The Translator's Invisibility: A History of Translation

164 The Translator’s Invisibility
orecchio Dyckens”/“very little, just enough to attain a rudimentary
understanding of Shakespeare and Byron and to translate Dickens by
ear” (ibid.:34). Tarchetti’s translation of Shelley’s tale confirms, on the
contrary, that he had an excellent reading knowledge of English. All
the same, this does not necessarily disprove Farina’s assertion that
“non parlava inglese affatto e sarebbe stato imbarazzato a sostenere
una conversazione”/“he did not speak English at all and would have
been embarrassed to sustain a conversation” (ibid.). Farina notes that
the registration for the course netted “una retata magnifica”/“a
magnificent haul” (ibid.:35), but Tarchetti gave much fewer than forty
lessons:
quando il professore non seppe più che cosa insegnare ai suoi
scolari, lessero insieme Shakespeare e Byron e fumarono le sigarette
che Iginio preparava sul tavolino all’ora della lezione.
when the professor no longer knew what to teach his pupils,
together they read Shakespeare and Byron and smoked the
cigarettes Iginio put out on the desk when the lesson began.
(ibid.:36)
This teaching scam was probably more profitable than Tarchetti’s
plagiarism. Yet since translation was poorly remunerated in
nineteenth-century Italy, with payment usually taking the form of
books as well as money, his implicit claim that his text was his creation
would have earned him a higher fee than if he had published it as a
translation (Berengo 1980:340–346). A financial motive may also
explain the curious retitling and reprinting of the text when he took
over the editorship of the Emporio pittoresco. The different title and his
signature claimed that it was his original tale being published for the
first time.
Because the legal status of translation was just beginning to be
defined in 1865, Tarchetti’s plagiarism did not in fact constitute a
copyright infringement which resulted in a financial loss for Shelley’s
estate and her English publisher. By the early nineteenth century,
many countries had developed copyright statutes which gave the
author exclusive control over the reproduction of her text for life and
beyond. But international copyright conventions were slow to emerge,
and translation rights were not always reserved for the author. In
1853, for example, a federal court in the United States held that a
German translation of Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) which had not been