The Translator’s Invisibility

What is “literal” about this method is that it focuses on the letter of the translation as well as the foreign text, emphasizing the signifier, the signifying play that routinely gets fixed in English-language translation, reduced to a relatively coherent signified. Newman’s foreignizing translation released this play, adding a surplus of domestic meanings to the foreign text by encompassing various {147} English-language cultural discourses, past and present, elite and popular, poetic and novelistic, English and Scottish. In foreignizing translation, the ethnocentric violence that every act of translating wreaks on a foreign text is matched by a violent disruption of domestic values that challenges cultural forms of domination, whether nationalist or elitist. Foreignizing undermines the very concept of nation by invoking the diverse constituencies that any such concept tends to elide.

Chapter 4. Dissidence

The fundamental error of the translator is that he stabilizes the state in which his own language happens to find itself instead of allowing his language to be powerfully jolted by the foreign language.

Rudolf Pannwitz (trans. Richard Sieburth)

The search for alternatives to the domesticating tradition in English-language translation leads to various foreignizing practices, both in the choice of foreign texts and in the invention of translation discourses. A translator can signal the foreignness of the foreign text, not only by using a discursive strategy that deviates from the prevailing hierarchy of domestic discourses (e.g. dense archaism as opposed to fluent transparency), but also by choosing to translate a text that challenges the contemporary canon of foreign literature in the target language. Foreignizing translation is a dissident cultural practice, maintaining a refusal of the dominant by developing affiliations with marginal linguistic and literary values at home, including foreign cultures that have been excluded because of their own resistance to dominant values.[1] On the one hand, foreignizing translation enacts an ethnocentric appropriation of the foreign text by enlisting it in a domestic cultural political agenda, like dissidence; on the other hand, it is precisely this dissident stance that enables foreignizing translation to signal the linguistic and cultural difference of the foreign text and perform a work of cultural restoration, admitting the ethnodeviant and potentially revising domestic literary canons.

The translation projects of the Italian writer Iginio Ugo Tarchetti (1839–1869) offer a provocative way to explore these issues. Tarchetti belonged to the Milanese movement known as the {149} scapigliatura, a loosely associated group of artists, composers, and writers who contested bourgeois values in their bohemianism (scapigliato means “dishevelled”) and in their formal innovations. The literary members of this dissident group were at variance with the highly conservative realism that dominated Italian fiction since Alessandro Manzoni’s I promessi sposi (The Betrothed) (1827, rev. 1840). And some of them abandoned Manzoni’s sentimental Christian providentialism for a democratically oriented representation of class divisions, realistic but also romantic, historically detailed yet melodramatic, often with a topical engagement in events surrounding the Italian Unification, like the Austrian presence or the Italian conscript army (Carsaniga 1974).

Tarchetti’s first novel, Paolina (1865), followed a seamstress who is persecuted by an aristocrat and ultimately raped and murdered. His second novel, Una nobile follia (A Noble Madness) (1866–1867), a protest against the new standing army, focused on a military officer moved to desertion by distracted, pacifistic musings. The book caused an uproar in the press, and copies were openly burned at many barracks. Tarchetti’s later narratives took more experimental forms. Fosca (1869), a semi-autobiographical novel about a pathological love affair, mixed several fictional discourses—romantic, fantastic, realistic, naturalistic—to counter the notion of character as a unified subjectivity (Caesar 1987). In a number of short narratives, some of which were posthumously published in 1869 as Racconti fantastici (Fantastic Tales), Tarchetti deployed the conventions and motifs of nineteenth-century fantasy to issue a fundamental challenge to realist representation and its ideological grounding in bourgeois individualism.