The Translator's Invisibility: A History of Translation

150 The Translator’s Invisibility
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. […]