The Translator’s Invisibility

ebbi tra le mani un romanzo, e per poco io fui tentato di riconciliarmi [agli uomini]; non dirò quanto mi apparissero diversi da quelli conosciuti nelle storie, non accennerò a quel mondo meraviglioso che mi si aperse allo sguardo: nel romanzo conobbi l’uomo libero, nella storia aveva conosciuto l’uomo sottoposto all’uomo.

I held a novel in my hands, and in a little while I was tempted to reconcile myself [to men]; I shall not say how different they appeared to me from those I encountered in histories, I shall not note the marvelous world that opened to me at a glance: in {153} the novel I knew man free, in history I knew man subjected to man.

(ibid.)

Discourse produces concrete social effects; the novel can alter subjectivity and motor social change, even for a literary bohemian like Tarchetti, whose scapigliato refusal to conform to the canons of bourgeois respectability situated him in the margins of Italian society. For the novel to have this social function, however, it would seem that realism must be rejected: a realist discourse like history can represent social life only as an “odyssey,” a wandering, an atomization in which agents victimize one another; the novel can contribute to a social homecoming, the reconstruction of a collective, only by representing a “marvelous world” wherein hierarchical social relations are resolved.

Tarchetti’s distinction between the freedom of the novel and the subjection of history at first appears a romantic retreat from society to culture, a transcendental aesthetic realm where the subject can regain its self-possession, its autonomy, although at the expense of a withdrawal from political engagement.[2] Tarchetti does in fact revert to romantic expressive theory at various points in the essay, validating an individualistic program of authorial self-expression, transparent discourse, illusionistic response: he favors writers whose

vita intima […] rimane in un’armonia così perfetta colle loro opere, che il lettore non è tentato di dire a se stesso: la mia commozione è intempestiva, quell’uomo scriveva per ragionamento; buttiamo il libro che non nacque che dall’ingegno.

inner life […] remains in such perfect harmony with their works, that the reader is not tempted to say to himself: my emotion is inappropriate, that man wrote to argue a position; we toss away any book that issues only from ingenuity.

(Tarchetti 1967, II:531)

At other points, however, Tarchetti views the novel not as a window onto the author, “le onde trasparenti di quei laghi che nella loro calma lasciano scorgere il letto che le contiene” / “the transparent waves of those lakes which in their calmness allow a glimpse of the bed containing them” (ibid.), but rather as a historically specific “forma di {154} letteratura” / “form of literature” (ibid.:522), a genre of literary discourse with a social significance that exceeds authorial psychology:

L’Italia composta di tanti piccoli stati, diversi tutti per leggi, per usi, per dialetto, per abitudini sociali, e direi quasi per suolo, doveva creare dei grandi e svariatissimi romanzi.

Italy, composed of many small states, with entirely different laws, customs, dialects, social practices, and I dare say, soils, should create great and extremely varied novels.

(ibid.:526)

And when Tarchetti describes the value of a long tradition in the novel, he assumes that fictional discourse can never be free of social determinations: