venuti

Margin 189Khayyám (1859) because “Fitzgerald translated a poem that neverexisted, yet by an unforced, natural expansion of Dryden ’ s aim,made Omar utter such things ‘as he would himself have spoken ifhe had been born in England and in’ an age still slightlyovershadowed by Byron” (Bunting 1936:715). For Bunting,Fitzgerald embodied the modernist ideal by appearing to translatea poem that “never existed,” but paradoxically the translator drewon preexisting materials: he followed Dryden’s domesticatingtranslation method (which made Virgil a Restoration English poet),and his translation was noticeably influenced by Byron, Byronism,the Orientalism in romantic culture. Bunting’s awareness of thisdomesticating process was never sufficiently skeptical to make himquestion his concept of translation, to doubt the autonomy of thetranslated text, or to wonder about what happened to theforeignness of the foreign text when it got translated. He wasinterested only in translation that makes a difference at home, nottranslation that signifies the linguistic and cultural difference of theforeign text.In modernist translation, these two kinds of difference get collapsed:the foreign text is inscribed with a modernist cultural agenda and thentreated as the absolute value that exposes the inadequacy oftranslations informed by competing agendas. In a 1928 review ofArthur Symons’ translation of Baudelaire, T.S.Eliot acknowledged thata translation constitutes an “interpretation,” never entirely adequate tothe source-language text because mediated by the target-languageculture, tied to a historical moment: “the present volume shouldperhaps, even in fairness, be read as a document explicatory of the’nineties, rather than as a current interpretation” (Eliot 1928:92). Eliotassumed the modernist view that translation is a fundamentaldomestication resulting in an autonomous text: “the work oftranslation is to make something foreign, or something remote in time,live with our own life” (ibid.:98). But the only “life” Eliot would allowin translation conformed to his peculiar brand of modernism. Whatmade Symons’s version “wrong,” “a mistranslation,” “a smudgybotch” was precisely that he “enveloped Baudelaire in theSwinburnian violet-coloured London fog of the ’nineties,” turning theFrench poet into “a contemporary of Dowson and Wilde” (ibid.:91, 99–100, 102, 103). The “right” version was shaped by what Eliotannounced as his “general point of view,” “classicist in literature,royalist in politics, and anglo-catholic in religion” (ibid.:vii). Thus, “theimportant fact about Baudelaire is that he was essentially a Christian,