The Translator's Invisibility: A History of Translation

Dissidence 183
feminism, its failure to recognize the gender hierarchy in the bourgeois
marriage and its concealment of working-class oppression and
European racism. The paradox of Tarchetti’s translation strategy is that
its abuses issue mostly from its manifold fidelities—to the standard
Italian dialect, but not the dominant realism; to the syntactical and
lexical features, fantastic discourse, and feminist ideology of the
English text, but not its bourgeois values and Orientalism. These lacks
in Tarchetti’s translation are supplied by another fidelity, to a
democratic cultural politics.
More specifically, the attention to class in Tarchetti’s translation
provides one example of how his use of the fantastic was designed
to confront class divisions that were altered but nonetheless
maintained after the Italian Unification. This social transformation
was ultimately liberalizing, not democratizing: it freed markets from
regional restrictions and encouraged the development of
professional, manufacturing, and mercantile interests, particularly
in the north, yet without markedly improving the lives of the
agrarian and industrial workers who composed the largest segment
of the population. On the contrary, the economic reorganization,
instead of weakening workers’ dependence on landowners and
employers, added the uncertainties of market conditions, of higher
prices and taxes. And the institution of a national government with
a standing army faced workers with conscription, while their
widespread illiteracy hindered their participation in the political
process (Smith 1969). Tarchetti’s translation, like his other fantastic
tales, intervenes into these social contradictions, not only by
criticizing aristocratic and bourgeois domination of the working
classes, but by adopting a fictional discourse that overturns the
bourgeois assumptions of realism. He made this intervention,
moreover, in the highly politicized cultural formation of the 1860s,
publishing his tales in Milanese periodicals that were closely allied
to the most progressive, democratic groups and thus reaching the
northern bourgeoisie who stood to benefit most from the economic
and political changes in post-Unification Italy (Portinari 1989:232–
240; Castronovo et al. 1979).
Yet Tarchetti’s reliance on plagiarism to forward his political
agenda, as well as his deletion of a literary allusion he probably did
not understand, gives a final twist to Lewis’s concept of abusive
fidelity in translation. Both moves show that the source-language
text can cause “a kind of unsettling aftermath” in the targetlanguage
text, indicating points where the latter is “foreign” to its