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40 The Translator’s Invisibilityenergies and failings, heights and degenerations, poisons andantidotes. Its task is to become a curative science” (ibid.:156). Byconstructing a differential representation of the past, genealogy bothengages in present cultural debates and social conflicts and developsresolutions that project utopian images.The Translator’s Invisibility intervenes against the translator’ssituation and activity in contemporary Anglo-American culture byoffering a series of genealogies that write the history of present. Ittraces the rise of transparent discourse in English-languagetranslation from the seventeenth century onward, while searchingthe past for exits, alternative theories and practices in British,American, and several foreign-language cultures—German,French, Italian. 12 The chapters form an argument pursuedchronologically, showing that the origins of fluent translating lie invarious kinds of cultural domination and exclusion, but also thattranslation can serve a more democratic agenda in which excludedtheories and practices are recovered and the prevailing fluency isrevised. The acts of recovery and revision that constitute thisargument rest on extensive archival research, bringing to lightforgotten or neglected translations and establishing an alternativetradition that somewhat overlaps with, but mostly differs from,the current canon of British and American literature.This book is motivated by a strong impulse to document thehistory of English-language translation, to uncover long-obscuretranslators and translations, to reconstruct their publication andreception, and to articulate significant controversies. Thedocumentary impulse, however, serves the skepticism ofsymptomatic readings that interrogate the process ofdomestication in translated texts, both canonical and marginal,and reassess their usefulness in contemporary Anglo-Americanculture. The historical narratives in each chapter, grounded as theyare on a diagnosis of current translation theory and practice,address key questions. What domestic values has transparentdiscourse at once inscribed and masked in foreign texts during itslong domination? How has transparency shaped the canon offoreign literatures in English and the cultural identities of Englishlanguagenations? Why has transparency prevailed over othertranslation strategies in English, like Victorian archaism (FrancisNewman, William Morris) and modernist experiments withheterogeneous discourses (Pound, Celia and Louis Zukofsky, PaulBlackburn)? What would happen if a translator tried to redirect the