THE SCANDALS OF TRANSLATION

THE SCANDALS OFTRANSLATION‘The Scandals of Translation is one of the most provocative and far-reaching books to bepublished in the field of Translation Studies in recent years. Lawrence Venuti has provedhimself a cultural commentator of the very first order. This book should be requiredreading for all those engaged in the humanities.’Terry Hale, Performance Translation Centre, University of Hull‘Venuti proposes a radical reformulation of what constitutes a valid translation… I findeverything he says intellectually stimulating. If a good book makes the reader want toenter into a personal dialogue with the author, this is a very good book.’Michael Henry Heim, University of California at Los AngelesTranslation remains on the margins of society. Stigmatized as a form of authorship,discouraged by copyright law, depreciated by the academy, exploited by publishersand corporations, governments and religious organisations. Lawrence Venuti arguesthat translation is in this predicament because it reveals the contradictions andexclusions of dominant cultural values and institutions and thereby calls theirauthority into question.Venuti exposes what he refers to as the ‘scandals of translation’ by looking at therelationship between translation and the practices which at once need andmarginalize it. The book moves between different languages, cultures, periods,disciplines and institutions and is richly illustrated by numerous case studiesincluding: Bible translation in the early Christian Church; translations of poetry andphilosophy from classical Greek and German (Homer, Plato, Aristotle, Wittgenstein,Heidegger); translations of the modern Japanese novel; the translation of bestsellers,advertisements and business journalism; and the author’s own translation of theItalian writer, I.U. Tarchetti.The Scandals of Translation advances current thinking about translation, as Venuti workstowards the formulation of an ethics that enables translations to be written, read andevaluated with greater respect for linguistic and cultural differences.Lawrence Venuti is professor of English at Temple University, Philadelphia. He is aprofessional translator and the author of The Translator’s Invisibility: A history of translation(Routledge, 1995).

THE SCANDALS OFTRANSLATIONTowards an ethics of differenceLawrence VenutiLondon and New York

First published 1998by Routledge11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EESimultaneously published in the USA and Canadaby Routledge29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis GroupThis edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2002.© 1998 Lawrence VenutiAll rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprintedor reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic,mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented,including photocopying and recording, or in any informationstorage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from thepublishers.British Library Cataloguing in Publication DataA catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication DataVenuti, LawrenceThe scandals of translation: towards an ethics of difference/Lawrence Venuti.Includes bibliographical references and index.1. Translating and interpreting—Moral and ethical aspects.2. Intercultural communication. I. Title.P306.2.V45 1998.418′.02–dc21 98–9530ISBN 0-203-04787-7 Master e-book ISBNISBN 0-203-16085-1 (Adobe eReader Format)ISBN 0-415-16929-1 (hbk)ISBN 0-415-16930-5 (pbk)

FOR GEMMA LEIGH VENUTIC’è un amore più grandedi te e di me, me e voi nella specie,acqua su acqua.

CONTENTSIntroduction 11 Heterogeneity 82 Authorship 313 Copyright 474 The formation of cultural identities 675 The pedagogy of literature 886 Philosophy 1067 The bestseller 1248 Globalization 158Acknowledgements 190Bibliography 193Index 206vii

INTRODUCTIONscandal. A grossly discreditable circumstance, event, or conditionof things.Oxford English DictionaryThe scandals of translation are cultural, economic, and political. They arerevealed when one asks why translation today remains in the margins ofresearch, commentary, and debate, especially (although not exclusively) inEnglish. Any description of these margins risks seeming a mere litany ofabuse, the premise of an incredible victimology of translation and thevictims it leaves in its wake. Translation is stigmatized as a form of writing,discouraged by copyright law, depreciated by the academy, exploited bypublishers and corporations, governments and religious organizations.Translation is treated so disadvantageously, I want to suggest, partly becauseit occasions revelations that question the authority of dominant culturalvalues and institutions. And like every challenge to established reputations, itprovokes their efforts at damage control, their various policing functions, alldesigned to shore up the questioned values and institutions by mystifyingtheir uses of translation.My project is, first, to expose these scandals by enquiring into therelationships between translation and a range of categories and practices thatcontribute to its current marginal status. This enquiry must begin with theemergent discipline of translation studies. Translation research and translatortraining have been impeded by the prevalence of linguistics-orientedapproaches that offer a truncated view of the empirical data they collect.Because such approaches promote scientific models for research, they remainreluctant to take into account the social values that enter into translating aswell as the study of it. Research thus becomes scientistic, claiming to beobjective or value-free, ignoring the fact that translation, like any culturalpractice, entails the creative reproduction of values. As a result, translationstudies get reduced to the formulation of general theories and the descriptionof textual features and strategies. These lines of research are not only limitedin their explanatory power, but directed primarily to other academic1

INTRODUCTIONspecialists in linguistics, instead of translators or readers of translations or evenspecialists in other humanistic disciplines. In the end, translation suffers froman institutional isolation, divorced from the contemporary culturaldevelopments and debates that invest it with significance.By far the greatest hindrances to translation, however, exist outside thediscipline itself. Translation is degraded by prevalent concepts of authorship,especially in literature and in literary scholarship, and these conceptsunderwrite its unfavorable definition in copyright law, not only the codes ofspecific national jurisdictions, but the major international treaties. Translationlies deeply repressed in the cultural identities that are constructed byacademic, religious, and political institutions; in the pedagogy of foreignliteratures, notably the “Great Books,” the canonical texts of Western culture;and in the discipline of philosophy, the academic study of philosophicalconcepts and traditions. Translation figures hugely in the corporate world, inthe international publishing of bestsellers and the unequal patterns of crossculturalcommerce between the hegemonic Northern and Western countriesand their others in Africa, Asia, and South America. Translation powers theglobal cultural economy, enabling transnational corporations to dominate theprint and electronic media in the so-called developing countries bycapitalizing on the marketability of translations from the major languages,preeminently English. “Developing” here means no more than a backwardrelation to world capitalism. Translation embarrasses the institutions that housethese categories and practices because it calls attention to their questionableconditions and effects, the contradictions and exclusions that make thempossible—and discredit them.The scandals may appear where we least expect them. The April 1990 issueof the Courier, a monthly magazine published by UNESCO to promoteintercultural understanding, ran an article—in its Spanish and Englisheditions—that presented a history of Mexican peoples. The English translationis extraordinary for its ideological slanting against pre-Columbian Mexicans,whose oral culture is represented as inferior, especially as a repository of thepast (Mason 1994; cf. Hatim and Mason 1997:153–159). Thus, “antiguosmexicanos” (“ancient Mexicans”) is rendered as “Indians,” distinguishingthem sharply from their Spanish colonizers; “sabios” (“wise men”) as“diviners,” opposing them to European rationalism; and “testimonias”(“testimonies”) as “written records,” subtly privileging literary over oraltraditions. The most recurrent term in the Spanish text, “memoria,” a crucialfaculty for the oral transmission of culture, is translated variously as “history”and “knowledge of the past,” as well as “memory.” In the following sentence,the translation has edited the Spanish, diminishing the indigenous culture bysimplifying the syntax and deleting another key term, “mitos” (“myths”):Los mitos y leyendas, la tradición oral y el gran conjunto deinscripciones perpetuaron la memoria de tales aconteceres.2

INTRODUCTIONThe memory of these events lives on in the thousands of inscriptionsand the legends of oral tradition.As Mason observed, we do not need to attribute a deliberate intention tothe translator in order to pe.rceive the skewed representation in thetranslation (Mason 1994:33). The ideological slanting against theindigenous population is inscribed in specific discursive choices whichwork both to create a subordinate identity and to make it seem natural orobvious—as it must have seemed to the translator and the magazineeditors. Or perhaps they were guided by a translation strategy that prizesthe utmost clarity, easy readability, so that the most familiar languageturned out to be the most prejudicial, but unconsciously so. What doesseem obvious is that the thinking about translation at UNESCO—aninstitution that is utterly dependent on translating and interpreting for itsoperation—is not incisive enough to vet a translated text that compromisesits basic principles and goals.Despite the magnitude of this particular example, the exposures thattranslation enables here will seek to avoid the sensationalism inherent in anysimple muckraking. I want instead to initiate a productive rethinking of thequestioned values and institutions, although through their anxious relationshipswith translation. I want to explore the ways in which translation redefinesauthorship in literature and in law, creates identities receptive to culturaldifference, requires different approaches to teaching literature and to doingphilosophy, and recommends new policies for publishers and corporations. Inthe process translation will be conceived anew on the basis of detailed casestudies, resulting in a set of theoretical concepts that carry practicalconsequences.Specific cases, past and present, are invaluable for the light they shed not onlyon the current marginality of translation, but on the meanings and functions itcan support if greater attention were paid to its diverse motives and effects.Translations are produced for many reasons, literary and commercial, pedagogicaland technical, propagandistic and diplomatic. Yet no translator or institutionalinitiator of a translation can hope to control or even be aware of everycondition of its production. And no agent of a translation can hope to anticipateits every consequence, the uses to which it is put, the interests served, the valuesit comes to convey. Nonetheless, it is these conditions and consequences thatoffer the most compelling reasons for discriminating among the stakes involvedin translating and reading translations.My chapters present a series of cultural studies that aim to advance currentthinking about translation. They move between several different languages,cultures, periods, disciplines, and institutions in an effort to describe and evaluatethe social effects of translated texts, to expand the possibilities for translationprojects, to establish translation more firmly as an area of research in the academy,and to win for translators greater cultural authority and a more favorable legal3

INTRODUCTIONstatus, especially (although not exclusively) in the United States and the UnitedKingdom.The authority I wish to achieve for translators and translations isn’t amere aggrandizement. It doesn’t trade on the cultural prestige nowenjoyed by original authors and compositions—novelists, say, or poets—or on the official nature of the institutions in which their prestige ismaintained. On the contrary, because translating is intercultural, itinvolves a distinct kind of authorship, secondary to the foreign text andin the service of different communities, foreign as well as domestic. Theonly authority that translation can expect depends on its remainingderivative, distinguishable from the original compositions that it tries tocommunicate, and collective, remaining open to the other agents whoinfluence it, especially domestic readerships. Hence, the only prestige thata translator can gain comes from practicing translation, not as a form ofpersonal expression, but as a collaboration between divergent groups,motivated by an acknowledgement of the linguistic and culturaldifferences that translation necessarily rewrites and reorders. Translating,like any writing, is usually practiced in solitary conditions. But it linksmultitudes, often in the most unexpected groupings.The focus on the marginality of translation is strategic. It assumes that astudy of the periphery in any culture can illuminate and ultimately revisethe center. Yet in the case of translation, of cross-cultural exchange, theperipheries are multiple, domestic and foreign at once. They take the formof marginal cultures, so defined by their position in national or globalframeworks, situated in relation to hegemonic languages, a standard dialectat home and English generally, still the most translated languageworldwide. The overriding assumption of this book is perhaps the greatestscandal of translation: asymmetries, inequities, relations of domination anddependence exist in every act of translating, of putting the translated inthe service of the translating culture. Translators are complicit in theinstitutional exploitation of foreign texts and cultures. But there have alsobeen translators who acted just as dubiously on their own, not in theemploy of any bureaucracy.Between 1967 and 1972, the American translator Norman Thomas diGiovanni worked closely with the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges,publishing several English-language volumes of Borges’s fiction and poetry,acting as his literary agent, helping him gain the canonical status he enjoystoday (Rostagno 1997:117–120). Yet di Giovanni’s editing and translatingaggressively revised the Spanish texts to increase their accessibility to anAmerican readership: he assimilated them to American stylistic canons,adhering to current standard usage, smoothing out the abrupt transitions inBorges’s prose, avoiding abstractions in favor of concrete diction, evencorrecting quotations that the writer made from memory (Howard 1997).Of his work with Borges, di Giovanni said: “I liken it to cleaning a4

INTRODUCTIONpainting: you could see the bright colors and the sharp outlinesunderneath where you couldn’t before” (ibid.: 49). Di Giovanni felt hewas advocating a writerly approach to translation, opposed to “professorsand pseudoscholars who look at writing through microscopes, placing toomuch emphasis on single words and abstractions” (ibid.: 44). But he washimself enforcing a discursive regime that sought to repress the literarypeculiarities of Borges’s innovative writing, practicing an antiintellectualismin the translation of a most intellectual writer. After fouryears Borges abruptly ended their collaboration.Authors have in turn exploited translators, but few have publiclydenounced the translations of their writing. The Czech novelist MilanKundera seems unique not only in scrutinizing and correcting the foreignlanguageversions of his books, but in asserting his preferred translationpractice in wittily pointed essays and prefaces. The most notorious caseinvolves the different English versions of his novel The Joke (1967). The firstin 1969 appalled Kundera because it edited, excised, and rearrangedchapters; the second in 1982 was “unacceptable” because he judged it “notmy text,” a “translation-adaptation (adaptation to the taste of the time andof the country for which it is intended, to the taste, in the final analysis, ofthe translator)” (Kundera 1992: x).Kundera is rightly suspicious of domesticating translations that assimilateforeign literary texts too forcefully to dominant values at home, erasing thesense of foreignnness that was likely to have invited translation in the firstplace (see Kundera 1988:129–130). Yet how can any foreignness beregistered in a translation except through another language—i.e., throughthe taste of another time and country? Kundera’s thinking abouttranslating is remarkably naive for a writer so finely attuned to stylisticeffects. He assumes that the meaning of the foreign text can avoid changein translation, that the foreign writer’s intention can travel unadulteratedacross a linguistic and cultural divide. A translation always communicatesan interpretation, a foreign text that is partial and altered, supplementedwith features peculiar to the translating language, no longer inscrutablyforeign but made comprehensible in a distinctively domestic style.Translations, in other words, inevitably perform a work of domestication.Those that work best, the most powerful in recreating cultural values andthe most responsible in accounting for that power, usually engage readersin domestic terms that have been defamiliarized to some extent, madefascinating by a revisionary encounter with a foreign text.Kundera, in effect, wishes to control the interpretations put forward byFrench and English translators—but on the basis of the author’s sheerdisagreement with them. That a translation was well received in French orEnglish, important for achieving an international readership for the author,doesn’t matter to Kundera (whose own writing has acquired considerablecultural and economic capital through translations). He wishes only to evaluate5

INTRODUCTIONthe relationship between the translation and the foreign text as if his access tothe latter were direct and unmediated. With Kafka, he criticizes the French useof “marcher” (“walk”) to translate “gehen” (“go, walk”) because the resultingeffect “is surely not what Kafka wanted here” (Kundera 1995:105). But atranslation can’t give what a foreign writer would want if he were alive andwriting in the translating language and culture. What Kafka would write inFrench can be no more than another French interpretation, not a renderingmore faithful or adequate to the German text. The fact that the author is theinterpreter doesn’t make the interpretation unmediated by target-languagevalues.Kundera doesn’t want to recognize the linguistic and cultural differencesthat a translation must negotiate; he rather wants to preside over them byselecting the ones he most prefers. Thus, he produced a third English versionof his novel The Joke, which he cobbled together not just from his ownEnglish and French renderings, but also from the “many fine solutions” andthe “great many faithful renderings and good formulations” in the previoustranslations (Kundera 1992: x). Whether the translators consented to Kundera’shandling of their work remains unclear; the title page of his revision does notlist their names.Copyright law permits Kundera to get away with his questionable uses oftranslation by giving him an exclusive right in works derived from his. Thelaw underwrites his view that the author should be the sole arbiter of allinterpretations of his writing. And that turns out to mean that he can bearbitrary as well. Kundera’s “definitive” English version of The Joke actuallyrevises the 1967 Czech text: it omits more than fifty passages, making thenovel more intelligible to the Anglo-American reader, removing references toCzech history but also altering characters (Stanger 1997). Kundera’s prefacepassed silently over these revisions. In fact, he concluded his version with themisleading notation, “completed December 5, 1965,” as if he had merelytranslated the unabridged original text. When the author is the translator,apparently, he is not above the domestications that he attacked in the previousEnglish versions.Translation clearly raises ethical questions that have yet to be sorted out. Themere identification of a translation scandal is an act of judgment: here itpresupposes an ethics that recognizes and seeks to remedy the asymmetries intranslating, a theory of good and bad methods for practicing and studyingtranslation. And the ethics at issue must be theorized as contingent, an idealgrounded in the specific cultural situations in which foreign texts are chosenand translated or in which translations and the act of translating are made theobjects of research. I articulate these ethical responsibilities first in terms of myown work, beginning with a discussion of the choices I confront as anAmerican translator of literary texts. The issue of a translation ethics is addressedsubsequently in other pertinent contexts, particularly when the power oftranslation to form identities and qualify agents is examined. The ethical stance I6

INTRODUCTIONadvocate urges that translations be written, read, and evaluated with greaterrespect for linguistic and cultural differences.Insofar as translation involves an intercultural collaboration, my aim extendsto the global reach of my topic: to address translators and users of translationsthroughout the world, but with an attentiveness to their different locationsthat influences the terms of address. The more detailed the case studies, themore historically and locally specified, the more deeply they interrogate andshape the theoretical concepts derived from them. This critical give-and-takeseems essential for studying the many dimensions of cross-cultural exchange.For translation looms large among the cultural practices that at once join andseparate us.7

1HETEROGENEITYAlthough the growth of the discipline called “translation studies” has beendescribed as “a success story of the 1980s” (Bassnett and Lefevere 1992: xi),the study of the history and theory of translation remains a backwater in theacademy. Among the English-speaking countries, this is perhaps most true ofthe United States, where only a handful of graduate programs in translatortraining and translation research have been instituted, and foreign-languagedepartments continue to assign greater priority to the study of literature(literary history, theory, and criticism) than to translating, whether literary ortechnical (see Park 1993). Yet elsewhere as well, despite the recentproliferation of centers and programs throughout the world (see Caminadeand Pym 1995), translation studies can only be described as emergent, notquite a discipline in its own right, more an interdiscipline that straddles arange of fields depending on its particular institutional setting: linguistics,foreign languages, comparative literature, anthropology, among others.This fragmentation might suggest that translation research is pursued witha great deal of scholarly openness and resistance against rigidlycompartmentalized thinking. But it has produced just the opposite effect.Indeed, translation hasn’t become an academic success because it is beset bya fragmentary array of theories, methodologies, and pedagogies, which, farfrom being commensurate, still submit to the institutional compartments ofintellectual labor (now adjusted to admit translation). The prevalentapproaches can be divided—loosely but without too much conceptualviolence—into a linguistics-based orientation, aiming to construct anempirical science, and an aesthetics-based orientation that emphasizes thecultural and political values informing translation practice and research (seeBaker 1996; cf. Robyns 1994:424–425).This theoretical division is reflected, for example, in Routledge’s recentpublishing in translation studies. In the early 1990s, these books werepublished in two different areas, each with its own commissioning editor,catalogue, and audience: “linguistics and language studies” and “literary andcultural studies.” The potential market seemed so divided that Routledgecut back its translation studies series (whose general editors then left toinitiate a similar series with Multilingual Matters Ltd). Currently, Routledge8

HETEROGENEITYshrewdly aims to counter the fragmentation of the field by assigning thecommissioning responsibilities to the linguistics editor, who is pursuingmore interdisciplinary projects. Yet this international publisher, at onceacademic and commercial, remains unique. In English, and no doubt inother languages, translation studies tend to be published by small presses,whether trade or university, for a limited, primarily academic readership,with most sales made to research libraries. Splintered into narrowconstituencies by disciplinary boundaries, translation is hardly starting newtrends in scholarly publishing or setting agendas in scholarly debate.This current predicament embarrasses translation studies by suggestingthat it is suffering, to some extent, from a self-inflicted marginality. Withrare exceptions, scholars have been reluctant to negotiate areas ofagreement and to engage more deeply with the cultural, political, andinstitutional problems posed by translation (for an exception see Hatimand Mason 1997). And so a critical assessment of the competing theoreticalorientations, an account of their advances and limitations, seems in order.As a translator and student of translation, I can evaluate them only as aninterested party, one who has found cultural studies a most productiveapproach, but who remains unwilling to abandon the archive and thecollection of empirical data (how could studies be cultural without them?).My main interest in the theories lies in their impact on themethodological fragmentation that characterizes translation research andkeeps translation in the margins of cultural discourse, both in and out ofthe academy. The question that most concerns me is whether theorists arecapable of bringing translation to the attention of a larger audience—larger, that is, than the relatively limited ones to which the competingtheories seem addressed. This question of audience in fact guides my owntheory and practice of translation, which are premised on the irreducibleheterogeneity of linguistic and cultural situations. To assess the currentstate of the discipline, then, and to make intelligible my assessment, I mustbegin with a manifesto of sorts, a statement of why and how I translate.Writing a minor literatureAs an American translator of literary texts I devise and execute my projects witha distinctive set of theoretical assumptions about language and textuality. Perhapsthe most crucial is that language is never simply an instrument ofcommunication employed by an individual according to a system of rules—evenif communication is undoubtedly among the functions that language canperform. Following Deleuze and Guattari (1987), I rather see language as acollective force, an assemblage of forms that constitute a semiotic regime.Circulating among diverse cultural constituencies and social institutions, theseforms are positioned hierarchically, with the standard dialect in dominance but9

HETEROGENEITYsubject to constant variation from regional or group dialects, jargons, clichés andslogans, stylistic innovations, nonce words, and the sheer accumulation ofprevious uses. Any language use is thus a site of power relationships because alanguage, at any historical moment, is a specific conjuncture of a major formholding sway over minor variables. Lecercle (1990) calls them the “remainder.”The linguistic variations released by the remainder do not merely exceed anycommunicative act, but frustrate any effort to formulate systematic rules. Theremainder subverts the major form by revealing it to be socially and historicallysituated, by staging “the return within language of the contradictions andstruggles that make up the social” and by containing as well “the anticipation offuture ones” (Lecercle 1990:182).A literary text, then, can never simply express the author’s intendedmeaning in a personal style. It rather puts to work collective forms in whichthe author may indeed have a psychological investment, but which by theirvery nature depersonalize and destabilize meaning. Although literature canbe defined as writing created especially to release the remainder, it is thestylistically innovative text that makes the most striking intervention into alinguistic conjuncture by exposing the contradictory conditions of thestandard dialect, the literary canon, the dominant culture, the majorlanguage. Because ordinary language is always a multiplicity of past andpresent forms, a “diachrony-within-synchrony” (Lecercle 1990:201–208), atext can be no more than “a synchronic unity of structurally contradictoryor heterogeneous elements, generic patterns and discourses” (Jameson1981:141). Certain literary texts increase this radical heterogeneity bysubmitting the major language to constant variation, forcing it to becomeminor, delegitimizing, deterritorializing, alienating it. For Deleuze andGuattari such texts compose a minor literature, whose “authors areforeigners in their own tongue” (1987:105). In releasing the remainder, aminor literature indicates where the major language is foreign to itself.It is this evocation of the foreign that attracts me to minor literatures in mytranslation projects. I prefer to translate foreign texts that possess minority statusin their cultures, a marginal position in their native canons—or that, intranslation, can be useful in minoritizing the standard dialect and dominantcultural forms in American English. This preference stems partly from a politicalagenda that is broadly democratic: an opposition to the global hegemony ofEnglish. The economic and political ascendancy of the United States hasreduced foreign languages and cultures to minorities in relation to its languageand culture. English is the most translated language worldwide, but one of theleast translated into (Venuti 1995a: 12–14), a situation that identifies translatingas a potential site of variation.To shake the regime of English, a translator must be strategic both inselecting foreign texts and in developing discourses to translate them. Foreigntexts can be chosen to redress patterns of unequal cultural exchange and torestore foreign literatures excluded by the standard dialect, by literary canons,10

HETEROGENEITYor by ethnic stereotypes in the United States (or in the other major Englishspeakingcountry, the United Kingdom). At the same time, translationdiscourses can be developed to exploit the multiplicity and polychrony ofAmerican English, “conquer[ing] the major language in order to delineate init as yet unknown minor languages” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987:105). Foreigntexts that are stylistically innovative invite the English-language translator tocreate sociolects striated with various dialects, registers and styles, inventing acollective assemblage that questions the seeming unity of standard English. Theaim of minoritizing translation is “never to acquire the majority,” never toerect a new standard or to establish a new canon, but rather to promotecultural innovation as well as the understanding of cultural difference byproliferating the variables within English: “the minority is the becoming ofeverybody” (ibid.: 106, 105).My preference for minoritizing translation also issues from an ethical stancethat recognizes the asymmetrical relations in any translation project. Translatingcan never simply be communication between equals because it is fundamentallyethnocentric. Most literary projects are initiated in the domestic culture, where aforeign text is selected to satisfy different tastes from those that motivated itscomposition and reception in its native culture. And the very function oftranslating is assimilation, the inscription of a foreign text with domesticintelligibilities and interests. I follow Berman (1992:4–5; cf. his revision in1995:93–94) in suspecting any literary translation that mystifies this inevitabledomestication as an untroubled communicative act. Good translation isdemystifying: it manifests in its own language the foreignness of the foreign text(Berman 1985:89).This manifestation can occur through the selection of a text whose formand theme deviate from domestic literary canons. But its most decisiveoccurrence depends on introducing variations that alienate the domesticlanguage and, since they are domestic, reveal the translation to be in fact atranslation, distinct from the text it replaces. Good translation is minoritizing:it releases the remainder by cultivating a heterogeneous discourse, opening upthe standard dialect and literary canons to what is foreign to themselves, to thesubstandard and the marginal. This does not mean conceiving of a minorlanguage as merely a dialect, which might wind up regionalizing orghettoizing the foreign text, identifying it too narrowly with a specific culturalconstituency—even though certain foreign texts and domestic conjuncturesmight well call for a narrow social focus (e.g. Québec during the 1960s and1970s, when canonical European drama was translated into joual, theworkingclass dialect, to create a national Québecois theater: see Brisset 1990).The point is rather to use a number of minority elements whereby “oneinvents a specific, unforeseen, autonomous becoming” (Deleuze and Guattari1987:106). This translation ethics does not so much prevent the assimilation ofthe foreign text as aim to signify the autonomous existence of that textbehind (yet by means of) the assimilative process of the translation.11

HETEROGENEITYInsofar as minoritizing translation relies on discursive hetereogeneity, itpursues an experimentalism that would seem to narrow its audience andcontradict the democratic agenda I have sketched. Experimental formdemands a high aesthetic mode of appreciation, the critical detachment andeducated competence associated with the cultural elite, whereas thecommunicative function of language is emphasized by the popular aesthetic,which demands that literary form be not only immediately intelligible,needing no special cultural expertise, but also transparent, sufficientlyrealistic to invite vicarious participation (Bourdieu 1984:4–5, 32–33; cf.Cawelti 1976, Radway 1984, Dudovitz 1990).Yet translation that takes a popular approach to the foreign text isn’tnecessarily democratic. The popular aesthetic requires fluent translations thatproduce the illusory effect of transparency, and this means adhering to thecurrent standard dialect while avoiding any dialect, register, or style that callsattention to words as words and therefore preempts the reader’sidentification. As a result, fluent translation may enable a foreign text toengage a mass readership, even a text from an excluded foreign literature,and thereby initiate a significant canon reformation. But such a translationsimultaneously reinforces the major language and its many other linguisticand cultural exclusions while masking the inscription of domestic values.Fluency is assimilationist, presenting to domestic readers a realisticrepresentation inflected with their own codes and ideologies as if it were animmediate encounter with a foreign text and culture.The heterogeneous discourse of minoritizing translation resists thisassimilationist ethic by signifying the linguistic and cultural differences ofthe text—within the major language. The heterogeneity needn’t be soalienating as to frustrate a popular approach completely; if the remainder isreleased at significant points in a translation that is generally readable, thereader’s participation will be disrupted only momentarily. Moreover, astrategic use of minority elements can remain intelligible to a wide range ofreaders and so increase the possibility that the translation will cross theboundaries between cultural constituencies, even if it comes to signifydifferent meanings in different groups. A minoritizing translator can draw onthe conventionalized language of popular culture, “the patter of comedians,of radio announcers, of disc jockeys” (Lecercle 1988:37), to render a foreigntext that might be regarded as elite literature in a seamlessly fluenttranslation. This strategy would address both popular and elite readerships bydefamiliarizing the domestic mass media as well as the domestic canon forthe foreign literature. Minoritizing translation can thus be considered anintervention into the contemporary public sphere, in which electronic formsof communication driven by economic interest have fragmented culturalconsumption and debate. If “the public is split apart into minorities ofspecialists who put their reason to use non-publicly and the great mass ofconsumers whose receptiveness is public but uncritical” (Habermas12

HETEROGENEITY1989:175), then translating should seek to invent a minor language that cutsacross cultural divisions and hierarchies. The goal is ultimately to alterreading patterns, compelling a not unpleasurable recognition of translationamong constituencies who, while possessing different cultural values,nonetheless share a long-standing unwillingness to recognize it.A minoritizing projectI was able to explore and test these theoretical assumptions in recenttranslations involving the nineteenth-century Italian writer I.U. Tarchetti(1839–69). From the start the attraction was his minority status, both in hisown time and now. A member of a Milanese bohemian subculture calledthe “scapigliatura” (from “scapigliato,” meaning “dishevelled”), Tarchettisought to unsettle the standard Tuscan dialect by using it to write inmarginal literary genres: whereas the dominant fictional discourse in Italywas the sentimental realism of Alessandro Manzoni’s historical novel, Ipromessi sposi (The Betrothed), Tarchetti favored the Gothic tale and theexperimental realism of French novelists like Flaubert and Zola (Venuti1995a: 160–161). The Italian standards against which Tarchetti revoltedwere not just linguistic and literary, but moral and political as well:whereas Manzoni posited a Christian providentialism, recommendingconjugal love and resigned submission before the status quo, Tarchettiaimed to shock the Italian bourgeoisie, rejecting good sense and decencyto explore dream and insanity, violence and aberrant sexuality, floutingsocial convention and imagining fantastic worlds where social inequity wasexposed and challenged. He was admired by his contemporaries and, amidthe cultural nationalism that characterized newly unified Italy, was soonadmitted to the canon of the national literature. Yet even if canonical hehas remained a minor figure: he receives abbreviated, sometimes dismissivetreatment in the standard manuals of literary history, and his work fails toresurface in the most provocative debates in Italian writing today.A translation project involving Tarchetti, I realized, would have a minoritizingimpact in English. His writing was capable of unsettling reigning domesticvalues by moving between cultural constituencies. In Fantastic Tales (1992) Ichose to translate a selection of his work in the Gothic, a genre that has bothelite and popular traditions. Initially a middlebrow literature in Britain (AnnRadcliffe), the Gothic was adopted by many canonical writers (E.T.A.Hoffmann, Edgar Allan Poe, Théophile Gautier) and has since under-gonevarious revivals, some satisfying a highbrow interest in formal refinement(Eudora Welty, Patrick McGrath), others offering the popular pleasure ofsympathetic identification (Anne Rice, Stephen King). Importing Tarchettiwould cast these traditions and trends in a new light. It would also challenge thecanon of nineteenth-century Italian fiction in English, long dominated by13