The Translator’s Invisibility

Excerpts from Ramon Guthrie’s poetry and translations, used by permission of Dartmouth College. Eugenio Montale’s poem, “Mottetti VI,” is reprinted by permission from Tutte le poesie edited by Giorgio Zampa, copyright © 1984 by Arnoldo Mondadori Editore SpA, Milano.

Excerpts from the works of Ezra Pound: The ABC of Reading, all rights reserved; Literary Essays, copyright © 1918, 1920, 1935 by Ezra Pound; The Letters of Ezra Pound 1907–1941, copyright © 1950 by Ezra Pound; Selected Poems, copyright © 1920, 1934, 1937 by Ezra Pound; The Spirit of Romance, copyright © 1968 by Ezra Pound; Translations, copyright © 1954, 1963 by Ezra Pound. Used by permission of New Directions Publishing Corporation and Faber & Faber Ltd. Previously unpublished material by Ezra Pound, copyright © 1983 and 1995 by the Trustees of the Ezra Pound Literary Property Trust; used by permission of New Directions Publishing Corporation and Faber & Faber Ltd, agents.

The tables, “U.S. Book Exports, 1990,” “U.S. Book Exports to Major Countries, 1989–1990,” and “World Translation Publications: From Selected Languages, 1982–1984.” Reprinted (as Tables 1 and 2) from the {xii} 5 July 1991 issue of Publishers Weekly, published by Cahners Publishing Company, a division of Reed Publishing USA. Copyright © 1991 by Reed Publishing USA.

The Best Seller List for Fiction from The New York Times Book Review, 9 July 1967, copyright © 1967 by The New York Times Company. Reprinted by permission.

Excerpts from the agreement between myself and Farrar, Straus & Giroux for the translation of Delirium by Barbara Alberti, used by permission of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Inc.

Grateful acknowledgement is made to the following journals, where some of this material appeared in earlier versions: Criticism, Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies, SubStance, Talisman: A Journal of Contemporary Poetry and Poetics, Textual Practice, To: A Journal of Poetry, Prose, and the Visual Arts, and TTR Traduction, Terminologie, Rédaction: Etudes sur le texte et ses transformations. An earlier version of chapter 4 appeared in my anthology, Rethinking Translation: Discourse, Subjectivity, Ideology (Routledge, 1992). My work was supported in part by a Research and Study Leave, a Summer Research Fellowship, and a Grant in Aid from Temple University. My thanks to Nadia Kravchenko, for expertly preparing the typescript and computer disks, and to Don Hartman, for assisting in the production process.

The graphs displaying patterns in translation publishing (Figures 1 and 2) were prepared by Chris Behnam of Key Computer Services, New York City.

All unattributed translations in the following pages are mine.

Come la sposa di ogni uomo non si sottrae a una teoria del tradurre (Milo De Angelis), I am reduced to an inadequate expression of my gratitude to Lindsay Davies, who has taught me much about English, and much about the foreign in translation.

L.V.

New York City

January 1994

Chapter 1. Invisibility

I see translation as the attempt to produce a text so transparent that it does not seem to be translated. A good translation is like a pane of glass. You only notice that it’s there when there are little imperfections— scratches, bubbles. Ideally, there shouldn’t be any. It should never call attention to itself.

Norman Shapiro

I