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Visibility now: Historicizing foreign

presences in translation
a
A.E.B. Coldiron
a
Florida State University, Tallahassee, and The Folger
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 Translation Studies,
Vol. 5, No. 2, 2012, 189
200

Visibility now: Historicizing foreign presences in translation

A.E.B. Coldiron*

Florida State University, Tallahassee, and The Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington DC,
USA
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Visibility is proposed in this article as an inverse corollary to Venuti’s notion of

invisibility and a site of methodological interest for translation history. By
historicizing the visibility of translators and of other foreign elements in
translations and paratexts, we can trace broader cultural-aesthetic agendas
related to translation as they change over time. This essay demonstrates such
changes in medieval and Renaissance translations. Impeding the practice and
study of visibility have been ideologies strongly favoring invisibility, such as those
ultimately derived from the Western discipline’s founding myth of Babel, or from
post-Romantic notions of literary value. But the visibility of the foreign has
been
and is, in contemporary, experimental and digital translations
a potential
aesthetic resource, a locus of friction and interest, and an index to historically
changing attitudes to alterity.
Keywords: visibility in translation; medieval translation; Renaissance translation;
contemporary translation; Philip Sidney

In one sense, the history of translation records efforts to mediate alterity, to make
alien cultures comprehensible to one another. The visibility or invisibility of such
mediating efforts turns out to matter a good deal to literary history; the present essay
has several aims regarding visible (and invisible) translation. The first aim is to re-
examine Lawrence Venuti’s key notion of The Translator’s Invisibility (1995/2008),
extending this major concept both back into the medieval and early modern periods
and forward, briefly, into our own moment and its digital future. In re-historicizing
invisibility, we find that its implied corollary, or mirror notion, visibility, has also
frequently served the values of particular literary-historical moments. Thus a second
aim is to emphasize invisibility’s alter idem, visibility, and its uses. Another aim here
is to recover for translation studies some generative potentials of visibility even
beyond the ‘‘Call to Action’’ in Venuti’s final chapter. If we expand Venuti’s powerful
concept to include more generally the in/visibilities of all foreign elements in a text, as
his own hermeneutic practice has tended to do, then the visibly foreign elements in
translations may appear not only as sites of resistance that bring to light the too-
often suppressed labor and art of translators, but also as aesthetic successes of
collaborative intertextuality, and perhaps even as ethical models for encountering
alterity.1
Questions of visibility and invisibility are on some level questions of how to
encounter, use and value things foreign. Where invisibility of foreign elements and
mediating translators points to devaluations of the foreign or at least to problems in

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 190 A.E.B. Coldiron

valuing and placing the foreign, visibility (when historicized and explicated) points
to, if not solutions, then certain alternative potentials for valuing the foreign. Venuti’s
call for translations that resist fluency or announce the translator’s arts and labor

and the call for a study of translation that does not make invisibility the benchmark
of a translation’s success
can also be understood as a call to welcome foreign
presences in a text. In other words, just as Ricœur advocated intercultural relations
grounded in an ethic of hospitality (2010), we may wish to ground the intertextual
relations of translation in an ethic of welcome. I would also wish to historicize
visibility, and the welcome implicit in it, and to understand precisely how the visibly
foreign elements worked and for what they were valued in particular times and
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places. We have not exhausted the implications of Venuti’s rich ideas, in other words,
even some 17 years after the initial publication of The Translator’s Invisibility. I hope
in this essay to extend our field’s ongoing conversation about Venuti’s work so as to
stress historicized methods that can link particular habits of translation to broad
changes in cultural agendas over time. Less explicitly, the essay suggests an ethical
dimension of highly visible translations: sometimes to reveal, to acknowledge and to
honor our differences, or at very least to show how the foreign has been used (or
abused) and valued (or devalued) over time.

The translator’s visibility and literary values before 1640

Invisibility, as Venuti explains, has been fetishized among most evaluators and critics
of translation in the Western world as a summum bonum since Dryden. The best
translations have been thought to be the seamless ones, the ‘‘fluent’’ ones, the
invisible ones: that is, those that are comfortable, native, ‘‘natural’’. They do not seem
like translations. Their translators remain silent, hiding the texts’ foreignness. Venuti
is surely right that the stress on fluency and the demand for the invisibility of the
translator have devalued and elided the labor of individual translators as well as the
presence of the foreign in whole canons of literature. However, to re-examine and
re-historicize Venuti’s key notion of invisibility (and its sibling, visibility) is to
discover that these notions
and thus, the agencies of the translator and the presence
of the foreign
meant very different things in medieval and early modern literary
translation than they did in the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the
corpora for which Venuti’s invisibility concept was first developed. Like other textual
signs, marks of visibility in translation look rather different when reconsidered in
terms of medieval theories of authorship and textuality, and different still when seen
in terms of early modern theories of imitatio and aemulatio (not to mention in the
typical New Historicist contexts of trade, travel or social customs as backgrounds to
literary practice). The visible marks of the foreign have had entirely different valences
and values in prior ages.
We can identify some fairly specific literary-historical reasons for a shift in the
value of visibility in translation. Visibility in medieval translations was part of a
complicated, powerful textual system designed to guarantee and to display a text’s
auctoritas. Auctoritas is usually translated as ‘‘authority’’, but in medieval scribal
culture it meant much more. The ultimate ‘‘authorship’’ of the world was thought to
be God’s, and the authorship of texts thus borrowed, at least figuratively, a god-like
creative function as well as moral and intellectual authority. But as A.J. Minnis
(1984) and others after him have shown, the textual agencies displayed in medieval
 Translation Studies 191

manuscripts were not singular and godlike; instead, textual production was radically
collaborative and involved many roles and functions, from those who scraped the
skins to those who translated words, from compilatores to illuminators. Specific roles
and hierarchies of production came to be established and were announced (and
perpetuated) in certain metatextual and paratextual sites in the manuscripts. The
articulation of these roles and hierarchies guaranteed, in some sense, the validity and
value of the work and the reliability of any given text or copy of the work. For
instance, the accessus ad auctores was essentially an opening statement about the
authors, glossators, commentators, scribes and others in the line of textual
production and transmission for the given work and the particular copy of it
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(Sanford 1934; Nardi 1961; Suerbaum 1998; Gilbert-Santamarı́a 2005, 412
13). An

articulated genealogy and hierarchy of production warranted the value and validity
of the text. Invisibility, in short, would have worked directly against a chief goal for
medieval texts, the establishment of auctoritas.
Within this general and well-motivated visibility of textual producers, medieval
texts developed certain conventions of expression for the translator’s visibility. Along
with the accessus ad auctores, the mention of translators in incipits, explicits, envois
and asides, and the common use of exegetical glosses and apparatus in certain genres
all tended to display the translator’s role in transmitting the work, often enough in
the first person. Specific translators’ topoi became conventional: translators usually
claimed their humble servitude and fidelity to the work and to its auctor. They
claimed their care for translating each word and/or for reproducing the sense and
intention of author, even if individual words could not be precisely the same.
(Sometimes this issue in linguistic difference was blamed on our post-Babel
fallenness.) But Rita Copeland and scholars following her Rhetoric, Hermeneutics,
and Translation in the Middle Ages have carefully demonstrated how often these
translators’ claims covered their strong interventions and interpretations (among
many others, Copeland 1991, 2
8, 37
8, 62, 87
126, 179
202, 221
9; Franco 2009;
Yucesoy 2009). Likewise, translators conventionally claimed humility and modesty
even when, in the case of famous translators or authors, this was clearly
disingenuous. Medieval translators may have been cagey, but they were not invisible

indeed they were highly visible in specific ways, with claims and attitudes intended
to insure the validity of the present text, the venerability of the antecedent work, and
its truth value overall. So in medieval texts, visibility, not invisibility, was the
fetishized thing, precisely the opposite case of what Venuti finds in the past two
centuries’ demands for ‘‘smooth’’, invisible translations that efface the labor and art
of the translator as well as the foreignness of the work. This is not to say that
medieval translators had it any better: translators, like compilatores, and perhaps a
little better than scriptores, were always lower in the textual-production food chain
than auctores. Still, the need for the translator’s visible work was never in doubt in
medieval translation: in a literary system committed to preservation, continuity,
hierarchy, authority and venerability, the translator’s visibility was a crucial mark of
value.
After printing technology and other changes combined to alter irrevocably the
landscapes of both sociopolitical and textual authority, different values obtained,
entailing shifts in the meaning of visibility and invisibility in translations. While we
can still find translators’ fidelity and humility topoi in early modern paratexts, as the
age of imitatio and sprezzatura unfolds, two concomitant ideas develop: first, that
 192 A.E.B. Coldiron

changes rung by a new author on an old work add value; and second, that graceful
ease in a difficult performance adds value. The first idea is part of a complex of
changes born in an educational system built on translation practice (Ascham 1570;
Miller 1963), and it is related to the great aesthetic debates on art and nature that
seized the Renaissance imagination (Frye 1992; Tayler 1995; Orgel 1996, 46
7, 172).
These are further connected to the paragone or sister-arts debates that fostered
aesthetic comparison, competition, transformation and contrastive juxtaposition (da
Vinci c. 1492; Farago 1992; Campo 1998).2 At the same time, the second value, that
Italian idea of sprezzatura, encouraged artists, especially those seeking court
patronage, to accomplish difficult things with an apparent ease and gracefulness
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(Castiglione 1528; Berger 2000; Dobranski 2010). The high value placed on
sprezzatura seems to have further encouraged writers, including translators, to reveal
the changes they were ringing on old texts and to display the ways they were
renovating the fashionable classical past or the trendy continental present. And their
innovations had to be graceful: visible yet smooth. These values, like the medieval
cluster of values around auctoritas, held sway outside translation praxis as well. Well-
known examples would be wittily recusatory poems like Du Bellay’s ‘‘J’ai oublié l’art
de pétrarquiser’’ [I’ve forgotten the art of Petrarchizing] or some of Sidney’s sonnets
on poetry
poems that deny using the very poetic resources on which they draw.
These general ideas at work in sixteenth-century literary culture grounded the
shift in the meaning and value of invisibility/visibility. On a spectrum of values, we
might think to align invisibility with sprezzatura (smoothness and ease) and visibility
with imitatio (the revealed difference that highlights the translator’s actions). But no
credit can be awarded for sprezzatura without some sight of the underlying
difficulties surmounted. Thus visibility, valued in the medieval scriptorium for its
guarantees of auctoritas, became revalued in the early modern world for its
guarantees of a pleasing innovation that showed itself engaged with the literary
past. Ideally, of course, a translator’s visibility would have been graceful, not labored;
likewise, one’s imitation, to be recognizable, had to be enough like a known and
valued prior text for its own differences to be acknowledged. Any given early modern
translation will locate itself somewhere on these axes
an axis of sprezzatura and an
axis of imitatio (to include aemulatio). Both of these emergent literary values
required a paradoxical visible-masking. In England, for instance, despite the nation-
forming power of the ‘‘Englishing’’ imperative expressed by so many translators,
invisibility could not have been the only or the highest early modern literary-aesthetic
value.
As we would expect in such a context, the paratextual sites of translators’
visibility expanded and flourished: the ‘‘translator to the reader’’ developed its own
conventions in print. Old fidelity topoi lingered: ‘‘this, reader, is a faithful translation
of the worthy foreign author’’, such prefaces often say, more or less. But translators’
declarations increasingly conformed less to the old demands of auctoritas than to a
demand for what Thomas Greene (1982) famously called ‘‘creative imitation’’:
sixteenth-century translators more often pointed out the changes they had made to
their texts. These discussions often entailed questions of national literary identity and
linguistic development (Du Bellay 1549; see Vickers 1999), and they sometimes
involved resistance to the foreign, especially to foreign words or ‘‘inkhorn terms’’
thought to be too labored and clunky. Here the demand for sprezzatura found lexical
focus and more strongly favored invisibility: neologisms might well be imported, but
 Translation Studies 193

had to be made to sound native. Since inkhorn terms were to be eschewed but were
also needed to build vernacular languages and literatures, ambivalence about
national lexicons resulted
perhaps more so in England than in France, where the
stricter regulations of the Académie française were not long coming. Citizenship
metaphors about naturalization, immigration and denizenry turned up in such
paratexts, loading political and economic implications onto the work of the
translator. In fact, many early printed paratexts, especially translators’ prefaces,
used elaborate, suggestive metaphors for translation (Hermans 1985; Martı́n de León
2010; St André 2010). These metaphors demand the reader’s attention to the
complexity of the translation process itself, making the translators and their work
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anything but invisible.

An extreme case of early modern visibility in translation is Thomas Watson. His
Hekatompathia (1582) is a lyric sequence in which each 18-line poem or ‘‘passion’’ is
accompanied with a prose headnote that explains his effort, names and sometimes
quotes his subtexts in various languages, prints marginal citations to multiple-
language subtexts, and explains his actions in rendering the various lines or tropes
from foreign poems. An example is the typical third-person headnote to Passion V:

All this Passion (two verses only excepted) is wholly translated out of Petrarch, where he
writeth,
Samor non è, che dunque è quel ch’i sento?
Ma s’egh è amor, per Dio che cosa, e quale?
Se buona, ond’è l’effetto aspro e mortale?
Seria, ond’è si dolce ogni tormento?
Heerein certaine contrarieties, whiche are incident to him that loueth extrèemelye, are
liuely expressed by a Metaphore. And it may be noted, that the Author in his first halfe
verse of this translation varieth from that sense, which Chawcer vseth in translating the
selfe same: which he doth vpon no other warrant then his owne simple priuate opinion,
which yet he will not greatly stand vpon.

The poem, one of many competing European lyrics on this theme, then begins, ‘‘IF’t
bée not loue I feele, what is it then?’’ The reader of this poem cannot miss
and is
asked to judge
the translator’s work; this is apparently the desired goal and point of
the aesthetic experience of the poem. Passion VI continues the metatextual attention
to the author’s work and arts as a translator:

This passion is a translation into latine of the selfe same sonnet of Petrarch which you
red lastly alleaged, and commeth somwhat neerer vnto the Italian phrase the[n] the
English doth. The Author whe[n] he translated it, was not then minded euer to haue
imboldned him selfe so farre, as to thrust in foote amongst our english Poets. But beinge
busied in translating Petrarch his sonnets into latin new clothed this amo[n]gst many
others, which one day may perchance come to light [. . .].

A Latin version of Passion V follows, and one cannot read it without experiencing
aesthetic contrasts in versification and syntax (i.e. language based), but also in tone
and flavor (not here attributable to the poet’s ‘‘personality’’ or ‘‘subjectivity’’, since
both are his translations). Is one a different poet when writing in different languages?
A different person? The poet’s ‘‘own simple priuate opinion’’ is not something to
stand on, he tells us, but the foreign prior texts of Chaucer and Petrarch are, as is the
Latin post-text by Watson himself.
 194 A.E.B. Coldiron

In Passion XXII, the translator’s visibility shows us just how great a historical
gap in sensibility and literary values has developed since 1582. Watson typically
points out in the headnote that ‘‘the Author hath in this translation inuerted the
order of some verses of Seraphine, and added the two last of himselfe to make the rest
to seeme the more patheticall’’
the modern colloquial sense no doubt unintended.
In a post-Romantic age conditioned to value originality and sincere feeling (or at
least the illusion of ‘‘spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings [and] emotion
recollected in tranquillity’’, as Wordsworth’s Preface to the Lyrical Ballads put it;
1802, xvii), this kind and level of visibility arouses quite different emotions. I have
had otherwise strong students toss aside these and similarly fascinating early printed
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poems as ‘‘derivative’’ because their high visibility conflicts with the students’ own
contemporary confessional aesthetic, which remains rooted in the values of
Romanticism. The admittedly extreme case of Watson, who in this short work
mentions his own translation process 12 times using the word ‘‘translation’’ and
22 times using the word ‘‘imitation’’, strongly favors visibility. The aim seems to have
been
and the result certainly is
an aesthetic experience primarily animated by
encounters with literary and linguistic alterities.
This highly visible translator was lower on the sprezzatura axis and higher on
creative imitatio than most of his contemporaries. At the other end of the sprezzatura
axis, Philip Sidney’s sonnets dismiss, or pretend to dismiss, several continental lyric
traditions as inferior to his own work (1591). His recusationes, in Astrophel and Stella
3, 6, 15 or 45, for instance, are far more graceful than Watson’s visible translations;
Sidney’s poems draw on the very traditions they reject. Sonnet 15, for instance, calls
on poets to reject as furtum (theft; ‘‘stol’n goods’’, line 11) the usual imitations of
classically based poetry, Petrarchan poetry and alliterative poetry
even as Sidney
draws on each kind. He alliterates the very lines that dismiss alliteration (‘‘running in
ratling rowes’’, lines 5
6). He relies on classical poetry for the Muse concepts that he
revises in the larger sequence, for allusions, for the accusation of furtum itself (and
indeed for the recusatory mode). Petrarchism provided both his chosen form and his
readers’ ability to recognize the changes he rings on it:

YOu that doe search for euery purling spring,

Which from the rybs of old Pernassus flowes,
And euery flower (not sweete perhaps) which growes
Neere there about, into your Poems wring.
You that doe dictionary method bring
Into your rymes, running in ratling rowes,
You that old Petrarchs long deceased woes
With new borne sighes, and wit disguised sing;
You take wrong wayes, those far-fet helps be such,
As doe bewray a want of inward tutch,
And sure at length stolne goods doe come to light.
But if both for your loue and skill you name,
You seeke to nurse at fullest brest of Fame,
Stella behold and then begin to write.

The visible structure of classical recusatio supports beautifully the aesthetic claim to
sprezzatura, of course: ‘‘it’s nothing, really, just my normal utterance, unlike that
dreck that dolts like Watson sweat over’’. Sonnet 3 (‘‘Let dainty wittes cry on the
sisters nine’’) and Sonnet 6 (‘‘Some Louers speak when they their muses entertain’’),
 Translation Studies 195

as well as ‘‘I never drank of Aganippe well’’ and others, continue the visibly
recusatory attitude toward prior poetry, which for some readers comes to look as
disingenuous as the persona’s other protestations. Regardless, these poems insist on
our attention to intertextuality and to the imitation of foreign poetry. Recusatory
sprezzatura actually makes the foreign presences showily visible.
Watson’s thoroughly visible metatexts and Sidney’s deny-and-display may be
endpoints on a spectrum of visible Renaissance lyric engagements with foreign
literature. But they are not unrepresentative: the work of Spenser, Shakespeare and
any number of other early modern English poets, not to mention continental poets
after Trissino in Italy and the Pléiade poets in France, followed similar methods.
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Most worked harder at the appearance of ease than Watson, while nevertheless
keeping their interlingual engagements visible to the Renaissance reader. Just as
medieval translators’ visibility supported the value placed on auctoritas, visibility in
early modern literature supported the value placed on competitive imitatio (even
when modulated by sprezzatura). Considered from a slightly different angle, the
changing construction of the visibility of the translator reveals literary values
gradually shifting from what we have retrospectively come to periodize as ‘‘medieval’’
into what we now call ‘‘early modern’’ or ‘‘Renaissance’’ literature. In that great age
of translation, the translator’s presence and the presence of the foreign continue to
show, less as marks of authority than as marks of artistic agency, but, as ever, in
concert with broader aesthetic and cultural agendas.

Beyond Babel: Future potentials for visibility in translation?

My first qualification to the historical sketch above is that it ignores non-Western
translation histories, which certainly have their own ways of construing and valuing
the translator’s in/visibility. The second problem with this kind of brief overview
is that it risks reinforcing the very fallacies of periodization that we know translation
challenges so effectively (Coldiron 2009). Yet to stretch Venuti’s concept back to
periods prior to those for which it was designed shows how usefully elastic it is;
visibility in translation served identifiable values in the history of European literary
systems prior even to the problematic he poses. Since visibility and invisibility have
meant such different things in different times and places, they are an important index
to ideological and aesthetic change. Just as invisibility has been a key concept for
translation studies, perhaps visibility, considered historically, can become a
methodological key to broader cultural and aesthetic agendas in contemporary
and future translation studies.
Against visibility in translation, of course, there have been some powerful ideas.
First, invisibility has sustained specific literary-aesthetic values since the eighteenth
century, as Venuti and others following him have confirmed. As long as a chief
benchmark of literary value remains the unique genius of individual authors working
alone, translators and their work must remain invisible, as Venuti shows. To the
degree that literary modernity remains committed to Romantic conceptions of
originality and to single-author confessional modes, invisibility will rule. Neither the
visibility of the translator (who disrupts the fiction of original authorship), nor the
visibility of the foreign (which disrupts fictions of purity and national literary
identity), can hold much aesthetic sway. In national literary canons and curricula,
which are after all based on national literary identities, marks of the foreign will have
 196 A.E.B. Coldiron

to be elided, suppressed, made ‘‘native citizens’’ or
in that very strange, common

figure for translation
‘‘naturalized’’. Otherwise, as Venuti shows, they are
potentially disruptive, resistant, marks of implicit ideological challenge.
Another deeply rooted support for invisibility comes from the founding myth of
Western translation theory, the biblical story of Babel. Inasmuch as high-visibility
translations promote openness and curiosity toward alterity and language difference,
they are at odds with this story. The oldest readings of the Babel story take the tower
as a sign of human pride that had to be destroyed. In this view, a punitive deity was
threatened by the tower as a sign and result of industrious, ingenious, cooperative
humanity. The divine curse imposed on that overweening ambition was the
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‘‘confusion’’ of multilingualism. The New Testament story of Pentecost typologically

answers the Babel myth. But the Pentecost story’s answer is that the Holy Spirit’s
mystical entry into each person will redeem the curse of multilingualism. Like
Douglas Adams’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, in which the small, yellow Babel
fish translates any language automatically when inserted in one’s ear, the Pentecost
story offers a magical translator-function to create understanding. The happy ending
of mutual comprehensibility only works, however, as it works in tales for punished
children: we are to be passive, obedient and credulous, so as to undo the curse given
for having been successfully industrious, ingenious and cooperative. These wish-
fulfillment tales
one salvific and one sci-fi-comedic
tap our deep yearning for
mutual understanding. But in them, mutual understanding is not to come through
our own agencies. The translator has no place in the Babel myth-pair: no heroic
verbal efforts to redress the ‘‘curse’’ can be proposed, and no translator’s linguistic
talent, knowledge or human skill is part of the typological solution. With founding
myths like Babel-Pentecost, the translator’s invisibility is no wonder, since to repair
Babel risks a further curse for pride, or it risks substituting further human
cooperative and ingenious agency for the acceptably passive reception of a gift of
the Holy Spirit.
In a revised, secularized view, and with a revitalized theory and practice of
visibility in translation, the translator’s mythic shame and subservience can be
unwritten. Human cooperation, curiosity and mutual understanding do not threaten
a destructive deity, nor do translations threaten such literary gods as Authorship or
Originality. Multilingualism is not a deity’s curse, but a natural function of time and
distance, as linguists and forensic paleontologists have proven. Translations do not
have to originate in a mystical phenomenon to bridge alterities. The visible translator
is not forbidden from just pride in his or her cooperative work, nor from revealing
that work to the reader as part of the aesthetic pleasure of the text. The millennium
of modesty and fidelity topoi, the centuries of translators’ disclaimers and hiding, the
hierarchies of authority and subservience can be tossed out with this unhelpful
founding myth of our discipline. With an ethic of visibility at work, Babel, in other
words, can be reinterpreted as a site not of punishment, shame and passivity, but of
potential mediation and aesthetic play.
So in addition to Venuti’s revalorization of the translator’s visibility (and indeed
of foreignizing translations) as sites of resistance and interest, we might speculatively
look to a future in which marks of visibility become revalued as aesthetic resources,
ludic elements, or even subtle ethical models of encountering alterity. Since
intellectual fashions and media transitions inevitably alter systems of literary and
aesthetic value, they also change dramatically the position of translation within those
 Translation Studies 197

systems. Certain recent movements might favor and revalue visibility in translation.
After post-structuralism, a theoretical space of inquiry remains open between
signifier and signified for visibility in translation. And postmodernism, with its
quirky juxtapositions, glossolalia, asymmetry, self-referentiality and bricolage, holds
aesthetic stances highly favorable to visibility and to the frictional sites of translation
where unlike things meet. Postmodern collage, like collage’s poetic ancestor, the
classical cento, operates from the energy of difference-in-contact, whether inter-
lingual or inter-media. Some contemporary painters, like some translators, allow
differently textured residues to persist visibly in their work; the presence of the alien
substance is precisely what is interesting. Mixed-media art, the high-low juxtaposi-
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tions in contemporary fashion, asymmetries in post-1945 architecture, decentered

photographic composition and the use of musical quotation and ‘‘sampling’’ in
popular songs all depend for their effects on the intrusion of some kind of visible
alterity. This suggests a contemporary aesthetic favorable to visibility, or at least that
visible alterities provide stimuli well suited to current sensibilities. In such a favorable
climate, one more easily imagines a literary practice in which translators intrude
openly as co-artists
perhaps playfully, wistfully, angrily or wryly, depending on
the work in question.
The digital revolution may concomitantly offer improved technical options for an
aesthetic of visibility. In web-based digital forms, postmodern visibility could be
welcomed much more easily and in aesthetically interesting ways with links, windows
and embedded files
for instance, in a web poem featuring a sliding sidebar of the
prior-language poem; links to alternative translations, dictionaries, or a translator’s
site or biography; a video clip of the translator discussing her choices for a particular
line; or sound files of both language versions read aloud to display and juxtapose
their respective oral-aural qualities. As Karin Littau notes, ‘‘precisely because
hypertext can call up numerous translations of the foreign text, [. . .] presenting its
readers with a multiplicity of variant translations on the screen, in flaunting before
our very eyes the seriality of translation’’ (1997, 91), hypertext permits a visibility
never before possible. Yet even this clear capacity of new media has to be qualified.
In an electronic comment to the author on 7 November 2011, Carol O’Sullivan
remarks that less progress seems to have been made in hypertext translation than we
might have imagined and explains a valid concern ‘‘that the e-book revolution will
impede this still further by becoming more about surface than network’’. In other
words, not all digital formats are equally favorable to visibility in translation.
The experimental work of such poets as Charles Bernstein or Bernadette Mayer
demonstrates options for working through some of these issues. Bernstein’s first six
experiments (1996
2010) are translation-based; homolinguistic translation, homo-
phonic translation, lexical translation and dialect-idiolect translation seem especially
fruitful suggestions. Ron Silliman, bpNichol and Caroline Bergvall create poems in
which translation is not only visible in, but integral to, the verbal product. A
recording of Bergvall, for instance, reveals multilingual phonetic wordplay making
unexpected meanings that could not exist without highly visible
which here means
audible
alterity (Bergvall n.d.). It may take time to press visibility into as full a
coordination with the present age’s literary aesthetic as was the case in the medieval
or early modern periods. Of course, self-conscious visibilities will not simply repeat
or update the patterns found in medieval translators’ paratextual conventions and
humility topoi or in early modern translators’ coy denials of sprezzatura: the future
 198 A.E.B. Coldiron

will find its own ways. Still, one can speculate that aesthetic efforts following artists
like Mayer, Bernstein or Bergvall might well come to depend on the co-artist’s
that
is, the translator’s
visibility.
Cooperating with such praxis might be a translation criticism that highlights
visibility, and both would depend on facilitating textual technologies. Like the
expansive hypertexts noted above, older formats, particularly facing-page or facing-
column codex translations, create complete visibility and a welcoming engagement
with the foreign prior text. Facing-page translations invite readers to witness and to
experience for themselves the translator’s engagement with the prior text, and thus to
know the fact and process of translation as integral to the literary experience even as
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they first read a work. Like digital omni-texts, revealing the translator’s co-artistry
and the foreign materials involved in the text, facing-page codex translations honor
both the foreign text and its mediator. Such translation formats are, to my mind,
aesthetically supercharged, supremely ethical, and what Ricœur might call welcom-
ing textual objects.
With an eye to such facilitating textual technologies, a translation criticism
focused on visible alterities might articulate any number of possible relations between
prior text and translation. Schleiermacher’s Janus-like dilemma is solved in fully
visible translations, and even post-Hieronymian issues of fidelity, equivalence and
functionality are more easily clarified. Gayatri Spivak famously called translation a
species of rape (1986), but encounters with the Other need not do violence, and may
do less in the full light of visibility. Full visibility would assure that the prior text,
and thus the translator’s actions on it, remain present, independent, and viable
alongside the translation in an implicitly equal relation with it. Points of visibility

either traces of the translator’s presence or of the foreign
are sites of friction and
interest between two literary systems, but they are so varied as to seem bewildering to
discuss. Critical taxonomies of visibility might organize the study of visibility so as to
register that different kinds of visibility signal the foreign in different ways and at
many possible levels. For example, paratextual visibility and residual visibility do not
work the same way. References to the foreign text or translator may be open and
direct, but they often appear paratextually in titles, subtitles, prefaces, marginalia or
notes (or, in digital formats, links or windows), inviting comparative analysis. Or
generative residues (such as Bergvall’s phonemes; retained foreign refrain lines;
untranslated slang, dialogue, dialect or names; or allusions to foreign places and
cultural practices) may be immediately present in the text itself, and in some cases
may be enhanced by the textual technology (as when printers place foreign words in a
different typeface). Yet residues may variously serve as resistant, celebratory or
subversive traces of alterity. In any case, they invite historically contextualized
cultural analysis. At still another level, visibly foreign generic or formal gestures
the
use of the ghazal or tanka form in an English poem, or the use of sonnet form in
poems in Persian or Japanese
would strongly mark and preserve alterity, and would
foster polysystem analysis.
Visible alterities at whatever level and of whatever kind, in short, can be revalued
as resources to be analyzed both synchronically (as revealing the nature of aesthetic
contact between two literary systems) and diachronically (as revealing changes in
literary histories or polysystems over time). This brief, speculative sketch in no way
exhausts the rich potentials of visibility that might revalue the foreign presences
in translated texts. The present essay instead closes with tentative hopes for a
 Translation Studies 199

re-historicized, expanded attention to visibility. If invisibility, as Venuti explained,

signals the suppression or elision of the translator’s work, marks of visibility signal
resistance and presence. Such marks issue a vade mecum to readers and scholars
alike: inviting readers not only to honor the fact of translation and the acts of the
translator, but to welcome thoughtfully the foreign presences in a text, and in the case
of translation scholars, to chart over the long term the changing strategies that
literary systems adopt for using and valuing the foreign.

Acknowledgements
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Thanks to Bruce Boehrer, Deborah Solomon and Carol O’Sullivan for insightful, encouraging
comments on an early version.

Notes
1. Or at least as aesthetic stimuli: the literary systems in question have to favor or at least
tolerate alterities, and readers must be ready for new, potentially more dissonant reading
experiences. See, for example, Venuti’s work on Catalan translations and the power of both
invisible and visible translation strategies to intervene in collective identity formation (1995/
2008, 177
202).
2. Claire Farago explains the dating of the composition of da Vinci’s first writings on the
paragone at or before 1492; Codex Vaticanus Urbinas 1270, the manuscript that includes
them and some later additions, is dated c. 1508.

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