Author warrants that he is the sole author of the Work; that he is the sole owner of all the rights granted to the Publisher […] Author shall hold harmless Publisher, any seller of the Work, and any licensee subsidiary right in the Work, against any damages finally sustained.
The shrewdness and sheer audacity of Tarchetti’s plagiarism may make it attractive to dissidents in Anglo-American literary culture— especially dissident translators interested in upsetting current practices in the publishing industry. Yet the fact remains that to publish an unauthorized translation of a copyrighted foreign text is to invite legal proceedings whose cost will far exceed the translator’s income from even a bestselling translation.
What the contemporary English-language translator can learn from Tarchetti is not how to plagiarize a foreign text, but how to choose one to translate. Tarchetti shows that foreignizing translation takes the form, not just of deviant translation strategies, but also of foreign texts that deviate from dominant literary canons in the target-language culture. Tarchetti’s choice to translate Shelley’s Gothic tale was foreignizing in its introduction of a fictional discourse that challenged the dominant realism, and his translation, along with the few other Italian translations of foreign fantasies that had already been published, initiated a change in literary taste that culminated in a significant canon reformation. Other members of the scapigliatura, notably Arrigo and Camillo Boito and Emilio Praga, published Gothic tales in the 1860s, and Italian translations of foreign writers like Poe, Gautier, and Erckmann-Chatrian increased rapidly during the {186} remainder of the nineteenth century. Hoffmann’s tales, for example, appeared in eight different Italian editions between 1877 and 1898 (Costa and Vigini 1991; Rossi 1959). It is partly as a result of these trends that the fantastic became a dominant genre in twentieth-century Italian fiction, modernist as well as postmodernist, inspiring such diverse canonical writers as Luigi Pirandello, Massimo Bontempelli, Dino Buzzati, Tommaso Landolfi, and Italo Calvino (Bonifazi 1971 and 1982). The lesson Tarchetti teaches the dissident English-language translator is that the choice of a foreign text for translation can be just as foreignizing in its impact on the target-language culture as the invention of a discursive strategy. At a time when deviations from fluency may limit the circulation of a translation or even prevent it from getting published in the first place, Tarchetti points to the strategic value of discriminating carefully among foreign texts and literatures when a translation project is developed.
Chapter 5. Margin
The translation of a poem having any depth ends by being one of two things: Either it is the expression of the translator, virtually a new poem, or it is as it were a photograph, as exact as possible, of one side of the statue.
The dominance of transparent discourse in English-language translation was decisively challenged at the turn of the twentieth century, when modernism emerged in Anglo-American literary culture. The experimentation that characterized the literature of this period brought with it new translation strategies that avoided fluency by cultivating extremely heterogeneous discourses, principally in poetry translations, but also more widely in poetic composition. Translation now became a key practice in modernist poetics, motivating appropriations of various archaic and foreign poetries to serve modernist cultural agendas in English (see, for example, Hooley 1988). At the same time, English-language translation theory attained a new level of critical sophistication, summoned as it was to rationalize specific modernist texts, poems that were translations as well as translations of poems.
But translation today seems to bear little sign of these developments. The dominance of transparent discourse has remained so secure in English that even though modernist poetry and prose have long been canonized in Anglo-American literary cultures, both in and out of the academy, the innovations that distinguish modernist translation continue to be marginal, seldom actually implemented in an English-language translation, seldom recommended in theoretical statements by translators or others. In the search for exits from the dominance of transparency, it is important to assess the innovations {188} of modernist translation, interrogating the cultural functions it performed with such force at the beginning of the century, but also the conditions of its marginalization from mid-century onward. What alternatives did modernist translation offer in its challenge to transparency? Why were they relegated to the fringes of Anglo-American culture?
In a review published in the Criterion in 1936, Basil Bunting criticized E.Stuart Bates’s study Modern Translation for not keeping the promise of its title, for failing, in fact, to present a modern concept of translation. In Bunting’s view, Bates couldn’t distinguish school “cribs (e.g. Loeb Classics) from translations” that Bunting himself valued, “translations meant to stand by themselves, works in their own language equivalent to their original but not compelled to lean on its authority, claiming the independence and accepting the responsibility inseparable from a life of their own” (Bunting 1936:714). Modernism asserts the “independence” of the translated text, demanding that it be judged on its “own” terms, not merely apart from the foreign text, but against other literary texts in its “own” language, accepting the “responsibility” of distinguishing itself in the literary terms of that language. But as soon as a modernist translation chooses these terms, it can never be an independent work, can never be its “own” insofar as the translation is written in a language coded with cultural values that are fundamentally different from those circulating in the foreign language. Modernism believes that the responsibility of translation is to be independent, but the responsibility assumed in this belief is actually owed to a domestic intelligibility and cultural force that erase, somewhat irresponsibly, the linguistic and cultural difference of the foreign text. For Bunting, this difference wasn’t the important thing in translation, partly because the opportunities to experience it in English seemed to him rare, or simply nonexistent. “No one is truly bilingual,” he wrote, “but it does not matter” (ibid.:714).
Modernism seeks to establish the cultural autonomy of the translated text by effacing its manifold conditions and exclusions, especially the process of domestication by which the foreign text is rewritten to serve modernist cultural agendas. Bunting was aware of this domestication. He praised Edward Fitzgerald’s {189} Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám (1859) because “Fitzgerald translated a poem that never existed, yet by an unforced, natural expansion of Dryden ’s aim, made Omar utter such things ‘as he would himself have spoken if he had been born in England and in’ an age still slightly overshadowed by Byron” (Bunting 1936:715). For Bunting, Fitzgerald embodied the modernist ideal by appearing to translate a poem that “never existed,” but paradoxically the translator drew on preexisting materials: he followed Dryden’s domesticating translation method (which made Virgil a Restoration English poet), and his translation was noticeably influenced by Byron, Byronism, the Orientalism in romantic culture. Bunting’s awareness of this domesticating process was never sufficiently skeptical to make him question his concept of translation, to doubt the autonomy of the translated text, or to wonder about what happened to the foreignness of the foreign text when it got translated. He was interested only in translation that makes a difference at home, not translation that signifies the linguistic and cultural difference of the foreign text.