venuti

78 The Translator’s Invisibility(ibid.:307). Yet the reviewer also suggested that the simplicity shouldbe considered a feature of Mitchell’s style as well (“a style of his own”),showing unwittingly that fluent translation domesticates the foreigntext, making it intelligible in an English-language culture that valueseasy readability, transparent discourse, the illusion of authorialpresence.Once again, the domestication enacted by a fluent strategy was notseen as producing an inaccurate translation. The usually contentiousperiodicals agreed that William Stewart Rose’s 1823 version ofAriosto’s Orlando Furioso was both fluent and faithful. Blackwood’s, amagazine that pursued Tory conservatism to reactionary extremes,called Rose’s translation “a work which, of necessity, addresses itself tothe more refined classes,” since “never was such scrupulous fidelity ofrendering associated with such light dancing elegance of language”(Blackwood’s 1823:30). 13 The London Magazine, which sought to maintainan independent neutrality amid its politically factious competitors,similarly found that Rose “generally combined the garrulous ease andunpremeditated manner of the original with a terse and equable flowof numbers” (London Magazine 1824:626; Sullivan 1983b:288–296). TheQuarterly Review took Rose’s version as an opportunity to restate thecanons of fluent translation:the two characteristics of a good translation are, that it should befaithful, and that it should be unconstrained. Faithful, as well inrendering correctly the meaning of the original, as in exhibiting thegeneral spirit which pervades it: unconstrained, so as not to betrayby its phraseology, by the collocation of its words, or construction ofits sentences that it is only a copy.(Quarterly Review 1823:53)A fluent strategy can be associated with fidelity because the effectof transparency conceals the translator’s interpretation of the foreigntext, the semantic context he has constructed in the translationaccording to target-language cultural values. Rose’s fluenttranslation was praised for “rendering correctly the meaning of theoriginal” because it assimilated the Italian text to English values, notonly the valorization of “unconstrained” language, but also theinterpretation of Ariosto’s poem that currently prevailed in thetarget culture. And, once again, the dominion of fluency entailedthat canonical texts, the ancient and modern texts in which the senseof original authorship was felt to be most pronounced, would