The Translator's Invisibility: A History of Translation

Dissidence 165
licensed by Harriet Beecher Stowe did not infringe her copyright for
the English-language text (Kaplan 1967:29). Although England
instituted the first important copyright statute at the beginning of the
eighteenth century, in 1851, the year of Shelley’s death, English law
did not give the author translation rights. It was not until 1852 that
the right of authors to license translations of their published texts was
recognized by statute, which limited it to five years from the date of
publication (Sterling and Carpenter 1986:103). A general copyright
law was not formulated in Italy until the Unification: on 25 June 1865,
four days after Tarchetti published the first installment of his
translation as his tale, the Italian government gave authors the right
to “publish, reproduce, and translate” their texts, although the
translation rights were limited to ten years from the date of
publication (Piola-Caselli 1927:22, 24, 26).
Tarchetti’s plagiarism was not so much copyright infringement
as a violation of the individualistic notion of authorship on which
copyright is based. As Martha Woodmansee shows, copyright
laws recognize the writer’s ownership of a text insofar as he is its
author or originator—“that is, insofar as his work is new and
original, an intellectual creation which owes its individuality
solely and exclusively to him” (Woodmansee 1984:446). This
notion of authorship assumes romantic expressive theory: the text
is seen as expressing the unique thoughts and feelings of the
writer, a free, unified consciousness which is not divided by
determinations that exceed and possibly conflict with his
intention. The author is assigned the sole and exclusive copyright
because his subjectivity is taken to be a metaphysical essence
which is present in his text and all its copies, but which
transcends any difference or change introduced by formal
determinations, like printing and binding, language and genre,
and by economic and political conditions, like the publishing
industry and government censorship. The very idea of authorial
copyright, however, confesses the possibility of change because it
is designed to control the form and marketing of the book by
licensing reproduction and repressing change that is not
authorized. Copyright opens up a contradiction in the
individualistic notion of authorship by demonstrating that such
law is suspended between metaphysics and materialism,
acknowledging the material contingencies of form, the possibility
of its difference from the author, but enacting its transparency
with the metaphysical assumption of authorial presence.