The Translator's Invisibility: A History of Translation

40 The Translator’s Invisibility
energies and failings, heights and degenerations, poisons and
antidotes. Its task is to become a curative science” (ibid.:156). By
constructing a differential representation of the past, genealogy both
engages in present cultural debates and social conflicts and develops
resolutions that project utopian images.
The Translator’s Invisibility intervenes against the translator’s
situation and activity in contemporary Anglo-American culture by
offering a series of genealogies that write the history of present. It
traces the rise of transparent discourse in English-language
translation from the seventeenth century onward, while searching
the past for exits, alternative theories and practices in British,
American, and several foreign-language cultures—German,
French, Italian. 12 The chapters form an argument pursued
chronologically, showing that the origins of fluent translating lie in
various kinds of cultural domination and exclusion, but also that
translation can serve a more democratic agenda in which excluded
theories and practices are recovered and the prevailing fluency is
revised. The acts of recovery and revision that constitute this
argument rest on extensive archival research, bringing to light
forgotten or neglected translations and establishing an alternative
tradition that somewhat overlaps with, but mostly differs from,
the current canon of British and American literature.
This book is motivated by a strong impulse to document the
history of English-language translation, to uncover long-obscure
translators and translations, to reconstruct their publication and
reception, and to articulate significant controversies. The
documentary impulse, however, serves the skepticism of
symptomatic readings that interrogate the process of
domestication in translated texts, both canonical and marginal,
and reassess their usefulness in contemporary Anglo-American
culture. The historical narratives in each chapter, grounded as they
are on a diagnosis of current translation theory and practice,
address key questions. What domestic values has transparent
discourse at once inscribed and masked in foreign texts during its
long domination? How has transparency shaped the canon of
foreign literatures in English and the cultural identities of Englishlanguage
nations? Why has transparency prevailed over other
translation strategies in English, like Victorian archaism (Francis
Newman, William Morris) and modernist experiments with
heterogeneous discourses (Pound, Celia and Louis Zukofsky, Paul
Blackburn)? What would happen if a translator tried to redirect the