venuti

68 The Translator’s Invisibilityreproducing primarily the meanings of the Latin text, usually atthe cost of its phonological and syntactical features, and the aim ofrendering it word for word, respecting syntax and line break. Andhe distinguished his method from Abraham Cowley’s “imitations”of Pindar, partial translations that revised and, in effect,abandoned the foreign text. Dryden felt it was Denham “whoadvis’d more Liberty than he took himself” (Dryden 1956:117),permitting Denham’s substantial liberties—the editing of the Latintext, the domestic lexicon—to pass unnoticed, refined out ofexistence, naturalized by the majesty of the style. The ethnocentricviolence performed by domesticating translation rested on adouble fidelity, to the source-language text as well as to the targetlanguageculture, and especially to its valorization of transparentdiscourse. But this was clearly impossible and knowinglyduplicitous, accompanied by the rationale that a gain in domesticintelligibility and cultural force outweighed the loss suffered bythe foreign text and culture.This trend in English-language translation gets pushed to a newextreme at the end of the eighteenth century, in Alexander FraserTytler’s Essay on the Principles of Translation (1791). Tytler’s influentialtreatise is a key document in the canonization of fluency, a digest of its“principles,” “laws,” and “precepts” which offers a plethora ofillustrative examples. His decisive consolidation of earlier statements,French as well as English, constituted a theoretical refinement, visiblein the precision of his distinctions and in the philosophicalsophistication of his assumptions: domestication is now recommendedon the basis of a general human nature that is repeatedly contradictedby an aesthetic individualism.For Tytler, the aim of translation is the production of an equivalenteffect that transcends linguistic and cultural differences:I would therefore describe a good translation to be, That, in which themerit of the original work is so completely transfused into anotherlanguage, as to be as distinctly apprehended, and as strongly felt, by anative of the country to which that language belongs, as it is by those whospeak the language of the original work.(Tytler 1978:15)The “merit” of the foreign text, and the “excellencies and defects” ofattempts to reproduce it in translation, are accessible to all, because, inso far as reason and good sense afford a criterion, the opinion of all