venuti

Invisibility 37perceived in social developments like monopoly capitalism,particularly the creation of a mass work force and thestandardization of the work process (Jameson 1979:110–114).The examples from Graves and Pound show that the aim of asymptomatic reading is not to assess the “freedom” or “fidelity” ofa translation, but rather to uncover the canons of accuracy by whichit is produced and judged. Fidelity cannot be construed as meresemantic equivalence: on the one hand, the foreign text is susceptibleto many different interpretations, even at the level of the individualword; on the other hand, the translator’s interpretive choices answerto a domestic cultural situation and so always exceed the foreigntext. This does not mean that translation is forever banished to therealm of freedom or error, but that canons of accuracy are culturallyspecific and historically variable. Although Graves produced a freetranslation by his own admission, it has nonetheless been judgedfaithful and accepted as the standard English-language rendering byacademic specialists like Grant. In 1979, Grant published an editedversion of Graves’s translation that pronounced it accurate, if not“precise”:[It] conveys the peculiarities of Suetonius’s methods andcharacter better than any other translation. Why, then, have Ibeen asked to “edit” it? Because Robert Graves (who explicitlyrefrained from catering for students) did not aim at producinga precise translation—introducing, as he himself points out,sentences of explanation, omitting passages which do notseem to help the sense, and “turning sentences, andsometimes even groups of sentences, inside-out.” […] What Ihave tried to do, therefore, is to make such adjustments aswill bring his version inside the range of what is nowgenerally regarded by readers of the Penguin Classics as a“translation”—without, I hope, detracting from his excellentand inimitable manner.(Grant 1980:8–9)In the twenty-two years separating Graves’s initial version from therevised edition, the canons of accuracy underwent a change, requiringa translation to be both fluent and exact, to make for “vivid andcompulsive reading” (ibid.:8), but also to follow the foreign text moreclosely. The passages quoted earlier from the life of Caesar wereevidently judged accurate in 1979, since Grant made only one revision: