The Translator's Invisibility: A History of Translation

Dissidence 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