ABSTRACT
Iginio Ugo Tarchetti belonged to the Milanese movement known as the scapigliatura, a loosely associated group of artists, composers, and writers who contested bourgeois values in their bohemianism and in their formal innovations. Methods of cultural appropriation like translation would clearly be useful to Tarchetti’s project of putting the major language to minor uses. Indeed, his most intensive utilization of the standard dialect occurs in his translation of a foreign fantastic narrative, an English Gothic tale written by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. The political significance of Tarchetti’s translation, however, is complicated by the fact that it is a plagiarism of the English text. Shelley’s ‘The Mortal Immortal’ is a first-person narrative in which an assistant to the sixteenth-century alchemist Cornelius Agrippa laments drinking the elixir of immortality. Tarchetti’s translation sets up two discontinuous relationships, one with Shelley’s tale, the other with Italian culture, which can best be understood with Philip Lewis’ concept of abusive fidelity.
