The Translator’s Invisibility

The appropriation of foreign texts was a crucial component of Tarchetti’s dissident cultural politics. He was the first practitioner of the Gothic tale in Italy, and most of his fantastic narratives are based on specific texts by writers like E.T.A.Hoffmann, Edgar Allan Poe, Gérard Nerval, Théophile Gautier, and the collaboration of Éimile Erckmann and Louis-Alexandre Chatrian (Mariani 1967; Rossi 1959). Tarchetti adapted fantastic motifs, reproduced scenes, translated, even plagiarized—yet each discursive practice served the political function of interrogating ideologies and addressing hierarchical social relations in Italy. His fantastic narratives mobilized foreign texts to question the hegemony of realist discourse in Italian fiction, and yet this mobilization, insofar as it entailed transforming foreign texts to function in a different {150} cultural formation, simultaneously critiqued them from a different ideological standpoint. Tarchetti’s Gothic tales were foreignizing in their appropriation of foreign texts that deviated from Italian cultural values, initiating a reformation of the Italian literary canon that admitted fictional discourses other than realism, whether domestic or foreign. For the English-language translator who would implement a foreignizing method under the regime of fluency Tarchetti’s practices show how translation can revise domestic cultural values by casting strategically chosen foreign texts in the dominant language, the standard dialect.

I

Tarchetti’s first foreignizing move was his decision to appropriate the fantastic, a foreign discourse opposed to the bourgeois realism that prevailed in Italian fiction. The fantastic proves to be subversive of bourgeois ideology because it negates the formal conventions of realism and the individualistic concept of subjectivity on which they rest. The realist representation of chronological time, three-dimensional space, and personal identity is based on an empiricist epistemology that privileges a single, perceiving subject: the key assumption is that human consciousness is the origin of meaning, knowledge, and action, transcending discursive and ideological determinations (Watt 1957). The unity of time and space in realism points to a unified consciousness, usually a narrator or character taken to be authorial, and this subject-position establishes intelligibility in the narrative, making a specific meaning seem real or true, repressing the fact that it is an illusory effect of discourse, and thus suturing the reading consciousness into an ideological position, an interested ensemble of values, beliefs, and social representations. The trutheffect of realism, the illusion of transparency whereby language disappears and the world or the author seems present, shows that the form itself reproduces the transcendental concept of subjectivity in bourgeois individualism: as Catherine Belsey indicates,

Through the presentation of an intelligible history which effaces its own status as discourse, classic realism proposes a model in which author and reader are subjects who are the source of shared meanings, the origin of which is mysteriously extra-discursive. […] {151} This model of intersubjective understanding, of shared understanding of a text which re-presents the world, is the guarantee not only of the truth of the text but of the reader’s existence as an autonomous and knowing subject in a world of knowing subjects. In this way, classic realism constitutes an ideological practice in addressing itself to readers as subjects, interpellating them in order that they freely accept their subjectivity and their subjection.

(Belsey 1980:72, 69)