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Chapter 4DissidenceThe fundamental error of the translator is that he stabilizes thestate in which his own language happens to find itself instead ofallowing his language to be powerfully jolted by the foreignlanguage.Rudolf Pannwitz (trans. Richard Sieburth)The search for alternatives to the domesticating tradition in Englishlanguagetranslation leads to various foreignizing practices, both inthe choice of foreign texts and in the invention of translationdiscourses. A translator can signal the foreignness of the foreign text,not only by using a discursive strategy that deviates from theprevailing hierarchy of domestic discourses (e.g. dense archaism asopposed to fluent transparency), but also by choosing to translate atext that challenges the contemporary canon of foreign literature inthe target language. Foreignizing translation is a dissident culturalpractice, maintaining a refusal of the dominant by developingaffiliations with marginal linguistic and literary values at home,including foreign cultures that have been excluded because of theirown resistance to dominant values. 1 On the one hand, foreignizingtranslation enacts an ethnocentric appropriation of the foreign text byenlisting it in a domestic cultural political agenda, like dissidence; onthe other hand, it is precisely this dissident stance that enablesforeignizing translation to signal the linguistic and cultural differenceof the foreign text and perform a work of cultural restoration,admitting the ethnodeviant and potentially revising domestic literarycanons.The translation projects of the Italian writer Iginio Ugo Tarchetti(1839–1869) offer a provocative way to explore these issues.Tarchetti belonged to the Milanese movement known as the