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166 The Translator’s InvisibilityTarchetti’s plagiarism violated this notion of authorship not bymerely copying Shelley’s tale, but by translating it. Because hisplagiarism was a translation, it introduced a decisive change in theform of the original, specifically in its language; his assertion ofauthorship simultaneously masked this change and indicated thatit was decisive enough to mark the creation of a new text whichoriginated with him. Tarchetti’s plagiarism covertly collapsed thedistinction that an individualistic notion of authorship drawsbetween author and translator, creator and imitator. Yet because hisplagiarism remained undiscovered and unrationalized—at leastuntil today—it continued to support this distinction; it did notreflect or contribute to any revision of nineteenth-century Italianopinion concerning the aesthetic and legal status of translation. Allthe same, the fact that Tarchetti’s plagiarism was covert did not inany way mitigate its violation of authorship—nor its effect as aneminently foreignizing translation practice. Because his Italiantranslation was a plagiarism, it was especially subversive ofbourgeois values in the major language. On the one hand,Tarchetti’s text flouted bourgeois propriety and property byfraudulently exploiting the process of literary commodification inthe Italian publishing industry; in this way, his plagiarismexemplified the nonconformist tendency of the scapigliatura toidentify with socially subordinate groups, particularly the worker,the poor, and the criminal, professing a dissident refusal of thedominant by affiliating with the subcultural (Mariani 1967). On theother hand, Tarchetti’s text deterritorialized the bourgeois fictionaldiscourse that dominated Italian culture precisely because it was aplagiarism in the standard dialect, because it passed itself off notjust as an original Gothic tale, but as one written originally in theItalian of Manzonian realism and therefore foreignizing in itsimpact on the Italian literary scene.Yet Shelley’s authorship comes back to worry the ideologicalstandpoint of Tarchetti’s intervention by raising the issue ofgender. To be effective as a subversion of bourgeois values thatdeterritorialized the Italian literary standard, his text was requiredto maintain the fiction of his authorship, referring to Shelley’s taleonly in the vaguest way (“imitation”). At the same time, however,this fiction suppressed an instance of female authorship, so that thetheft of Shelley’s literary creation had the patriarchal effect offemale disempowerment, of limiting a woman’s social agency. Thiswould seem to be a consequence which Tarchetti did not anticipate: