{176} Tarchetti’s translation probes the contradictions of Shelley’s feminism by subtly revising the ideologies her tale puts to work. The Italian follows the English in having Vincenzo assert that “io divenni marito di Ortensia” / “I became Ortensia’s husband” (Tarchetti 1967, I:123), but it repeatedly omits signs of their marriage. When Bertha becomes aware of Winzy’s immortality, he renews his conjugal vows to her: “I will be your true, faithful husband while you are spared to me, and do my duty to you to the last” (228). Tarchetti deletes this entire statement. And where Winzy and Bertha address each other with “my poor wife” and “my husband” (227, 228), Vincenzo and Ortensia say “mia buona compagna” and “mio amico” / “my good companion” and “my friend” (I:128). These changes show an effort to weaken, however slightly, the valorization of marriage in Shelley’s tale and perhaps reflect a scapigliato rejection of bourgeois respectability. Most significantly, Tarchetti’s changes locate the very ideological determination which qualifies Shelley’s feminist project, and they do so by emphasizing friendship rather than marriage, hinting at the possibility of an equal relationship between the lovers, questioning the gender hierarchy of the bourgeois family.
At the same time, Tarchetti’s translation superimposes another class conflict on the English text. This too requires a diminution of Shelley’s bourgeois values. The Italian version reproduces all of those passages which point to the main characters’ financial independence—except the most explicit one: the description of Vincenzo’s and Ortensia’s parents deletes “respectable” and emphasizes “humble,” clearly suggesting that they are not bourgeois, but members of the working class: “I suoi parenti erano, come i miei, di assai umile condizione” / “Her parents were, like mine, of very humble rank” (I:116). Ortensia’s adoption by the protectress thus figures patriarchy as aristocratic domination of the working class. The Italian version underscores this representation by encoding Ortensia’s vain obsessions with aristocratic attitudes. Whereas Bertha, driven by her envy of Winzy’s physical appearance to the paradoxical extreme of disparaging beauty, tells him that “gray hairs” are “much more comely,” and that “youth and good looks” are “despicable gifts” (227), Ortensia expresses an aristocratic sense of social superiority: the Italian version replaces “comely” with “gentili” (“fair,” but also “polite,” “noble”) and “despicable” with “volgari” (“common,” “unrefined”) (I:127, 128). With these changes, Tarchetti’s translation forces Shelley’s tale to address the hierarchical relationship between {177} the aristocracy and the working class, an instance of class domination which her bourgeois feminism represses.
This pressure in the translation to expose forms of ideological mystification also makes itself felt in deletions which remove the Orientalism from Shelley’s tale. Tarchetti omits Winzy’s response to Bertha’s coquettish behavior: “I was jealous as a Turk” (221). Because any particularly violent or aggressive show of jealousy would be comically inconsistent with Winzy’s submissiveness, his assertion can be seen as contributing to the satire of male power built into his characterization. Yet once the feminist significance of the joke is appreciated, the reader is positioned in an another ideology, European Orientalism: the satire becomes intelligible only when the reader thinks that Winzy’s jealousy could never possibly be as excessive as a Turk’s, i.e., only when the reader assumes the truth of the cliché and thus accepts an ethnic slur, drawing a racist distinction between the West as rational and the East as irrational. Shelley’s use of the cliché to support the feminist satire ridicules a gender hierarchy by introducing one based on race.
The absence of this racial ideology from the Italian version might seem insignificant, were it not that Tarchetti omits another, much more complicated Orientalist reference in the English text: an allusion to The History of Nourjahad, an Eastern tale written by the eighteenth-century novelist and playwright Frances Sheridan. Near the beginning of Shelley’s text, Winzy wistfully cites “fabled” instances of longevity which proved much more tolerable than his:
I have heard of enchantments, in which the victims were plunged into a deep sleep to wake, after a hundred years, as fresh as ever: I have heard of the Seven Sleepers—thus to be immortal would not be so burthensome; but, oh! the weight of never-ending time—the tedious passage of the still-succeeding hours! How happy was the fabled Nourjahad!
The extremely elliptical quality of this allusion, especially compared to the explanatory statement that precedes the Seven Sleepers, indicates the enormous popularity of Sheridan’s character, even as late as 1833, when Shelley was writing her own tale. Published in 1767, a year after Sheridan’s death, The History of Nourjahad went through at least eleven British editions by 1830, including an illustrated abridgement for children, and it was twice adapted for the {178} stage, first as a “melodramatic spectacle” in 1802, then as a musical production in 1813 (Todd 1985:282–284). Having already published several tales in The Keepsake, Shelley knew that Oriental motifs were in vogue among its readers, she seems even to have assumed that the “fabled Nourjahad” was more familiar to them than the rather learned allusion to the Seven Sleepers, and so she needed merely to have her “mortal immortal” drop the character’s name to signify immortality punctuated by “deep sleep.”[4] Yet, for readers who know The History of Nourjahad, the reference is too abrupt and unqualified to stop resonating, so that it constitutes a disturbing point of indeterminancy in Shelley’s text, limited only by the cultural and social conditions under which it is read.
Sheridan’s Nourjahad is the favorite of the Persian sultan Schemzeddin, who would like to appoint him as “first minister” but must establish that he is worthy, innocent of the faults imputed to him by court advisors: “youth,” “avarice,” “love of pleasure,” and “irreligion” (Weber 1812:693). Schemzeddin tests Nourjahad by asking him what he would like if his every desire could be satisfied, and Nourjahad’s response confirms the advisors’ suspicions:
I should desire to be possessed of inexhaustible riches; and, to enable me to enjoy them to the utmost, to have my life prolonged to eternity, [disregarding] hopes of Paradise [in order to] make a paradise of this earthly globe while it lasted, and take my chance for the other afterwards.
Nourjahad elicits the sultan’s rebuke, and that night he is visited by his “guardian genius” who fulfills his desire for wealth and immortality, although with the proviso that any vice he commits will be “punished by total privation of [his] faculties,” lasting “for months, years, nay for a whole revolution of Saturn at a time, or perhaps for a century” (ibid.:695). Nourjahad forgets this punishment, further alienates Schemzeddin by devoting himself to “nothing but giving loose to his appetites” (ibid.:698), and performs three immoral acts which are each punished by long periods of deep sleep. While indulging himself “with an unbounded freedom in his most voluptuous wishes,” Nourjahad, “for the first time, got drunk,” whereupon he sleeps over four years (ibid.:700); then he invents a “celestial masquerade” in which he orders “the women of his seraglio to personate the houris,” while {179} “he himself would needs represent Mahomet; and one of the mistresses whom he loved best […] Cadiga, the favourite wife of the great prophet,” for which “wild and profane idea” he sleeps forty years (ibid.:705); finally, when his “appetites palled with abundance,” he begins to delight in “cruelty” and brutally kills Cadiga, thereafter sleeping twenty years (ibid.:710). Upon waking Nourjahad reforms and embarks on a vast program of philanthropy, so profoundly regretting his wealth and immortality that his guardian genius reappears to take them away. It is subsequently revealed that Nourjahad’s “adventure […] was all a deception” (ibid.:719), he did not actually kill Cadiga, he was never wealthy or immortal, and only fourteen months have passed, not more than sixty years. Schemzeddin had invented everything to bring about his favorite’s moral reformation.
[4]
From its very first issue, The Keepsake published Oriental tales and poems with titles like “Sadak the Wanderer. A Fragment,” “The Persian Lovers,” and “The Deev Alfakir” (Reynolds 1828:117–119, 136–137, 160–169).