The Translator's Invisibility: A History of Translation

Dissidence 159
Tarchetti’s Orientalist literary history clarifies the political agenda
in his use of the fantastic, but simultaneously discloses an
ideological contradiction which runs counter to that agenda. The
passage shows him actively rewriting his cultural materials so as to
transform the Orient into a vehicle for his democratic social vision.
Whereas the Arabian tales actually offer glimpses of despotic
monarchies, and the geographer Strabo describes the nomadic Arabs
as “a tribe of brigands and shepherds” who are less “civilised” than
the Syrians because their “government” is not as well “organised”
(Strabo 1930:VII, 233, 255), Tarchetti drew on Rousseau’s notion of
natural human innocence and perceived only a utopian
“comunanza,” a community or fellowship, close to “virgin nature”
and not corrupted by the hierarchical social organization of Europe.
Tarchetti also represented the Orient as exotic and phantasmagorical
(“their burning sky,” “love for the marvelous”), setting his concept
of fiction apart from the realist discourse that dominated Italy by
identifying with its other, the fantastic. Both these representations of
the Orient, however, are clearly Eurocentric: they aim to make Persia
and Arabia perform a European function, the regeneration of Italian
fiction and society, and they never escape the racist opposition
between Western rationality and Eastern irrationality. Tarchetti’s
literary history assumed the range of meanings which, as Edward
Said has observed, were typical of romantic representations of the
Orient: “sensuality, promise, terror, sublimity, idyllic pleasure,
intense energy” (Said 1978:118).
This racial ideology, obviously in conflict with Tarchetti’s
democratic politics, becomes more explicitly damaging to his
project in his closing reference to Strabo, which abruptly reverses
the logic of his argument. Tarchetti initially treated Arabian
narratives as a mirror of the Arabian social order, a reliable
representation of its “laws and customs,” but he concluded in
apparent agreement with Strabo’s complaint that these texts reflect
little more than an overheated imagination. Tarchetti’s typically
romantic Orientalism seems to result in an uncritical acceptance of
Strabo’s equation of the East with “love for the marvelous.” Yet
Strabo’s point that the “histories” of Eastern countries lack a firm
basis in reality renders “uncertain,” not only Arabian narratives,
but the democratic images that Tarchetti found in them,
questioning his earlier treatment of the novel as figuring a
“marvelous world” without social hierarchies. Tarchetti’s citation
of Strabo suggests that the utopian world of the novel may be no