The Translator's Invisibility: A History of Translation

184 The Translator’s Invisibility
own project or where it conflicts with the translator’s intention. As
soon as Tarchetti’s theft is known and his deletion located, Shelley’s
tale enacts an ideological critique of his translation which reveals
that he imported her feminist fiction into Italy with some violence,
suppressing her authorship and her construction of a feminist
literary tradition. The antifeminist effects of Tarchetti’s text
constitute an egregious reminder that translation, like every cultural
practice, functions under conditions that may to some extent be
unacknowledged, but that nonetheless complicate and perhaps
compromise the translator’s activity—even when it aims to make a
strategic political intervention.
For the contemporary English-language translator who seeks forms
of resistance against the regime of fluent domestication, Tarchetti
exemplifies a foreignizing translation practice that operates on two
levels, that of the signified as well as the signifier. His discursive
strategy deviated from the dominant realism by releasing the play of
the signifier: he amplified the discursive registers of Shelley’s fantastic
narrative, both mimetic and marvelous, and thus forced an
uncertainty over the metaphysical status of the representation (is the
elixir “real” or not?), preempting the illusion of transparency. Yet
Tarchetti’s plagiarism also produced the illusion of his authorship: he
effaced the second-order status of his translation by presenting it as
the first Gothic tale written in the Italian of the dominant realist
discourse, establishing his identity as an oppositional writer, fixing
the meaning of his text as dissident. Like the contemporary writer of
fluent English-language translations, Tarchetti was invisible to his
readers as a translator. Yet this very invisibility enabled him to conduct
a foreignizing translation practice in his Italian situation because he
was visible as an author.
Tarchetti’s translation practices cannot be imitated today
without significant revision. Plagiarism, for example, is largely
excluded by copyright laws that bind translators as well as
authors, resulting in contracts designed to insure that the
translation is in fact a translation, and that it does not involve the
unlicensed use of any copyrighted material. Here is a sampling of
standard clauses from recent translation contracts, 5 including
those wherein the translator is termed the “author” of the
translation:
You warrant that your work will be original and that it does not
infringe upon the copyright or violate the right of any person or