venuti

Margin 203that in translation, the foreignness of the foreign text is availableonly in cultural forms that already circulate in the target language,some with greater cultural capital than others. In translation, theforeignness of the foreign text can only be what currently appears“foreign” in the target-language culture, in relation to dominantdomestic values, and therefore only as values that are marginal invarious degrees, whether because they are residual, survivals ofprevious cultural forms in the target language, or because they areemergent, transformations of previous forms that are recognizablydifferent, or because they are specialized or nonstandard, formslinked to specific groups with varying degrees of social power andprestige. The foreign can only be a disruption of the currenthierarchy of values in the target-language culture, an estrangementof them that seeks to establish a cultural difference by drawing onthe marginal. Translation, then, always involves a process ofdomestication, an exchange of source-language intelligibilities fortarget-language ones. But domestication need not meanassimilation, i.e., a conservative reduction of the foreign text todominant domestic values. It can also mean resistance, through arecovery of the residual or an affiliation with the emergent or thedominated—choosing to translate a foreign text, for instance, thatis excluded by prevalent English-language translation methods orby the current canon of foreign literature in English and thusforcing a methodological revision and a canon reformation.The remarkable thing about modernist translation is that, eventhough in theoretical statements it insists on the cultural autonomyof the translated text, it still led to the development of translationpractices that drew on a broad range of domestic discourses andrepeatedly recovered the excluded and the marginal to challengethe dominant. Pound’s translations avoided the transparentdiscourse that has dominated English-language translation sincethe seventeenth century. Instead of translating fluently,foregrounding the signified and minimizing any play of thesignifier that impeded communication, pursuing linear syntax,univocal meaning, current usage, standard dialects, prosodicsmoothness, Pound increased the play of the signifier, cultivatinginverted or convoluted syntax, polysemy, archaism, nonstandarddialects, elaborate stanzaic forms and sound effects—textualfeatures that frustrate immediate intelligibility, empathic response,interpretive mastery. And by doing this Pound addressed theproblem of domestication that nags not just his own claim of