The Translator's Invisibility: A History of Translation

160 The Translator’s Invisibility
more than a misrepresentation of its social situation, especially in
the case of the Eastern prototypes of the genre. It is worth noting
that Tarchetti in effect reiterated this view at the end of his brief
tale, “La fortuna di capitano Gubart” (“Captain Gubart’s
Fortune”), published the same year as his essay on the novel. After
demonstrating the arbitrariness of class distinctions by relating
how a poor street musician is mistakenly awarded a royal military
commission, the narrator concluded: “Questo fatto comunque
abbia una decisa analogia con quelli famosi delle novelle arabe, è
incontrastabilmente vero e conosciuto”/“This incident, despite its
decided resemblance to those famous ones of the Arabian tales, is
indisputably true and well-known” (Tarchetti 1967, I:79). This
reference to The Arabian Nights seems designed to satirize Italian
social relations as fantastic and therefore irrational, but it can make
this satiric point only by assuming the irrationality of Eastern
culture and by distinguishing Tarchetti’s narrative as “true.”
Tarchetti sought to enlist foreign fantastic texts in the democratic
cultural politics he conducted in Italy, but his Orientalism was
implicated in the key binary opposition by which Europe
subordinated, and justified its colonization of, the same foreign
countries whose texts he considered politically useful.
Given the diverse linguistic, cultural, and ideological materials
that constituted Tarchetti’s project, it can be seen as what Gilles
Deleuze and Félix Guattari call a minor utilization of a major
language:
Even when it is unique a language remains a mixture, a
schizophrenic mélange, a Harlequin costume in which very
different functions of language and distinct centers of power are
played out, blurring what can be said and what can’t be said; one
function will be played off against the other, all the degrees of
territoriality and relative deterritorialization will be played out.
Even when major, a language is open to an intensive utilization that
makes it take flight along creative lines of escape which, no matter
how slowly, no matter how cautiously, can now form an absolute
deterritorialization.
(Deleuze and Guattari 1986:26)
The major language that Tarchetti confronted was the Tuscan
dialect of Italian, the linguistic standard for Italian literature since
the Renaissance. In 1840, after more than a decade of research into