Tarchetti’s financial difficulties no doubt figured into his motives to plagiarize Shelley’s tale. The frenzied pace of his writing during the last four years of his life demonstrates that he was producing for immediate publication and payment. A memoir by his friend and {163} collaborator Salvatore Farina shows Tarchetti drifting from one address to another, writing for several periodicals and publishers at once, but constantly poor, shabbily dressed, ill—he died of typhus and tuberculosis. In a letter dated 31 January 1867, Tarchetti complained to Farina about
le mie solite complicazioni economiche […] che ho nulla al mondo, che devo pensare da oggi a domani come pranzare, come vestirmi, come ricoverarmi.
my usual economic complications […] that I have nothing in the world, that from one day to the next I must find some way to dine, to dress, to house myself.
The letter referred to Tarchetti’s antimilitaristic novel Una nobile follia, which was currently being serialized in the periodical Il sole (November 1866 to March 1867): “aspetto sempre la completazione di quei drammi dai quali posso avere un po’ di danaro” / “every day I expect to finish these dramas [from the military life] which should yield me a little money” (ibid.:39).
Farina’s memoir suggests a financial motive for Tarchetti’s plagiarism by relating an incident in which his knowledge of English becomes the pretext of a fraudulent scheme. Living for some weeks in a hotel in Parma, but unable to pay the bill, Tarchetti “s’improwisò professore di lingua inglese” / “posed as a professor of English” and
annunziò per la via delle gazzette e alle cantonate di tutte le vie di Parma che, trovandosi di passaggio in quella città, avrebbe dato un corso completo di quaranta lezioni per insegnare la lingua inglese con un suo metodo spicciativo.
announced in the newspapers and on every street corner of Parma that since he was travelling through the city, he would give a complete, forty-lesson course in the English language with his rapid method.
Farina’s rather melodramatic memoir seems to be unduly minimizing Tarchetti’s proficiency in English by limiting it to “pochissimo, appena il tanto da intendere alla meglio Shakespeare e Byron e tradurre ad {164} orecchio Dyckens” / “very little, just enough to attain a rudimentary understanding of Shakespeare and Byron and to translate Dickens by ear” (ibid.:34). Tarchetti’s translation of Shelley’s tale confirms, on the contrary, that he had an excellent reading knowledge of English. All the same, this does not necessarily disprove Farina’s assertion that “non parlava inglese affatto e sarebbe stato imbarazzato a sostenere una conversazione” / “he did not speak English at all and would have been embarrassed to sustain a conversation” (ibid.). Farina notes that the registration for the course netted “una retata magnifica” / “a magnificent haul” (ibid.:35), but Tarchetti gave much fewer than forty lessons:
quando il professore non seppe più che cosa insegnare ai suoi scolari, lessero insieme Shakespeare e Byron e fumarono le sigarette che Iginio preparava sul tavolino all’ora della lezione.
when the professor no longer knew what to teach his pupils, together they read Shakespeare and Byron and smoked the cigarettes Iginio put out on the desk when the lesson began.
This teaching scam was probably more profitable than Tarchetti’s plagiarism. Yet since translation was poorly remunerated in nineteenth-century Italy, with payment usually taking the form of books as well as money, his implicit claim that his text was his creation would have earned him a higher fee than if he had published it as a translation (Berengo 1980:340–346). A financial motive may also explain the curious retitling and reprinting of the text when he took over the editorship of the Emporio pittoresco. The different title and his signature claimed that it was his original tale being published for the first time.
Because the legal status of translation was just beginning to be defined in 1865, Tarchetti’s plagiarism did not in fact constitute a copyright infringement which resulted in a financial loss for Shelley’s estate and her English publisher. By the early nineteenth century, many countries had developed copyright statutes which gave the author exclusive control over the reproduction of her text for life and beyond. But international copyright conventions were slow to emerge, and translation rights were not always reserved for the author. In 1853, for example, a federal court in the United States held that a German translation of Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) which had not been {165} licensed by Harriet Beecher Stowe did not infringe her copyright for the English-language text (Kaplan 1967:29). Although England instituted the first important copyright statute at the beginning of the eighteenth century, in 1851, the year of Shelley’s death, English law did not give the author translation rights. It was not until 1852 that the right of authors to license translations of their published texts was recognized by statute, which limited it to five years from the date of publication (Sterling and Carpenter 1986:103). A general copyright law was not formulated in Italy until the Unification: on 25 June 1865, four days after Tarchetti published the first installment of his translation as his tale, the Italian government gave authors the right to “publish, reproduce, and translate” their texts, although the translation rights were limited to ten years from the date of publication (Piola-Caselli 1927:22, 24, 26).
Tarchetti’s plagiarism was not so much copyright infringement as a violation of the individualistic notion of authorship on which copyright is based. As Martha Woodmansee shows, copyright laws recognize the writer’s ownership of a text insofar as he is its author or originator—“that is, insofar as his work is new and original, an intellectual creation which owes its individuality solely and exclusively to him” (Woodmansee 1984:446). This notion of authorship assumes romantic expressive theory: the text is seen as expressing the unique thoughts and feelings of the writer, a free, unified consciousness which is not divided by determinations that exceed and possibly conflict with his intention. The author is assigned the sole and exclusive copyright because his subjectivity is taken to be a metaphysical essence which is present in his text and all its copies, but which transcends any difference or change introduced by formal determinations, like printing and binding, language and genre, and by economic and political conditions, like the publishing industry and government censorship. The very idea of authorial copyright, however, confesses the possibility of change because it is designed to control the form and marketing of the book by licensing reproduction and repressing change that is not authorized. Copyright opens up a contradiction in the individualistic notion of authorship by demonstrating that such law is suspended between metaphysics and materialism, acknowledging the material contingencies of form, the possibility of its difference from the author, but enacting its transparency with the metaphysical assumption of authorial presence.
{166} Tarchetti’s plagiarism violated this notion of authorship not by merely copying Shelley’s tale, but by translating it. Because his plagiarism was a translation, it introduced a decisive change in the form of the original, specifically in its language; his assertion of authorship simultaneously masked this change and indicated that it was decisive enough to mark the creation of a new text which originated with him. Tarchetti’s plagiarism covertly collapsed the distinction that an individualistic notion of authorship draws between author and translator, creator and imitator. Yet because his plagiarism remained undiscovered and unrationalized—at least until today—it continued to support this distinction; it did not reflect or contribute to any revision of nineteenth-century Italian opinion concerning the aesthetic and legal status of translation. All the same, the fact that Tarchetti’s plagiarism was covert did not in any way mitigate its violation of authorship—nor its effect as an eminently foreignizing translation practice. Because his Italian translation was a plagiarism, it was especially subversive of bourgeois values in the major language. On the one hand, Tarchetti’s text flouted bourgeois propriety and property by fraudulently exploiting the process of literary commodification in the Italian publishing industry; in this way, his plagiarism exemplified the nonconformist tendency of the scapigliatura to identify with socially subordinate groups, particularly the worker, the poor, and the criminal, professing a dissident refusal of the dominant by affiliating with the subcultural (Mariani 1967). On the other hand, Tarchetti’s text deterritorialized the bourgeois fictional discourse that dominated Italian culture precisely because it was a plagiarism in the standard dialect, because it passed itself off not just as an original Gothic tale, but as one written originally in the Italian of Manzonian realism and therefore foreignizing in its impact on the Italian literary scene.