. This social transformation was ultimately liberalizing, not democratizing: it freed markets from regional restrictions and encouraged the development of professional, manufacturing, and mercantile interests, particularly in the north, yet without markedly improving the lives of the agrarian and industrial workers who composed the largest segment of the population. On the contrary, the economic reorganization, instead of weakening workers’ dependence on landowners and employers, added the uncertainties of market conditions, of higher prices and taxes. And the institution of a national government with a standing army faced workers with conscription, while their widespread illiteracy hindered their participation in the political process (Smith 1969). Tarchetti’s translation, like his other fantastic tales, intervenes into these social contradictions, not only by criticizing aristocratic and bourgeois domination of the working classes, but by adopting a fictional discourse that overturns the bourgeois assumptions of realism. He made this intervention, moreover, in the highly politicized cultural formation of the 1860s, publishing his tales in Milanese periodicals that were closely allied to the most progressive, democratic groups and thus reaching the northern bourgeoisie who stood to benefit most from the economic and political changes in post-Unification Italy (Portinari 1989:232–240; Castronovo et al. 1979).

Yet Tarchetti’s reliance on plagiarism to forward his political agenda, as well as his deletion of a literary allusion he probably did not understand, gives a final twist to Lewis’s concept of abusive fidelity in translation. Both moves show that the source-language text can cause “a kind of unsettling aftermath” in the target-language text, indicating points where the latter is “foreign” to its {184} own project or where it conflicts with the translator’s intention. As soon as Tarchetti’s theft is known and his deletion located, Shelley’s tale enacts an ideological critique of his translation which reveals that he imported her feminist fiction into Italy with some violence, suppressing her authorship and her construction of a feminist literary tradition. The antifeminist effects of Tarchetti’s text constitute an egregious reminder that translation, like every cultural practice, functions under conditions that may to some extent be unacknowledged, but that nonetheless complicate and perhaps compromise the translator’s activity—even when it aims to make a strategic political intervention.