The Translator's Invisibility: A History of Translation

Dissidence 171
italicized words in the Italian quotations below indicate Tarchetti’s
additions to the English text). Thus, the translation heightens the
marvelous register of Shelley’s fantastic discourse by adding a strong
tendency toward sensationalism. Tarchetti followed the English by
initiating the fantastic hesitation in the first sentence, with a date that
glanced at the Italian reader’s reality, yet he inserted slight changes that
intensify the narrator’s amazement:
Dicembre 16, 1867.—È questo per me un anniversario assai
memorabile. Io compio oggi il mio trecentoventinovesimo anno
di vita.
December 16, 1867.—This is a very memorable anniversary for me.
Today I complete my three hundred and twenty-ninth year of life.
(Tarchetti 1967, I:114)
Winzy’s first expression of doubt about his physical superiority is the
simple question, “Am I, then, immortal?” (Shelley 1976:219), whereas
the Italian version resorts to a more emphatic restatement: “Ma non
invecchierò io dunque? Sono io dunque realmente immortale?”/“But
shall I not age, then? Am I, then, really immortal?” (Tarchetti 1967, I:114).
Sometimes the amplification produces a melodramatic effect: “belief”
and “thought” (226) are inflated into the more stagy “illusione” and
“dubbio”/“dream” and “suspicion” (I:126); “sad” (224) is rendered by
“pazza”/“mad” (I:124), “fondly”—as in “my Bertha, whom I had
loved so fondly” (228)—by “pazzamente”/“madly” (I:129). And
sometimes the melodrama tips into the marvelous. When the aged
Bertha tries to salve her wounded vanity by telling Winzy that
“though I looked so young, there was ruin at work within my frame,”
the Italian version turns the “ruin” into a preternaturally abrupt
process: “quantunque io apparissi così giovane, eravi qualche cosa in
me che m’avrebbe fatto invecchiare repentimente”/“although I looked
so young, there was something in me which would make me age all of
sudden” (I:130).
At other points, Tarchetti’s translation increases the Italian reader’s
epistemological confusion by strengthening the mimetic register of
Shelley’s fantastic discourse. The main characters are rechristened
Vincenzo and Ortensia, two quite ordinary Italian names which
remove the comic improbability suggested by an immortal called
Winzy. Tarchetti’s strategy of mimetic amplification works by
accumulating verisimilar details and explanations. When Vincenzo