Other modes of resistance

Lawrence Venuti interprets the translation strategy of an Italian writer Iginio Ugo Tarchetti as a tool of dissent with accepted notions of literature. Tarchetti (1839 – 1869) was a bohemian writer, at variance with the notions of realism in Italian literature of his times. His strategy was essentially one of foreignization – both in terms of style and choice of text to be translated. He deliberately chose texts that were foreign in terms of language and also literary practice, thereby questioning accepted notions of literary canon and style. This expression of dissent is palpable in the novels that he wrote besides the translations. Venuti observes that he “deployed the conventions and motifs of nineteenth-century fantasy to issue a fundamental challenge to realist representation and its ideological grounding in bourgeois individualism” (The Translator’s Invisibility 149). The texts he chose to translate furthered his dissident agenda. He was the first to write the Gothic tale in Italy and made active use of fantasy in his own writings. Venuti terms this as a form of translation whereby one genre is adapted to another cultural milieu.

Tarchetti’s choice of texts to translate included Shelley’s Gothic tales and other tales of fantasy. Venuti ascribes the increased interest that 19th century Italy exhibited in the Gothic, to Tarchetti and his subversive aim of undermining Italian realism with fantasy. Writers like Poe, E. T. A. Hoffmann, and Theophile Gautier became well-translated into Italian after Tarchetti’s pioneering work. Venuti is of the view that it is partly because of this trend that fantasy became such an indispensable part of modernist as well as postmodernist Italian fiction. Tarchetti’s foreignizing strategy was more in the choice of text that he translated rather than the method he used. Thus the conscious dissent that he expressed through his translations successfully subverted established canons and started off a new literary movement.