This racial ideology, obviously in conflict with Tarchetti’s democratic politics, becomes more explicitly damaging to his project in his closing reference to Strabo, which abruptly reverses the logic of his argument. Tarchetti initially treated Arabian narratives as a mirror of the Arabian social order, a reliable representation of its “laws and customs,” but he concluded in apparent agreement with Strabo’s complaint that these texts reflect little more than an overheated imagination. Tarchetti’s typically romantic Orientalism seems to result in an uncritical acceptance of Strabo’s equation of the East with “love for the marvelous.” Yet Strabo’s point that the “histories” of Eastern countries lack a firm basis in reality renders “uncertain,” not only Arabian narratives, but the democratic images that Tarchetti found in them, questioning his earlier treatment of the novel as figuring a “marvelous world” without social hierarchies. Tarchetti’s citation of Strabo suggests that the utopian world of the novel may be no {160} more than a misrepresentation of its social situation, especially in the case of the Eastern prototypes of the genre. It is worth noting that Tarchetti in effect reiterated this view at the end of his brief tale, “La fortuna di capitano Gubart” (“Captain Gubart’s Fortune”), published the same year as his essay on the novel. After demonstrating the arbitrariness of class distinctions by relating how a poor street musician is mistakenly awarded a royal military commission, the narrator concluded: “Questo fatto comunque abbia una decisa analogia con quelli famosi delle novelle arabe, è incontrastabilmente vero e conosciuto” / “This incident, despite its decided resemblance to those famous ones of the Arabian tales, is indisputably true and well-known” (Tarchetti 1967, I:79). This reference to The Arabian Nights seems designed to satirize Italian social relations as fantastic and therefore irrational, but it can make this satiric point only by assuming the irrationality of Eastern culture and by distinguishing Tarchetti’s narrative as “true.” Tarchetti sought to enlist foreign fantastic texts in the democratic cultural politics he conducted in Italy, but his Orientalism was implicated in the key binary opposition by which Europe subordinated, and justified its colonization of, the same foreign countries whose texts he considered politically useful.
Given the diverse linguistic, cultural, and ideological materials that constituted Tarchetti’s project, it can be seen as what Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari call a minor utilization of a major language:
Even when it is unique a language remains a mixture, a schizophrenic mélange, a Harlequin costume in which very different functions of language and distinct centers of power are played out, blurring what can be said and what can’t be said; one function will be played off against the other, all the degrees of territoriality and relative deterritorialization will be played out. Even when major, a language is open to an intensive utilization that makes it take flight along creative lines of escape which, no matter how slowly, no matter how cautiously, can now form an absolute deterritorialization.
The major language that Tarchetti confronted was the Tuscan dialect of Italian, the linguistic standard for Italian literature since the Renaissance. In 1840, after more than a decade of research into {161} the question of a national language, Manzoni published an extensive revision of the first version of I promessi sposi which recast it in the Tuscan dialect, undertaking the nationalistic project of unifying Italy through its language and literature, at once situating his text in the Italian literary canon and establishing a linguistic model for fiction which could be understood by most Italian readers (Reynolds 1950). Because Tarchetti’s fantastic narratives were written in the Tuscan dialect, they took the major language on a line of escape that deterritorialized the dominant fictional discourse. He used the Italian literary standard to produce Gothic tales, a genre that was not merely marginal in relation to realism, but that existed in Italian culture primarily as sporadic translations of a few foreign writers, namely Hoffmann, Poe, and Adelbert von Chamisso.[3] Traced with German, English, French, even Arabic texts, Tarchetti’s tales foregrounded what realism repressed, the discursive and ideological determinations of subjectivity. In his foreign-derived, fantastic narratives, the standard dialect was turned into a political arena where the bourgeois individualism of realist discourse was contested in order to interrogate various class, gender, and racial ideologies. Nevertheless, Tarchetti’s Orientalism shows that he did not have his cultural politics entirely under controclass="underline" his interrogations were democratically directed, but they sometimes repressed the ideological contradictions precipitated by their own materials and methods of appropriating them.
Methods of cultural appropriation like translation would clearly be useful to Tarchetti’s project of putting the major language to minor uses. And the deterritorializing effect of this project would clearly make his translations foreignizing in their impact on dominant cultural values in Italian. His most intensive utilization of the standard dialect did in fact occur in his translation of a foreign fantastic narrative, an English Gothic tale written by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. The political significance of Tarchetti’s translation, however, is complicated by the fact that it is a plagiarism of the English text.
In 1865, Tarchetti published a tale entitled “Il mortale immortale (dall’inglese)” (“The Immortal Mortal (From the English)”) in the {162} Rivista minima in two installments, on 21 June and 31 August. The first installment was unsigned; the second bore his name. These appearances indicate Tarchetti’s authorship, and so Italian readers have always assumed, none venturing beyond the supposition that he adapted the fantastic motif of his tale, the elixir of immortality, from two French texts. What Tarchetti actually published, however, is his Italian translation of Shelley’s tale “The Mortal Immortal,” which was first published in the English literary annual The Keepsake in 1833. In 1868, Tarchetti had another opportunity to acknowledge his translation, but he did not: while serving as the editor of the periodical Emporio pittoresco, he reprinted it under his name with a different title, “L’elixir dell’immortalità (imitazione dall’inglese)” (“The Elixir of Immortality (An Imitation from the English)”).
Tarchetti’s use of parenthetical subtitles (“From the English,” “An Imitation from the English”) appears to glance at the actual nature of his text, but this is misleading: they offer only the vaguest indication of the relationship between his Italian version and Shelley’s tale. Tarchetti did introduce some significant changes: he altered a date, used different names for two main characters, omitted a few phrases and sentences, and added some of his own, all of which amount to a strong transformation of the English text. Nevertheless, in sentence after sentence, paragraph after paragraph, his Italian version is governed by the aim of reproduction: it adheres so closely to the syntactical and lexical features of Shelley’s English as to be less an “imitation” than an interlingual translation. By failing to acknowledge his text as a translation, Tarchetti asserted his authorship of Shelley’s material and therefore committed plagiarism. And it seems certain that he was fully aware of this fact. In 1865, he began a brief but intense period of activity in the burgeoning Milanese publishing industry, first printing his short fiction and serializing his novels in the periodical press, and then issuing them in book form with several large publishers. He was also employed to write book-length translations. In 1869, he published his Italian versions of two English novels, one of which was Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend (1865). In both cases, he was credited as the translator.
[3]
Costa and Vigini 1991 indicates that few book-length translations of foreign fantastic narratives were available in Italy before Tarchetti began writing and publishing: there were three editions of Hoffmann’s tales (1833, 1835, and 1855) and