venuti

Invisibility 29particular humanism, or my own attempt to ground a symptomaticreading of translated texts on a foreignizing method of translationthat assumes a determinate concept of subjectivity. This sort ofreading can be said to foreignize a domesticating translation byshowing where it is discontinuous; a translation’s dependence ondominant values in the target-language culture becomes most visiblewhere it departs from them. Yet this reading also uncovers thedomesticating movement involved in any foreignizing translationby showing where its construction of the foreign depends ondomestic cultural materials.Symptomatic reading can thus be useful in demystifying theillusion of transparency in a contemporary English-languagetranslation. In some translations, the discontinuities are readilyapparent, unintentionally disturbing the fluency of the language,revealing the inscription of the domestic culture; other translationsbear prefaces that announce the translator’s strategy and alert thereader to the presence of noticeable stylistic peculiarities. A case inpoint is Robert Graves’s version of Suetonius’s The Twelve Caesars.Graves’s preface offered a frank account of his domesticatingtranslation method:For English readers Suetonius’s sentences, and sometimes evengroups of sentences, must often be turned inside-out. Whereverhis references are incomprehensible to anyone not closelyfamiliar with the Roman scene, I have also brought up into thetext a few words of explanation that would normally haveappeared in a footnote. Dates have been everywhere changedfrom the pagan to the Christian era; modern names of cities usedwhenever they are more familiar to the common reader than theclassical ones; and sums in sesterces reduced to gold pieces, at100 to a gold piece (of twenty denarii), which resembled a Britishsovereign.(Graves 1957:8)Graves’s vigorous revision of the foreign text aims to assimilate thesource-language culture (Imperial Rome) to that of the target language(the United Kingdom in 1957). The work of assimilation depends notonly on his extensive knowledge of Suetonius and Roman cultureduring the Empire (e.g. the monetary system), but also on hisknowledge of contemporary British culture as manifested by Englishsyntactical forms and what he takes to be the function of his