The Translator’s Invisibility

What the contemporary English-language translator can learn from Tarchetti is not how to plagiarize a foreign text, but how to choose one to translate. Tarchetti shows that foreignizing translation takes the form, not just of deviant translation strategies, but also of foreign texts that deviate from dominant literary canons in the target-language culture. Tarchetti’s choice to translate Shelley’s Gothic tale was foreignizing in its introduction of a fictional discourse that challenged the dominant realism, and his translation, along with the few other Italian translations of foreign fantasies that had already been published, initiated a change in literary taste that culminated in a significant canon reformation. Other members of the scapigliatura, notably Arrigo and Camillo Boito and Emilio Praga, published Gothic tales in the 1860s, and Italian translations of foreign writers like Poe, Gautier, and Erckmann-Chatrian increased rapidly during the {186} remainder of the nineteenth century. Hoffmann’s tales, for example, appeared in eight different Italian editions between 1877 and 1898 (Costa and Vigini 1991; Rossi 1959). It is partly as a result of these trends that the fantastic became a dominant genre in twentieth-century Italian fiction, modernist as well as postmodernist, inspiring such diverse canonical writers as Luigi Pirandello, Massimo Bontempelli, Dino Buzzati, Tommaso Landolfi, and Italo Calvino (Bonifazi 1971 and 1982). The lesson Tarchetti teaches the dissident English-language translator is that the choice of a foreign text for translation can be just as foreignizing in its impact on the target-language culture as the invention of a discursive strategy. At a time when deviations from fluency may limit the circulation of a translation or even prevent it from getting published in the first place, Tarchetti points to the strategic value of discriminating carefully among foreign texts and literatures when a translation project is developed.

Chapter 5. Margin

The translation of a poem having any depth ends by being one of two things: Either it is the expression of the translator, virtually a new poem, or it is as it were a photograph, as exact as possible, of one side of the statue.

Ezra Pound

The dominance of transparent discourse in English-language translation was decisively challenged at the turn of the twentieth century, when modernism emerged in Anglo-American literary culture. The experimentation that characterized the literature of this period brought with it new translation strategies that avoided fluency by cultivating extremely heterogeneous discourses, principally in poetry translations, but also more widely in poetic composition. Translation now became a key practice in modernist poetics, motivating appropriations of various archaic and foreign poetries to serve modernist cultural agendas in English (see, for example, Hooley 1988). At the same time, English-language translation theory attained a new level of critical sophistication, summoned as it was to rationalize specific modernist texts, poems that were translations as well as translations of poems.

But translation today seems to bear little sign of these developments. The dominance of transparent discourse has remained so secure in English that even though modernist poetry and prose have long been canonized in Anglo-American literary cultures, both in and out of the academy, the innovations that distinguish modernist translation continue to be marginal, seldom actually implemented in an English-language translation, seldom recommended in theoretical statements by translators or others. In the search for exits from the dominance of transparency, it is important to assess the innovations {188} of modernist translation, interrogating the cultural functions it performed with such force at the beginning of the century, but also the conditions of its marginalization from mid-century onward. What alternatives did modernist translation offer in its challenge to transparency? Why were they relegated to the fringes of Anglo-American culture?

I