Queer Theory and Translation Studies: Language, Politics, Desire 2020010144, 9781138200319, 9781138200326, 9781315514734

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Queer Theory and Translation Studies

This groundbreaking book explores the relevance of queer theory to Translation Studies and of translation to Global Sexuality Studies. Beginning with a comprehensive overview of the origins and evolution of queer theory, this book places queer theory and Translation Studies in a productive and mutually interrogating relationship. After framing the discussion of actual and potential interfaces between queer sexuality and queer textuality, the chapters trace the transnational circulation of queer texts, focusing on the place of translation in “gay” anthologies, the packaging of queer life writing for global audiences, and the translation of lyric poetry as a distinct site of queer performativity. Baer analyzes fictional translators in literature and film, the treatment of translation in historical and ethnographic studies of sexual and linguistic others, the work of queer translators, and the reception of queer texts in translation. Including a range of case studies to exemplify key ethical issues relevant to all scholars of global sexuality and postcolonial studies, this book is essential reading for advanced students, scholars, and researchers in Translation Studies, gender and sexuality studies, and related areas. Brian James Baer is Professor of Russian and Translation Studies at Kent State University, Ohio. He is founding editor of the journal Translation and Interpreting Studies and coeditor, with Michelle Woods, of the series Literatures, Cultures, Translation. His most recent publications include the monograph Translation and the Making of Modern Russian Literature; the collected volumes Translation in Russian Contexts (with Susanna Witt) and Queering Translation, Translating the Queer (with Klaus Kaindl); and the translated volumes Culture, Memory and History:  Essays in Cultural Semiotics (by Juri Lotman) and Red Crosses (by Sasha Filipenko, with Ellen Vayner).

New Perspectives in Translation and Interpreting Studies Series editor: Michael Cronin is 1776 Professor of French at Trinity College Dublin and Director of the Trinity Centre for Literary and Cultural Translation.

The New Perspectives in Translation and Interpreting Studies series aims to address changing needs in the fields of translation studies and interpreting studies. The series features works by leading scholars in both disciplines, on emerging and up-to-date topics. Key features of the titles in this series are accessibility, relevance and innovation. These lively and highly readable texts provide an exploration into various areas of translation and interpreting studies for undergraduate and postgraduate students of translation studies, interpreting studies and cultural studies. Fictional Translators Rethinking Translation through Literature Rosemary Arrojo Translation and World Literature Edited by Susan Bassnett Translation Sites A Field Guide Sherry Simon Translation and Translanguaging Mike Baynham and Tong King Lee Queer Theory and Translation Studies Language, Politics, Desire Brian James Baer For more information on any of these and other titles, or to order, please go to www.routledge.com/​New-​Perspectives-​in-​Translation-​and-​Interpreting-​ Studies/​book-​series/​NPTS Additional resources for Translation and Interpreting Studies are available on the Routledge Translation Studies Portal: http://​cw.routledge.com/​ textbooks/​translationstudies

Queer Theory and Translation Studies Language, Politics, Desire Brian James Baer

First published 2021 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2021 Brian James Baer The right of Brian James Baer to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-​in-​Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-​in-​Publication Data Names: Baer, Brian James, author. Title: Queer theory and translation studies: language, politics, desire / Brian James Baer. Description: London; New York: Routledge, 2020. | Series: New perspectives in translation and interpreting studies | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020010144 | ISBN 9781138200319 (hardback) | ISBN 9781138200326 (paperback) | ISBN 9781315514734 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Translating and interpreting–Social aspects. | Queer theory. Classification: LCC P306.97.Q44 B34 2020 | DDC 418/.033–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020010144 ISBN: 978-​1-​138-​20031-​9  (hbk) ISBN: 978-​1-​138-​20032-​6  (pbk) ISBN: 978-​1-​3155-​1473-​4  (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by Newgen Publishing UK

To N., forgotten but still remembered as a testament to the precarity of queer lives and to the meanings that accrue in translation

Contents

Acknowledgments  Introduction: Textual and sexual orientations 

viii 1

1 Queering translation, or what queer theory can do for Translation Studies 

22

2 Queering Global Sexuality Studies, or translation and unease 

53

3 Queering the gay anthology, part I: Evolution in/​of a genre 

82

4 Queering the gay anthology, part II: From appropriation to consecration to incorporation 

106

5 Keep the lyric queer, or poetic translation as reparative reading 

140

6 From sexual dissidence to sexual dissonance: Translating the queer life of Charlotte von Mahlsdorf 

165

Conclusion: Uneasy reading, or putting the trans* in Translation Studies 

189

Bibliography  Index 

200 221

Acknowledgments

I have a number of people and institutions to thank for supporting me in the writing of this book, beginning with the series editors, Michael Cronin and Moira Inghilleri, who invited me to undertake it. I am very grateful for their confidence. I  must also thank my colleague Judy Wakabayashi, who many years ago encouraged me to connect my interest in sexuality studies with my interest in Translation Studies, and my colleague Carol Maier, who very patiently looked over several iterations of the proposal for this book; her comments as always were firm but just and pushed me to think bigger about this project. A  key moment in the evolution of my thinking on the subject of this book was my participation in the Translating Transgender Workshop held in 2015 at the University of Arizona, organized by David Gramling and Susan Stryker, where I  presented my earliest thoughts on Charlotte von Mahlsdorf. For that I  wish to thank Susan, David, and all the participants, who so generously shared their work in progress and offered suggestions that were always constructive and made in a spirit of collaboration. A  version of that paper was published in the special issue of Transgender Studies Quarterly, Translating Transgender, edited by David Gramling and Aniruddha Dutta. I also benefited greatly from a two-​week stay at the University of Cardiff in 2017, funded by a Leverhulme grant. My interactions there with Loredana Polezzi, Serena Bassi, and other faculty members and students were extremely productive in pushing my thinking forward. I also greatly benefited from my collaboration with Klaus Kaindl on the Queering Translation conference held at the University of Vienna in 2015 and on the collected volume Queering Translation, Translating the Queer (Routledge, 2018) that resulted from the conference. Thanks also go to my doctoral student Mirjam Müller, who helped me with the translations from Kupffer’s anthology; to Linda Angst for her editing assistance; to Christopher Mellinger for his invaluable assistance with the index and proofs; and, of course, to Sam Asher, without whose unwavering support none of this would have been possible. Finally, I  would like to express my deep gratitude to the Kent State University Division of Research and Sponsored Programs for research support in the spring of 2017 and the summer of 2019, which allowed me to complete the manuscript.

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Acknowledgments  ix “Translation, Transition, Transgender: Framing the Life of Charlotte von Mahlsdorf” was originally published in TSQ 3(3–​4): 506–​23, © 2016, Duke University Press. All rights reserved. Republished by permission. (www. dukeupress.edu) Analysis of the translations by Aleksei Apukhtin in Chapter 5 was first published as pages 55–​62 of the chapter “A Poetics of Evasion: The Queer Translations of Aleksei Apukhtin,” in the 2017 volume Queer in Translation, edited by B.  J. Epstein and Robert Gillett. Reproduced by permission of Taylor and Francis, a division of Informa PLC. This permission does not cover any third party copyrighted work which may appear in the material requested.

Introduction Textual and sexual orientations

Joseph A. Boone (2000, 3) situates the birth of queer theory in the “volatile political climate of the fin de millennium,” a time when Translation Studies could be said to have undergone a second birth. That rebirth involved the field liberating itself from earlier linguistics-​based approaches that were mostly concerned with the accurate rendering of the source text in a target language—​although what constituted accuracy was continually contested. The emergence of Skopos theory in the 1980s, which introduced sociolinguistic concerns into the field—​namely, how do or should the audience, mode, and venue of a target text influence translation, what could be glossed as textual orientation—​prepared the way for Descriptive Translation Studies in the early 1990s, which focused scholarly attention on translation as “a fact of the target culture” (Toury 1995, 29), with accuracy assuming relevance only to the extent that it shaped the reception of the translation. This reorientation of the field opened it up to a variety of approaches from other disciplines, such as Cultural Studies, Postcolonial Studies, and Sociology, that would help it address issues of power, identity, and agency, and to embed translation in societies, networks, and global configurations, characterized by profound political and economic asymmetries. Queer theory, too, would be productively challenged in the late 1990s by new fields of scholarly inquiry. As Elisa Glick (2003, 123) comments, the rapid emergence of racial, ethnic, colonial/​ postcolonial, cross-​ cultural, and national/​ transnational engagements and approaches in queer studies has often contested [queer theory’s] deconstructive framework (and its unspoken presumptions), arguing instead for a local and global elaboration of queer identities and communities. Nevertheless, queer theory and Translation Studies have, until only recently, remained largely siloed. This is surprising given the very out and proud queer sexuality of James Holmes, considered a founder of the field of Translation Studies, who also published translations of queer Latin texts under the playful pseudonym Jacob Lowland (he worked at the University of Amsterdam).1 It is also surprising given the growing body of research

2 Introduction in the field of queer linguistics, to which Keith Harvey, also a key figure in the field of Translation Studies, made an early and significant contribution in 1997 with the volume Language and Desire:  Encoding Sex, Romance and Intimacy, co-​edited with Celia Shalom.2 In fact, already in 1992, in the first edition of In Other Words, Mona Baker (1992, 24) pointed out that there was no “neutral” word for “homosexuality” in the Arabic language, highlighting homosexuality as a distinct translation problem. Indeed, perhaps nowhere is the concept of linguistic equivalence more easily challenged than in regard to same-​sex desire where local terms compete with recent borrowings and neologisms against the backdrop of culture wars over “gay rights,” which are often proxy wars, indexing more profound struggles over cultural hegemony and the nature of modernity. This indifference to issues of sexuality in general and of queer sexuality in particular on the part of scholars working in Translation Studies appears less surprising, however, when we consider Theo Hermans’s influential two-​ volume collection Translating Others (2006). The others referenced in the title are clearly conceptualized in terms of national languages and cultures. No other types of otherness are considered. This may be a legacy of the field’s origins in the training of translators and interpreters for diplomatic and military service, a sign, perhaps, of Translation Studies’ collusion with the modern international order built on the monolingual nation-​ state. Introducing other forms of otherness into the study of translation, then, is one way to open up a critical position for Translation Studies vis-​à-​vis this international order. No less surprising is the reluctance on the part of scholars in Global Sexuality Studies to productively engage with issues of translation, given the fact that “the deployment of Western theoretical languages to account for non-​ Western texts and contexts has long been a contentious issue among critics of every ideological stripe involved in cross-​cultural research” (Ha 2009, 425). Indeed, exposing the imperialist assumptions and pretensions undergirding the circulation of the Western minoritarian model of homosexuality, or the global gay (see Altman 2002), has been a major focus of scholars working from postcolonial and queer perspectives. In some cases, however, the critique of Western hegemony has led to claims of radical alterity and untranslatability, on the one hand, and passive indoctrination, on the other, both of which obscure or mystify the realities of cross-​cultural exchange in our globalizing world and translation’s role in that exchange. My position is that paying critical attention to translation can trouble the hegemonic pretensions of the global gay while recognizing the agency of subaltern subjects who engage with these ideas, critiquing and transforming them in the process. At the same time, translation must not be construed as something only the subaltern do; it must also be incorporated into a counterhegemonic rethinking of the scholar’s positionality, one that acknowledges “the indeterminacy of cultural phenomena in general” (Dinshaw 1999, 13), the contingency of historical accounts, and the role of affect

Introduction  3 in language. The purpose of this book, therefore, is to place Translation Studies and queer theory in a productive, mutually interrogating relationship, first, by articulating points of common theoretical interest and, second, by modeling in a series of case studies the dual integration of queer theory into the study of translations and translators, and of translation into the global study of sexuality. In this way, I hope to make a modest contribution to counterhegemonic approaches to the study of sex and sexuality across languages and cultures while complicating the ways otherness is construed in Translation Studies. Before I  undertake that, however, let me trace the broad outlines of a shared history, which has rendered both translation and queer sexuality foreign to the modern nation.

Translation, queer sexuality, and the modern nation In the opening paragraphs of the memoir of the nineteenth-​century French hermaphrodite Herculine Barbin, the author writes: My place was not marked out in this world that shunned me, that had cursed me. Not a living creature was to share in this immense sorrow that seized me when I left my childhood, at that age when everything is beautiful, because everything is young and bright with the future. That age did not exist for me. As soon as I reached that age, I instinctively drew apart from the world, as if I had already come to understand that I was to live in it as a stranger. (1980, 3; italics added) In the original French text, the final word in the above citation is étranger, which means both “stranger” and “foreigner.” Underscoring the queer potential of polysemy, which is a running theme of this book, étranger offers a convenient point of entry into a discussion of the relationship between queer theory and Translation Studies insofar as the central concern of both fields has been the conceptualization and representation of sameness and difference, of borders and bordering—​or of how one’s place is or is not, as Barbin puts it, “marked out in this world.” Incidentally, the English stranger is also polysemous, having once been used as slang for “homosexual,” an association that is still invoked today in the title of Jonathan Goldberg’s essay “Strange Brothers” (1997), Shane Phelan’s Sexual Strangers: Gays, Lesbians, and Dilemmas of Citizenship (2001), and Graham Robb’s Strangers (2004).3 Not surprisingly, then, the themes of travel and exile are persistent, often overlapping motifs in modern gay and lesbian literatures (see Wilper 2016, 30–​41). For example, James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room not only takes place in France but also involves an affair with an Italian, and one of the first works of Russian gay fiction in the post-​Soviet period was a collection of short stories edited by D. V. Lychev titled The Other [Drugoi, 1993], all of which are set in foreign countries.

4 Introduction As defining others of the modern (heterosexual) nation, queer sexuality and translation are entangled in interesting ways. Consider the fact that one of the first recorded instances of the English word queer, meaning “weird” or “strange,” was in reference to a translation, Gavin Douglas’s 1513 translation of Virgil’s Aenied into Middle Scots (Sayers 2005, 17), or that the inventor of the term “homosexual,” Karl-​Maria Kertbeny (born Karl-​Maria Benkert), was a translator, and that the word homosexual first entered the English language through a translation from the German, as did the term transvestite. Indeed, translation played a central role in the birth of the Western field of sexology, as discussed in Chapter 4, and has enabled the circulation of sexological terms and concepts far beyond the borders of Europe. In fact, the Western mania to classify and name was applied to the body in what came to be known as forensic science, construing the body, in particular, the body of queers and criminals, into a text to be deciphered, or translated. The French doctor of forensic medicine Ambroise Tardieu, who was the first to publish Barbin’s memoir, in 1872, dedicated much of his research to demonstrating how homosexuality could be read on the body. His very sympathetic treatment of Barbin is based on his contention that the medical authorities misread Barbin’s genitalia at birth, presenting Barbin as the unwitting victim of a medical mistranslation. Others point to a semantic link between queer sexuality and translation. Bruno Perreau (2016, 80), for example, presents the etymology of queer as deriving from “the Indo-​European root -​twerkw, meaning ‘across’ ” or “trans.” The recent proliferation of theoretical work on transgender-​related topics has made that connection more obvious, bringing queer sexuality and translation into semantic proximity through the use of a common prosthesis, with Paul B. Preciado (2018, 131) noting an early English meaning of the term prosthesis as “the supplement of a word with a prefix in grammar.”4 The abjectification of both translation and queer sexuality can be traced to the regimes of absolute difference that emerged in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, producing modern nations as monolingual and heterosexual. In the realm of sexuality, I am referring to what Thomas Laqueur (1990, 6)  describes as the “two sex model,” which emerged when “an anatomy and physiology of incommensurability replaced a metaphysics of hierarchy in the representation of woman in relation to man.”5 Foucault (1980, viii) discusses this in terms of the shift in the medical and legal treatment of hermaphrodites in the nineteenth century, which would become the introduction to the 1980 English translation of Barbin’s memoir: Biological theories of sexuality, juridical conceptions of the individual, forms of administrative control in modern nations, led little by little to rejecting the idea of a mixture of the two sexes in a single body, and consequently to limiting the free choice of indeterminate individuals. Henceforth, everybody was to have one and only one sex.

Introduction  5 This notion of sexual incommensurability becomes the basis of modern theories of heterosexual attraction across gender difference. As argued by Otto Weininger in Sex and Character (Geschlecht und Charakter, 1903), the greater the gender difference, the healthier the children produced from such unions. The focus on reproductive sexuality that lay at the heart of modern nationalism, with its glorification of the nuclear family, also contributed to the construction of homosexuality as the abject (nonreproductive) other of the modern nation. This conception of national culture as fundamentally reproductive continues to organize the contemporary imagining of national communities, producing the enduring association of queerness with effete urban culture. This allowed for the AIDS crisis to be presented in conservative US media as an invasion of the nation’s body and complicates to this day the question of full citizenship for queer individuals. One can see the powerful legacy of such thinking across contemporary Europe in the concept of “human ecology” that has been championed by the Vatican and that targets so-​called “gender theory,” which Bruno Perreau (2016, 74)  argues is a synecdoche for “queer theory,” and in attempts by queer scholars to reclaim reproduction (see Mamo 2007; Mortimer-​Sandilands and Erickson 2010) or to stake out alternative, nonreproductive temporalities (Edelman 2004; Halberstam 2005). In the realm of language, I am referring to what David Gramling (2017) describes as “the invention of monolingualism.” The Romantic notion of linguistic relativism, as articulated by Herder, von Humboldt, and Schleiermacher, namely, that individual languages are bearers of a distinct cultural worldview, produced linguistic incommensurability. Schleiermacher (1977, 85)  in fact insisted that bilingualism was impossible as it would imply having two mothers, and describes writing in a foreign language as “contrary to nature and morality.” Such linguistic incommensurability effected “the highly consequential political linkage of language and nation” (Yildiz 2012, 7), establishing what Naoki Sakai (2008) terms the “monolingual addressee” as the implied object of all translation in the modern international order. This makes untranslatability not so much a problem for national literatures as the very condition of their existence, which is why Soviet translation theorist Andrei Fedorov (1953, 25)  critiqued untranslatability as a bourgeois fallacy meant to protect the products of national cultures. In constructing language as a privileged manifestation of a nation’s original “genius,” Romantic thought cast translation as inauthentic and imitative, a distorting screen through which the national genius is filtered and inevitably diminished, if not lost, or, through which the national genius is contaminated (see Baer 2016). Romantic nationalists typically assert the untranslatability of national culture as powerful evidence for the existence of a distinct national genius. As Alexandra Jaffe (2010, 271) notes in regard to Corsican translators,

6 Introduction When translators talk about the untranslatable, they often reinforce the notion that each language has its own “genius”, an essence that “naturally” sets it apart from all other languages and reflects something of the “soul” of its culture or people. At the turn of the nineteenth century, US anthologist and editor Edmund Clarence Stedman (1900, xxxi) would declare the French language to be “so constituted that we cannot transmute its essential genius,” which led him to encourage would-​be writers in the United States to develop their capacities in English rather than wasting their time imitating the French.6 Or consider Eva Hoffman’s (2000, 17) review of an English translation of Polish queer writer Witold Gombrowicz’s Ferdydurke, which she describes as “hardly perfect—​how could it be?” What is also crucial in the context of the modern nation and what aligns translation with queer sexuality is its nonreproductive nature. While Lori Chamberlain (1988) documents the gendered metaphorics of translation discourse in the West, this is a sexual encounter that is typically cast as either sterile—​as the Russian Romantic poet Wilhelm Kiukhelbeker ([1824] 2013, 21) lamented, “who translates translators”—​or as illegitimate, begetting bastard texts. This is certainly one of the reasons that indirect or relay translations have been entirely ignored in Literary Studies and, until only recently, in Translation Studies, relegated to the margins as inauthentic, doubly mediated, despite their importance in transnational exchange (see Cho 2016). Preciado (2018, 8)  brings these two regimes of incommensurability—​ the sexual and the linguistic—​ together in his discussion of sexual monolingualism: Sexualities are like languages: they are complex systems of communication and reproduction of life. As languages, sexualities are historical constructs with common genealogies and biocultural inscriptions. Like languages, sexualities are historical constructs with common genealogies and bioinscriptions. Like languages, sexualities can be learned. Multiple languages can be spoken. As is often the case within monolingualism, one sexuality is imposed on us in childhood, and it takes on the character of a naturalized desire. We are trained into sexual monolingualism. It is the language that we are unable to perceive as a social artifact, the one that we understand without being able to fully hear its accent and melody. Within the modern national imaginary, however, there emerged the alluring figure of the “despised outsider,” embodied in the queer translator.7 Consider, for example, the image of Byron translating Ypsilanti on the shores of Greece—​he was there fighting for Greek independence—​as a powerful symbol of the inseparability in the Romantic imagination of nomadism

Introduction  7 and belonging, nationalism and cosmopolitanism, queerness and community, translation and originality.8 Or consider the equally queer figure of the explorer and translator Richard Burton, who used his translation of the Arabian Nights to assert the existence of a “sotadic zone” in which homosexuality flourished. Although situated at a considerable geographic distance from Great Britain, Burton’s sotadic zone, once textualized, was able to circulate, alongside his translation, throughout the Anglophone world. And so, the projection of queer sexuality onto the Orient may have been a necessary prerequisite for its translation—​both literal and figurative—​into Victorian England. The relative protection afforded by the foreign provenance of a text is undoubtedly one of the reasons translations “were the mainstay of England’s underground obscene print culture” in the nineteenth century (Colligan 2003, 1). Burton’s translation disrupted Victorian norms, inciting Britain’s “first public literary debate about pornography” (Colligan 2003, 1), which led to a reedition of the translation, much bowdlerized and without the final essay, by Burton’s wife.9 Under the title Lady Burton’s Edition of Her Husband’s Arabian Nights and featuring a profile of Lady Burton wearing a matronly white cap on the cover, Lady Burton assures her readers that “no mother shall regret her girl’s reading this Arabian Nights.” The edition, however, was not a commercial success. Moreover, while Burton’s translations may have “allowed his English readers to displace this putative sexual perversion [sodomy] onto the Arabs,” they “also forced them to face the inadequacies and prudery of English sexual mores” (Colligan 2003, 2), underscoring the thorough entangling of the national and the foreign in the emergence of modern understandings of sex and sexuality. “Over two decades,” Colette Colligan (2003, 2)  argues, “Burton’s translations tested, challenged, and recirculated this self-​perception in England’s underground obscene print culture around the subject of male same-​sex desire.”

Translation as techne And so, it is important when analyzing the abjectification of queer sexuality and translation in the context of the modern nation to resist taking the oppositions that define them as essential. The point is not that the nation “is” naturally reproductive and that queer sexuality and translation “are” not, but rather, that queer sexuality and translations are construed as unnatural and nonreproductive in order to construct the national community, by contrast, as organic and reproductive, the nation as family. For example, one of the ways in which translation is construed as unnatural is by association with techne, or craftsmanship, which allows the original writing to be perceived as inspired, not contracted, a spontaneous and unmediated eruption of creative genius. Indeed, in The Social Contract (1762), Rousseau (1997, 73) describes original or true genius as “that which creates everything out of nothing,” that is, as something that requires no unnatural

8 Introduction props or supports, no technologies, thus replacing a “mechanistic image of speakers’ relation to language with an organic one” (Yildiz 2012, 9).10 This construal of original genius as requiring no props is confirmed when “uninspired” literary works are described in terms of craftsmanship, their authors “artists, rather than poets [who] work in the spirit of the graver or decorator” (Stedman 1900, xxx).11 This leads nations to disavow or, in Ernest Renan’s terms, forget, the technologies employed to construct modern national communities, which can be extrapolated from Renan’s discussion as military (most nations begin with invasion), linguistic and pedagogical (involving the standardization of a single language variant as the national language), and political (involving the negotiation of borders) (Renan [1882] 1990). This construal of translation also serves to mystify the notion of writing itself as techne, or pharmakon, in Derrida’s formulation, a technology that was instrumental in the modern construction of the folk, which involved “translating” oral folk culture into the stuff of national literatures. (For more on this, see the discussion of Stedman’s banishing of translations from his history of American literature in Chapter 3). The constructed, relative nature of this binary is exposed not only in modernist histories of the nation but also in colonial contexts, where the terms of the binary are often flipped, with colonizers now construed as possessing technology, making them more civilized than the people they were colonizing (see Haraway 1989).12 (For more on the constitutive role of translation in the construction of “original” writing, see Karen Emmerich’s Translation and the Creation of Originals [2017]). If translation’s association with techne was construed by Romantics as a sign of its inauthenticity, scholars in queer theory and postcolonial studies have mined the critical potential of the techne to deconstruct the binaries that authenticate and naturalize the modern nation. As Precadio (2018, 98) argues in his Counter-​sexual Manifesto, the fact that the techne, which he discusses specifically in regard to the sexual prosthesis, is separated from the body opens up “unprecedented possibilities for incorporation, decontextualization, resignification, and mutation.” In this way, Preciado’s sexual prosthesis is like what Carolyn Dinshaw (1999, 35) refers to as the queer relic or fetish, which highlights “the alterity within mimesis itself, the never perfect aspect of identification.”13 But the relationship of the prosthesis to the body is more intimate than that of the relic or fetish and, as such, challenges the simple construal of the body as natural, organic. Consider, for example, Walter Benjamin’s description of the foreign word inserted into an idea as a “silver rib.” As Theodor Adorno remarks, “[T]‌he silver rib helps the patient, the idea, to survive, while it is sickened from the organic rib. The dialectic of the foreign word is of this nature” (Adorno 1991b, 290).14 And so, one can see early indications of homonationalism—​that is, the collusion of the gay liberation movement with the modern nation-​ state—​in the visceral antipathy felt by first-​generation liberationists over the polyglot coinage “homosexual,” a Greek prefix with a Latin root.15

Introduction  9 Edward Carpenter would propose homogenic as an alternative, but it failed to catch on. The critical potential of translation as techne is twofold. First, while a translation is detached from the organic body of the nation, from the mother tongue, it nonetheless maintains a relationship to it. Like the sexual prosthesis discussed by Preciado, a translation need not replace the original; it exists contemporaneously with it, producing multifarious textual selves. In other words, translations are capable of connecting two different linguistic, cultural and historical contexts in a way that does not entirely reduce the one to the other, provided the text’s status as a translation is not completely suppressed. (I use the modifier “different” here not in an absolute or essential sense, but simply as recognition that translation takes place only when idioms are deemed sufficiently unlike or incomprehensible to warrant it. In this way, translation always establishes or reinforces the difference that it purports to overcome, as evident in the ways translation has been used in post-​Yugoslavian states to distinguish Croatian, Serbian, and Bosnian from one another, bolstering their status as “national” languages [see Kuhiwczak 1999, 221].) This seems to be what Keith Harvey (2000, 153) was getting at in his discussion of issues of identity in the translation of Juan Goytisolo’s Realms of Strife (1986):  “The translation in its paradoxical oneness and difference with the original precisely enacts the identity trouble explored in Goytisolo’s book.” This critical potential of translation is theorized by Brent Hayes Edwards (2003, 15)  through the metaphor of the joint, noting the “strange ‘two-​ ness’ of the joint” as that which “is both the point of separation (the forearm from the upper arm, for example) and the point of linkage.”16 As a joint, translation is neither necessarily an instrument of hegemony or counterhegemony, of imperial domination or resistance, as Michael Cronin (1998, 148) elaborates: “Translation is both predator and deliverer, enemy and friend.” Indeed, translation was used by colonial powers to subjugate and incorporate colonial subjects at the same time it was used by colonial subjects to resist that subjugation and incorporation. In Gayatri Spivak’s (2005, 95) pithy formulation: “Translation is as much a problem as a solution.” And while Vincente Rafael (2010, 387; 386) invokes visual imagery in his description of translation as techne, ascribing translation’s “capacity to reshape the terms of hegemony” to its ability to “look two ways,” Carolyn Dinshaw explores the erotic dimension of this connection through the metaphor of touch, highlighting the affective, even libidinal, aspects of such encounters. As we shall see over the course of this book, translation has been used both to erase or domesticate queer sexuality and to highlight queer understandings and experiences of sexuality and in some cases to resist the incorporation of queerness into a Western—​and perhaps specifically Anglophone—​conception of “gay.” In this regard, the nineteenth-​century Egyptian educator and writer Rifa’ah al-​Tahtawi (qtd. in Massad 2008,

10 Introduction 32) was only partly right when he asserted that Western translators would necessarily heterosexualize queer texts: If [a Frenchman] translated one of our books, he would twist the words to say, “I have fallen for a youthful girl,” or he would get rid of the sentence altogether, as they see in this a corruption of morals, and they are right. True, some Western translators, like Edward Lane, did bowdlerize queer content, but others, like Burton, exploited it, which is why it is ultimately impossible to align foreignizing and domesticating approaches with specific political effects. The notion of translation as techne is central to the development of translation as a critical method, one that assumes identities and subjectivities, whether framed as national or international, to be always under construction, contingent, in transit. As Keith Harvey (2003, 4) explains, It is in translation—​in their existence, (in)visibility, market positioning, indeed, in their very textures—​that the issues, debates, resistances and influences of intercultural exchange are worked out and made manifest. Translations, in other words, are not mere tokens of the commerce between cultural spaces. They have inscribed within their very texture the problematic of the crossing. This insight also emerged among postcolonial scholars, such as Dipesh Chakrabarty (2007, 17), who demonstrate how “critical and unrelenting attention to the very process of translation” can challenge the universalizing claims of Western theory by provincializing it. In The Practice of Diaspora, Brent Hayes Edwards (2003, 7), a scholar working in Critical Race Studies, examines the rise of Black internationalism through the prism of translation, arguing, “the cultures of black internationalism can be seen only in translation […] by attending to the ways that discourses of internationalism travel, the ways they are translated, disseminated, reformulated, and debated in transnational contexts marked by difference.” To that end, Edwards records the presence of translations in anthologies of Black poetry and folklore, both as a sign of an emergent transnational perspective and as a means of realizing that perspective. But this state of “in transit” should be construed not as a liberation from all categories, some happy limbo of nonidentity, to borrow Foucault’s description of Barbin’s life before being re-​diagnosed, but rather as an unsettling of epistemological certainties and a complicating of universalizing claims, as many translation challenges cannot be resolved by establishing an uncontestable equivalence or, conversely, by designating certain terms and concepts as untranslatable. The rejection of teleogical histories grounded in what Chakrabarty terms “western historicism” underscores the idea that this transit is unlikely to end by making a safe landing on firm epistemological ground. As Carolyn Dinshaw (1999, 2–​3) writes of her history of the

Introduction  11 Lollards in medieval England: “I suggest that my queer history is contingent history in the postmodern sense—​its forms are intelligible but do not emerge out of teleological necessity.”

Framing queer sexualities My elaboration of translation as a method for understanding the transnational circulation of queer sexualities is not restricted to critical readings of translations proper but extends to the packaging or framing of these translations for a new readership in a different cultural location, a different language, and often in a different historical period, with special attention paid to the framing of queer life writing. Such attention to framing is warranted based on a queer understanding of the nature of sexuality, namely, that “sex is heterogenous, multiple, and fundamentally indeterminate” (Dinshaw 1999, 1), setting up an inevitable tension between the frame and the framed. Any discussion of the politics of framing must begin by acknowledging that framing occurs in a variety of forms, which could be generally classified as covert and overt, which I derive from Brent Hayes Edwards’ (2003, 45) discussion of the two meanings of frame: the picture frame, which is exterior and overt, versus the structural frame, such as a skeleton, which is interior and largely covert. (The distinction between overt and covert framing aligns closely with Judith Butler’s (1998) concepts of explicit and implicit censorship.17) Insofar as covert framing structures a work from the inside, it may leave few visible traces, which makes it an especially powerful vehicle in naturalizing ideology, allowing it to appear self-​evident. One of the most extreme and authoritative examples of covert framing would be Freud’s case studies in which the patient’s thoughts and feelings are presented in Freud’s words. The frame in this case paradoxically conceals itself by completely subsuming its object. Other examples of covert framing would be anthologies when the selection criteria are not made explicit, or translations, when the translator’s decision-​making is not explained. Without those explanations, anthologies and translations, not to mention anthologies of translated texts, become instruments of covert framing. The decision-​making of the anthologist and the translator will inevitably inscribe a text or texts within different associative pathways, foreclosing certain readings and enabling others. Consider, for example, if Camus’s existentialist masterpiece had been translated into English as The Foreigner instead of The Stranger. Wouldn’t such a translation have made it more difficult to ignore the colonial backdrop of the novel, and of existentialism en gros?18 And so, despite its etymology, from the Latin meaning “to carry over,” translation is more like the dynamic, unpredictable phenomenon described by Jacques Derrida (1982, 3) as a sheaf, or the complex structure of a weaving, an interlacing which permits the different threads and different lines of meaning—​or of force—​to go off again in different directions, just as it is always ready to tie itself up with others.

12 Introduction Overt framing, on the other hand, involves paratextual material, such as introductions and notes. While ostensibly guiding the reader’s interpretation, such paratextual material also functions to establish the author of that material as an expert, as Carolyn Shread (2010, 113) notes in her discussion of “the colonizing effects of conventional [translation] paratexts.” Specifically, Shread argues, the expert’s authoritative situating of the translated text in its cultural and political context “moves [the text] from speaking for itself to speaking for, or representing, an entire culture” (119). Brent Hayes Edwards (2003, 39) makes a similar point regarding the narratives of former slaves, which he describes as “a persistently framed mode of production: they are almost always supported and sometimes suffocated by a mass of documentary and verifying material serving to ‘authenticate’ the Negro subject’s discourse by positioning and explicating it.” Such overt framing plays a particularly conspicuous role in the modern field of sexology, which established a relationship to queer subjects not unlike the colonizing relationship described by Shread insofar as the science of sexology emerged from an obsessive interest in the abnormal and exceptional—​what Foucault referred to as “sexualités périphériques.” In this way, the margins, often represented by the testimonies and life writing of queer individuals, were pathologized in order to construe the center as normal, natural, self-​evident, not subject to or in need of diagnosis, of being read.19 The need for sexologists to embed these individual or anecdotal testimonies within emerging structures of knowledge meant that queer voices were almost always accompanied by paratextual framing, which was typically extensive or “heavy,” to use Edwards’s term. That framing was also typically anterior, placed in front of the subject’s account in order to shape or prejudice the reader’s interpretation. Such framing served to discipline the individual queer voice in at least two ways—​first, by abstracting it to say something more general about the nature of sex and sexuality, and, second, by “objectifying” it to contain its literariness.20 In this respect, Tardieu’s heavy, anterior framing of the memoir of Herculine Barbin is quite typical of the field.21 That disciplinary framing of queer lives was complicated, however, not only by the affective power of those texts but also by the fact that, while sexologists were attempting to objectify those case studies, writers were using them as models for fictional representations of “gay” characters. The US writer Edward Irenaeus Prime-​Stevenson actually translated case studies from German, which informed his fictional representations of gay characters. In fact, his first work of fiction, Imre. A Memorandum (1906), which is often described as the first work of openly gay writing in the United States, not only features translation as a running theme, it also dramatizes one character’s encounter with a work of German sexology (see Breen 2012, 7; Livesey 1997, 75–​160; Wilper 2016, 115–​16), suggesting the unsustainability of any absolute separation of literature and science at this time, or of “medical and vernacular terms” (Halberstam 2018, 7). Indeed, Foucault (1980, xiv)

Introduction  13 mentions “medico-​pornographic novels” that were popular at the end of the nineteenth century, and people like Edward Carpenter and John Addington Symonds were prolific poets, critics, and philologists while also making contributions to the science of sexology. For all these reasons, critical attention to the mechanisms and patterns of framing must be an important aspect of a queer Translation Studies. By comparing not only how queer voices are translated into other languages and cultures but also how the frames shift, we can challenge the universalizing pretensions of these disciplinary regimes, thereby provincializing the Western sexual epistemology. In so doing, we might offer a more nuanced picture of the global circulation of sexual knowledge, one that is more attentive to the voices of queer individuals in different times, places, and languages, and that is more attuned to the contemporary geopolitics of knowledge, which is another running theme of this book—​namely, how do liberal calls for multiculturalism and tolerance track with the hegemony of English and the attendant forgetting of translation? Translation, I will argue, has the distinct capacity to expose the contingency of these culturally-​and historically inflected regimes of legibility, evident not only in the translations themselves but also in the decision to translate or not to translate certain works and, perhaps most overtly, in the way translations are reframed for a new audience. And so, with Didier Eribon’s (2017, 69) comment in mind, that “the truth of the subject is not in the subject, it is in the history/​story, in the logics that escape us,”22 I will focus in this volume not on queer voices alone, an approach that risks positing the truth of the subject in the subject, but rather on the tension between these voices and the overt and covert reframing of them as they travel across languages and cultures.

Toward a queer Translation Studies Keith Harvey (2003) modeled the value of such a translational perspective to Global Sexuality Studies, although firmly within the confines of the West, in his seminal work Intercultural Movements, in which he shows through close readings of translations how the importation of American “gay” fiction into France was shaped by the French conception of universal citizenship. This concept of citizenship led French translators (and/​or editors and publishers) to tone down or erase the camp talk, a characteristic of American “gay” fiction indexing a minoritarian identity. Harvey’s work was important in modeling how analysis of specific translations and translation flows could be tied to broader political and cultural questions, without resorting to a rhetoric of loss or distortion.23 As Harvey (2003, 2) describes his project in the introduction, “What follows may be envisaged as part of an intercultural history of contemporary homosexual formations, which is predicated upon a fundamental assumption of hybridity and discursive interference, and within which translations will be given their due.”24

14 Introduction Although slow to see the value of sexuality studies to translation, even following the publication of Harvey’s Intercultural Movements, scholars from Translation Studies and other fields seem to be making up for lost time. Following the publication of a special issue of In Other Words (2010) edited by B. J. Epstein and dedicated to issues of translation and sexuality, and the volume Re-​Engendering Translation (2011) edited by Christopher Larkosh, which includes three chapters dealing with the translation of sexuality across languages and cultures, there have appeared in rapid succession a special issue of the journal Comparative Literature Studies (2014), dedicated to the gender and queer politics of translation, edited by William J. Spurlin; the volume Sexology and Translation (2015), edited by Heike Bauer; a special issue of Transgender Studies Quarterly, titled Translating Transgender (2016), edited by David Gramling and Aniruddha Dutta; the monograph Translating the Queer:  Body Politics and Transnational Conversations (2016), by Héctor Domínquez Ruvalcaba; the collected volume Queer in Translation, edited by B. J. Epstein and Robert Gillett (2017); the collected volume Queering Translation, Translating the Queer, edited by Klaud Kaindl and me (2018); and Douglas Robison’s Transgender, Translation, Translingual Address (2019). One purpose of the present book is to bring the kind of deep self-​reflection and critique that characterizes queer theory to the field of Translation Studies, understanding a queer approach to sexuality studies to be grounded in “the ability of ‘queer’ to define (homo)sexual identity oppositionally and relationally but not necessarily substantively, not as a positivity but as a positionality, not as a thing but as a resistance to the norm” (Halperin 1995, 66). While acknowledging the affective power of identity and its political utility, queer theory also recognizes that sexuality (like language) “is heterogenous, multiple, and fundamentally indeterminate” (Dinshaw 1999, 1), setting up a tension between disciplinary projects—​whether liberal or conservative—​and their object. In this sense, a queer approach to the study of translation reaches far beyond the task of bringing visibility to queer translators or to the translation of queer texts. This also means that not all scholarship dealing with same-​sex desire is necessarily queer. And so, what makes a scholarly approach to translation queer, in the sense of being deeply informed by the insights of queer theory? Harvey’s study is definitely queer insofar as he uses translation to challenge the universalizing pretensions of the US gay rights model and, in so doing, provincializes it, resisting the temptation to suggest that the French somehow “got it wrong” in toning down the camp talk in translations of US gay fiction. Instead, Harvey connects it to broader features of French political thought, specifically, to the deep French commitment to a “universal” understanding of citizenship that resists minoritarian formations. In this way, Harvey demonstrates the ways in which translations stage a clash of epistemologies and serve as a site of cultural negotiation. Harvey’s work is also queer insofar as it avoids reinforcing the self-​evident unity of the national languages in question. Harvey triangulates

Introduction  15 his study by introducing camp talk, a group idiom that exists within but apart from the national language. The fact that no attempt is made to render this camp talk in the French translation is due not to the fact that there is no French subcultural idiom available, but rather to ongoing French resistance to granting special rights or protections to its many regional languages, such as Breton, Basque, and Corsican. In this way, Harvey’s use of a minority language to expose the workings of the national imaginary presages the work of the queer Russian emigré artist Yevgeniy Fiks (see his Mother Tongue, 2018)  and of queer scholars of color, such as LaMonda Horton Stallings (see her Funk the Erotic: Transaesthetics and Black Sexual Cultures, 2015). As Stallings (2015, 10) describes her project: “I trans black literary studies and sexuality studies to demonstrate how black communities’ deployment of funk provides alternative knowledge about imagination and sexuality.” In fact, the idea of minority idioms challenging the mythic monolingualism of the modern nation-​state and generating alternative knowledge was raised by June Jordan in 1972 with her article “White English/​Black English: The Politics of Translation” ([1972] 1989). Robinson’s Transgender, Translation, Translingual Address (2019) is also deeply queer in that it ties the regulation of sex and sexuality to the foundations of the modern world order in the monolingual state, which construes the addressee of translations as monolingual (pace Sakai). Robinson then considers how transgender forms of address may serve to expose and trouble that regulatory functioning of the world order and, in the process, change the way we think about translation. In this way, Robinson contributes to the project laid out in David Gramling and Aniruddha Dutta’s (2016, 334) introduction to Translating Transgender, a special issue of the journal Transgender Studies Quarterly, of releasing the ambivalences of translated texts, the very kind of ambivalences, that “have no place within the technocratic social orders of monolingualism, reactionary multilingualism, and the GILT industry (globalization, internationalization, localization, and translation), which together aspire to translate fixity, monetizable singularity, and political authentication.” Another queer approach to translation is Serena Bassi’s (2014) analysis of Lawrence Venuti’s translation of the 2003 Italian novel Cento colpi di spazzola prima di andare a dormire, by Melissa Panarello. First, Bassi acknowledges the Italian novel’s indebtedness to the Anglophone sexual culture as indexed by certain key terms, making the Italian novel already globalized. Bassi then looks at Venuti’s treatment of the queer character of Ernesto in light of Venuti’s position that translators should resist domesticating the source culture and language through a regime of fluency. In relation to this novel, Venuti resists transforming the main character, Melissa, into a typical American adolescent. However, as Bassi shows, Venuti domesticates the queer aspects of Ernesto’s presentation in the novel, making him conform to a standard image on an American “gay,” missing an opportunity to challenge or queer those stereotypes.

16 Introduction

The structure of this book The book is presented in seven chapters, the first two of which are theoretical investigations of possible intersections between queer theory and Translation Studies (Chapter 1) and between Translation Studies and Global Sexuality Studies (Chapter 2). To the extent that queer theory explores “the utopian horizons of desire and possibility that beckon beyond the limits of the rigid binaries that have shaped twentieth-​century understandings of sexuality” (Boone 2000, 4), it can help the field of Translation Studies move definitively beyond the restrictive and reductive binaries that continue to structure not only popular understanding of translation but also much scholarly work in the field. Back in 1996, Douglas Robinson lamented that translation scholarship continued to be dogged by “old dualisms and dogmatisms” (Robinson 1996, x), and this continues to be the case in large swathes of the field. Only when translation is divorced from the binaries that continue to reduce the complexity of translational exchanges can translation be understood as a practice integral to what Walter Mignolo describes as “border thinking” (2000, 49–​88). At the same time, Translation Studies has much to contribute to global sexual studies’ critical exploration of “the threshold into the unknown that faces global culture as constructions of East and West continue to loosen their grip on local and national formations of sex and gender” (Boone 2000, 4). Those new constructions are negotiated and recorded in acts of translation. Greater attention to the materiality of language, as manifested in the fact of translation, and to the variety of languages in which queerness is expressed can help reign in the tendency to abstraction among queer theorists and may help us address in more concrete ways issues of “homonationalism” and “gay imperialism” without lapsing into positions of radical alterity or total transposability. Chapters 3 and 4 are dedicated to the queer origins of the gay anthology, which has for almost two centuries served as a privileged vehicle for the consolidation and circulation of a Western sexual epistemology. Chapter 3 explores the distinct cultural work of anthologies and translation’s role within them, presenting categories for analyzing anthologies (framing, selection, and arrangement) and distinguishing between national and international anthologies based on their treatment of translated texts. Special attention is given to the emergence of chronology as the dominant principle of organizing texts in anthologies, transforming these collections into vehicles for presenting and consolidating developmental narratives both in national and international anthologies. Chapter 4 traces the history of the modern gay anthology and the queer tensions that were at the core of this project from the very start—​namely, using texts to support the congenital argument for tolerance of homosexuality that often documented age-​ stratified homosexual relations, or pederasty, that was increasingly problematized over the course of the nineteenth century. The introduction

Introduction  17 of a chronological arrangement of texts in the early twentieth century allowed for gay rights to be enfolded into a progressivist developmental history of the world, laying the foundations for what queer theorists at the beginning of the twenty-​first century would critique as “homonationalism.” Finally, the proliferation of gay anthologies in the Post-​Stonewall era actually precipitated a kind of existential crisis or at least deeply problematized the labeling of texts from various historical times and places as “gay”—​ something that was not an issue in previous anthologies, which typically used more general labels, such as “friendship” and “eros.” This chapter underscores how the anthology, as an ideological tool meant to document and legitimate “gay” identity and culture, worked to trouble and queer the whole identitarian project. Chapter 5 looks at the rise of the novel in the circulation of a Western sexual epistemology and its deleterious effect on our appreciation of the lyric as a historically important site of queer performance, relegating lyric poetry to the margins of gay anthologies while also promoting the novelization of the lyric, that is, the reading of lyrics as if they were novels. Such novelistic readings of the lyric, I argue, are fundamentally paranoid readings, as Sedgwick (2003) defines the concept, imposing an epistemology of the closet onto a mode of writing that is, as Jonathan Culler argues, nonmimetic and performative. This novelization of the lyric compels interpretation, which becomes a search for clues as to the identity of the lyric persona, and often, of the author of the poem. I  then look at the queer translations of the nineteenth-​century Russian poet Aleksei Apukhtin to demonstrate how poetic translation in this case models a mode of reparative reading that challenges the imposition of an epistemology of the closet onto the lyric and embraces lyric poetry as a site of embodied queer performance. In Chapter 6, I look at the global circulation of the life story of Charlotte von Mahlsdorf, a self-​identified transvestite who lived through Nazi Germany and socialist East Germany, publishing a memoir in 1992 under the title Ich Bin Meine Eigene Frau [I am my own woman/​wife]. The fact that a number of translations appeared in the course of the 1990s and that a reedition of the English translation appeared in 2004, following the enormous success of Doug Wright’s play, I Am My Own Wife, allows me to study the translation and the framing of the translation both synchronically—​comparing the first English edition of 1994 to the first Russian edition of 1997—​and diachronically, comparing the first English edition of 1994 with the second English edition of 2004, marked by a change of title, from I Am My Own Woman to I Am My Own Wife. The synchronic analysis highlights the stark differences between LGBT communities in the United States and in post-​ Soviet Russia at this time, while the diachronic analysis allows me to trace what Kadj (2017) describes as the idealization of queer subjects in the West and their subsequent deflation. Granting queer subjects like von Mahlsdorf “the right to a complex personhood,” I conclude, helps us to avoid either

18 Introduction fully appropriating or radically othering those subjects, allowing us to read their life stories not as a confirmation of our beliefs and values but as a productive paradox. In the conclusion, I outline some concrete ways that translation can be incorporated into a queer counterhegemonic pedagogy, one that is grounded in Dinshaw’s notion of indeterminateness, Halberstam’s notion of the queer art of failure, and Amin’s notion of unease. Central to such a pedagogy would be the uneasy reading of texts in translation, one that does not seek to resolve that unease by radically othering queer voices or by incorporating them neatly into a Western sexual epistemology. Special attention is paid to translator footnotes and foreign words as puncturing the regime of fluency denounced by Lawrence Venuti in The Translator’s Invisibility (1995). Of course, any attempt to represent two diverse, rapidly expanding fields of study is destined to fall short, and the limitations of this particular study are probably obvious from the description of the chapters. But, rather than pretend to some encyclopedic mastery of all languages and cultures, which would not be true to the spirit of queer theory or to Translation Studies, I  decided to focus on those languages and cultures with which I  am familiar. This necessarily resulted in prioritizing of the Global North. However, the fact that I  include Eastern Europe, which has been constructed as Western Europe’s “internal other” since at least the Enlightenment, allowed me nonetheless to capture the workings of hegemony, specifically, the imperialism inherent in developmental histories and the expansion inherent in Neoliberal capitalism, two related processes that gained new impetus with the fall of communism. These geographic limitations made the racialization of sexual others less prominent than it deserves, although, it should be noted that the restrictive Immigration Act of 1924, also known as the Johnson-​Reed Act, not only prevented Asians from immigrating to the United States, it also greatly restricted immigration from Eastern and Southern Europe, effectively classifying inhabitants of those regions as nonwhite. That being said, I do expose the rather overt racialization carried out by Carpenter’s anthology Ioläus, as well as the more covert racialization carried out by anthologies that construe as natural the connection of American with Anglophone. I should also note that, because I  am critically examining the emergence of a modern Western sexual epistemology as consolidated in the gay liberation movement, this work inevitably replicates some of that movement’s occlusions, by focusing mostly on the white, middle-​class men who were central to it. To the extent that this critical interrogation works to historicize and provincialize that Western sexual epistemology, however, I hope it will carve out space for imagining alternatives. Finally, a note on terminology. The use of terms such as “homosexual,” “gay,” and “queer” may appear to be inconsistent, but in fact reflects their varied usage and multiple meanings. That being said, I tend to use “gay” to refer to a Western identitarian model of homosexuality and, as such, it

Introduction  19 is most closely associated with the modern Western sexual epistemology. I  use “queer” to denote both queer theoretical approaches that critique the identitarian or minoritizing model of same-​sex desire and subjectivity, as well as an umbrella term for all nonnormative forms of sexual desire and personhood. And so, when I analyze the queer fault lines in the gay anthology, I am trying to expose the contradictions inherent in the use of “queer” texts translated from a variety of cultures and historical periods in service of documenting a minoritarian “gay” identity. I  use “homosexual” at times like the second use of queer, as a kind of grab bag, but also at times to refer specifically to medical accounts of same-​sex desire. I also use “same-​sex desire” to refer to premodern and non-​Western forms of desire. The situation is further complicated when we are discussing translations, and how to render “local” terms, some of which may be used in ways that are similar to “gay” but may have a different, and in some cases, much longer history, which connects those terms to premodern forms of desire in a way that gay does not. Examples of this are the Italian dialectical fenuc or the German schwul, which are often translated into English as “gay,” without any note to complicate the translation. Further adding to the complexity of all this is the fact that, while English terms related to sex and sexuality travel globally, they are often resemanticized in the process, acquiring in some cases a more narrow set of meanings—​in Myanmar, for example, the borrowing gay basically refers to urban middle-​class gays who live a more or less open lifestyle (see Chua 2018)—​and in others a much broader set of meanings—​ “gay” and “queer” in non-​ Western contexts may serve as a metyonym if not a metaphor for Western values, for public discussion of sex and sexuality, or even Western cultural imperialism. Wherever possible, I will make those linguistic and cultural asymmetries visible.

Notes 1 See Larkosh (2017) for the first comprehensive discussion of all these aspects of Holmes’s life and work. Holmes’s pseudonym, far from an effect of the closet—​ there was nothing closeted about Holmes—​alludes both to his adopted homeland, the Netherlands, and perhaps to the sexually explicit nature of his poetry and of his translations of Martial—​what Bakhtin referred to as the realm of “the bodily lower stratum” in his discussion of Rabelais (1965, 26). 2 However, the volume, Don Kulik notes, “made little impact” on the field of linguistics (Kulik 2014, 77). 3 See the play with “strange” and “foreign” in the final lines of A. E. Housman’s poem XII from his Last Poems (c. 1900): “I, a stranger and afraid /​In a world I never made. /​They will be master, right or wrong; /​Though both are foolish, both are strong. /​And since, my soul, we cannot fly /​To Saturn or to Mercury, /​Keep we must, if keep we can, /​These foreign laws of God and man” (qtd. in White 1999, 1).

20 Introduction 4 Jack Halberstam (2018, xiii) dedicates a book to this prefix Trans*, “looking not for trans people (or people who have legally changed their sex) but for a politics of transitivity.” 5 Incidentally, Foucault (1980, xiv) uses the term “bisexual” to refer to what Laqueur describes as the two-​sex model:  “Most of the time, those who relate their change of sex belong to a world that is strongly bisexual.” 6 As Stedman (1900, xxx) puts it, “There is not been an English-​speaking captive to the bewitchment of the French rhythm and symbolism who has not achieved far less than if he had held fast to the resources of his native tongue.” Note the negative descriptors Stedman uses to portray this interest in foreign literature: captive, bewitchment, and surrender (failing to hold fast). 7 As Heather Love (2007, 3) puts it, “homosexuality is experienced as a stigmatizing mark as well as a form of romantic exceptionalism.” 8 Bonnie Honig (2001, 115) suggests as much in her monograph Democracy and the Foreigner, where she describes democracy’s romance with the foreigner as “a tale of Gothic love.” 9 The term bowdlerize is derived from the name of Thomas Bowdler who edited The Family Shakespeare (1818), removing all passages “which cannot with propriety be read aloud in a family” (qtd. in Mosse 1985, 3). The point underscores that the modern nation with its focus on reproductive culture and the nuclear family also saw the rise of modern notions of “respectability,” targeting nonreproductive sexual and gender behavior (see Mosse 1985). 10 Of course, culture assumes cultivation, hence technologies, so the opposition between culture and civilization does not map perfectly onto the opposition of nature and culture. It then becomes a question of degree, of technology that is in tune with nature versus technology that is destructive to nature. 11 It is worth citing this passage in full as Stedman (1900, xxx) not only presents uninspired art as techne but also goes on to argue that such uninspired art must use props to make up for its lack of inspiration: It is true that much correct verse is written without inspiration, and as an act of taste. The makers seem artists, rather than poets:  they work in the spirit of the graver or decorator; even as idyllists their appeal is to the bodily eye; they are over-​careful of the look of words, and not only of their little pictures, but of the frames that contain them,—​book cover, margin, paper adornment. That lyrical compositions should go forth in attractive guise is delectable, but not the one thing needful for the true poet, whose strength lies in that which distinguishes him from other artists, not in what is common to all. 12 For a sophisticated discussion of the contradictions inherent in the term techne itself, see Preciado (2018). 13 As Dinshaw (1999, 142) puts it, Queer relics—​queer fetishes—​do not stand for the whole, do not promise integrity of the body; they defy the distinction between truth and falsehood, as do ordinary fetishes, but they offer the possibility of a relation to (not mirroring or completing of) something or someone that was […] prevented from being or even being thought of.

Introduction  21 14 Later in that same essay, Adorno (1991b, 290)  would consider “how foreign words operate beneath the sphere of language without fusing with the body of language.” 15 As Edward Carpenter (1908, 40)  says in a footnote to The Intermediate Sex:  “ ‘Homosexual,’ generally used in scientific works is of course a bastard word. ‘Homogenic’ has been suggested, as being from two roots, both Greek, i.e., ‘homos,’ same, and ‘genos,’ sex.” He nonetheless uses the “bastard” term 44 times in this work, and homogenic only 29. 16 Translation in this sense could also be described as a cultural mechanism as formulated by the semiotician Juri Lotman (see Lotman 2019), or as “semiotic technology” (Haraway 1988, 579). 17 Judith Butler distinguishes between explicit and implicit censorship in her 1998 essay “Ruled Out:  Vocabularies of the Censor.” By implicit censorship, Butler (1998, 249, 256) is referring to “operations of power that rule out in unspoken ways what will remain unspeakable” functioning through norms that structure and frame “the very field of speech.” In this sense, implicit forms of censorship do not silence already existing discourse; rather, they represent the very conditions of legibility, thereby enabling and disabling certain interpretations—​ often without the subject being aware of it. 18 As Edward Said (1989, 217) comments, “The Arabs of La Peste and L’Étranger are nameless beings used as back-​ground for the portentous European metaphysics explored by Camus, who […] denied the existence of an Algerian nation.” 19 This argument is elaborated in Derrida’s seminal work Of Grammatology (1997). 20 As a reaction to this disciplinary tradition, contemporary scholars have begun to reassert the validity of the personal and the literary in the study of sexuality (see Mak 2012, 67–​8) and to recognize how thoroughly the literary and the scholarly were entangled in the emergence of sexology (see Bauer 2015 and Tobin 2018). 21 While Tardieu (1874, 122, 2n) appears to admire the memoir’s “particular stamp of captivating sincerity and emotion,” he also insists that “the facts and the impressions remain absolutely true.” Believing science’s role to be making the body legible, Tardieu in fact takes a very sympathetic approach toward Barbin, condemning the medical establishment for having misread Barbin’s genitalia at birth, which condemned Barbin to the “wrong” sex. 22 The original French reads: “La vérité du sujet n’est pas dans le sujet, elle est dans l’histoire, dans les logiques qui nous échappent” (Eribon 2017, 69). 23 I think Baker (2007, 153) incorrectly describes this work as an example of identity politics, whereas Harvey’s project, in showing how a minority identity as represented in US “gay” fiction is transformed through translation in the context of French culture, with its strong attachment to universal citizenship, is, I would argue, essentially queer. He is by no means promoting a minoritarian identity or mourning its loss in translation. 24 For anyone familiar with Harvey’s work, the findings of Bruno Perreau’s recent study of the French reaction to queer theory would have come as no surprise, although Perreau fails to mention Harvey.

1  Queering translation, or what queer theory can do for Translation Studies

In this chapter, I  will attempt to outline the potential contributions of queer theory to Translation Studies by discussing how we might queer the concepts that have served as the pillars of the most popular and influential models of translation in the West for decades now by definitively exorcizing them of what Gloria Anzaldúa (2012, 41) referred to as “the absolute despot duality.” Before undertaking that, however, let me provide a brief overview of the various meanings and deployments of the term “queer” and what is typically referred to as queer theory, which describes various theoretical critiques of gay identity politics that arose in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

The queer in queer theory, or that theory which is not one The Anglophone word queer has an interesting history. The original meaning of the word was “strange” or “peculiar,” and, according to Oxford English Dictionary, one of the first documented uses of the word in the English language was in a description of Gavin Douglas’s 1513 translation of Virgil’s Aenied into Middle Scots (Sayers 2005, 17). But in the nineteenth century, queer began to be used pejoratively to describe individuals attracted to members of the same sex, reinforcing its association with the abnormal, which was established in the field of sexology and increasingly in law in the latter half of the nineteenth century, about the time that, Michel Foucault (1978, 43) asserts, the “modern homosexual” emerged as “a personage, a life form, and a case history, and a childhood, in addition to being a type of life, a life form, and a morphology.” The pejorative term was reappropriated by activists in the 1980s during the AIDS crisis in the United States, as evident in the organization Queer Nation, and in that context took on the valence of “defiantly nonnormative,” indexing an in-​ your-​ face form of political and social activism. At about the same time that queer was being reappropriated by activists, “queer theory” was emerging among US-​based academics, such as Teresa de Laurentis, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Diana Fuss, and Lee Edelman.1 Queer theory and queer activism are not, however, simply products of the same historical moment. As Heather Love (2007, 2) notes, “Queer theorists drew on the energies of confrontational, stigma-​inflected

Queering translation  23 activisim.” Things are further complicated by the fact that new meanings and uses do not necessarily relegate older ones to the dustbin of history, and so, today, “queer” is used as a scholarly and activist positioning, as an umbrella term for nonnormative forms of sexual desire, as a synonym for “gay,” and still as a pejorative term. Any overview of queer theory should probably begin with the acknowledgment that queer theory’s deep suspicion of totalizing frameworks and exclusive categories makes it notoriously difficult to delimit “the explosion of theory taking place under the term queer” (Boone 2000, 3, 4), except to say that it is characterized by a high degree of indeterminacy and mobility. Or as David Halperin (1995, 62) put it, “Queer is by definition whatever is at odds with the normal, the legitimate, the dominant. There is nothing in particular to which it necessarily refers. It is an identity without an essence.” Moreover, while the term queer theory was coined by Italian film theorist and feminist Teresa de Lauretis for a conference she organized at the University of California, Santa Cruz, in 1990, and then featured in a special issue of the journal Differences: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Sexualities, titled Queer Theory, in 1991, it is often used anachronistically to describe work that appeared before the term itself, most notably, that of Michel Foucault. While many aspects of Foucault’s history of sexuality have been criticized, such as its Western bias, especially as it is reflected in his geographical mapping of the distinction between a scientia sexualis and an ars erotica onto West and East, respectively (see Stoler 1995), his History of Sexuality has profoundly influenced queer scholarship, in particular, his focus on the discursive construction of sexual subjects, his conceptualization of an inseparable linkage between knowledge and power, and his rejection of a progressivist teleology in the writing of history, as suggested by his fondness for the metaphor of archeology, implying historical layers placed one atop of the other rather than situated along a developmental or causal trajectory. As Lynne Huffer (2009, 33) asserts, “Without Foucault’s Sexuality One, queer theory as we know it would not have developed.” So, let me begin my overview of queer theory with Foucault. Under the influence of Foucault and other post-​structuralist thinkers, early queer theorists sought a position from which to critically interrogate the social organization of sexual knowledge, or to put it in more Foucauldian terms, the regime of sexual knowledge/​power, while rejecting the possibility of a position “outside” from which to do so. As de Lauretis (1991, iii) wrote:  “[…] homosexuality is no longer to be seen simply as marginal with regard to a dominant stable form of sexuality (heterosexuality) against which it would be defined either by opposition or homology.” To that end, queer scholarship seeks, in the words of the literary theorist Barbara Johnson (1987, 12), “to elaborate a discourse that says neither ‘either/​or,’ nor ‘both/​and’ nor even ‘neither/​nor,’ while at the same time not totally abandoning these logics either.” This is why much of queer scholarship is a critique from within, so to speak, in recognition of the impossibility

24  Queering translation of occupying an “objective” space outside the discursive field we inhabit. Lee Edelman’s concept of homographesis, which he conceptualized as an effect of the social imperative to make the homosexual legible, is a great example of this positioning from within (which I discuss at greater length below). As he puts it in the language of high theory of the 1990s: If the project of a deconstructive homographesis can never successfully disentangle itself from the regulatory homographesis against which it would gain some leverage, this only bespeaks the emergence of gay theory from within the symbolic discourse that demands the reification of identities. (Edelman 1993, 23) This is also what makes the reappropriation of the derogatory term queer a queer gesture par excellence, as Florence Tamagne (2001, 236) explains: “In choosing an insult to designate themselves, homosexuals intended to call into question the categories or normality and abnormality, casting doubt in the shared spaces of language,” reflecting, as Boone (2000, 4) puts it, “the destabilization of any givens inherent in the very concept of queerness.” The mobility of the term queer, however, was exploited long before the advent of queer theory. We see it, for example, already in Radclyffe Hall’s Well of Loneliness (1928), considered a foundation text of modern lesbian literature. Hall uses “queer” quite frequently but also quite promiscuously—​to refer not just to the narrator herself and to her lovers but also to other characters in the novel, such as her father—​“A queer mixture, Sir Philip, part sportsman, part student” (Hall 2014, 19)—​and to the surrounding world—​“the queer, pungent smell from the hearts of dog-​daisies” (25), which troubles any identitarian fixing of identity; she creates a truly queer world. The project of interrogating or deconstructing “the repressive ideology of similitude or identity itself” (Edelman 1993, 23), or the gap between labels and lived experience, is central to the work of most scholars working in queer theory. For example, in Imagining Transgender, David Valentine recounts the transformation of his intended ethnography from a traditional study of transgender identity to a queer investigation of the “category of transgender.” Valentine writes candidly of how he initially undertook his ethnography assuming the existence of transgender individuals who would serve as the objects of his study. Indeed, he was going to conduct his research at a transgender support center that had been established at a New  York City hospital. What better proof that transgender individuals existed. Not long into his research, however, he became aware of the fact that most of his subjects did not “identify” as transgender. Aware of a mismatch between the institutionalization of transgender and the lived experience of his subjects, Valentine realized he was writing not an ethnography of those individuals but an ethnography of the category of transgender itself. This shift allowed him

Queering translation  25 to see their “alternative understanding and organization of their gendered and sexual lives not as false or outmoded but at valid and real (2007, 4–​5). Eve Sedgwick’s Between Men (1985) and the Epistemology of the Closet (1990) are two foundational works of queer theory avant la lettre that are deeply influenced by Foucault. In these works, Sedgwick reconceptualizes the modern sexual field as organized around an epistemology of the closet, arguing that, for a variety of socioeconomic reasons, homosexuality emerged, in a historically new way, as a rupture in the homosocial continuum, which required a policing of male–​male interactions, which induced the phenomenon of “homosexual panic.” The argument is deeply queer in that it inverts identitarian logic, making homosexuality, or the specter of homosexuality, into an effect of changes that were occurring across the field of homosociality. George Chauncey (1995) would follow in Sedgwick’s footsteps with his monumental queer history of New York City, in which he describes gay identity as a largely middle-​class phenomenon, distinguishing it from other expressions of same-​sex desire among working class men and recent immigrants. Regarding the writing of sexual histories, what people often see as the hopelessness or pessimism in Foucault’s approach reflects his understanding of the workings of power and his resistance to incorporating expressions of sexuality from other historical periods and cultures into a progressivist Western reading of history. Crucial to a Foucauldian understanding of sexuality is that the birth of the modern homosexual as a totalizing identity served as the basis not only of a regulatory regime but also of forms of resistance to that regime and, specifically, emancipatory political movements. In other words, the Western narrative of sexual emancipation is predicated on the initial pathologization and criminalization of same-​sex desire. Foucault’s entangling of regulation and resistance is often seen as limiting political agency or even the capacity to imagine alternatives, which led Foucault (1980, xiii) himself to fantasize about spaces beyond or before regulation, such as Barbin’s “happy limbo of a nonidentity” in the convent. Following Foucault, resisting the association of shifts in the discursive field of sex and sexuality with “progress” has become a central component of queer historiography.2 Already in 1990, in Making Sex, Thomas Laqueur insists that the sexual paradigm shift he is describing should not be seen as the result of scientific advancements. As Laqueur (1990, 9)  explains, “the more general shift in the interpretation of male and female bodies cannot have been due, even in principle, to scientific progress.” And later:  “these constructions were not the consequence of scientific change but rather of a social-​political revolution” (20). More recently, Dagmar Herzog (2011, 1) in her Sexuality in Europe: A Twentieth-​century History cautions against inscribing shifts in sexual culture within a grand Western narrative of emancipation and progress: “To tell only a narrative of gradual progress would be to misunderstand how profoundly complicated the sexual politics of the twentieth century in Europe actually were.” Complicating such a narrative

26  Queering translation is “the very difficulty we at times have in defining what a truly sexually free society would be,” not to mention the simple fact that “sex does not always make people happy” (2). Indeed, as sex was construed as central to one’s identity and well-​being, individuals were burdened with “newly heightened expectations of pleasure” (2), the effects of which were not necessarily liberatory. If Herzog provincializes this grand progressivist narrative of sexual emancipation by situating it within modern European history, Joseph Massad in Desiring Arabs (2008) interrogates it from a postcolonial position, arguing that the exportation or universalizing of this Western narrative functions both to justify Western intervention throughout the world and to displace traditional sexual epistemes. While the importation of a Western sexual epistemology may serve to empower an elite few in non-​Western contexts, providing them with a discourse of personal emancipation, that same discourse is adopted by conservative reactionaries to pursue and prosecute queer subjects. And so, Massad argues, “a liberatory social approach whose telos included sexual and gender emancipation” turned out to be “less than liberatory” (2007, 100, 163), leaving many of the subaltern queer subjects it sought to emancipate less safe than before. Massad’s work is in line with other scholars who are reevaluating the legacy of Western liberalism, or specifically, “the Enlightenment project to modernize, normalize, and civilize (or, perhaps better, civicize) the individual and society,” by focusing on the “paradoxical practices, prejudices, and exclusions” it produces (Slaughter 2007, 5). The queer critique of the “ostensibly ‘benign’ ethnocentrism of human rights” has led to a critical rereading of Western bias in the work of Foucault himself. As Ann Laura Stoler (1995, 5–​6) states, What is striking is how consistently Foucault’s own framing of the European bourgeois order has been exempt from the very sorts of criticism that his insistence on the fused regimes of knowledge/​power would seem to encourage and allow. Why have we been so willing to accept his history of a nineteenth-​century sexual order that systematically excludes and/​or subsumes the fact of colonialism within it? Critiques such as Stoler’s are grounded in the insights of earlier queer scholars, such as Diana Fuss (1995, 159), who asked in her seminal work Identity Papers:  “Can one generalize from the particular forms sexuality takes under Western capitalism to sexuality as such? What kinds of colonizations do such translations perform on ‘other’ traditions of sexual difference?” Indeed, second-​generation queer scholars were among the first to acknowledge and address “the inextricability of modern, Western gay and lesbian identities from legacies of race, class, and imperialism” (Hames-​ Garcia 2006, 78), something I will discuss in greater detail in Chapter 4 in reference to Edward Carpenter’s (1902) Ioläus: An Anthology of Friendship.

Queering translation  27 Another queer critique of Foucault centers around his conceptualization of archeologies of knowledge, specifically, the idea that “one episteme decisively, once and for all, replaces another” (Laqueur 1990, 21). In that regard, many scholars have critiqued his very precise dating of the “birth” of the modern homosexual in 1867, which occurred, he argues, with the Adamic coining of the term homosexual. While this was undoubtedly a significant moment in the emergence and consolidation of a modern “gay” identity, it was part of a process, or processes, that were in place long before, as evidenced in Alan Bray’s (1982) study of eighteenth-​century urban molly houses, among other historical studies dating back to the Renaissance, which document the existence of a subcultural “identity.” Moreover, that historically “new” identity did not replace previous ones; they lived on, making the discursive field of sexuality, in Sedgwick’s now classic formulation, “a space of overlapping, contradictory and conflictual definitional forces” (Sedgwick 1990, 78). And so, one way in which queer historians of sex and sexuality after Foucault have attempted to loosen the “straightjacket of succession” (Puff 2012, 23) has been to conceptualize “heterogeneous temporalities” (Perreau 2014, 121), alternative temporalities (Freeman 2007; Halberstam 2005), queer history (Dinshaw 1999; Fradenburg and Freccero 1996; Love 2007), and queer futurity (Edelman 2004; Muñoz 2009). This queer questioning of temporality also applies to modes of research and writing. As Jasbir K. Puar notes: “Queerness irreverently challenges a linear mode of conduction and transmission: there is no exact recipe for a queer endeavor, no a priori system that taxonomizes the linkages, disruptions, and contradictions into a tidy vessel” (Puar 2007, xv).3 Other scholarly work, such as Robert Deam Tobin’s Peripheral Desires: The German Discovery of Sex (2015) and Bruno Perreau’s Queer Theory:  The French Response (2016) have interrogated the self-​ evident unity of a Western sexual epistemology. These studies highlight the specific entanglements of sexuality, society, and the law in different European contexts—​nineteenth-​century Germany and twenty-​first-​century France—​ revealing a number of fault lines in our understanding of Western sexuality. Both works are in profound ways influenced by queer theory while also critiquing it, as a US export, in the case of Perreau, and for its potential illiberal tendencies, in the case of Tobin, who presents the debate between the liberals and the masculinists in nineteenth-​century Germany as rehearsing some of the central issues in the minoritarian versus queer debates of today. Especially valuable is Tobin’s discussion of the decision of German liberals to present homosexuality as congenital so as to foreclose the notion that it could spread, thereby contaminating and corrupting German society. This devil’s bargain, which formed the basis of the liberal argument in favor of decriminalization and tolerance, also served, paradoxically, as the basis of anti-​gay discourse, which is very similar in many parts of the world to anti-​ Semitic discourse (see Tobin 2015, 104–​7). On the other hand, the German masculinist response to the minoritarian liberal model displayed marked

28  Queering translation illiberal tendencies. And while there are clearly fundamental differences with the masculinist movement, the queer critique of human rights has also been seen by some as illiberal, a case of “treason of the intellectuals,” to quote Julian Benda’s book about European intellectuals in the 1920s, and hopelessly undermining the very possibility of political action—​as Leo Bersani charged in Homos (1995, 5). I hope to show in the remaining chapters of this book how a focus on translation can address some of those charges, exposing the complex and often unpredictable workings of identification, disindentification, and desire, while lending a concrete dimension to queer theorizing. Scholars have also begun to study the importation and exportation not only of the minoritarian model but also of its critique in the form of queer theory. One might ask whether the act of naming this line of thinking as queer, a word, incidentally, without cognates outside the Germanic family of languages, fundamentally shaped its movement beyond the Anglophone world. As Chauncey notes, the institutionalization—​ not to mention commodification—​that accompanies such naming, threatens “to reify and naturalize the very categories it was initially designed to critique, and to freeze a rapidly developing field at a particular moment in its evolution” (2000, 305). In any case, that act of naming certainly set the terms for its exportation. Unlike désir, the preferred term of French theorists and one with long-​established equivalents in most languages, queer often travelled into other languages and cultures as an untranslatable, as suggested in the academic conference held in Russia in 2010: Is Queer Possible in Russian? (2010) or in the comment of Phillipe Mangeot, a former president of ACT UP Paris:  “It is impossible to overstate the fact that the French language lacks a suitable translation of ‘queer’ ” (qtd. in Perreau 2014, 83). When traveling outside the Anglophone sphere, “the trauma of its discriminatory origin stayed at home” (Ruvalcaba 2016, 7), allowing queer to become a kind of super-​sign, in Lydia Liu’s (2004) formulation, functioning as a metonym if not a metaphor for a global gay lifestyle and/​or American cultural hegemony, making it into a convenient target in the culture wars in France in the 1990s and beyond, as Perreau documents. My own work on the circulation of queer, or kvir, in post-​Soviet Russia reveals a set of complicated discursive positionings (Baer 2018). In analyzing the terminology used in the glossy journal Kvir, I found that the word was used almost exclusively in references to the journal’s title. In other words, no authors or interviewees were using the term to describe their sexuality. And while the journal contained many articles critical of the American minoritarian model of homosexuality, they resisted labeling those critiques as queer. In fact, one of the only times the word queer was used in that regard was in an interview with an American filmmaker who used the word himself. Perreau notes a similar phenomenon in France, where the title of the television series Queer as Folk was left in English, reflecting a gay marketing strategy “not so much on a register of identity as on the register of lifestyle.”

Queering translation  29 Queer was used in French mass media, Perreau argues, precisely because “its meaning was unclear in French” (2014, 95). In the Arabic world, the title of the Netflix series Queer Eye circulates untranslated, although the subtitles, such as “We’re in Japan!” are translated. Whether this is a way to index a lifestyle, avoid censorship, or both is hard to say. Queer scholars of color have also made extremely important interventions in the field of queer theory, introducing issues of intersectionality, specifically, the racialization of queer bodies, to complicate traditional models of gender and sexual expression, which have traditionally privileged white middle-​ class experience (see Muñoz 1999; Snorton 2017; Stallings 2015). Stallings’s focus on language makes it especially interesting for scholars working in Translation Studies, glossing distinctly Black deployments of language as transing the dominant culture. Finally, recent queer theorizing on the topic of transgender has produced works (Halberstam 2018; Preciado 2018; Salamon 2010) that, like queer of color critiques, highlight the somatics of embodiment.4 Gayle Salamon (2010, 1) sees transgender as underscoring a general “epistemological uncertainty regarding the body,” while Preciado (2018, 13)  argues that the visibility of transgender in political, academic, and popular media venues marks a shift to a new regime of knowledge/​ power, which he terms “pharmacopornographic.” Unlike the two-​ body model described by Laqueur as constructed on incommensurable categories, the pharmacopornographic is founded on fluids, pharmaceuticals, and the plasticity of bodies, made possible by advances in medical technologies and their increasing availability. What the implications for this new sex/​gender regime might be for the way in which we conceptualize translation, I will discuss in the conclusion of the book.

Queering the code, or translation and/​as homographesis While few queer theorists have engaged with translation in any serious or sustained way, queer scholarship has been keenly interested in issues of language, which are obviously relevant to the study of translation. David Gramling (2016, ix), for example, opens his monograph The Invention of Monolingualism with a discussion of a passage from Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s seminal work on queer theory The Epistemology of the Closet, in which she comments on Ronald Reagan’s exercise of monolingual privilege—​or, as she put it, “dilating in his native [language]”—​in a press conference with French president François Mitterand. This serves as the starting point for Gramling’s brilliant study of the role of monolingualism in the contemporary world and reminds us that any attempt to queer translation must take place within a world order structured on monolingualism, or in Gramling’s (2016, 10) formulation, “a global federation of isomorphic language-​states” assuming a monolingual addressee. In other words, monolingualism represents a linguistic ideology, “which holds that languages are unified, countable, stable, orderly, well-​bordered systems, and that human

30  Queering translation speakers use language(s) for discrete and instrumental communicative aims to represent their ideas” (Gramling and Dutta 2016, 335). Insofar as any conception of translation is closely aligned with an understanding of language, the project of queering translation must begin with deconstructing the linguistic code. As Derrida (1986, 14–​15) stated: “If I  had to risk a single definition of deconstruction, one as brief, elliptical, and economical as a password, I would say simply and without overstatement:  plus d’une langue—​more than one language, not more of one language.” Here Derrida connects the problem of translation—​made necessary by the existence of more than one language—​and the problem of naming or categorization, subverted or at least troubled by the signifying surplus of language. This plus d’une langue informs the construal of translation as paradox: it is impossible but constantly being done. It is an attempt to fix meaning that attests to the surplus of meaning, as there can always be another translation. Deeply influenced by deconstruction, queer theorist Lee Edelman uses the concept of the homograph to figure homosexual (in)visibility and its relationship to writing. It is a concept moreover that can easily be applied to translation, as I  will discuss below. Defined as words that are spelled the same but that have different etymologies and meanings, homographs, Edelman (1993, 13) argues, hold the potential to expose “the non-​coincident of what appears to be the same, the homograph, like writing, confounds the security of the distinction between sameness and difference.” That deconstructive potential lies in the homograph’s capacity to lay bare “the metonymic slippage, the difference internal to the ‘same’ signifier, that metaphor would undertake to stabilize or disavow” (14)—​revealing writing to be not a mimetic representation of reality but rather an endless deferral of meaning produced by the fact that language is built on the difference among its signifiers. Barbara Cassin makes a very similar argument regarding the linguistic phenomenon of homonymy, arguing that it should not be seen as an accident of language but rather as something that destabilizes the very structure of language (Apter 2013, 25). Based on phonetic or graphic similarity, the homograph and the homophone represent, many would argue, a “false” equivalence as compared with the “true” equivalence of semantic similarity assumed in traditional models of translation. They could be described as nonmimetic in the sense that they are based not on semantic equivalence but on phonic or graphic coincidence. Nonetheless, the effects of such metonymic connections are very real. Indeed, they are central to the phenomenon described by Freud as parapraxis, or slips. We see this, for example, in Gloria Anzaldúa’s description of a traumatic scene in a dentist’s office, in which the male dentist says he has to tame her “wild tongue” (1983, 75). The sentence takes on a symbolic resonance due to the fact that the Spanish word lingua means both “language” and “tongue.” Of course, in English, too, tongue can mean “language,” but such usage today is marked and typically appears only in fixed expressions, such

Queering translation  31 as “mother tongue.” This connection then is made translingually, through the Spanish. The unconscious is quick to exploit these sites of phonic and graphic similarity or slippage to generate queer expressions of desire. While Edelman does not concern himself with questions of translation, Cassin does, connecting homophony with faux amis, or false friends. These are words that, due to an accident of linguistic history or an act of borrowing, exist in nearly identical forms in two languages but have different meanings and present obvious difficulties for the translator. And so, like homographs, false friends, as the name suggests, may also expose “the noncoincident of what appears to be the same,” and in so doing undermine one’s security in the absolute difference among languages, the fiction that supports monolingualism, upon which the modern world order is built. (Incidentally, another name for the homograph and the false friend is the false cognate.) There is in fact a rather significant body of research in Translation Studies on the way translators deal with cognates, or “words that have similar meaning and spelling in two or more languages” (Mitkov et  al. 2008, 30), not all of which are false, suggesting that the presence of even a small number of false friends is enough to confound one’s security in the distinction between sameness and difference. As Mitkov et al. (2007, 30) comment, “In translation studies, cognates and false friends contribute to the notorious problem of source language interference for translators.” The same is true of borrowings. When Theodor Adorno used a number of French words in an interview on German radio in the 1950s, this led to a backlash from German listeners. The incident inspired Adorno to write two essays on the subject of foreign words, which, he declared, “are a problem, and that is not just a matter of speaking” (1991a, 185). In Tom Boellstorff’s ethnography The Gay Archipelago, he includes a note on Indonesian terms and italicization, in which he describes his treatment of English borrowings:  “Following standard practice, I  italicize Indonesian terms on first use only, except for the following three terms: gay, lesbi, and normal. I follow standard Indonesion orthography except […] when writing gay language terms” (2005, n.p.). Borrowings in this case defy “standard practice” insofar as they must be indexed as the same but different. They also challenge standard translation practice, often compelling the translator to reveal the status of her text as a translation. As Theo Hermans (2010, 205)  argues, “These disparities within the discourse itself prevent the conventional suspension of disbelief and bring into focus the linguistic as well as pragmatic displacement consequent upon the act of translation.” My own study of the treatment by English translations of foreign words in Mikhail Lermontov’s A Hero of Our Time showed there was indeed no standard practice for rendering those terms. One translator omitted all the Ossetian words while retaining French and German words, as the latter, in his judgment, were placed there “with psychological intent” (qtd. in Baer 2011a, 129). Because cognates (both true and false ones) could be said to represent the difference lurking behind a facade of sameness, as well as the opposite,

32  Queering translation the sameness lurking behind the facade of linguistic difference, they possess a certain deconstructive force vis-​à-​vis an international order founded on monolingualism. Perhaps no one has deployed cognates to undermine the ideology of monolingualism more systematically and effectively than Gloria Anzaldúa, whose Borderlands/​La frontera is a key text in both queer studies and Translation Studies. My analysis of her work presents the cognate as the “equivalent” of Edelman’s homograph in the context of interlingual writing and translation. At first glance, Anzaldúa’s title, Borderlands/​La Frontera, would appear to suggest an equivalence between the two terms, which are presented on the title page side by side, separated by a slash. But any sense of equivalence is immediately problematized by the fact that the English term is plural and the Spanish term singular. Moreover, the Spanish term, la frontera, carries the echo of the English word frontier, which entered the English language from French. While the first definition of the English frontier is “border” or “boundary,” meaning the point at which one territory or country abuts another, its second meaning is “the land or territory that forms the furthest extent of a country’s settled or inhabited regions” (Webster’s New Universal 1996, 771). That meaning acquired specific historical resonance when it was used in the nineteenth century to describe the Western territory of the United States and in the twentieth century, outer space, Kennedy’s New Frontier; as such, a frontier became a specific kind of border, one that propels colonizers and explorers outward, into the beyond. In other words, frontier is a view of the border from the position of the hegemon, as suggested in the title of Henry Reynold’s book The Other Side of the Frontier: Aboriginal Resistance to the European Invasion of Australia (1981). Moreover, insofar as frontier casts the Western United States as uninhabited, it serves to erase the history of Spanish colonization, which Anzaldúa provocatively recalls and, one might argue, reclaims, by using the Spanish “la frontera.” Another way Anzaldúa problematizes the function of the slash—​does it separate or bring together, does it enforce difference or invite comparison—​is by using the plural borderlands instead of the singular term “border,” which is typically presented in dictionaries as the first definition of frontier. With her plural borderlands, Anzaldúa designates the territory on either side of the border that produces its own cultural and linguistic entities, which might be described as supra-​or subnational, depending on one’s position.5 In other words, borderlands mark territories connected by a border not separated by one. Hence, Anzaldúa’s bilingual dedication of her book to “todos mexicanos on either side of the border.” Moreover, the words borderlands and frontera imply different notions of directionality, with borderlands inferring a kind of centripedal movement inward toward the border from both sides as opposed to the unidirectional centrifugal motion implied by frontier, as discussed earlier. That difference in directionality aligns with Sakai’s distinction between multilingual and monolingual forms of address, associating the latter with an international order of discrete and independent

Queering translation  33 nation states. So, if the slash in Anzaldúa’s title represents a border, it is one that challenges any simplistic notion of equivalence and suggests the very different ways borders can be imagined. Anzaldúa’s title then is less about a priori borders than it is about the process of bordering, a point she brings home by exploiting rather than suppressing cognates in her writing. The political dimension of translation, that is, the fact that it is almost always an “unequal exchange,” to use Pascale Casanova’s term, is highlighted in the design of Anzaldúa’s title on the cover of the book. By placing Borderlands above La Frontera on the cover and by italicizing La Frontera, marking it as “foreign,” Anzaldúa (or the publisher) appears to acknowledge the hegemonic power of English. Moreover, Frontera is capitalized in conformity with the English capitalization of titles, not the Spanish. Compare this to the cover of the Spanish-​language edition, on which La Frontera is not italicized and is superimposed in red over Borderlands to form an X, a design less obviously hierarchical than the English. Moreover, the question of capitalization in the Spanish title is rendered moot by presenting both words in all caps. Unfortunately, the bilingualism of the original subtitle, “The New Mestiza,” disappears in the Spanish edition: “La nueva mestiza,” reinstating the monolingualism of the nation-​state. Cognates, such as frontera and frontier, represent sites where languages mix and mingle, bleed into one another, making frontera into a linguistic point of entry that echoes the English (imperial) term. And so, it is surprising that Inderpal Grewal (1983, 249), in an otherwise very astute analysis of Anzaldúa’s Borderlands, makes the claim that Anzaldúa “does not translate, for that implies the domination of one language over another.” This is simply not true—​and if it were true, it would reduce her project to a series of binaries, ranging from dominated/​dominating, comprehensible/​incomprehensible, original/​translation. What Anzaldúa does is, in fact, far more complex. True, she does include long passages in Spanish with no translation, but she also does everything else in between. For example, in some instances she includes an English explanation of a Spanish term: “They called her half and half, mita’ y mita’, neither one nor the other but a strange doubling” (2007, 41), which could be taken as a description of all such bilingual appositives; “Petrified, she can’t respond, her face caught between los intersticios, the spaces between the different worlds she inhabits” (42); or “Every increment of consciousness, every step forward is a travesía, a crossing” (70). Moreover, by using Spanish words that share origins with English words, the words themselves become interstices, crossings. Elsewhere, she includes Spanish words with no translation, relying on cognates to make the meaning more or less comprehensible but perhaps not equivalent:  “La facultad is the capacity to see in surface phenomena the meaning of deeper realities” (60), or: But Chicano Spanish is a border tongue which developed naturally. Change, evolución, enriquecimiento de palabras nuevas por invención o

34  Queering translation adopción have created variants of Chicano Spanish, un nuevo lenguaje. Un lenguaje que corresponde a un modo de vivir. Chicano Spanish is not incorrect, it is a living language. (77) As I mentioned earlier, she does include long passages in Spanish with no translation, but she also offers translations from the Spanish with no original: “ ‘Out of poverty, poetry; out of suffering, song.’—​a Mexican song” (87), and elsewhere an original Spanish poem by Isabel Parra along with an English translation (161). Although Anzaldúa does present the need to translate as a burden, she also speaks out against any absolute separation or purity of languages, which a simple refusal to translate would only confirm: Until I am free to write bilingually and to switch codes without having always to translate, while I still have to speak English or Spanish when I would rather speak Spanglish, and as long as I have to accommodate the English speakers rather than having them accommodate me, my tongue will be illegitimate. (81) She is not talking here about Spanish but about her Spanglish or Tex-​Mex. Elsewhere she says: “Tex-​Mex, or Spanglish, comes most naturally to me. I may switch back and forth from English to Spanish in the same sentence or in the same word” (78; italics added). Switching in the same word—​isn’t this precisely what Edelman was describing with his homograph? Anzaldúa’s linguistic play resites Edelman’s homograph in an interlingual context. Cognates for Anzaldúa represent the queer borderlands of languages, a place of linguistic echoes, resemblances, and distortions, undermining the myth of monolingualism and the cultural capital it represents. In this respect, it is interesting to note the attraction of queer authors to translingual writing (see Larkosh 2016; Spurlin 2017) as an attempt to find emancipation in the interstices, gaps, and fault lines between political and sexual epistemologies, in the constant movement between. Such projects are fundamentally queer insofar as they demonstrate that “sexual categories and behaviors never perfectly coincide, that subjects constitute themselves across the gaps” (Perreau 2014, 80).

Queering exchange A new focus on complex systems has seriously undermined binary models of intercultural exchange. As Casanova suggests in The World Republic of Letters, the literary field is characterized by differences in cultural capital making most exchanges not simply unequal but involving international centers of cultural capital through which literary texts in “minor”

Queering translation  35 or dominated languages must pass, which, at a minimum, triangulates exchange. Moreover, new research on relay or indirect translation has also challenged traditional binary models of sender and receiver (see Boulogne 2009; Rosa, Pieta, and Maia 2017) insofar as literary works from minor cultures often pass through a prestige language, such as French, English, or Russian, on their way to other minor or other major languages. Although the phenomenon has been largely ignored by historians of national literary traditions and, until recently, even by scholars in Translation Studies, scorned as “inauthentic” or doubly mediated, the reality is that relay translations have played an enormous role in the circulation of literary and other cultural texts and are key to understanding the often hidden workings of cultural hegemony. When, for example, Russian literature passed through French, it reached other European languages in its French interpretation and packaging, although the fact that the text was a relay translation was often suppressed (Boulogne 2009). Heekyoung Cho’s recent monograph, Translation’s Forgotten History, underscores the enormous importance of relay translations of Russian literature in the making of modern Korean literature, relay translations often made from Japanese relay translations—​in other words, the Japanese translations the Koreans were translating were often translated not directly from the Russian but from English and French translations into Japanese—​ at a time when Korea was under Japanese colonial rule. Today, the international Anglophone market is often a third player in intercultural exchanges, complicating simple binary models of source and target texts. Writers with an eye on their international reputation, such as Vladimir Nabokov and Isaac Bashevis Singer, insisted that subsequent translations of their works written in Russian and Yiddish, respectively, be done from the English translations, making them the new original. In the circulation of queer texts, the role of the Anglophone market is enormous. Consider, for example, the translation of Charlotte von Mahlsdorf’s memoir. The subtitle of the Russian edition, which purports to be translated from the German original, is quite different from its laconic “ein Leben” [A Life]:  Tainaia zhizn’ Sharlotty fon Mal’sdorf, samogo izvestnogo berlinskogo transvetita [The Secret Life of Charlotte von Mahlsdorf, Berlin’s Most Famous Transvestite]. It has much more in common with the similarly lengthy subtitle of the English translation: The Outlaw Life of Berlin’s Most Distinguished Transvestite, although with a notable alteration, which I discuss in Chapter 5. It is very likely that the Russian subtitle was fashioned from the English translation even if the text itself was translated from the German. Or consider the more complicated transnational publishing history of the memoir of the nineteenth-​century hermaphrodite Herculine Barbin. Barbin’s French memoir was first published in 1872 as part of a volume by the French sexologist Ambroise Tardieu under the title Question medico-​ légale de l’identité dans ses rapports avec les vices de conformations des organs sexuals

36  Queering translation contenant les souvenirs et impressions d’un invidivu dont le sexe aviat été méconnu [The medical–​legal question of identity, in its relation to conformational defects of the sexual organs, containing memories and impressions of an individual whose sex was misrecognized]. Barbin’s memoir formed the second half of the volume and was titled Histoire d’Alexina B., while the memoir itself bore the title Mes Souvenirs, or “my memories,” given by Barbin. It was reissued in an expanded and corrected edition in 1874. In 1978, Gallimard issued a more complete version of the memoir—​Tardieu had made some minor cuts—​presented by Michel Foucault, which did not include Tardieu’s introductory essay and annotations to the memoir and replaced Tardieu’s title Histoire d’Alexina B. [The Story of Alexina B.] with the somewhat more enigmatic Herculine Barbin, dite Alexina B. [Herculine Barbin, called Alexina B.], followed by:  “Presenté par Michel Foucault” [presented by Michel Foucault]. The 1978 Gallimard edition, which was the first work published in the book series Les Vies parallèlles [Parallel Lives], opens directly with the memoir, which is followed by a “dossier,” consisting of several historical documents, briefly introduced by Foucault. Neither the short introduction to the dossier, which is entirely italicized and consists of less than two full pages, nor Foucault’s name appears in the table of contents. Two years later, an English “translation” appeared, published by Pantheon Books, with the elaborate title:  Herculine Barbin, Being the Recently Discovered Memoirs of a Nineteenth-​ century French Hermaphrodite, followed by “Introduced by Michel Foucault.” The explicit, even taxonomic nature of the English title, C. J. Gomolka (2012, 67)  argues, “becomes a teleological disclosure that causally divests the memoir of any eventual transitivity; in other words, the English reader knows the end before he/​she knows the beginning.”6 In this regard, it is interesting to compare the English subtitle of Barbin’s memoir—​“Being the Recently Discovered Memoirs of a Nineteenth-​ Century French Hermaphrodite”—​with the English subtitle of Charlotte von Mahlsdorf’s memoir, published 14  years later:  “The Outlaw Life of Charlotte von Mahlsdorf, Berlin’s Most Distinguished Transvestite,” a significant expansion of the laconic German subtitle “Ein Leben,” or “A life.”7 In terms of length, the Anglophone title of Barbin’s memoir has more in common with the title of Tardieu’s 1872 French edition than with Foucault’s (1978) one. The descriptor “recently discovered” in the English title would, however, appear to distance this edition from Tardieu’s volume, which was in fact the first publication of the work in French. Shouldn’t it have read:  the recently rediscovered manuscript? That being said, Foucault’s interpretation of Barbin’s life, as outlined in the opening essay of the US edition, is diametrically opposed to that of Tardieu, who, while sympathetic, presents Barbin as the unwitting victim of a medical mistranslation, a misreading of his genitalia. Foucault also blames the medical establishment, not for misclassifying Barbin but for attempting to classify him/​her at all. That

Queering translation  37 classifiactory violence, Foucault argues, put a brutal end to the “tender pleasures that non-​identity discovers and provokes” and led directly to Barbin’s death: “He was incapable of adapting himself to a new identity and ultimately committed suicide” (Foucault 1980, xiv, xi). The English volume also differs from the 1978 Gallimard edition in that it no longer opens directly with Barbin’s memoir, but with a ten-​page introduction by Foucault, which begins with the question: “Do we truly need a true sex?” (1980, vii), hence the substitution of “presenté par Michel Foucault” with “introduced by Michel Foucault” in the title. What was a largely covert and internal framing by Foucault in the 1978 French edition, involving the editing and presentation of the text, becomes in the translated edition overt and exterior. It is also anterior insofar as the introduction is placed in front of the memoir, encouraging readers to read it first, thus shaping their interpretation of Barbin’s life story. Like the elaborate title, the heavy expert framing of the US edition puts it more in line with Tardieu’s volume than with Foucault’s initial French edition. The introductory essay in the 1980 American edition was in fact a version of a talk delivered by Foucault to the 1979 congress of the homophile association Arcadie (Macey 1995, 362).8 In addition to Foucault’s essay, the English volume contains a translation of a short story about Barbin, “Ëin Skandalöser Fall,” written by the German psychiatrist and avant-​garde writer Oscar Panizza, appearing under the title “A Scandal at the Convent.” That story was clearly included to support Foucault’s interpretation of Barbin’s life as one of blissful nonidentity. As Foucault (1980, xvi) writes in the introduction, “Panizza deliberately leaves in the center of his narrative a vast area of shadow, and that is precisely where he places Alexina.” Shadow, as Foucault construes it, defies legibility. It is not surprising, given the enormous international reputation of Foucault, that the American version of Barbin’s memoir would become a new original, the version chosen for translation into most other languages:  A fen Hermafodits Erindringer (Danish, 1981); Un diario de un hermafrodita (Spanish, 1982); Herculine Barbin, llamada Alexina B. (Spanish, 1985); Herculine Barbin:  Mijn herrinneringen (Dutch, 1982); Über Hermaphrodismus (German, 1998); and Herculine Barbin: Una strana confessione. Memorie di un ermafrodito presentate da Michel Foucault (Italian, 2007). The Russian translation is one of the few to be translated from the 1978 French edition:  Erkiulin Barben, izvestnaia takzhe kak Aleksina B. Vospominaniia germafrodita (Russian, 2006). Those translated editions are often accompanied by an additional introduction by a local scholar, and some do not contain Panizza’s story. The German edition is perhaps the most hybrid, including in its introduction detailed information regarding the French and English versions of the text edited by Foucault, as well as some of the annotations from Tardieu’s version. The prominence of the Anglophone edition has produced some confusion in scholarly circles. For example, Jennifer Webb (2008) mentions only the

38  Queering translation 1980 English edition, while Roger J. Porter (1991, 126) mentions the 1978 Gallimard edition, but then claims: included in the same volume were detailed medical reports alleging Barbin’s true hermaphroditic nature, as well as a lurid short story based on the case, entitled “A Scandal in the Convent,” written a quarter-​ century after Barbin’s death by a German psychiatrist, Oscar Panizza.9 That story, however, first appeared in the English edition. The distinction between the two editions is also not made entirely clear in Judith Butler’s now famous critical reading of Foucault’s treatment of Barbin, which appears in Gender Trouble. When Butler (1999, 120) first mentions the work, she appears to be referring to Foucault’s essay in the English edition—​“his short but significant introduction to the journals he published of Herculine Barbin, a nineteenth-​century French hermaphrodite”—​but without clarifying that. She then notes that “a satiric short story by the German writer, Oscar Panizza,” is also included, which, again, is only true of the English edition. Only then do we get some indication that the French and English editions might differ:  “Foucault provides an introduction to the English translation of the text.” Ten pages later, she makes her first mention of the French edition, noting, “On the cover of the French edition, [Foucault] remarks that Plutarch understood illustrious persons to constitute parallel lives which in some sense travel infinite lines that eventually meet in eternity” (130).10 This is in fact the introduction to the Parallel Lives book series, of which Barbin’s memoir was intended to be the first of many, but Butler reads it as if it were the introduction to the French edition, which allows her to suggest that Foucault might have been drawing a connection between Herculine and Alexina as parallel lives, or between himself and Herculine/​Alexina. The 1978 French edition was in fact very influenced by Foucault’s interest in seriality, which distinguishes in a number of ways the packaging of Barbin’s memoir in the French and English editions, as I discuss below. Indeed, these two editions might be said to reflect the idea of parallel lines put forward by Foucault in his dedication of the series—​lines that travel in parallel for eternity without ever meeting.11 At the same time, new French “originals” continued to be published. In 2008, there appeared a new French edition of the “original” version of the memoir, edited by Tardieu, including Tardieu’s annotations but without his lengthy opening treatise. Then, in 2014, a French edition based on the 1980 English edition was published, but with some additions and telling alterations. The 2014 French edition fully exploits the cultural capital of Foucault—​and, metonymically, of French theory—​by altering his place in the title. Whereas the participial phrase “présenté par Michel Foucault” appears at the end of the title in the 1978 French edition, reflecting perhaps Foucault’s desire not to overshadow Barbin, Foucault is mentioned at the very beginning of the title in the 2014 edition, now as the subject: “Michel

Queering translation  39 Foucault présente.” The 2014 French edition also includes a closing essay by Eric Fassin, a French scholar working in the United States who has written extensively about the conceptual mismatch between French and English politics as they relate to same-​sex marriage and other issues. “The politics of same-​sex marriage,” as Fassin (2001, 217; italics added) declared elsewhere, “did not translate well.” The title of Fassin’s essay in the 2014 edition of Barbin’s memoir, “Le vrai genre,” alludes to Foucault’s essay, “Le vrai sexe” [The true sex] from the US edition, while exploiting the queer potential of the French word genre, which means both “gender” and “genre,” just as Foucault exploited the queer potential of sexe, which can mean “biological sex” or “genitalia.” “Postface d’Eric Fassin” is now at the end of the title, where “présenté par Michel Foucault” had been in the 1978 edition. The 2014 edition also includes Foucault’s description of the Les Vies parallèles series, which opened the 1978 French edition but was not included in the 1980 English edition: The Ancients liked to place the lives of illustrious men in parallel; they listened to these exemplary shades speak across the centuries. Parallels are, I know, designed to come together at infinity. Imagine others that diverge indefinitely. There is no meeting point or place where they can be brought together. Often we only heard their echo when they were condemned. We need to grasp them in the force of the movement that separates them; we need to find the instantaneous and dazzling wake they left when they were propelled toward an obscurity where that “is no longer talked about” and where all “renown” is lost. This would be the opposite of Plutarch: lives that are so parallel that nothing can connect them. (Foucault 2014, n.p.)12 In fact, this is one of the major dislocations that occurs with the English edition—​it is no longer part of a series, as Foucault had initially intended it—​nor, for that matter, is the 2014 edition. Moreover, for Foucault in the late 1970s, the concept of seriality had become quite central to his thinking. As he was preparing the Barbin volume and conceptualizing the Parallel Lives series, he was also developing the idea for another series with Gallimard based on archival fragments. He describes the series in the essay “La vie des hommes infâmes,” or “The Life of Infamous Men,” which was meant to serve as the introduction to the Le Chemin series (Macey 1995, 360). The idea for the book came out of Foucault’s archival work, inspired by brief “lightning-​ fast” mentions of individual lives intersecting with power that he found in “archives of confinement, police, petitions to the king and lettres de cachet” from 1660 to 1760 (Foucault 1979, 83). He imagined the work not as a conventional history, but rather as an “anthology of existences” (76), which he intended to present, like his editions of Barbin’s memoir and of the memoir of Pierre Rivière, with “a minimum of historical signification” (77). In this

40  Queering translation way, he hoped to resist those lives being turned into biographies, allowing them to exist, as Foucault initially found them, as “strange poems” (76) or “life-​poems” (78), whose “frugal lyricism” produced an effect Foucault describes as physical (77).13 As the transnational travel of Barbin’s memoir suggests, the relationship between the United States and France is a complicated one, one that challenges binary models based on the notion of a fixed point of origin and of translation as an end point in cross-​cultural exchange, as documented in Bruno Perreau’s Queer Theory:  The French Response (2014). As Perreau (2014, 143) puts it, I argue that there is no specifically French origin of queer theory any more than queer theory is today American. The idea that French theory has returned to French via queer theory is a translatlantic cultural fantasy that postulates the existences of two distinct, stable territories defined through their exchanges and oppositions. The complex and unpredictable relationship between the United States and France, Perreau (77) argues, makes it impossible to establish an “exact point of origin or arrival” for what would become “queer theory,” generating a number of seeming paradoxes. As Keith Harvey (2003, 2) commented over ten years before Perreau’s Queer Theory: It is, of course, an irony of intercultural history that much of the French work drawn on by American thinkers in this later movement of cultural transfer had been in its own time and cultural space specifically designed to resist the American work of the 1970s. In writing the history of such cross-​cultural relationships, translations represent important sites of engagement. Harvey, for example, notes the importance of a 1993 reedition of Dangoor’s English translation of Hocquenghem’s Le Désir homosexuel with a new introduction by Eve Sedgwick’s colleague Michael Moon. Of course, no less important than “the decision to translate this or that kind of work” (Perreau 2014, 2)  is the decision not to translate a work, which is often a symptom of cultural resistance to a text, author, or idea. For example, Butler’s Gender Trouble was not translated into French until 2005 and Sedgwick’s Epistemology of the Closet not until 2008, despite the obvious influence of French thought on these authors. Even more interesting than the fact of translation or of nontranslation, however, is what happens in the process of translation. In that regard, Perreau (2016, 77)  recounts a fascinating incident involving the translation into French of an essay by Eve Sedgwick, which was first delivered as a paper at a conference on gay and lesbian studies organized by Didier Eribon at the Centre Pompidou in Paris:

Queering translation  41 Sedgwick’s paper was titled “Making Queer Meanings.” However, given the difficulty of translating the word “queer” for a French audience, she decided—​ in consultation with Eribon—​ to use the term “gay”: “Construire des significations gay.” By the time the proceedings of the symposium were about to be published, a debate had arisen over the terms “gay” and “queer” themselves, so Sedgwick and Eribon decided to return to the original English word:  “Construire des significations queer.” Oblivious of that history, a recent anthology of essays by Sedgwick not previously published in English, The Weather in Proust, included the paper under the title used at the symposium itself: “Making Gay Meanings.” The translation thus carried out a rearguard action:  The term “queer,” associated with a certain critique of the word “gay” in the United States, was used in the published French title of Sedgwick’s paper, whereas the term “gay,” which seemed more acceptable to a French audience in the late 1990s, was used for the English title. In other words, the “source” was so marked by its echo that it was itself thereby transformed. The transnational movement of terms is in fact a constant in the field of sexuality studies. As Matthew Livesey (1997, 32) remarks in regard to the term inversion, its initial usage barely references what we might call homosexuality, “but when the term is translated into other languages, first English, and then Italian and French, its meaning begins to shift.” Perreau’s use of “echo” as a metaphor to refigure intercultural or transnational exchange beyond binaries echoes Foucault’s use of the term in the epigraph to the 1978 and 2014 French editions of Barbin’s memoir. We see it too in the following passage from Joseph Allen Boone’s The Homoerotics of Orientalism (2014, 53; italics added): In bringing eastern and western archives into conjunction, my intention is not to argue that one culture’s representations directly influence or shaped those of the other. Rather, reading these cultural manifestations contrapuntally, listening to the echo-​effects they create, adds a density of texture that illuminates the staying power, connotative energies, and accretion of meanings that emanate from them. Echo is used by these authors as a way to queer equivalence, to conceptualize sameness that is never the same.

Beyond equivalence It has probably become obvious from the sections above that once we have deconstructed binary models, the notion of equivalence essentially loses its meaning, or remains as a legal fiction (see Emmerich 2017). Once a

42  Queering translation relationship is ternary, equivalence makes no sense. It is a concept that (re) enforces the binary relationships it is meant to evaluate. Equivalence is also problematicized by the asymmetrical nature of natural languages—​the codes themselves are not equivalent to begin with—​and by the ubiquity of polysemous words, whose range of meanings rarely align with their “equivalent” in another language.14 To drive home the asymmetry of languages, Anzaldúa titles her book with opposing English and Spanish words that defy simple equivalence, as discussed earlier. Annamarie Jagose makes this point somewhat differently in her hilarious queer Bildungsroman In Translation, the central theme of which is the queerness of translation: [Navaz] says that she is trying something new, that she is translating Nishimura’s novel into English, then back into Japanese, to English again. It never comes out the same. She makes the gesture of pouring water back and forth between two containers. Each time, the plot lines, the characters’ interactions and outcomes, are recognizable yet recognisably different from the time before. Nishimura is pleased with her work. His publishing house is bringing it out next season as a trilogy. (1994, 50) That the result is a trilogy is, of course, no accident in Jagose’s queer world. Later, the narrator would read all of Navaz’s translations, out of more than politeness: “I was trying to find out how something could change while still equalling itself” (106)—​putting her finger on the paradox of equivalence. Later, Lillian will stage a photography exhibit titled “Same Difference” (146). As Jagose portrays in her novel, the purpose of translation is rarely to establish equivalences, especially in the fictional world she creates, where almost all the relationships are, minimally, triangulated. The heroine is involved in a series of relationships, none of which involves fewer than three people, betraying a queer antipathy toward binaries or what Anzaldúa calls “that absolute despot duality.” She is invited to live with a lesbian couple next door, becoming entangled in their complicated relationship. The younger woman, Navaz, is a translator, and the narrator begins to intercept the installments of the Japanese novel she is translating in order to alter the text as a way to interact with Navaz. In order to do so, she must learn Japanese, for which she solicits the help of Professor Mody, who then proofreads her revised versions of the Japanese original. But Professor Mody mistakes her for Miss Betty, a woman with whom he is having an epistolary relationship and has never seen. The point is not simply that these relationships are all ternary, but that they also involve a pronounced element of play and imposture; in everything there is a “touch of theatricality” (57). The older of the two women, Lilian, speaks “as if quoting something” and is often in costume:  “Even her clothes are a citation” (13). Lilian’s lover, Navaz, is a translator and, as such, also traffics in other people’s words, and

Queering translation  43 Lilian, a photographer, takes a series of pictures of Navaz dressed as the various authors she translates. Jagose, however, makes sure not to present the ternary as an unproblematic solution to the binary. When her relationship with Navaz and Lillian becomes complicated, she notes: “I had yet to learn that a three is always a two and a one. (A three is always a two and a one)” (75). Moreover, during his proofreading of the doctored Japanese novel, Professor Mody falls “a little in love with Nashimura,” the author of the novel, leading the narrator to exclaim: “We are a fine couple” (87). Later Professor Mody and the real Miss Betty will translate together some erotic verse by the Japanese poet Yukio (88), which he shows to the narrator, instantiating another triangulated erotic relationship. But Jagose’s queer project involves far more than simply resisting binaries. She suggests the ways in which equivalence is in fact an effect of different regimes of multilingualism, what M. A. K. Halliday (2007) designated by the terms glossodiversity and semiodiversity, with the former describing a diversity of linguistic codes and the latter, a diversity of meanings conveyed. As David Gramling (2016, 32) explains, the paradigm of glossodiversity, which is a historical outlier and tracks with the rise of global capital, “empowers speakers to say the same thing in many languages, to disseminate intellectual property translingually with heightened efficiency and reduced incidence of accidental content.”15 Semiodiversity, on the other hand, stresses semantic differences across language, although, Gramling (2016, 32)  cautions, it is “not reducible to how various recognized languages can house divergent meaning for an ostensible cognate concept, but also attends to how such meanings become stretched and unmoored amid historical and ecological constellations among those languages.” This is similar to a distinction made by the semiotician Juri Lotman (1994/​2019) between a model of translation built on equivalent codes and one built on nonequivalent codes. Only in the first model can a message be transferred so that the translation, when back translated, will always reproduce the original message, barring a technical glitch; however, it can only reproduce the initial message—​it cannot generate new messages. In the second model, a back translation will almost never reproduce the original, but this is the only model that can create new messages, precisely because the meanings of the words are “stretched” and “unmoored”—​ queered?—​ when transferred into a nonequivalent code. Glossodiversity, then, is predicated on the idea that natural languages are or could somehow be made “equivalent,” hence, transposable. Jagose again and again in her novel parodically represents the central premise of glossodiversity, namely, that words can transcend specific contexts of usage. The narrator’s globe-​trotting aunt, with whom she lives after leaving home when her parents discover her homosexuality, is the very embodiment of glossodiversity—​she travels all over the world, sending the narrator postcards of herself in various exotic locations, but remains “always and without doubt, my aunt, uninflected by foreign language and unfamiliar vegetation” (30). The narrator draws out the implications of this

44  Queering translation for translation—​namely, translation as substitution or transposability—​in the following paragraph, where she imagines her aunt suddenly appearing at the bottom of the lane: How impervious she would be to the yammer of two, or is it three, unknown tongues filtering up from the yard, to the elusive authority of the Japanese/​English dictionary always open on my desk, its sly offering of one word for another. I imagine her taking my place at the card table, as once I took hers, her unchanging sense of herself—​E. R. Morrow—​ easily filling these rooms. I  imagine her dispatching my day’s translation in the half hour before breakfast, scarcely pausing where I  have spent uncertain hours adjudicating between “maid” and “hired help”, between hair as black as a “crow’s” or a “raven’s” wing. (31) This passage is immediately followed by one in which the narrator suggests the violence underpinning the resolute glossodiversity embodied by her aunt, when she recounts how she herself “tames” the city to which she has moved “by superimposing on its seething streets, its unimaginable cul de sacs and short cuts, another map, the simple trajectories of my excursions, blue for the bank, green for the restaurant, red for the post office” (31). She then describes this as “the standarisation of her forays” (31). But this is an example of the specific—​ her trajectories—​ presenting itself as the transcendent. While her aunt, as a resolute, unapologetic monolingual, stands at one end of the spectrum of glossodiversity, the narrator’s polyglot lover, Navaz, stands at the other: “I look at Navaz whose brain is full of words, English, Japanese, German, Russian, and those little switchpoints that turn one word into another” (36). The mention of switchpoints here indexes the notion of transposability, which is central to glossodiversity. Navaz later reveals a monolingual understanding of language as a discrete entity when she asks the narrator:  “Do you have any German?” (47). To which the narrator responds: Not can you read German, can you follow it, but do you have any German? Not having any, and suddenly feeling this as a lack, an impoverishment, I made that open handed gesture you make when approached on the street to indicate that you have come out without money, that you don’t have a light. (47) This idea of possessing language, or of language as a commodity, is also suggested when the narrator mentions the Japanese/​English dictionary she uses was “bought from the Strand” (45).

Queering translation  45 The narrator, however, is increasingly troubled by the logic of glossodiversity represented by her aunt’s unselfconscious monolingualism and her lover’s equally unselfconscious code-​switching. For example, when traveling in India with Navaz, the narrator is rendered mute by a request from their taxi driver, Prakash, to tell him three words in English:  “ ‘In six years, I  have taught myself English,’ says Prakash. ‘Now I  will learn Japanese. My friends all teach me when I show them around. You will give me three words please’ ” (37). The narrator is flummoxed: “I stare and stare but the world is suddenly, for me, unspeakable. The neat captions that once labelled everything, that we exchange with each other, are no longer available” (37). Navaz then helps out, offering the word “tarmac,” at which Prakash “nods complacently, as if the definition is less valuable than the word, as if he always knew where the plane landed but not the ‘tarmac’ ” (38). After providing another term, pneumatic tyre, Prakash “makes these words his own” (38). Jagose critiques glossodiversity by pushing it to an absurd extreme—​ transposability gone mad—​when, for example, the narrator discovers that the stamps on the postcards her aunt is sending no longer match the location of the sites featured on the front. The narrator later mentions that a guidebook she uses while traveling recommends stamps from one’s own country as a gift, a “pretty thank you” (127), becoming the object of exchange rather than the “invisible” vehicle of that exchange. Here the mode of exchange takes on a life of its own, just as words do when Jagose’s narrator settles “for the literal eloquence of a word game” (132). In the game, words, divorced from their context, become fetishes: Beatrice turns out to have been one of those children who read the dictionary for pleasure: against the skirt and embark of the two men, she plays jauk and crissum, twice she empties her rack with petechia and arbuscle. They cannibalise each other:  Sanki adds lych to the maid’s gate; Mr. Oliver puts corpse before Sanki’s candle, beginning a dispute which is only settled with recourse to the dictionary. (132) Of course, their recourse to the dictionary is meant to check only the spelling, not the meaning of the words. If the realm of glossodiversity is indexed throughout the novel by the dictionary, then the narrator’s shift in her covert translation practice from using dictionaries to using phrasebooks is significant. As the narrator comments: There is an honest weight to the dictionary that the phrasebook lacks. Where the dictionary is judicious, offering one word for another, the phrasebook is aggressive and wheedling in turns. He will not give it back to you. You need not ask him for it. He was dead yesterday. Its

46  Queering translation sentences never coincide with those of Nishimura although occasionally, through my alterations, accommodation is made for them. (52). Dictionaries abstract meanings while the phrasebook presents words always in specific contexts. That being said, the sample sentences the narrator lists all deal with failed exchanges, underscoring the problem of context for glossodiversity. (Notice the insertion of ominous references—​corpse in the word game and now “He was dead yesterday”—​suggesting there might be more at stake here than the surface absurdity might suggest.) Navaz’s lover, Lillian, also plays a crucial role in instilling an awareness of semiodiversity in the narrator. A photographer, Lillian teaches the narrator that “the function of the camera is not to record but to frame” (8), offering framing and, later, staging, as alternatives to mimesis. In Lillian’s world of semiodiversity, words matter:  “That evening marked a change in Lillian’s dress-​ups or stagings, as she preferred to have me call them” (116). As Lillian explains, “Dress-​ups suggest that someone is concealing themselves within the clothes of another. […] Whereas if we think of these moments at stagings, as being performed in a dramatic space, we foreground at once both the authenticity and the artifice” (116). The metaphor of language as clothing supports glossodiversity insofar as clothes can be changed without altering in any way what is underneath. This notion of staging makes an impression on the narrator, who “memorises the difference” (116). She then goes on to connect staging with translation “because she produces work that is both real and not real” (116)—​unlike a bank teller, she says. The mention of a bank teller invokes another metaphor that, like clothing, supports glossodiversity by equating words with currency. Lillian, however, does not oppose transposability to nontransposability but rather the paradox of semiodiversity to the fiction of glossodiversity—​ insofar as meanings are not exchanged in translation, but rather they are inevitably stretched and unmoored. That paradox is evident in the title of Lillian’s photography exhibit “Same Difference.” When the narrator queries Lillian about the title, Lillian explains:  “ ‘Same difference’, which a dictionary of colloquial usage will tell you is no difference at all, articulates the difficulty of placing female sexuality in relation to a phallocentric system of representation which structures itself around notions of visibility” (152)—​ suggesting obvious parallels with Edelman’s homograph, while implicating translation, too. One of the featured photos in the exhibit is of Navaz titled “Portrait of a Translator.” One aspect of the narrator’s transition from a regime of glossodiversity to one of semiodiversity involves the recognition of the decisive role of desire in language. In fact, a definitive moment in the narrator’s transition is when she and Navaz first make love at Navaz’s aunt’s home in India, which leaves the narrator feeling “undone” (80). A parallel incident occurs toward the end of the novel when Navaz falls ill, which reduces her to her

Queering translation  47 physical body—​“she is her body” (175). This, in turn, places her outside any system of exchange: “For the first time I see her symptoms as evidence of her suffering, not signs of a new intimacy afforded me. It is a shaming moment” (174). Both confrontations with Navaz’s body, or, one might say, with somatics, problematize the narrator’s understanding of exchange as substitution or transposability. Their initial lovemaking is followed by a gathering with Navaz’s family, during which Navaz must translate for the narrator: “I could sometimes find these mediations estranging” (81). As she goes on to explain: Soon the polite English of the schoolroom and the public service gave way to an easier, unknown language and for the rest of the evening I would be caught in a time lag, waiting for Navaz’s hurried summaries of the conversation, laughing uneasily and alone after everyone had finished with the joke. […] I left each night exhausted as though I had watched six hours of subtitled films. (81–​2) The fact that the language of subtitles is not transparent but inscribed with source language patterning makes the viewing exhausting. Later on, during Navaz’s illness, when she is reduced to an inscrutable body—​she is her body—​the very nature of the narrator’s desire changes from a desire to identify with Navaz to a desire to know her in all her difference: There is no desire in me as I run my flannelled hand over her body or if there is, it is a desire bent double, turned back on itself; a desire to recognise Navaz’s boundaries, where the air meets her skin, not to confuse her body with mine. (126) This experience changes the way the narrator perceives their relationship. When she looks again at a photo taken by Lillian of her and Navaz, she remarks, “Now I see for the first time how Navaz and I are not equivalently placed on either side of the letterbox” (139); the presence of the letterbox, of course, suggests a model of exchange within a regime of glossodiversity. But what if the letterbox no longer guarantees equivalence, what if letters are not placed on either side of it? The narrator also becomes increasingly sensitive to words. For example, when Navaz’s aunt uses the word jet set, she does so “in a peculiarly self-​ satisfied way, pronouncing it carefully as if it is a phrase in a more valuable language” (82). The idea that there are languages that are more valuable than others suggests that translation is likely to be an “unequal exchange” (Casanova 2010). Moreover, following Navaz’s illness, the narrator becomes acutely aware of linguistic borrowings: “Déja-​vu, we say in French, as if we haven’t the words for it; as if what we have seen before happened in another

48  Queering translation country, in another language” (168), and later, toward the very end of the novel: “A shiver or, it can be said better in French, a frisson runs under and across the table, knitting me up with Professor Mody” (188). The novel ends as the narrator completes the final installment of her translation—​ and by extension, of her relationship with Navaz—​ which definitively dismantles the fiction of transposability: Airmail suggests absence but I allowed those cool blue envelopes to lure me into thinking that they more ably demonstrated absence overcome. Those letters, posted every third day, marked a trajectory that I might at any point follow. As long as I did not put them to the test, they offered me the promise of Hansel and Gretel’s crumbs, a safe return. Knowing that the envelope which has just this moment passed from my fingers is the last possible letter leaves me stranded. Even before I let it drop through the slot, it wants nothing more to do with me. It seems final and irrevocable like a heat-​seeking missile whose pre-​programmed focus on its destination allows no comfort for its source. (190) The false promise of a “safe return” is predicated on a model of exchange between equivalent codes, ensuring the message will return to its source intact. But as the narrator’s own manipulation of the source text suggests, that model is challenged not only by the fact that natural languages are not equivalent but also by the fact that language use is shot through with desire, “often motivated by the simplest and most satiable desire” (45). What makes Lagose’s novel so beautifully queer is that she does not succumb to the simple binary of translatability/​untranslatability but rather ties translation to different models of multilingualism:  glossodiversity and semiodiversity. Semiodiversity does not make translation impossible but ensures that translation will not produce and reproduce equivalents. By plotting her narrator’s journey from a state of glossodiversity to one of semiodiversity, initiated by her parents’ discovery of her homosexuality, Jagose offers a distinctly queer coming out story. If the act of coming out supposedly fixes one’s identity in language, and in so doing, repairs the breach between one’s public and private selves, then Jagose’s novel undermines the very possibility of that.

Conclusion All this suggests why the queering of translation—​involving the dismantling of binary models of exchange structured around a fixed and stable origin and a fixed and stable end point—​is a prerequisite for the deployment of translation as a valuable analytic in tracing the transnational circulation of sexual knowledge. Once liberated from the straight jacket of mimesis, translation can be understood as an effect of bordering, as Naoki Sakai argues,

Queering translation  49 as well as a practice integral to what Walter Mignolo describes as “border thinking.” The dismantling of binaries is also essential if we hope to capture rather than mystify the complex and shifting dynamics of the contemporary publishing industry, as anxious to commodify difference as it to facilitate circulation across languages and cultures. If, as Grewal and Kaplan (1994, 12) assert, “late capitalism requires differentiation and the stylistic markers of ‘otherness,’ ” then how do we know when a foreignizing approach is colluding with the forces of global capital rather than decentering target culture norms or when it is enforcing class divides (by promoting a “difficult,” elitist style) rather than promoting empathic solidarities across linguistic and cultural borders, what Preciado (2018, 17) refers to as “somatic communism”? Queer theory might also inspire some deep reflection within Translation Studies regarding the ways the field narrates its disciplinary history, typically adopting the Western rhetoric and presumptions of a minoritarian, civil rights model, as evident in two widely cited works, Venuti’s The Translator’s Invisibility (1995) and Maria Tymoczko’s Enlarging Translation, Empowering Translators (2007).16 The way the field is informed by a distinctly Western epistemology is reinforced in the oft-​told story that the field began in the West following the Allied victory in World War II, predicated on the suppression of other, alternative histories, most notably perhaps, the Soviet and Eastern European traditions. Translation Studies might ask a question analogous to the one posed by Jack Halberstam (2018, 38)  in his history of gender variability: “The U.S. focus of this book contributes in some ways to the hegemonic depiction of transgenderism as a Euro-​ American phenomenon and as a creation of a liberal democracy within which everyone is supposedly encouraged to ‘be themselves.’ ” A queer critique of the field, therefore, might interrogate the occlusions that accompany this particular narrative as one of many “convenient fictions for the ongoing imperial project of centering North America in global narratives of progress, freedom, and economic aspiration” (38). For example, how might we interrogate Venuti’s specific construal of visibility in terms of orientation, as discussed by Sarah Ahmed in Queer Phenomenology (2006). Simply put, one’s “orientation” determines what falls within one’s field of vision and what does not. For example, according to the logic of that model, the incorporation of the translator into society, her becoming visible, is predicated, paradoxically, on the translator being recognized as a “writer”—​see Susan Basnett and Peter Bush’s volume The Translator as Writer (2006). Just as the incorporation of the homosexual into US society is predicated, in the eyes of queer critics, on the normalization of homosexuality; visibility in the law and in mass media is predicated on the homosexual becoming virtually indistinguishable from heterosexuals, processes that exclude many alternatives embodiments of nonnormative sexuality and gender. Queer theory draws attention to this contradiction, which is built into the Western notion of visibility, or of civil rights as visibility.

50  Queering translation Such queer critiques of the field might help us not only to interrogate the imperialism at the core of the field’s disciplinary history but also preserve translation’s unique historicity, its connection to premodern regimes of literary production, organized around the concept of imitation as the highest aesthetic, ethical, and moral ideal. In this sense, translation is connected to an epistemology that is different in fundamental ways from the one consolidated by Romanticism and based on the cult or origins and originality, which is central not only to the modern nation but also to our celebrity culture. It is interesting in this regard to consider Richard Sennett’s (1974) discussion of the changes that took place in opera performance in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, when the audience was transformed from a raucous, participatory group of viewers into a silent, reverential mass, in parallel with the performing artist’s transformation from an artist-​as-​craftsman into an artist-​as-​genius. Indeed, one might see the silence of Sennett’s opera audience as analogous to the absence of readers, the ultimate arbiters of a translation’s meaning, in so much of contemporary translation theory. And so, queer theory might caution against the drive to transform the translator-​ as-​ craftsman into the translator-​ as-​ writer as potentially confirming the foundational premises of our celebrity culture by positing visibility as the ultimate good, while paradoxically weakening translation’s capacity to open up “unprecedented possibilities for incorporation, decontextualization, resignification, and mutation” (Preciado 2018, 98).17

Notes 1 For a comprehensive overview of the various meanings of queer, see Chen (2012, 58–​63), Whittington (2012), and Halperin (1995, 62–​67). 2 Some of the challenges posed by queer historiography are how “to avoid the seductions of the myths of simple causality and progress” (Spargo 1999, 10) and how “to defy the temptation to order narratives around crises, breaks, and ruptures” (Puff 2012, 21). 3 And so, it is not unusual to see an eschewal of chronology in queer scholarly writing:  “Rather than giving a neat, chronologically ordered account of the emergence of transgender communities and trans visibility in the twenty-​first century, I want to chart the undoing of certain logics of embodiment” (Halberstam 2018, xii). 4 I recognize the ongoing debate over the relationship between Transgender Studies and queer theory. In researching this book, I have found Transgender Studies as an important and timely intervention in queer theory. 5 Here, I would disagree somewhat with Ruvalcaba’s (2016, 11) binary construal of Anzaldúa’s “place of the borderlander” as “a geography that divides colonized from colonized countries.” Such binaries make possible the disavowal of colonization on the part of colonized countries, mystifying the fact that colonization is an inevitable byproduct of the logic of modern nationalism. 6 Gomolka’s remark is somewhat misleading insofar as neither of the French versions begins with “Mes Souvenirs.” Both Tardieu and Foucault add proper names, Alexina B and Herculine Barbin dite Alexina B., respectively.

Queering translation  51 7 Lest anyone think I am making a generalization about US publishing practices based on these two examples, let me present a counterexample. The English translation of Eduard Limonov’s qausi-​autobiographical narrative Eto ia, Edichka! (1979) was titled It’s Me, Eddie! (1983), a quite literal rendering, whereas the title of the French translation was the wildly expanded and salacious: Le poète russe préfère les grands nègres [The Russian poet prefers big Black men] (1980). 8 Notably, the final line of the French lecture—​“Le plaisir n’a pas de passeport, pas de carte d’identité” (Eribon 1994, 265)—​was not included in the English translation. 9 I should note that other scholars, such as Mak (2012) and Wing (2004), are very careful to note the differences in the editions. 10 Moreover, the footnote Butler (1999, 211, 17n) provides gives no indication that the two editions are in fact quite different: “All references will be from the English and French versions of that text.” 11 Butler (1999, 130) also offers a slight mistranslation of Foucault that consciously or not supports her description of Foucault’s “appropriation” of Barbin’s text as inadvertently romanticizing: “ ‘That would be the inverse of Plutarch,’ he writes, ‘lives at parallel that nothing can bring back together’ (my translation).” Parallel lines are not initially joined, and so cannot be brought back together. See my translation above. 12 All translations are mine unless otherwise indicated. 13 Throughout the essay, Foucault opposes the mimesis of traditional historiography to the poesis of this anthology of fragments, not only by referring to them as “strange poems” marked by a “frugal lyricism,” but also by pointing out the performative, as opposed to descriptive, use of language in these fragments. As Foucault (1979, 78–​9) writes: I haven’t sought to unite texts which would be more faithful to reality than others, which would merit selection for their representative value, but texts which played a role in the real of which they speak, and which in turn find themselves, whatever their inexactitude, their turgidity or their hypocrisy may be, traversed by it. It is interesting to contrast Foucault’s eschewal of representativeness in favor of rhetorical power to Stedman’s embrace of representativeness over aesthetic value in his anthology of American literature, discussed in Chapter 3. Foucault’s interest in chance, which produced these “brief, incisive, and often enigmatic” traces (80), is fundamentally opposed to the kind of determined historicity of historical anthologies such as Stedman’s. 14 The Canadian translation theorist Susanne de Lotbinière-​Harwood references the popular view of translation as a linguistic matching game in the title of her 1989 essay “Deux mots pour chaque chose” [Two words for everything], but then contemplates what to do when there is not an established equivalent in the target language. It could also be read as an allusion to polysemy: what happens when there are two (or more) words for a single “thing”—​consider Saussure’s famous example of the French word mouton, which references both “mutton” and “sheep.” 15 Elsewhere, Gramling and Dutta (2016, 335)  describe glossodiversity as a language ideology “which holds that languages are unified countable, stable, orderly,

52  Queering translation well-​bordered systems, and that human speakers use language(s) for discrete and instrumental communicative aims to represent their ideas.” 16 It was therefore inevitable that someone would use the metaphor of the closet to describe the increasing visibility of translators in fiction. See, for example, Beverley Curran’s “The Embedded Translation: A Coming out Story” in which coming out has nothing to do with sexuality. As Curran (2007, 233) herself notes, I call this growing presence a “coming out” story not in order to “sex up” the dossier of a figure hitherto largely ignored and left critically unexamined but to mark the increasing cultural significance of the translation, and, like any coming out story, signals the possible need for a retrospective re-​ reading of what precedes this emergence in search of why its identification was delayed. By construing translators as closeted, Curran justifies a paranoid reading of the past for clues to the translator’s coerced invisibility. The chapter is followed in the volume by a more nuanced discussion of visibility as a dialectical process by Carol Maier, “The Translator’s Visibility: The Rights and Responsibilities Thereof.” 17 My work on the role and rhetoric of translation in the Soviet period showed that translation was recognized both by the regime and by the increasingly oppositional intelligentsia as an alternative form of literary production. In other words, we may lose sight of the distinct cultural work of translated texts—​ and the distinct historicity of translation—​if we insist on making translators into writers. We see evidence of the distinct cultural work of translation, for example, in the phenomenon of pseudo-​translation. Why would authors claim their works to be translation if it didn’t add some distinct value? We also see evidence of translation’s roots in premodern literary production, which original writing disavows, in translators’ persistent use of “fidelity” and “faithfulness” to describe their work. For scholars in the field, this represents a “disturbing attachment,” which they repress by reconstruing the translator’s work as essentially radical, describing it as hijacking, subversion, and manipulation.

2  Queering Global Sexuality Studies, or translation and unease

For much of modern European history, homosexuality has been characterized as foreign, both within Europe—​the English called it the French vice, the Germans called it the Italian vice, and “Do you speak German?” became a pick up line among French homosexuals following the Eulenberg affair (Tamagne 2006, 19)—​and increasingly outside of Europe, assuming a central role in Western colonial discourse and its construction of the Orient. Sixteenth-​century English travelers to Moscovy, for example, reported a high incidence of sodomy (Cross 1971, 70–​1; Olearius 1967, 142); Sir Paul Rycaut in the seventeenth century reported on the “accursed vice of sodomy” among the Turks (qtd. in Dobie 2004, 44); and the charge of sodomy was deployed by the Spanish as justification for the colonization of the Americas (see Todorov 1984, 150, 177; Goldberg 1992, Part 3). In the context of modern German history, Robert Deam Tobin (2015, x) discusses “the long and extremely well-​developed tradition in the German-​speaking world of associating homosexuality with Jewishness, projecting the entire question of same-​sex desire onto the physical territory of Palestine.” All these accounts reveal an ever-​expanding “geography of perversion,” to use Rudy C. Bleys’s (1996) term. Indeed, as the epistemology of Western nationalism spread through colonization—​which also provided many postcolonial nations with their borders—​so too did the view of homosexuality as foreign to the body politic. Joseph Massad (2008, 108), for example, documents how in the Arabic-​speaking world in the late colonial and early postcolonial periods the phenomenon of man–​ boy love and the poetry it inspired were repeatedly attributed to Persian influence, effecting what Massad terms a “civilizational displacement.” True, some scholars in the field of Global Sexuality Studies have cautioned that sexual knowledge does not travel seamlessly across linguistic and cultural boundaries. Dennis Altman (1997, 419), for example, notes that the terminology used to describe (homo)sexuality in different cultures is not consistent, much of it is borrowed from the West and is often used “to describe a rather different reality.” Marie-​Paule Ha (2010, 134) makes a similar point, namely, that “the deployment of Western theoretical languages to account for non-​Western texts and contexts has long

54  Queering Global Sexuality Studies been a contentious issue among critics of every ideological stripe involved in cross-​cultural research.” Nevertheless, questions of translation have yet to be fully incorporated into Global Sexuality Studies, which retains a strong Western if not Anglophone bias. Consider, for example, the second, revised edition of Joseph Bristow’s Sexuality (2011), which includes a new five-​page section titled “Global Sexualities,” located at the very end of the final chapter, “Diverse Eroticisms.” There Bristow offers an admittedly brief overview of the work of scholars, such as Lisa Rofel, Tom Boellstorf, and Martin Manalansan, who study the global circulation of Western “gay” culture, focusing on the ways in which a Western sexual epistemology is adopted, adapted, and contested in non-​Western contexts. The first 200 pages of Bristow’s book, which establish the West as the source of sexual knowledge, are followed by five pages dedicated to “the rest,” which inevitably casts the latter as imitators. This tendency to give a perfunctory nod to non-​Western cultures at the end of a work like Bristow’s exposes the persistent imperialist asymmetries in the field of Global Sexuality Studies. So, too, does the unsystematic treatment of translation. (It is telling that the word “translation” appears only twice in this section of Bristow’s book, both times in a quotation from Boellstorf.) That being said, the problem of applying modern sexual terminology and concepts to premodern periods of Western culture was raised rather early in the field of sexuality studies. Jeffrey Weeks (1986, 15) argued back in 1986 that “what we define as ‘sexuality’ is an historical construction.” In fact, Weeks (1977, 44) employs the term “colonialism” back in 1977, but he uses it in reference to the sexual exploitation of lower-​class men and boys by the English upper classes.1 Sustained concern over the exportation of these terms and concepts, what Massad would call a Western sexual epistemology, to non-​Western contexts came later. Diana Fuss (1995, 159)  provides an opening for translation when she asks in Identity Papers: “Can one generalize from the particular forms sexuality takes under Western capitalism to sexuality as such? What kinds of colonizations do such translations perform on ‘other’ traditions of sexual difference?” In this chapter, I will address this question in a slightly inverted form, namely, “What kinds of translations do such colonizations of ‘other’ traditions of sexual difference produce?” Posing the question in this way avoids obscuring the specificity of translation as discourse, acknowledging its capacity both to support the workings of colonization and to trouble and resist them.2 In addressing this reformulated question, I  aim to demonstrate how a focus on translation can extend and enrich discussions of subaltern agency and of the global circulation of sexual knowledge, while also exposing the persistent imperial asymmetries of the field. The chapter ends with a discussion of translation as part of a methodology that resists (colonial) mastery in favor of “unease,” as theorized by Kadji Amin in Disturbing Attachments (2017). But let me begin by discussing the general ambivalence toward translation in Global Sexuality Studies and related fields.3

Queering Global Sexuality Studies  55

Forgetting translation As Boone (2014, xxxi) argues in The Homoerotics of Orientalism:  “The increasingly politicized debates about whether either modern ‘gay identity’ or queer theory is transferrable to non-​Western contexts, of whether both signal a further colonizing of the third world by American and European power” have produced “binaries so absolute that one is totally complicit or totally excluded and uniformly subjected to ‘epistemic…violence’ (the phrase is Massad’s)”. One could gloss the mutually exclusive positions constituting these binaries as “alteritism” (Saleri 1992, 12), or radical alterity, on the one hand, and transposability, on the other. These align with George Steiner’s opposition of monadist to univeralist positions in the philosophy of language (1993, 76–​7). Neither position, however, captures the complexity of cross-​cultural and cross-​linguistic engagements, and neither leaves much room for translation. We see evidence of the alteritist position in David Halperin’s (2002, 4) call for contemporary scholars to “snip the thread that connected ancient Greek paederasty with modern homosexuality in the mind of modern historians” so as “to restore to Greek erotic practices their alterity.” Halperin’s call to “snip the thread” suggests that any translation of ancient Greek texts could somehow avoid putting those texts in contact with contemporary conceptual frameworks. Indeed, how do we simply snip a thread that has been woven into our cultural consciousness for centuries? While the desire to resist appropriating other cultures by forcing them into our conceptual frameworks is certainly laudable, what might constitute effective or productive resistance is not self-​evident when “local particularities are highly valued in a global marketplace even as global circulation demands universal appeal” (Warren 2018, 1). How then do we distinguish Halperin’s call to snip the historical thread from the “fetishization and relentless celebration of ‘difference’ and ‘otherness’ ” in modern Western cultures (Said 1989, 213)—​or the call to “cherish otherness” from the Western impulse to essentialize it (Swann 1992, xvii)? Similarly, can we inure Venuti’s “foreignizing” translations from the commodification of difference in late capitalism or from Slavoj Žižek’s (1997, 44) accusation that, “the multiculturalist respect for the Other’s specificity is the very form of asserting one’s own superiority.” It is no coincidence, then, that the alteritist position is often reflected in a critique of “domesticating” translations, typically without offering an alternative that would somehow fully capture the radical alterity of the source culture. Consider Gregory Woods’s (1998, 9)  criticism of Stephen Coote’s translations in his 1983 Penguin Book of Homosexual Verse: The fact that Coote’s own translation of the gay classics incorporate such culturally and historically specific epithets as “faggot”, “queer”, and “queen”, and one must reluctantly conclude that the academic uses

56  Queering Global Sexuality Studies of the book are limited; or, at least, that the book needs to be shelved next to a more skeptical volume of sexual history. Woods’s description of Coote’s anthology as a “skeptical volume” also reflects the role translation, or translation criticism, has assumed in distinguishing academic historiography from the work of popularizers. Woods served as chair in Gay and Lesbian Studies at Nottingham Trent University for 15  years while Coote was a prolific writer who worked outside the academy.4 We see something similar at the very end of Joseph Massad’s (2007, 50) introduction to Desiring Arabs, where he dismisses all previous translations of the works he will analyze: “I will cite the Arabic editions throughout and use my own translation unless otherwise noted. I  have found most of the English translations not particularly helpful to my analysis.” He does not, however, elaborate on what made the previous translations unsuitable. A related tendency involves the desultory or vaguely dismissive treatment of translation, as evident in Woods’s magisterial The History of Gay Literature:  The Male Tradition (1999). While discussing works written in a variety of languages and in a variety of historical periods, Woods makes only passing mention of translations. For example, in a chapter dedicated entirely to the work of Marcel Proust, Woods (1998, 405) fails to mention Proust’s gay-​identified English translator, C.  K. Scott Moncrieff, except in a footnote, where he describes Moncrieff’s translation somewhat dismissively as a “camp classic,” despite the fact that, as Andrew Holleran (2016, 14) points out, Scott Moncrieff is not only the crucial medium by which Proust came to be known to English readers but also the author of a translation so beautiful that a British critic of the time said Proust’s novel is better in English than in French. Indeed, Joseph Conrad (qtd. in Findlay 2014, 197) wrote to Scott Moncrieff, praising his translation: I was more interested by your rendering than by Proust’s creation. One has revealed to me something and there is no revelation in the other. I am speaking of the sheer maitrise de langue; I mean how far it can be pushed—​in your case of two languages—​by a faculty akin to genius. The point here, however, is not whether Scott Moncrieff’s English translation is better or worse than Proust’s novel in French; rather, Woods’s dismissive treatment of Scott Moncrieff’s translation is significant insofar as it reveals a specific form of homonationalism in its debt to nationalist historiography with its attendant privileging of “original writing” over translations.

Queering Global Sexuality Studies  57 One of the few places in which translation is mentioned in any sustained way in Woods’s volume occurs in the chapter entitled “The Orient,” where Woods (1998, 54) writes: Among the great documents of this [Orientalist] tendency, many of them imbued to a greater or lesser extent with a homoerotic ethos, are the homosexual Edward Fitzgerald’s ungendered translation of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam (1859) and the bisexual Sir Richard Burton’s translations of the Arabian Nights (1885 and 1886–​88) and of The Perfumed Garden of Shaykh Nafzawi (1886).5 Both examples reflect a minoritarian approach to the work of these accomplished translators. The first example is meant to illustrate Fitzgerald’s homophobic self-​censorship in removing gender markers—​Woods is perhaps unaware that the Persian language is not gendered—​and in the second, Burton’s translations are meant to serve as proof of his bisexuality. We see an illustration of the second position, that of total transposability, in the much-​lauded film Call Me by Your Name (2017), directed by Luca Guadagnino and based on the novel by André Aciman (2007). In fact, transposibility is referenced in the title itself, which refers to the lovers’ practice of calling each other by the other one’s name. Moreover, in the course of the evolving love story between the teenager and the adult, which is condoned by the boy’s father toward the end of the film, there is a scene involving the excavation of an ancient Roman sculpture of a nude boy, which foreshadows their first sexual encounter—​the contemporary youth is unproblematically substituted for the ancient Roman boy. Incidentally, both the adult lover and the boy’s father are archeologists, and the father is the academic advisor or mentor of his son’s lover, suggesting the unproblematic persistence of the ancient Greek model of pederasty, albeit through a series of substitutions. As the review of the novel in the San Francisco Chronicle puts it: “A feverish, often exhilarating rumination on ‘what happens when two beings need, not just to be together, but to become so totally ductile that each becomes the other’ ” (Aciman 2007, n.p.; italics added)—​despite their difference in age and background.6 That ideal of total identification is in turn reflected in a completely unproblematic, instrumentalist view of translation, which is featured throughout the film. The young protagonist moves with total fluency among several languages; he also spends his spare time transcribing music, a kind of inter-​ semiotic translation. In one scene, the mother is shown effortlessly sight translating fables of La Fontaine for her husband and son. (Incidentally, this scene is interrupted when the power goes out and they’re left in the dark, suggesting that translation, like light, is simply a condition for reading.) Toward the end of the novel, Oliver, the son’s American lover, publishes his first academic book, “which had already been published in England, in France, in Germany, and was finally due to come out in Italy” (2007, 226)—​ one can assume, in translation.

58  Queering Global Sexuality Studies This view of translation as transparent medium is also evident in human rights circles, as Joseph Slaughter (2007, 6; italics added) discusses in Human Rights, Inc., referencing a remark made by the social activist and Nobel Prize–​winning Nigerian poet and playwright Wole Soyinka in the introduction to the 1994 Yoruba translation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948): “All that this document requires therefore is simply that it be rendered in all the accessible languages of all societies.”7 As Slaughter (6; italics added) comments, “In Soyinka’s optimistic appraisal, translation alone is all that is needed to release the hegemonizing force of common sense, to transform what everyone should know into what everyone does know”. Soyinka represents translation as a simple rendering, which assumes, as Slaughter points out, that the concepts of human and rights “are presumed to be known in advance of their articulation in language and their transcription (or translation) into legal conventions” (6). Translation in this case is mere transcription of a priori truths. Such universal claims may also be protected simply by suppressing translation, as Joseph Massad discusses in Desiring Arabs. In the chapter on the “Gay International,” Massad (2007, 180)  recounts how Arabic delegates to the 1994 conference of the International Lesbian and Gay Association, or ILGA, were denied translations of conference resolutions, which were made available “only in English, French, and Spanish.” This was done, in Massad’s view, to preempt any dissent that might have been incited by the translation of “universal” Western concepts of sexuality and sexual citizenship into non-​Western languages, such as Arabic. In this way, Massad (2007, 163)  argues, the suppression of translation reflects the imperial ambitions of the Gay International, which, “both produces homosexuals, as well as gays and lesbians, where they do not exist, and represses same-​ sex desires and practices that refused to be assimilated into its sexual epistemology.” Another example offered by Massad (2007, 388) involves the choice not to translate literary texts that do not reflect the reigning Western epistemology:  “Such [Arabic] fictional depictions, which shy away from sensationalism and contemporary political agendas, are not much noted in the Arabic tabloid press, nor is there a rush to translate them into foreign languages.” Bruno Perreau (2016, 2), in his discussion of the French response to queer theory, also notes “the decision to translate this or that kind of work,” and, of course, the decision not to translate a given work. This active suppression of translation, as Massad and Perreau imply, belies translation’s capacity to disrupt epistemological complacency, to stage a clash of epistemes. The counterpart to the active suppression of translation is the casual forgetting of translation that often occurs in scholarship across the Humanities and Social Sciences. For example, at the beginning of an article on colonialist narratives of the Americas, queer scholar Jonathan Goldberg presents a passage from Eduardo Geleano’s trilogy, Memory of Fire, making no mention of the fact that it was written in Spanish and that he is citing a

Queering Global Sexuality Studies  59 translation. (You have to look in the Works Cited to find the name of the translator.) Moreover, the passage he discusses is of a conversation between an Aracuacanian chief and a Spanish captain. Again, no mention is made of the language or languages involved in the conversation or whether it was mediated by an interpreter. In fact, the complete elision of translation is quite stunning, given that the captain’s speech is highlighted, both within the conversation itself (“says the captain slowly, savoring the words”) and in Goldberg’s (1993, 3) analysis that follows (“The Spaniard speaks of the future with absolute certainty”). That elision is completed later in the text, when Goldberg uses translation as a metaphor for his theoretical reading of the encounter: It would be possible to recast the reading of Galeano that I have offered into a more explicit theoretical register. This would involve, for instance, translating “the history that will be” into the Derridean idiom and tense of the future anterior: the history that will have been. (5; italics added) We see a similar elision of translation in the social sciences, as demonstrated in a recent study by Erynn Masi De Casanova and Tamara R.  Mose. They analyzed 47 book-​length ethnographies of Latin America, published in English in the United States, and found “little evidence of what we call linguistic reflexivity: recognition of linguistic boundaries and language-​based identities in fieldwork” which is especially surprising given the “abundant literature on ethnography as cultural translation” (2017, 2, 3). More surprising still is the forgetting of translation in the field of globalization studies. In the almost 500-​page Global Transformations Reader (Held and McGrew 2000), translation is not mentioned in any sustained way and does not appear in the index, where it would have appeared between “transborder flows” and “transnational movements,” two phenomena that depend heavily on translation.

Translation as agency As Boone (2014, xxxi) argues, one of the more deleterious effects of the binaries structuring the field of Global Sexuality Studies is that “human agency disappears in the process.” Indeed, much of the early research in the field construed subaltern queer subjects, Jon Binnie (1983, 4, 6) argues, as “passive receptacles” who mindlessly reproduce “norms, values, and signs of transnational power” or as unwitting victims of a “false consciousness”; or, in Dipesh Chakrabarty’s (2007, xii) formulation, “blank slates.” Since the late 1990s, concerted efforts have been made to rethink the agency of subaltern queers. George Chauncey and Elizabeth Povinelli, for example, address the issue of subaltern agency head-​on in their introduction to a 1999 special issue of the journal GLQ “Thinking Sexuality

60  Queering Global Sexuality Studies Transnationally.” While Chauncey and Povinelli (1999, 439)  continue to employ some ambivalent formulations of that agency, describing it as the “apparent” mimicking and reproduction of “Euro-​American forms of sexual identity, subjectivity and citizenship,” they recognize its ability nonetheless to “challenge fundamental Western notions of the erotic, the individual, and the universal rights attached to this fictive ‘subject.’ ” Several years later, Binnie (2004, 68)  would offer a less ambivalent formulation of subaltern agency, as “deploying and re-​working symbols and images associated with the global gay to help fight their own struggles for self-​determination, rights and resistance to violence and the production of spaces and territories,” while also acknowledging the “allure” those symbols and images might hold. Arnaldo Cruz-​Malavé and Martin F. Manalansan IV (2002, 1–​2), in their introduction to Queer Globalizations: Citizenship and the Afterlife of Citizenship, point out the ambivalent agency of queer sexualities, their capacity both to dispossess and to empower: [The position] occupied by queer sexualities and cultures in our globalized world as a mediating figure between nation and diaspora, home and state, the local and the global has not only been a site of dispossession, it has also been a creative site for queer agency and empowerment.8 At the level of rhetoric too, queer sexualities are presented here as a highly ambivalent form of agency as this agency is attributed not to queers but to queer sexualities, leaving it unclear whether this agency is accomplished by queers or through them. In raising issues more specific to the use of language, Joseph Allen Boone and Peter A. Jackson come closer to including translation proper in their formulation of subaltern agency. As Boone (2014, xxxi) writes, local cultures “annex the global into their own practices in ways that often make it work for them, and the same can hold for ‘imported’ concepts like gay and lesbian identity or queer theory.” Similarly, Jackson (1996, 118–​19), in his study of same-​sex desire and practices in Thailand, traces how Western conceptions and terminology are “borrowed,” and “in the processing becom[e]‌as much Thai as Western, if not more so.” This reflects a broad attempt in the field to focus not so much on what is lost but also on “what is brought to life through cultural permeability, exchange, influence or simple coexistence” (Kulpa, Mizielinska, and Stasinska 2012, 116). This concerted attempt to rethink subaltern agency in the context of globalization has been accompanied by a gradual recognition of translation’s central role in “the transnational traffic in cultural representations” (Grewal and Kaplan 1999, 442). As Chakrabarty (2007, xv) notes in Provincializing Europe:  “modernity was a historical process that involved not just transformation of institutions but categorical and practical translation as well.” One of the more sophisticated theorizations of subaltern queer agency as

Queering Global Sexuality Studies  61 translation is presented by Martin F. Manalansan IV in Global Divas: Filipino Gay Men in Diaspora. Manalansan’s (2003, 46)  theorization is especially nuanced in that he begins by recognizing the varied and eclectic linguistic repertoire of the individuals he is discussing, which makes code-​switching between English, Tagalog, Taglish (a creole of English and Tagalog), and swardspeak, a “vernacular language or code used by Filipino gay men in the Phillipines and in the diaspora,” a central feature of their performance of identity. He also highlights nontranslation as a mode of resistance when he describes the decision of a Filipino drag queen to give her acceptance speech in swardspeak and Taglish, ignoring the shouts from the white Anglophones in the audience, “Translation! Translation!” (46). Manalansan goes on to describe translation as “a creative negation between [multiple!] languages and cultures” through which Filipino gay men claim pleasures and attempt to work out miseries and disappointments by utilizing idioms and linguistic practices that capture these men’s search for modernity, the itinerant quality of immigrant life, and the sometimes elusive cosmopolitan ideal of living life away from the homeland. (47) In this way, Manalansan uses translation as a model for a diasporic negotiation of identity outside the binaries of the monolingual nation-​state while acknowledging the speakers’ longing for community and home. As such, these men are not passive consumers but rather are “translating agents” who with the wildness of their lips, tongues, and bodies are able to lay claim to a space no matter how fleeting or limited in the translational setting of New York City. (61) Especially admirable here is Manalansan’s refusal to allow the linguistic specificity of translation to be obscured by using translation as metaphor alone. The concept of dubbing in Tom Boellstorft’s Gay Archipelago: Sexuality and Nation in Indonesia represents another important attempt to generate “new understandings of imbrication and transference” (2005, 5) that resist the hierarchized binaries of the colonial and early postcolonial periods. Like Malanasan, Boellstorft does not allow the metaphor of translation to become unmoored from the fact of translation. Indeed, he traces his interest in the practice of dubbing to a controversy that erupted in Indonesia in the late 1990s when dubbing was banned by the Indonesian government “on the grounds that if Westerners appeared to speak Indonesian in the mass media, Indonesians would no longer be able to tell where their culture ends and authentic Indonesian culture begins” (2005, 5).9 Boellstorft goes on to explain what is queer in his concept of dubbing:

62  Queering Global Sexuality Studies Dubbing culture provides a rubric for rethinking globalization without relying on biogenetic (and, arguably, heteronormative) metaphors like hybridity, creolization, and diaspora. In dubbing culture, two elements are held together in productive tension without the expectation that they will resolve into one—​just as it is known from the outset that the speaker’s lips will never be in synch with the spoken work in a dubbed film. “Dubbing” culture is queer; with dubbing, there can never be a “faithful” translation. (5) Of course, the practice of dubbing is not in and of itself queer. It is in fact preferred over subtitling in most authoritarian regimes as it forecloses access to the original script. And so, like other forms of translation, it is a techne or cultural mechanism whose queer potential lies in the fact that “each element articulates a different language, yet they are entangled into a meaningful unit. It is a relationship more intimate than dialogue, but more distinct than monologue” (5). Malanansan’s and Boellstorft’s work inspired others to approach the experience of subaltern queers and queers in diaspora through the lens of translation. An interesting example of such research is the chapter “Out of Place:  Translations of ‘Race’, Ethnicity, Sexuality and Citizenship in Washington, D.C. and San Salvador, El Salvador,” by Maria Amelia Viteri, in the volume Out of Place:  Interrogating Silences in Queerness/​Raciality (2008), edited by Adi Kuntsman and Esperanza Miyake. The chapter is located in section 4, titled “Translating Languages of Queerness/​Raciality,” but it is the only one of the three chapters that discusses translation proper. Viteri’s chapter seeks to document how Latino immigrants from El Salvador construct their sexual identities, especially as they relate to the Anglophone concepts of “gay” and “queer.” In framing the ethnographies she presents, Viteri (2008, 245) argues, “Although translation has been at the core of Anthropological work, differences between linguistic and cultural translations have received little attention, particularly when the ‘natives’ have come to study their ‘own’ ” (Narayan 1993; Slocum 2001). Therefore, Viteri (2008, 245) attempts to redress this by “translat[ing] and illustrat[ing] points of resistance and—​ways of talking back of ‘queer’ Diasporic identities in relation to Latino/​a American understandings of race and sexuality.” Viteri goes on to present seven extracts from her ethnographic interviews, along with English translations, which she then analyzes. The translations, however, are not accompanied by any commentary or discussion of her translation approach. Without that commentary, the translations are presented as self-​evident, transparent renditions, although a cursory comparison of the translations against the original statements raises a number of questions. Why, for example, is ambiente in the first interview kept in Spanish in the translation? Or why is the subject’s description of herself as “poco mas aburrida, mas recta, mas correcta” condensed to “more well-​behaved”? Why is categoría in another interview translated

Queering Global Sexuality Studies  63 as “box” rather than “category”? Why is super imperativo rendered as “imperative” and not “super imperative”? If the purpose of the project is to pay close attention to the respondents’ individual construction of “subject positions with more nuanced and conjectural relationship to the ‘West,’ ” why then was “Un chico le dice a su papá: ‘Soy gay’ ” rendered as: “A young guy comes out to his father as gay” as opposed to “A young guy says to his dad: ‘I’m gay’ ”? This more literal rendering would have preserved the subject’s rhetoric, as well as the distinction between papá and padre, the latter appearing in the next sentence. And at the end of the passage, when the father tells his son he’s not gay but a culero, because he doesn’t have a credit card, a car, an apartment, or a college education, there is no discussion of the valence of this term. How, for example, is culero different from maricon, both of which are typically translated into English as “fag” or “faggot”? Viteri (2008, 249)  then concludes, “gay, painted with upper-​class mobility, allows culero to retain its local meaning.” But the introduction of a new term cannot leave the semantics of the indigenous term untouched. I would argue that culero assumes a local valence it didn’t have before the introduction of gay. In other words, the entrance of gay localizes culero. The point I’m trying to make here is not that these translations are incorrect, but that we are provided with no insight into the author’s approach to the translations and how that approach might serve the needs to her particular project. Nor does the author present her protocols for formatting instances of code-​switching, something especially relevant here. The conclusion is even more problematic, glossing over the very real differences among the various respondents’ accounts, declaring that “ ‘queer’ sits epistemologically outside the daily life of the ‘Latino’ immigrants that are part of this project” (258). A close reading of the first ethnography, however, suggests something quite different. In that passage, the subject establishes an opposition between her work life, where she is a well-​behaved, proper woman, Ms. Jade, who cannot be a slut (puta), and her private space (mi ambiente), where she is queer and crazy (loca), which, she declares, is more fun (248), using the English word. To the extent that queer is presented here as her “real” self, how can it be interpreted to be epistemologically outside her daily life? The author then glosses over the distinction between the “translations” undertaken by her ethnographic subjects and her own translations of their statements. As she writes, “As this article has discussed, translating across cultural understanding of race, ethnicity and sexuality is not an easy task” (258). By translation, she appears to be referring to her ethnographic subjects’ engagement with Western terms to describe their sexuality, not to her own translations of those statements. This is confirmed later in the conclusion, where she writes: The rethinking of translation becomes an urgent task for a postcolonial theory attempting to make sense of “subjects” living “in constant

64  Queering Global Sexuality Studies translation” and seeking to reclaim the notion by deconstructing it and re-​inscribing its potential as a mode of resistance. (259) But rendering these interviews in a way that respects the complexity and the linguistic specificity of the discursive negotiation they record is not an easy task either. Moreover, by failing to mention her own translations, the author introduces a distinction between the translation undertaken by these Latino subjects, which require the scholar’s expertise to decipher, and those of the scholar, which are presented as transparent and self-​evident. This appears as an unwitting assertion of mastery, a failure to respect their rhetoric. This is why it is so important to include a discussion of the challenges posed by the translation of such texts, and not as a footnote or an add-​on, but as a very visible and integral part of the data analysis. Uncritical, transparent translations reflect and reinforce a geopolitics of knowledge that continues to support the opposition of the west as original to the rest as copy, and the consolidation of English as the language of international scholarship. In that light, John Boswell’s insistence on the use of “gay” in the French translation of his Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality seems uncomfortably imperialist:  “Although it is not ideal, the word ‘gay’ is the only available term in any language, for what I wish to convey” (qtd. in Dinshaw 1999, 29). It is interesting that Carolyn Dinshaw (1999, 29) cites this as evidence that “Boswell never swerved from his commitment to the term [gay] in premodern contexts,” as it also suggests his commitment that it be used in other contemporary, non-​Anglophone contexts All this reflects broad trends in the international publishing world, which Elliot Weinberger, the English translator of Octavio Paz, describes as the deleterious effect of a superficial multiculturalism: “[Multiculturalism] has led not to internationalism but to a new form of nationalism. Instead of promoting foreign writers, the publishing industry promotes ‘hyphenated’ American writers, foreign-​born or of foreign parents” (qtd. in Lowe and Fitz 2007, xv). As Weinberger comments, “I think publishers feel, ‘Oh well.’ We have this Latino writer, you know, what do we want a young Mexican or Peruvian writer for” (xv). In the introduction to The Globalization of Sexuality, Binnie (2004, 3; italics added) is in fact surprisingly candid about the pressure to publish in English and, I assume, not to reference scholarship in other languages: In the invitation I  received to submit the proposal for this book, the two major concerns of Robert Rojek, my commissioning editor at Sage, were that it “must be written for an interdisciplinary market”, and that it must appeal to an English-​speaking global audience—​that is, the book “must mean something to people in Milwaukee, Manchester, Melbourne and all points in between”. Obviously the English language

Queering Global Sexuality Studies  65 is itself a key factor in globalization, and this book reproduces this linguistic hegemony. The pressure exerted by publishers on authors to write in English and to appeal to an international Anglophone audience goes hand in hand with a reluctance on the part of publishers to invest in translations—​and of universities to recognize translation as scholarship in the awarding of tenure, promotion, and merit. These twin phenomena compel authors to compose their work in English, thus furthering the hegemony of English, confirming “the positional superiority of Western knowledge” (Said 1989, 59) and accelerating the marginalization or even loss of other scholarly traditions, what Karen Bennett refers to as epistemicide (Bennett 2007). Moreover, at an ethical level, shouldn’t Edward Said’s call for scholars to “take the Other seriously” entail letting the Other speak her own language, and when she does, taking the time to do a careful, annotated translation that highlights what Harvey refers to as “the problematic of the crossing”? And so, when scholars address their own translation practice, they are acknowledging that they do not have access to some position outside translation from which to analyze translations. As Said (1989, 216–​17) puts it, There is no vantage outside the actuality of relationships between cultures, between unequal imperial and nonimperial powers, between different Others, a vantage that might allow one the epistemological privilege of somehow judging, evaluating, and interpreting free of the encumbering interests, emotions, and engagements of the ongoing relationships themselves. By problematizing their translations, Western scholars could resist the imperialist dichotomy that associates the subaltern with translation and the metropolitan scholar with original writing. Finally, they would recommit themselves to the somatics of language and to the linguistic embodiment of ideas and desire.

The scholarship and/​of desire Binnie’s mention of “allure” also indexes broader efforts in postcolonial studies to integrate desire into our understanding of the complex nature of colonial encounters, as evident in works such as:  Lenore Manderson and Margaret Jolly’s collected volume Sites of Desire, Economies of Pleasure:  Sexualities in Asia and the Pacific (1997); Greg Mullins’s Colonial Affairs:  Bowles, Burroughs, and Chester Writer Tangier (2002); Ann Laura Stoler’s Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power:  Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule (2002, 2010); Robert Aldrich’s Colonialism and Homosexuality (2003); Dror Ze’evi’s Producing Desire:  Changing Sexual Discourse in the Ottoman Middle East, 1500–​1900 (2006); Joseph Massad’s

66  Queering Global Sexuality Studies Desiring Arabs (2007); and Shaden Tageldin’s Disarming Words:  Empire and the Seduction of Translation in Egypt (2011).10 But like the ethnography discussed earlier, which uses translation as a lens to understand the discursive construction of subaltern identities while failing to interrogate the scholar’s own translational practice, many of the abovementioned studies of desire explore it in colonial and postcolonial contexts while ignoring the desire that led the scholar to engage with the topic in the first place. Medieval queer historians have offered what is arguably the earliest theorizations of scholarly desire as a way to move beyond the whole alteritist–​universalist opposition. This is perhaps not surprising given the central role of history in the modern gay liberation movement, which constructed a pantheon of queer forebears and an archive of queer literary texts in order to establish that homosexuality existed in all times and all places. Recognizing the legitimacy of such affect, or what Dinshaw (1999, 40) refers to as “a profound desire for connectedness,” however, should not be taken as “the rejection of truth for pleasure—​which would only repeat the myth of their opposition” (Fradenburg and Freccero 1996, xix). Queer medievalists point out that such desire does not—​and cannot—​resolve into a stable identification, for these histories, built on textual fragments and in languages different from our own, are necessarily contingent. As Dinshaw (1999, 35) writes, “I describe partial connections, queer relations between incommensurate lives and phenomena—​relations that collapse the critical and theoretical oppositions between transhistorical and alteritist accounts, between past and present, between self and other.”11 Indeed, as Dinshaw argues, isn’t positing the radical alterity of the past a way to construe the scholar as modern? Truth and desire, the queer medievalists insist, exist not in a state of opposition but in a state of profound intimacy. This is perhaps nowhere more clearly manifested than among early gay liberationists in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In what follows, I  will trace the intimacy of truth and pleasure in the work of nineteenth-​and early-​twentieth-​century gay liberationists, specifically as it relates to their translation activity, which was a privileged expression of both their “desire for touching across time” (Dinshaw 1999, 40) and their commitment to historical “truth,” as formulated by nineteenth-​century historicists, such as Schlegel, who sought to make history into a science. Consider John Addington Symonds’s (1983, 120) erotically charged description of his search for the historical truth of the ancient Greeks in his Studies of the Greek Poets of 1873: How can we then bridge over the gulf which separates us from the Greeks? How shall we, whose souls are aged and wrinkled with the long years of humanity, shake hands across the centuries with those young-​ eyed, young-​limbed immortal children? The history of sexuality studies in the West is in fact characterized by deep tensions that developed over the course of the nineteenth century between

Queering Global Sexuality Studies  67 the emerging scholarly imperative to be objective and the queer object of study, in this case, same-​sex desire. These tensions are brilliantly laid out by Linda Dowling in Hellenism and Homosexuality in Victorian England (1994), which documents the ways in which the writings of the ancient Greeks on same-​sex desire—​and the new scholarship being generated on the subject—​offered a number of discursive opportunities to reevaluate homosexuality, which unwittingly gave birth to a modern gay consciousness as well as the modern policing of non-​normative sexuality. The high esteem in which Greek culture was held throughout nineteenth-​century Europe combined with a new detached ethical approach to its study made possible a counter-​discourse that disassociated homosexuality from the earlier republican discourse of “corruption” and “effeminacy” (Dowling 1994, 4). Indeed, the Reverend J. P. Mahaffy was one of a generation of Anglophone scholars to advocate for understanding Greek culture “as it was,” in its own terms, so to speak, complaining in his Social Life in Greece that, regarding homosexuality among the Greeks, “there is no field of enquiry where we are so dogmatic in our social prejudices, and so determined by the special circumstances of our age and country” (qtd. in Mendelsohn 2010, 61).”12 The “revolution in modern historiography lying at the heart of Oxford Greek studies” (Dowling 1994, 30) led directly to the first nonbowdlerized translations of ancient Greek texts, providing translators, like Edward Cary, a respectable defense for refusing to censor those texts to suit the tastes of contemporary readers.13 For this reason, Gideon Nisbet (2013, 35) declares, “In the [Greek] Anthology’s case as in no other, attempts at canon formation are inseparable from translation history.” The translator, however, had no control over how his “scholarly” translation was read; he was ultimately powerless to direct his readers’ desire, as recounted so movingly by John Addington Symonds (1984, 99; italics added) in his memoir, which I cite at length as it demonstrates how thoroughly scholarly imperatives to objective historical truth were entangled with the subjective experience of desire: We were reading Plato’s Apology in the sixth form. I  bought Cary’s crib, and took it with me to London on an exeat in March. […] When we returned from the play, I went to bed and began to read my Cary’s Plato. It so happened that I stumbled on the Phaedrus. I read on and on, till I  reached the end. Then I  began the Symposium; and the sun was shining through the shrubs outside the ground-​floor room in which I slept, before I shut the book up. I have related these insignificant details because that night was one of the most important nights of my life; and when anything of great gravity has happened to me, I have always retained a firm recollection of trifling facts which formed its context. Here in the Phaedrus and the Symposium—​in the myth of the Soul and the speeches of Pausanias Agathon and Diotima—​ I discovered the true liber amoris at last, the revelation I had been waiting for, the

68  Queering Global Sexuality Studies consecration of a long-​cherished idealism. It was just as though the voice of my own soul spoke to me through Plato, as though in some antenatal experience I had lived the life of a philosophical Greek lover. Harrow vanished into unreality. I  had touched solid ground. I  had obtained the sanction of the love which had been ruling me from childhood. Here was the poetry, the philosophy of my own enthusiasm for male beauty, expressed with all the magic of unrivalled style. And, what was more, I now became aware that the Greek race—​the actual historical Greeks of antiquity—​treated this love seriously, invested it with moral charm, endowed it with sublimity. For the first time I saw the possibility of resolving in a practical harmony the discords of my instincts. One can only wonder whether Symonds would have had the same emotional reaction had he been struggling through the original with his schoolboy Greek. Moreover, the “detached” scholarship that accompanied these nonbowdlerized translations was no less vulnerable to readerly desire. For example, Mahaffy’s views were no doubt influenced by Karl Otfried Müller’s Die Dorier (1824), a study of homosexuality among the ancient Dorians, which Dowling (1994, 75)  describes as “the great example of this ethically detached historicist view.”14 The English edition of Müller’s study, translated by George Cornewall Lewis as History and Antiquities of the Doric Race (1830), was among the books in Mahaffy’s library, where it no doubt came to the attention of his student Oscar Wilde. It is likely that the name of Wilde’s protagonist Dorian Gray is a veiled reference to Müller’s work, indexing a queer reading of the novel for readers in the know (Bowersock 2009, 10).15 Lewis’s translation is also widely cited in quasi-​scientific works of the time, such as Edward Carpenter’s Homogenic Love (1896) and The Intermediate Sex (1908).16 As Carpenter’s biographer, Sheila Rowbotham (2008, 37)  suggests, new translations supported new readings of old texts, as Carpenter made clear in a letter to a friend in 1870: “I have just been reading a translation of Plato’s Phaedrus—​that is the essence of what you dream of—​do read it.” He was likely referring to the new translation done by Cambridge classicist W. H. Thompson in 1868. The essence alluded to by Carpenter is glossed by Rowbotham (2008, 37) in this way: “Plato’s assumption that a love between an older and a younger man could be the most noble of all human relationships was electrifying and revelatory; it shook contemporary presumptions to the core.” Most of those early translators, however, were not themselves sympathetic to what would become the gay liberation movement; in fact, Jowett would complain toward the end of the century that his translations had been used in arguments for the decriminalization of homosexuality (Evangelista 2007, 211); but, in the end, they were powerless to control the reading of their translations (Orrells 2011, 42).

Queering Global Sexuality Studies  69 Later, under the influence of psychiatry, translations were being interpreted as empirical evidence of the translator’s queer desire. Carpenter, for example, presented Percy Bysshe Shelley’s translation of Plato as proof of the poet’s strong romantic attachment to men. As Carpenter (1925, 25–​6; italics added) noted in his 1925 work The Psychology of the Poet Shelley: One concludes that Shelly certainly attracted the devotion of his men friends; and on the other hand, that he was capable of warm and faithful attachment to them, some of them. This is, I think, clearly indicated not only by his relations with Hogg and by numerous passages in Adonais and other poems, but by the fact of his giving so much time and thought to the translation of Plato’s Symposium (whose chief subject, of course, is love between men as well as to the study (see his letters) of the Greek statuary. George Barnefield (1925, 93–​4), who authored the second part of The Psychology of the Poet Shelley, also focused on the poet’s translations as a sign of his growing awareness of his homosexuality: He seems to have had a predilection for such classical authors as Theocritus, Moschus, and Plato, in all of whom there is an atmosphere of “ideal homosexuality.” He translated a sonnet of Dante’s to Guido Cavalcanti, and another by the latter to Dante, and he had obviously appreciated the significance of Shakespeare’s Sonnets: If any should be curious to discover Whether towards you I am Friend or Lover, Let them read Shakespeare’s Sonnets… During the years 1817–​18 he occupied himself much with Plato’s Symposium. He apparently only read this dialogue in Latin, but its thought fascinated him, and he set himself to translate it, and also to write a commentary on its subject. Barnefield (1925, 96; italics added) goes on to note that “[Shelley] had no need to translate the Symposium at all, and only did so because it fascinated him.” The historicist approach also gave proto-​gay liberationists, like Carpenter, a respectable position from which to critique earlier translators who had censored sexually explicit passages from texts for the sake of safeguarding public morality. As Carpenter (1912, 22; italics added) comments in Love’s Coming of Age regarding extant translations of ancient Sanskrit texts dealing with sex and sexuality: Such is the pass we have come to that actually Max Muller in his translation of the Sacred Books of the East appears to have been unable to persuade himself to render these and a few other quite similar passages

70  Queering Global Sexuality Studies into English, but gives them in the original Sanskrit! One might have thought that as Professor in the University of Oxford, presumably sans peur and sans reproche, and professedly engaged in making a translation of these book for students, it was his duty and it might have been his delight to make intelligible just such passages as these, which give the pure and pious sentiment of the early world in so perfect a form; unless indeed he thought the sentiment impure and impious—​in which case we have indeed a measure of the degradation of the public opinion which must have swayed his mind. As to the only German translation of the Upanishad which I can find, it balks at the same passages in the same feeble way—​repeating nicht wiederzugeben, nicht wiederzugeben, over and over again, till at last one can but conclude that the translator is right, and the simplicity and sacredness of the feeling is in this our time indeed “not to be reproduced.” Note Carpenter’s use of affect to defend his scholarly position, turning the tables on the moralizers by describing their censorship in terms of degradation and feebleness, terms typically invoked in conservative discourse to describe homosexuality, and by shaming the Oxford don for violating the ethical detachment demanded by the modern historicist approach—​indexed here by the French phrases sans peur and sans raproche—​to the detriment of his students’ learning.17 (It is interesting to note that Carpenter uses foreign words here to criticize or expose Muller’s use of foreign words to obscure.) Elsewhere, Carpenter (1894, 8, 10)  refers to such translations as “pious frauds.” As the queer medievalists have demonstrated, the opposition of truth and pleasure or of duty and delight simply does not hold in such cases, nor does any clear distinction between scholarship and activism.18 We cannot place Carpenter on the side of interested activists and the bowdlweizers on the side of disinterested academics. The former made an affective appeal to scholarly rigor while the latter practiced a notion of “interested” scholarship that involved censoring historical texts in order to protect the morality of students and other potential readers. The opposition between interested and disinterested scholarship would play itself out in the late twentieth century within the gay community following the institutionalization of gay and queer studies in the curriculum of many US and British universities. Here we see an almost total reversal of the position of fin-​ de-​siècle scholar–​activists, like Carpenter and Symonds. Carpenter accused “straight” translators of cowardice and prudery in obscuring references to same-​sex desire through radically foreignizing approaches or omissions, advocating for a fearless objectivity—​“sans peur and sans raproche”—​in their translations.19 Now activists are being accused of using translations to advance a parochial agenda, producing what Gregory Woods describes as “skeptical” scholarship (Woods 1998, 9).

Queering Global Sexuality Studies  71 So, the opposition is not between “gay” activists and “objective” historians. In fact, the scholarly interest in the Greeks—​Wissenschaft—​happened at the same time as contemporaries in Britain and Germany were seeking in ancient Greek culture a usable past through which to reinvigorate their educational systems and by extension their societies. So, as Daniel Orrells (2011, 18–​19) argues, the tension between Wissenschaft and Bildung was there at the very emergence of philhellenism, ensuring that the “translatability and reproducibility of ancient knowledge were profoundly debated issues.” In fact, the opposition of pleasure to truth, or what Elizabeth Freeman (2010, 95) glosses as “sensory and cognitive modes of apprehending history,” might be one of the more lasting legacies of historicism.20 The victory of cognitive modes over sensory ones, or of truth over pleasure, in the nineteenth century also distinguishes it from the eighteenth century, where there was a widespread belief that there was truth in pleasure.21

This uneasy art The translations discussed earlier generated two distinct kinds of unease, which are still with us today. The first involves the form of desire featured in many of those translations from ancient Greece, while the second involves the intractable nature of many of the translation problems posed by those texts. Any discussion of same-​sex desire in ancient Greece generates what Kadji Amin (2017, 15)  refers to as a “disturbing attachment” to the phenomenon of modern pederasty, which “remains an inconvenient and embarrassing object for queer inquiry.” Indeed, consider the awkward treatment of the topic by Ian Buruma (2017, 30) in his review of an exhibition of Japanese art: We live in very different times. Boy love still exists, of course, but it is no longer cloaked, even in Japan (pace Inagaki Taruho), with the poetic sentiments of shudo. In most cultures sex with minors is frowned upon. In the West, it is entirely taboo. This is progress. Buruma then criticizes the Royal Ontario Museum’s refusal to exhibit paintings displaying man–​boy love, noting their hypocrisy in exhibiting paintings that feature adult women lusting after boys. But, in the end, Buruma (2017, 30) expresses ambivalence over any neat separation of scholarly truth from bodily desire: “Whether we need to be shielded from works of art created three hundred years ago is an open question.”22 And so, while the detached historicist approach to studying ancient Greece and other cultures “as they were” produced the first nonbowdlerized translations, those translations created a disturbing attachment that compelled early proponents of gay rights to confront the fact that many of the relationships portrayed in those ancient texts were age-​stratified, something

72  Queering Global Sexuality Studies that became increasingly problematic throughout the course of the Victorian Age, with its “cult of childhood” (see George Boas 1966). As Jana Funke (2013, 140) notes, In the second half of the nineteenth century, concerns about age difference and consent together with fears about the corruption of youth were fueled by numerous debates, focusing, for instance, on the influence of the classics on young readers, public school scandals, the 1885 Criminal Law Amendment (CLA) and the Wilde trials in 1895. Moreover, the element of mentoring central to the Greek model, which had been adopted at Oxford University, where, until 1884, fellows were required to be celibate (see Dowling 1994, 85), was problematized in the latter half of the nineteenth century by high-​profile homosexual scandals involving Oxford and Cambridge dons (Evangelista 2007; Rousseau 2007). All this would lead John Addington Symonds (1984, 269) to proclaim: “We cannot be Greek now.” As Funke (2013, 140)  argues, “in trying to reconcile the ideal of Greek love with the demands of the modern world, Symonds had to negotiate problematic questions of age difference and related concerns of equality, consent and the influence and corruption of youth.” The translation of ancient Greek texts became a site of unease for another reason, related to what Dinshaw (1999, 9) calls the indeterminate nature of many translation issues, indeterminate due not only to the asymmetry of languages but also to the fact that the meanings of the terms involved were often “notoriously shifting,” or because the target language lacked appropriate terms, or terms unburdened by previous censure. As John Addington Symonds (1983, 80) notes in A Problem of Modern Ethics (1896): Those who read those lines will hardly doubt which passion it is that I am hinting at. Quod semper ubique et ab omnibus—​surely it deserves a name. Yet I can hardly find a name which will not seem to soil this paper. The accomplished languages of Europe in the nineteenth century supply no term for this persistent feature of human psychology, without importing some implication of disgust, disgrace, vituperation. And so, Symonds looks to science for a “neutral” term. (Of course, such neutrality isn’t neutral at all, first, because it is defined in opposition to previous terms, and, second, because its very neutrality in fact indexes “modernity” and “scientific objectivity.”23) For all these reasons, many of the translation issues faced by translators of ancient Greek texts are indeterminate, as Daniel Orrells makes clear in his discussion of English translations of Plato’s work, which were central to debates over the nature of eros and its role in pedagogy from the late eighteenth century to today. Some definitive resolution to these debates was sought in the translation of some of the key terms used in the passages regarding

Queering Global Sexuality Studies  73 pedagogy, and specifically in Diotimas’s speeches in The Symposium. However, as Orrells (2011, 14)  points out, “successfully translating and reproducing what this image of perfect reproduction is has eluded classical scholars. Instead, Plato’s language has spawned too many translations.” Or consider the more recent controversy incited by the publication of John Boswell’s Same-​Sex Unions in Pre-​Modern Europe (1994). Boswell’s translation choices might have been lightly dismissed as skeptical or dubious had he not been a Yale historian. Instead, his work became embroiled in the cultural wars of the nineties. While many of his critics “questioned the accuracy of his translation and interpretations of a number of specialized texts” (Shopland 2018, 26), Boswell himself adopted an argument similar to the one used by Carpenter to critique previous translations as “pious frauds,” accusing previous translators of “artful mistranslation and a general unwillingness to recognize something as ostensibly improbable as a same sex reading” (qtd. in Shopland 2018, 27). A good deal of the controversy surrounded the Latin term desponsationis that appears in a twelfth-​century work about Ireland. Previous English translators had rendered the term as “treaty” while Boswell translated it as “betrothal.” In vindicating Boswell, Nora Shopland (2018, 27)  notes that the 1965 Revised Medieval Word-​ List: From British and Irish Sources gives the meaning of desponsationis as “espousal, betrothal or marriage.”24 While Shopland’s point lends credence to Boswell’s charge of artful mistranslation on the part of previous translators, Alan Bray cautions against any simple resolution of the issue, noting that such quarrels over meaning often obscure historical shifts in the semantic content of the terms.25 To reject Boswell’s translation based on a “narrow” contemporary understanding of marriage as necessarily sexual is problematic. As Bray (2003, 104) explains, In the past these potentially differing definitions [of kinship] often did not coincide so nearly, and one major cause of this mismatch was the several forms of what one might call voluntary kinship, kinship created not by blood but by ritual or a promise. Modern society recognizes only one such “voluntary” kinship, in marriage. And so, Shopland (2018, 28)  concludes, “At the end of the day, all we can really say is that a human institution such as marriage can have multiple meanings at any time in history, while its meanings can also change over time.” To the extent that the indeterminateness of translation is a source of unease, and that the act of ignoring translation replicates and reinforces imperial asymmetries as discussed earlier, it is imperative for scholars, especially those from the Global North, to embrace that unease. As Kadji Amin (2017, 10)  suggests in Disturbing Attachments:  “Scholars might inhabit unease, rather than seeking to quickly rid themselves of it to restore the mastery of the critic, the unassailability of her politics, and the legitimacy

74  Queering Global Sexuality Studies of her trained field expectations.” This necessitates a critical discussion of translation when it forms a part of our research, but a discussion that is open to the indeterminateness at the heart of many translation challenges. The specific feeling of unease elicited by the process of translation is wonderfully captured by Kate Briggs in her translator’s memoir/​meditation This Little Art, inspired by the challenges she faced, on a variety of fronts, when she took on the translation of an essay on the novel by Roland Barthes. Here is Briggs’s (2017, 140) description of that unease: a sometimes long drawn-​out to and fro between what the translator might want to write and what the original sentence is instructing her to write, between what seems to work in English, and what the French is saying and doing, between a certain aesthetic of the sentence that the translator may well want to bring to bear on the French, her own ideas of what counts as a good idea, or good writing, and the sentence’s own thinking, its own aesthetic, which is different, often very different, and serves as a repeated and necessary reminder—​because it’s true that in her quest for a sentence that works in English, for the phrasing of an idea that she is capable of thinking, she might be in danger of forgetting—​ that its difference is part of her motivation for undertaking to translate it in the first place. This unease is perhaps the inevitable result of the failure that haunts the translator’s task. By failure, I am not referencing the monadist position in language philosophy that construes translation as impossible due to the asymmetry of languages nor am I referencing the utopian aspiration to hold two languages “within a single expression” and to “maintain the familiar in the face of otherness without either sacrificing or appropriating difference” (Dingwaney and Maier 1995, 304)—​and always necessarily failing. Rather, I am referring to the fact that the responsible translator will inevitably encounter a unit of text, be it a word, phrase, or something larger, that the translator judges to be key to her understanding of the workings of the source text and that exploits the semantic range of that word or phrase, its multiple valences, and its complex history—​what Spivak (2005) discusses as the problem of paleonymy—​not to mention its relationship to other source text words (intratextuality) or to citations outside the text (intertextuality), in ways that do not fix meaning but unmoor it. Such words and phrases provoke unease in the translator by opposing “the desire to grasp meaning with the impossibility of naming” (Halberstam 2018, 91), which distinguishes the translator’s task from that of the literary exegete, who is not called upon to “name”; here we see a core difference between what Jakobson described as intralingual translation and interlingual, or translation proper. Moreover, it is those discrete textual units that are most likely to inspire eruptions in the surface of the translation, either in the form of notes or borrowings, which I will discuss in the conclusion.26

Queering Global Sexuality Studies  75 While many translators themselves construe such moments as failure, what if we were to rethink failure along the lines outlined by Judith Halberstam in The Queer Art of Failure? What if we were to see failure as an alternative to the US preoccupation with personal responsibility and a positive attitude, which divides the world into winners and losers while masking the structural conditions that cause some people to lose more than others (Halberstam 2017, 3)? Translation failure would, by analogy, be an alternative to what Spivak (2005, 94)  describes as “quick translations,” or translations as “a quick way to ‘know a culture.’ ” Might this be what Edward Carpenter (1902, 122) was alluding to when he asked in “Nothing Less Than All”:  “Is it for pleasure and the world and the present, or for death and translation and spirituality, that we must live?”27 The structural conditions that make translators lose are certainly economic and political, but they also include certain linguistic givens: namely, that natural languages are asymmetrical, most words are polysemous—​and the range of meanings in one language will almost never align with the range of meanings in another—​and even words with similar semantic content will have lived different lives in their respective languages, lending them different valences, accents, and leading them along different semantic and intertextual pathways. This is something that is obscured in the metaphors of the translator as an actor or performer. Actors or musicians are constrained to interpret the author’s words and the composer’s notes; the translator’s interpretation involves replacing the author’s words with words from another language, words that have lived alternative lives in other linguistic environments. It is not simply that they have different semantic ranges, but that they have different degrees of historicity, as Mikhail Bakhtin (1981, 293) so beautifully describes: there are no “neutral” words or forms—​words and forms that can belong to “no one”; language has been completely taken over, shot through with intentions and accents. For any individual consciousness living in it, language is not an abstract system of normative forms but rather a concrete heteroglot conception of the world. All words have the “taste” of a profession, a genre, a tendency, a party, a particular work, a particular person, a generation, an age group, the day and hour. Each word tastes of the context and contexts in which it has lived its socially charged life; all words and forms are populated by intentions. Contextual overtones (generic, tendentious, individualistic) are inevitable in the word. One hears echoes of this in Theodor Adorno’s (1991b, 187) observation that “language is erotically charged in its words” or in Mel Y.  Chen’s (2012, 13)  formulation of language as “animated, as a means of embodied condensation of social, cultural, and political life.” Gary Saul Morson (2011, 53) adds a citational dimension, noting, “Many words and phrases represent

76  Queering Global Sexuality Studies quotational residue.”28 This is why Keith Harvey’s (2002, 1163) observation about the citationality of camp talk rings true for all utterances: “Alongside the propositions one is conveying, one is ghosting the message with something distinctly queer.”29

Conclusion A queer translation practice then would counter any association of translation with the easy transposability of global capital by firmly grounding it in the materiality and historicity of language, underscoring the contingent and affective dimensions of knowledge production. As such, queer translation might be situated among what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick termed “the middle ranges of agency that offer the only effectual space for creativity and change” (2003, 12), or what Judith Halberstam describes as “knowledge from below” (2011, 11).30 Indeed, Katie King (2002, 44; italics added) suggests something like this when discussing the role of “problematic translations” in her scholarly method:  “I believe in eclectic methods that emerge in different local politics and institutional struggles, that require always problematic translations, which themselves shape the methods.” A more concrete example of such a queer translation practice can be found in the field of HIV prevention, which often involves the translation of Western medical literature into local languages. Traditional approaches have typically relied on bilingual glossaries created by language experts. And while such glossaries might ensure consistency of terminology across the translated materials, they cannot ensure their successful reception. As Natasha Mack et al. (2013, 1) explain: A translator may not always have a nuanced understanding of language commonly used by the study participants, or may have an educational level higher than that of the study population. There may also be a variety of people serving in the role of translators, including investigators, study staff, and professional translation companies. […] Therefore, even when clinical research studies utilize bilingual lexicons, the risk remains that participants could misinterpret or not comprehend key terms essential to the clinical trial process. This rationale for the study undertaken by Mack et al. to develop effective focus group protocols recognizes that translation is not a simple linguistic matching game; the final glossaries are the product of an extended, deeply dialogic, collaboration. Such studies confirm the vital importance of translation in intercultural exchanges of this kind, warranting the investment of time, effort, and resources. In fact, this is the conclusion Joseph Slaughter comes to regarding the translation of human rights legislation—​not that it is impossible or that human rights are untranslatable just because their meaning is not transparent or transposable. What is required, therefore,

Queering Global Sexuality Studies  77 Slaughter (2006, 6)  argues, is not “translation alone” but “the collaboration of writers like Soyinka and the cooperation, or complicity, of literary and cultural forms to make the common sense of human rights norms both legible and legislatable, imaginable and articulable.”

Notes 1 As Weeks (1997, 44) writes, “On the one hand was a form of sexual colonialism, a view of the lower classes as a source of ‘trade.’ ” 2 In using the phrases “the specificity of translation as discourse,” I am referencing James Clifford’s notion of the “specification of discourses,” which he describes in the introduction to the collection Writing Culture as key to an ethical approach to ethnography, one that is “historicist and self-​reflexive” (1986, 19). For Clifford, specifying discourse “historically and intersubjectively” challenges the tendency in traditional ethnography to give “to one voice a pervasive authorial function and to others the role of sources, ‘informants,’ to be quoted or paraphrased” (1986, 15), thereby restraining or repressing the polyvocality that is an inevitable aspect of any cross-​cultural encounter. The example Clifford provides of such polyvocal ethnography is an edition of documents collected by the ethnographer James Walker and edited by Raymond DeMallie and Elaine Jahner under the title Lakota Belief and Ritual (1980). In this collection of “notes, interviews, texts, and essay fragments,” the ethnographer’s own descriptions appear as “fragments among fragments” (Clifford 1986, 15). In addition, the volume makes visible the role of the Lakota interpreters who helped Walker: “The ethnographer worked closely with interpreters Charles and Richard Nines, and with Thomas Tyon and George Sword, both of whom composed extended essays in Old Lakota. These have now been translated and published for the first time” (15). In such a polyvocal text, Clifford concludes, “the question of who writes (performs? transcribes? translates? edits?) cultural statements is inescapable” (16). 3 The fact that translation rarely appears as a term in the indexes of works in the field of Global Sexuality Studies underscores this ambivalence. 4 James Holmes (1989, 58) also offers a very critical assessment of the volume, describing the anthology as “not very good. It has a lot of very perverse—​if I may use the word in this context—​translations in it.” 5 It is interesting that Woods (1998, 53) justifies this ahistorical placement of the “Orient” in his largely chronological presentation of the history of gay literature by citing the example of Carpenter’s Ioläus (!), the third chapter of which is entitled “Friendship in Early Christian and Mediaeval Times,” which concludes with an 11-​page sequence subtitled “Eastern Countries.” As Woods goes on to explain, “I am adopting a similar policy here, even if […] this must be regarded as little more than a strategy of convenience” (53). 6 Incidentally, the French word for translation, traduction, is built on the Latin root “duct.” 7 The statement is interesting given the fact that Soyinka’s novel The Interpreters (1965) offers a very complicated view—​complicated at the level of both theme and construction—​of the experience of five high school friends in Nigeria, who go abroad to study and then return to Nigeria to work. While the interpreting in the title is clearly a metaphor, the intercultural processes Soyinka describes are hardly straightforward or transparent.

78  Queering Global Sexuality Studies 8 Unlike Malanasan’s Global Divas (2003), this collected volume does not front issues of translation, and, in fact, translation does not appear in the index. 9 Dubbing practices underscore translation’s functioning as a techne. In many authoritarian regimes, dubbing is preferred as it forecloses unmediated access to the source language, hence facilitating censorship. In the Indonesian case, as Boellstorft describes it, dubbing was seen as an especially seamless mode of cultural infiltration. 10 While several of these scholars mention translations and translators, only two—​ Mullins and Tageldin—​incorporate translation into their work in a sustained and systematic way. Mullins dedicates a chapter to Paul Bowles’s collaborative translations with Moroccan writers and storytellers, while Tageldin makes translation into the organizing theme of her monograph, positing translation as a privileged site for the workings of colonial power, using the concept of seduction elaborated by Baudrillard. 11 Jack Halberstam (2018, 73–​4) makes a similar point in regard to trans* lives in the past: “[G]‌ender-​ambiguous figures from earlier historical periods cannot be explained using the contemporary language of transgender identity.” 12 That scholarly approach, however, did not necessarily reach down into the classroom; in E. M. Forster’s novel Maurice, for example, the eponymous hero is instructed by his professor at Oxford to “omit a reference to the unspeakable vice of the Greeks,” when translating a work of Greek philosophy (Forster 1971, 51)—​an instruction that unwittingly directs the student’s attention to the offending passage. 13 For examples of the kind of censorship, typically self-​censorship, that took place previously in regard to translations of Ancient Greek and Roman texts, see Nicolas Perrot d’Ablancourt’s preface to his translation of Lucian (Ablancourt [1709] 1992)  and an overview of German translations of Plautus in Limbeck (1999). 14 While this historicist approach often resulted in translations that were more complete, it did not mean that all new translations were necessarily more accurate, although they typically advertised themselves, like Carey’s translations of Plato, as “new and literal.” They in fact reflected new target culture interpretations of ancient Greek texts, influenced by earlier interpretations by the German Hellenists, both in the form of scholarship and translations, and by their place in the Victorian culture wars. As Dowling (1994, 71) notes of Benjamin’s Jowett’s much vaunted translations of Plato, Jowett was to write and rewrite his translations of the Dialogues [of Plato] until virtually all the various Platonic speakers, from Socrates to Aristophanes to Charmides, seem to be speaking in the recognizable accents—​so reassuring to Victorian readers—​of the Authorized Version of the Bible. Overall, Dowling (1994, 78, 83) does an excellent job of illustrating how central translation was to the cultural project of the Victorian liberal Hellenists, which involved not only the metaphoric “continuous translation of Christian into Hellenic terms,” but also actual translations, noting Walter Pater’s ideologically inflected translation of the Greek word khlidē as “pride of life,” “but which in Plato carries darker connotations of ‘delicacy,’ ‘luxury,’ and ‘effeminacy.’ ”

Queering Global Sexuality Studies  79 15 As Dowling (1994, 124) notes, The great significance of Dorian Gray’s given name becomes, in turn, the way it implicitly summons, with an elegantly offhand gesture of allusion, the legitimating authority of K. O. Müller’s Dorians and, beyond it, a world of learned historical Wissenschaft […], upon which Wilde’s seemingly airy Hellenism ultimately rests. 16 It should also be noted that one of the reasons Germanophones were among the first to explore the topic of homosexuality among the ancient Greeks was the fact that they “had at their disposal more editions and translations of classical texts than their neighbours” (Robb 2003, 178). 17 The Oxford professor’s strategy of leaving sexually explicit passages in the original Sanskrit reflected the norm of the day. Sir Richard Burton, for example, in his translation of The Arabian Nights translated sexual terms into Latin. 18 See David Halperin’s Saint Foucault for a contemporary description of this debate, where Halperin (1995, 6)  argues that gay intellectuals who undertake “explicitly to combine scholarship and politics” are stigmatized as “militant,” “radical,” or “extreme.” 19 James Jope (2005, 48) refers to this shift in positions in his academic critique of a new English translation of Stratos’s epigrams: The recent appearance of Daryl Hine’s fresh and imaginative translation may stimulate interest in Strato’s anthology. Hine himself is a poet. But precisely those qualities which make enjoyment of the poems more accessible for the general reader may cause difficulty when his book is consulted by people studying ancient sexuality. Whereas earlier translations used to distort erotic content for reasons of censorship, Hine makes brilliant adaptations to create amusing epigrams with erotic twists and sociocultural allusions to which a modern reader can relate. But sexual historians need an accurate conveyance of the original content. 20 As Freeman (2010, 95) writes: As the winners of a battle between sensory and cognitive modes of apprehending history, history should be understood rather than felt, and written in a genre as clearly separated from “fiction” if not from narrative as possible. Yet from at least the 1800s, fiction has offered traces not only of unrealized pasts but also of the unrealized past of history itself. 21 As Alexander Cook (2009, 453) puts it, “Although scholars have differed in their assessments of the causes and consequences of the phenomenon, there has been little dispute that 18th-​century Europe witnessed a general discovery (or rediscovery) of pleasure as a valuable component of human experience.” 22 The argument must seem incredibly naive to anyone familiar with the modern reception of ancient Greek art. There was, of course, Winkelman’s erotic interest in Greek statuary, but more germane to the topic at hand are the early collectors of Greek erotic pottery. Homosexual men in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, such as the Americans Edward Perry Warren and John Marshall,

80  Queering Global Sexuality Studies were among the first serious collectors of ancient Greek art featuring explicit sexual acts between men and boys at a time when museums wouldn’t have anything to do with those works, suggesting an investment that went beyond pure aesthetics or historical objectivity (see Sox 1991, 50). At the same time, their “interest” is responsible for saving these works for posterity. Should their desire invalidate their preservation work—​or alternately, should the museums’ prudery be interpreted as objectivity? 23 In a chapter in the collection Nonbinary: Memoirs of Gender and Identity, Jules de la Cruz (2019, 221) acknowledges the need for “a new lexicon” for nonbinary folks, but wants those new words to convey “the same awe and reverence of mother and father, without the binary connotations that inherently come along.” But doesn’t that awe and reverence accrue over time, through repeated use in specific contexts and through the canonization of those words in works of art? Can we have it both ways—​that is, can we coin new words that have no prior connotations but that also immediately inspire awe and reverence? 24 The title of Shopland’s article, “Belated Vindication for John Boswell,” may be referencing Greg Grandin’s 2017 article from The Nation: “Rigoberta Menchú Vindicated.” I discuss the way Menchú’s memoir was framed in translation in Chapter 6. 25 One could make a similar critique of the current discourse on untranslatability, namely, that the stability of the term as it crosses linguistic and cultural borders obscures the internal translation of the term, its resemanticization. This is especially relevant to sexuality studies where certain Anglophone terms circulate globally but undergo significant resemanticization in local contexts. 26 I think it is important to make this distinction as translators do not go about their work with a general sense of its impossibility. Rather, one often works in a rather straightforward way but then hits a brick wall, when encountering the kinds of units I describe here. 27 Joseph Massad, in fact, ends Desiring Arabs with a reference to productive failure: It is at these rarer moments when the imposition and seduction of Western norms fail that the possibility of different conceptions of desires, politics and subjectivities emerges. My hope is that the critique that Desiring Arabs offers marks and instances of that possibility. (2007, 418) 28 Moreover, this quotational residue can be multilayered and contradictory. For example, while Scott Moncrieff’s rendering of the title of Marcel Proust’s novel Sodom et Gomorrhe as Cities of the Plain may appear as a “tasteful” attenuation of any direct reference to sodomy, queer readers of Scott Moncrieff’s time may have been familiar with The Sins of the Cities of the Plain; or, The Recollections of a Mary-​Ann, with Short Essays on Sodomy and Tribadism (1881), considered to be among the first works of exclusively homosexual pornography published in England. While the first edition was published in only 250 copies, there was a second edition in 1902 (see Setz 2013). 29 Indeed, Borges (2010, 47)  suggests that the best translations are those that engage the target culture’s literary tradition, exploiting their resources, as he elaborates in his essay “The Translators of the Thousand and One Nights”:

Queering Global Sexuality Studies  81 The versions by Burton and Mardrus, and even by Galland, can only be conceived of in the wake of a literature. Whatever their blemishes or merits, these characteristic works presuppose a rich (prior) process. In some way, the almost inexhaustible process of English is adumbrated in Burton—​John Dunne’s hard obscenity, the gigantic vocabularies of Shakespeare and Cyril Tourneur, Swinburne’s affinity for the archaic, the crass erudition of the authors of the 17th century chapbooks, the energy and imprecision, the love of tempests and magic. In Madrus’s laughing paragraphs, Salammbô and La Fontaine, the Mannequin d’osier and the ballets russes all coexist. In Littman, who, like Washington, cannot tell a lie, there is nothing but the probity of Germany. This is so little, so very little. The commerce between Germany and the Nights should have produced something more. 30 Halberstam (2017, 413)  develops the notion of knowledge from below from a reading of an essay by Stuart Hall who defends Gramsci against the charge made by Althusser that his ideas were “insufficiently theorized.” Hall argues that Gramsci was not a failed theorist; rather Gramsci’s abstract principles “were quite explicitly designed to operate at the lower level of historical concreteness.” Halberstam calls this “low theory,” alluding perhaps to Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s (2012, 2) “poor theory,” which seeks to provide an antidote to the tendency of theory becoming like a kite that, having lost its mooring, remains floating in space with no possibility of returning to earth; or an even more needed critique of the tendency in the writing of theory to substitute density of words for that of thought, a kind of modern scholasticism.

3  Queering the gay anthology, part I Evolution in/​of a genre

Early liberal defenses of homosexuality in Western Europe laid out what is now referred to as the congenital argument, namely, that homosexuality existed in all cultures in all historical periods but was restricted to a small minority of the population (Tobin 2015, 23–​5). Therefore, it could be treated with tolerance and decriminalized as it posed no threat to the rest of society. Crucial in supporting that argument was the genre of the anthology, or collection of writings by different authors, featuring a significant portion of texts in translation, which testified to the universality of same-​sex desire across languages and cultures. The very visible presence of translations could be considered a characteristic feature of the gay anthology, distinguishing it from anthologies meant to document national traditions. For example, one would not expect to find translations in an anthology of twentieth-​century French poetry, nor, for that matter, in an anthology of African-​American writing, and in fact there are none in the Norton Anthology of African American Literature (Gates and McKay 1997).1 As such, the gay anthology could be said to connect the global and the local in ways nation-​based anthologies do not, or do not do as overtly. While offering positive representations and expressions of same-​sex desire, many of the translated texts contained in these anthologies provided historical evidence that contradicted the minoritarian model they were deployed to support, inscribing a queer tension in this cultural project from the very start. But before we examine the emergence of the gay anthology, let us examine the genre of the anthology itself and its transformation over the course of the nineteenth century into a powerful disciplinary mechanism through which a (Western) developmental understanding of history was consolidated and circulated.

What is an anthology? Meleager of Gadara’s Garland, compiled in the first century BC E , is considered to be the first anthology. The term anthology, which was applied to Meleager’s collection, is derived from the Greek words for “flower” and “collection.” Not only does Meleager describe his collection in the introduction as flowers

Queering the gay anthology, part I  83 woven into a garland, he also introduces each of poets in the collection with a poem of his own describing the poet’s work as a kind of flower.2 Because the works included were inscriptions, or epigrams, anthologies were later distinguished from collections by the fact that they included previously published texts, although there are notable exceptions to the rule, such as Spoon River Anthology. The definitive version of the anthology, which was compiled by Constantine Cephalus in the tenth century C E , known as the Palatine Anthology, contained additional collections of epigrams from different historical periods, which added a metageneric dimension, making it an anthology omnibus, or an anthology of anthologies. Moreover, several of those new collections were thematically framed. Among them were a collection of Christian epigrams found in churches; a collection of satirical and convivial epigrams collected by Diogenianus; Christodorus’ description of statues in the Byzantine gymnasium of Zeuxippos; a collection of inscriptions from a temple in Cyzicus; and a collection of homoerotic verses collected by Strato of Sardis in the second century C E , described elliptically by the Loeb editor W. R. Paton (1918, I:viii) as “a collection on a special subject.” The anthology of Strato is therefore often referred to as the first “gay” anthology. Because anthologies are defined by the fact that they include already published texts, they are typically associated with preservation and cultural conservatism.3 This is also key to the anthology’s role in conferring literary and cultural value, as Barbara Hernnstein Smith (1988, 10) points out: anthologies themselves may be taken as a metaphor for the operation of various social determinants of literary value. The recommendation of value represented by the repeated inclusion of a particular work in anthologies of “great poetry” not only promotes but goes some distance toward creating the value of that work, as does its repeated appearance on reading lists or its frequent citation or quotation by professors, scholars, critics, poets, and other elders of the tribe; for all these acts have the effect of drawing the work into the orbit of attention of potential readers and, by making the work more likely to be experienced at all, they make it more likely to be experienced as “valuable.” In this sense, value creates value. The function of the anthology to confer value, or cultural capital, is quite obvious from the cover of W.  H. Auden’s Portable Greek Reader ([1948] 1959), which reads: “The fountainhead of our Western culture approached through its greatest writers—​in the finest English translations—​brilliantly interpreted by the editor, W.H. Auden.” The fact that anthologies are typically made up of works that have already been published not only lends “canonical authority to texts and quotations” (Robb 2003, 230) but also confirms the very existence of the subject, conferring ontological status. For example, the 20 volumes of Alden’s Cyclopedia

84  Queering the gay anthology, part I of Universal Literature (1885–​91) appear as irrefutable proof that there is such a thing as universal literature. Moreover, that conferral of ontological status has been, at least until the culture wars of the 1980s, typically accompanied by claims of impartiality, construing the conferral as a confirmation. In this way, by feigning merely to document a subject, anthologies allow that subject to come, “unbidden and unremarked, to occupy a definitional center” (Sedgwick 1993, 143). The power of the anthology to confer ontological status has made it an important tool for oppressed minorities and, perhaps, especially important in the gay liberation movement, as sexual identity is typically construed as less visible than ethnic or racial identities. And so, for gays and lesbians, the identitarian struggle for protections or rights must begin by establishing their existence: “We’re here, we’re queer.” Consider, for example, the Penguin anthology of Lesbian writing from India titled Facing the Mirror (1999). By invoking mimesis through the trope of the mirror, lesbianism is granted a priori status as “reflected reality,” suggesting the anthology is simply presenting to the Indian people the lesbianism in their midst. Indeed, the editor Ashwini Sukthankar (1999, xi) states in a note placed before the introduction, “[this book] reflects and represents our reality today. We will not be shamed into pretending we do not exist.” We see the same visual tropes in British poet Robert Graves’s reaction to reading Edward Carpenter’s anthology Ioläus and his historical treatise The Intermediate Sex: [They] have absolutely taken the scales from my eyes and caused me immense elation: you have provided a quite convincing explanation for all the problems, doubts and suspicions that I have been troubled by in my outlook on sex, and I see everything clearly. (qtd. in Tsuzuki 1980, 148) Moreover, in documenting a phenomenon, the anthology itself becomes a historical document, a privileged artifact among artifacts, leading Viktoriia Narizhna (2009, 340)  to recognize the dual function of the anthology, as act (postupok) and as text. Consider the fact that Edward Carpenter’s anthology of male friendship, which will be discussed at length in Chapter 4, was used as a calling card to declare one’s sexual affinities. As Graham Robb (2003, 144)  recounts:  “Eventually, books on homosexual love—​ William Johnson’s version of Greek and Latin in Ionica (1858), Carpenter’s Ioläus: An Anthology of Friendship (1902)—​could be given as presents and tokens.” (Incidentally, both works contain mostly translations, a fact I will discuss in greater length below and in Chapter  4.) Carpenter’s anthology was in fact reviewed in the New York Times in 1902, and that review was subsequently anthologized as an event in gay history in the Gay/​Lesbian Almanac, which describes itself on the cover as

Queering the gay anthology, part I  85 A New Documentary, In which is contained, in Chronological Order, Evidence of the True and Fantastical HISTORY of those Persons now called LESBIANS and GAY MEN, and of the Changing Social Forms of and Responses to those Acts, Feeling, and Relationships now called HOMOSEXUAL, in the Early American Colonies, 1607 to 1740, and in the Modern United States, 1880 to 1950. (Katz 1983) That 1902 review recommended Carpenter’s anthology as “an appropriate gift book,” and “a convenient reference […] for composers of ‘polite’ literature” (Katz 1994, 309).

The cultural work of anthologies The documentary aura of anthologies has led to comparisons with museums.4 Museums, however, have for some time now been an object of critical inquiry, whereas anthologies, and in particular anthologies of translated literature, have been, until only recently, ignored in the fields of literary and cultural studies (Seruya et al. 2013, 1).5 As Sarah Lawall (2004, 47)  expresses it with the understatement of an anthology editor, anthologies are “a theoretically interesting form whose potential for opening up discourse has yet to be sufficiently explored.” That being said, it may be that the anthology’s “odd mixture of highly articulated conceptions with largely unexamined assumptions” (Ferry 2001, 14) is key to its effectiveness as a vehicle for legitimating and propagating cultural forms and ideologies, which only underscores the need for a better understanding of how anthologies go about their cultural work (Di Leo 2004, 6). In order to understand the cultural work of anthologies, we need to examine a number of features, namely, how texts are selected for inclusion (and, where relevant, whether they are edited and/​or abridged); how those texts are arranged; and how the subject of the anthology is labelled or framed. While the very existence of the anthology lends its subject ontological status, the ways in which the anthology is structured lays out an epistemology, or, as Brent Hayes Edwards (2003, 44) puts it in regard to the anthologies of Black poetry and folklore that appeared in the 1920s, “the particular way an anthology frames race, the particular way it articulates an epistemology of blackness.” And while I separate the three aspects of the anthology mentioned earlier in the discussion that follows, I do so provisionally, for the sake of convenience, understanding them to be thoroughly entangled and mutually reinforcing.6

86  Queering the gay anthology, part I The selection process is of course key to the anthology’s cultural work, but it is often the most covert aspect of that work, as Gideon Nisbet (2013, 34)  makes clear in his description of selection as “an act of cultural memorialization that is predicated upon exclusion and forgetting—​ a damnatio memoriae as powerful in its consequence as it is (seemingly) passive in its method and objective in its necessity.” The seeming passivity of the anthologist’s method is often reflected in a mystification of the selection process, achieved by editorial claims of including only “the best” or “the finest” works of literature, as if the aesthetic or cultural value of these texts were self-​evident. Moreover, most readers are unaware of what is not included in a given anthology. This feigned passivity of method is, however, a modern aspect of the anthology, which is not evident in the anthology of Meleager, who makes clear that his selection of epigrams is based on his personal assessment of their beauty, which he highlights in the introductory poems he himself composes. Modern anthologies, on the other hand, designed to meet the perceived needs of an expanding reading public and of an expanding educational system, assumed a more overtly didactic function, as reflected in editorial claims of objectivity and completeness. Regarding the claim of objectivity, consider Charles Dudley Warner’s (1897, I:iii) description of his anthology: “The Library approves itself to impartial interest as a Universal Text-​book.” Similarly, the editors of the 11-​volume Library of American Literature, Edmund Clarence Stedman and Ellen McKay Hutchinson (1889–​90, I:vi), repeatedly attenuate if not disavow their interpretive role in the compilation of their anthology: “Our own object is to place before the reader select and characteristic examples of the literature of this country, and to do so, as far as possible, without note or comment, leaving to others the field of critical review.” They then go on to present the contents not only like paintings in a museum—​“a collection that shall be to our literature what a ‘National Gallery’ is to national art” (vii)—​but also like unmediated works of Nature: “After all, as with the study of Nature, the best way to gain a knowledge of literature is to survey it with our own eyes” (vi). Regarding the claim of completeness, consider Charles Dudley Warner’s (1897, I:iii) assertion that his anthology “adequately represent[s]‌the intellectual, moral, and spiritual treasures of the human race” or the Classicist W. R. Paton’s (1918, I:vii) description of the anthology as “all that is most worthy of presentation.”7 This leads to the ballooning in size of anthologies, peaking with the 50-​volume Harvard Classics series. Such claims of objectivity and completeness are not, however, quaint remnants of a postivist past but enduring features of anthologies, reflected even in many contemporary anthologies of theoretical texts, which, one might assume, would express a greater degree of self-​reflexivity regarding the ideological work of the anthology. In fact, these claims are as visible among culturally conservative anthologies as they are among more liberal ones. Compare, for example, Harold Bloom’s anthology The Best Poems

Queering the gay anthology, part I  87 of the English Language (2004; book cover), which describes itself as “a comprehensive anthology that offers the reader possession of six centuries of great British and American poetry,” to The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader (1993), which claims to be “the biggest and most comprehensive multi-​disciplinary anthology of critical work in lesbian/​gay studies” (qtd. in Morton 1996, 28. As Donald Morton (1996, 28) points out in regard to the editorial claims of the latter: On the one hand, [the editors] offer rather vague and impressionistic criteria for what they have included […]; on the other hand, they offer a substantial list of “Suggestions for Further Reading” (653–​666) to compensate for what they have excluded. One might be tempted to make a distinction between national and international anthologies in terms of their criteria for text selection, insofar as international anthologies have a supranational if not global dimension, and so must represent a worlding of the anthology’s subject. My research, however, has shown such a distinction is not at all clear-​cut. First, national anthologies often inscribe the national literary tradition they document within a world order. So, while the framing may be ostensibly national, they almost invariably cast a sideways glance at the world and their place in it. As Stedman argues in his 1900 American Anthology, the consolidation of a national literary tradition allowed the United States to enter the world stage.8 Second, international anthologies typically “over-​ represent” texts from the host country. As Alden (1885, I:8; italics added) writes in his introduction: “The literature of our own day, and especially of our own country, will occupy a more prominent place than it holds in any other work of its class.” This overrepresentation occurs for a variety of reasons, some quite practical, such as the availability of translations and translators, while others are more political. Charles W. Eliot, in his 50-​volume Harvard Classics, for example, offered one of the more overtly nationalist presentations of world literature. Rather than erase or attenuate national difference within some notion of a universal literature, Eliot seeks to legitimate and reinforce national differences in his anthology. As Eliot (1910, L:14) comments in the introduction: From these volumes, the thorough reader may learn valuable lessons in comparative literature. He can see how various the contributions of the different languages and epochs have been; and he will inevitably come to the conclusion that striking national differences in this respect ought in the interest of mankind to be perpetuated and developed, and not obliterated, averaged, or narrowed down. His specific US bias is further reflected in his decision to inaugurate the series with a volume dedicated to the American revolutionaries Benjamin Franklin, James Woolman, and William Penn.9

88  Queering the gay anthology, part I In terms of the arrangement of texts in anthologies, it was, until the late nineteenth century, decidedly random; either “the order of entries is not clearly articulated” (Ferry 2001, 16)  or editors resort to an alphabetical arrangement, based on the first word of the poem, as in Meleager’s Garland, or based on the last name of the author, which became popular in the nineteenth century. Lawall (2004, 53) describes such alphabetical arrangement as “apparently neutral” as it does not imply an overarching interpretation, although it could be said to construe great literary texts, often referred to as gems, as transcending time and place, that is, not historically determined.10 This, of course, makes such nonchronological arrangements no less ideologically shaped than chronological ones. It may be surprising to those of us who grew up using anthologies in literary survey courses to learn that anthologies adopted a chronological arrangement of texts only in the latter half of the nineteenth century. This no doubt reflected the enormous influence of the concepts of development and evolution that were central to the Western progressivist understanding of history, which Chakrabarty refers to as historicism (2000, 7). This is not to say that previous anthologies had no temporal dimension. In fact, Cephalus introduces a distinct temporal perspective into the Palantine Anthology by placing the later Christian epigrams first. In fact, those epigrams open with a defiant declaration by the compiler: “Let the pious and godly Christian Epigrams take precedence, even if the pagans are displeased” (Paton 1918, 3). Taking precedence (physically) in the anthology is meant not simply to mark the superiority of Christian teaching over pagan but also to imply a reading of sacred history, in which Christ fulfills or perfects the teachings of the Old Testament prophets. In this sense, Christ does not mark so much the end of history as the beginning of a new era in human history. Regarding the first grouping of epigrams, which were “Inscribed on the Tabernacle of Saint Sophia,” Cephalas goes on to note: “The images that the pagans took down from here our pious sovereigns replaced” (3). Here, too, time or history enters the anthology with Cephalas’s construal of the anthologist’s work as a political and theological act of recovery and restoration. By placing the Christian epigrams first, Cephalas may have also intended to prepare or protect his readers from the more salacious “pagan” epigrams that would follow, including the homoerotic epigrams collected by Strato. In any case, while Cephalus introduces a sense of time into his anthology of anthologies, this temporal consciousness, marked by “Christ’s eruption into history” (Holquist 1994, 18), is quite different from the developmental chronologies of nineteenth-​century anthologies, in which pride of place goes not only to the first texts but also to the last ones, which now together outline an arc of historical development. The adoption of a developmental perspective in anthologies of world literature—​or universal literature, as it was often referred to in the nineteenth century—​ took place gradually over the course of the nineteenth century. Compare, for example, Heinrich Hössli’s early-​nineteenth-​century anthology, discussed in detail in Chapter 4, with John B. Alden’s 20-​volume

Queering the gay anthology, part I  89 Cyclopedia of Universal Literature (1885–​91). All the works selected by Hössli are from the distant past, clearly cutoff from the present by a temporal gulf, which in fact constituted the authority of the ancients. Alden (1885, I:8), on the other hand, includes texts by contemporary authors alongside those of canonical authors of the past, placing them on equal footing: “It is hoped that this CYCLOPEDIA OF UNIVERSAL LITERATURE will be as fully and carefully studied for this current Nineteenth Century as for any preceding century of human culture and progress.” Despite several mentions of “progress” and “maturity” in his introduction, however, Alden (1885, I:8) ultimately resists the temptation to place those authors in chronological order: “The names of authors will appear in their proper alphabetical order, irrespective of their period, nationality, or the character of their writing. Whatever is said of any one man will be said in connection with his name.”11 The choice of alphabetical order shows the degree to which randomness had become a central feature of the anthology as genre, reflected in the popularity of the title Miscellany, not to mention the one-​off Oxford Sausage of 1764 (Ferry 2001, 19, 20). It also served to keep the focus on great individuals “who have made a distinctive mark in the history of human culture and progress” (Alden 1885, I:7)—​they were not merely products of their time—​while putting forward the idea of a universal culture composed of masterpieces that transcend national and historical boundaries, hence the popularity of the title Treasury (Ferry 2001, 18). This aligns with Matthew Arnold’s much-​cited definition of culture, in Culture and Anarchy (1869), as “the best which has been thought and said in the world.”12 That being said, Alden’s anthology opens with a text by Ezra Abbot, LL.D., who is described as a bibliographer. In an essay titled “The Bibliography of a Future Life,” Abbot (qtd. in Alden 1885, 11) expresses a strong preference for a chronological arrangement: “I would not hesitate to prefer a classed catalogue, with the titles to each section arranged chronologically,” suggesting that chronology was an emergent phenomenon in anthologies at this time. For example, the editor of the 31-​volume A Library of the World’s Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Charles Dudley Warner (1897, XXXI:v), preserved the alphabetical ordering of texts but included in the final volume a variety of organizational schemas, including a “chronological catalogue of the authors in each national literature. […] Both the chronological and the characteristics of literatures are thus given.” The American anthologist Edmund Clarence Stedman would be among the first not only to adopt a chronological arrangement of texts but also to articulate a defense of chronology, which he did in the introductions to his two popular fin-​de-​siècle anthologies: A Victorian Anthology (1895) and An American Anthology (1900), which also marked the resurrection of the term anthology.13 The innovative nature of that arrangement is suggested by the fact that Stedman (1895, ix) dedicates much of the introduction in his 1895 anthology to explaining his decision: “That plan is not to offer a collection of absolutely flawless poems, long since become classic and accepted as models”—​the timeless masterpieces paradigm—​“but in fact to

90  Queering the gay anthology, part I make a truthful exhibit of the course of song during the last sixty years, as shown by the poets of Great Britain in the best of their shorter production.” His use of “truthful exhibit” here references the metaphor of the anthology as museum, put forward in the introduction to his earlier Library of American Literature (1889–​ 90), while the phrase “course of song” indexes a developmental or evolutionary perspective. He then acknowledges that the principles of selection and arrangement are not separate. In other words, adopting a chronological arrangement does not assume the same selection of texts as before. Opting for a chronological ordering of texts to provide “a conspectus” leads the editor to privilege representativeness over aesthetic quality: “One sometimes finds, by a paradox, that an author when most characteristic is not always at his best” (x). In his 1889 anthology, An American Library, Stedman and his coeditor, Ellen MacKay Hutchinson (1889, I:vii), go even further, noting that minor authors are often more representative than major ones: “[M]‌inor authors, singly or in groups, reflect the tendencies of a period even more clearly than their more original compeers.” At the end of his introduction to the 1895 anthology, however, Stedman (1895, x) invokes chronology to mystify his interpretive role in the selection of texts, describing “time itself” as “a pretty logical curator.” Stedman’s adoption of chronological ordering was itself a process. In his Victorian Anthology, Stedman had violated the principle of absolute chronology by placing the authors within schools—​which Stedman describes as a “divisional arrangement” (xviii) and elsewhere as a “secondary division” (xi). He would fully commit to chronology five years later in his American Anthology.14 As he explains: Essaying almost every method of setting forth our own poets, I found it impossible to follow the one which before had worked so aptly. A chronological system proved to be not merely the best, but seemingly the only one applicable to my new needs. (1900, xviii) Why should it be that a chronological arrangement best suits the anthologization of American literature, in particular? The answer Stedman offers is quite telling: it allows him to present the history of US literature in a clear developmental frame, as Bildung: The one satisfactory order proved to be the chronological; this being of the greater value since national evolution is more fully reflected in the poetry of America than in that of countries, further advanced in the arts, wherein lyrical expression has derived importance from its literary worth rather than from its might as the voice of the people. (xx; italics added)

Queering the gay anthology, part I  91 But even in such a chauvinistic national anthology as Stedman’s, separating the national and the international is not possible, as Stedman connects the maturation of American letters with the US victory in the Spanish–​American  War! Chronology is ideologically laden not only because of its association with a developmental or evolutionary view of history, but also because it reinforces the Romantic privileging of the originary moment—​whether the arrangement is based on the year of the author’s birth or the year a text was written or first published. Both versions of chronological ordering suggest that a text is of its time and that a text’s worth is self-​evident from the moment of its creation, which is in keeping with the genetic bias of nationalist historiography. The semiotician Juri Lotman notes that such chronologization mystifies the whole question of a text’s fluctuating relevance, its shifting market value. For example, many cultural texts become relevant only long after their initial publication or fall into obscurity for long periods of time. As Lotman (2019, 141)  comments:  “Texts that are separated by centuries are ‘remembered’ and so become contemporary. For example, Gogol, without hesitation, placed Walter Scott and Homer side-​ by-​side as two of the most important writers for his age.” Chronologization also places special emphasis on the first and last texts in an anthology, something an alphabetical arrangement of texts does not do. And so, it is only with the introduction of a chronological organization of texts that the anthology is able to perform the ideological work described by Brent Hayes Edwards (2003, 44): “It delimits the borders of an expressive mode of field, determining its beginning and end points, its local or global resonance, its communities of participants and audiences.”

Translation and/​in anthologies Sarah Lawall’s claim, that the potential of the anthology “for opening up discourse has yet to be sufficiently explored” (2004, 47), is no less true of translation, although some scholars have begun to connect the two practices. Neelam Srivastava (2010, 155), for example, directly connects translation and anthologization: “Both the act of translation and that of compiling an anthology represent the original text but are not identical with it, and the interventions of the translator, as those of the anthologist, shape its interpretation for an audience.” Gideon Nisbet (2013, 35) makes a similar point, describing “the role of the translator and anthologist as a mediator of value within as well as between national cultures.” Seruya et  al. (2013, 4)  offer a more distinctly positive take on anthologies and translation, presenting them both as forms of rewriting that represent “the possibility of rediscovery and afterlife.” Another way translation and anthologization are connected, however, is as objects of scholarly contempt. In fact, one could easily

92  Queering the gay anthology, part I substitute “translations” for “anthologies” in the opening paragraph of Jeffrey J. Williams’s (2004, 207) essay “Anthology Disdain”: What do we usually think of anthologies, in particular literature and theory anthologies? As scholarly work they are usually deemed inferior entities. As pedagogical tools they seem a necessary evil. Simply as books they are disposable, worth only as much as the used market will carry, literally worthless after they are superseded by a new edition. Accordingly, in formal evaluations of our work—​yearly reports, salary documents, and so on—​they are not credited in the same blue-​chip research, but consigned to the prestige-​deprived category of teaching or the default category of service. In critical responses they are taken to take for the reductiveness. […] In general conversation they are usually mentioned with a long-​suffering nod or dismissed with disdain. It is not entirely clear why these two disciplinary practices, which play such an important role in the circulation, canonization, and teaching of literary and other cultural texts, have been for so long ignored, dismissed, or disdained. It may be an effect of the Romantic cult of originality with its distaste for mediated aesthetic experience, or what Derrida theorized as the metaphysics of presence. It could also be related to class bias, as expressed in the notion of the anthology as “the poor man’s library” and of translation as a necessary evil for those without the ability to read in the source language. In fact, Alden (1885, I:7) boasts that his multivolume Cyclopedia of Universal Literature is presented “in a convenient form, and at a very modest cost.” The anthology’s appeal to a new population of middle-​class readers with little or no training in classical or modern languages also necessitated the presence of translations in these anthologies, although the discussion of the translations is often as laconic and simplistic as is the discussion of criteria for selecting the texts themselves, with editors often limiting their commentary to the claim of having chosen the “best” translations. And so, anthologies can be relegated, along with translations, to what the scholars of the Göttingen School described as a “shadow culture” (see Mueller-​Vollmer and Irmscher 1998), which has left their role in the creation or even invention of cultural identities and traditions largely unexamined. The danger of this scholarly disdain, therefore, is not simply that it diminishes or invalidates certain forms of intellectual activity on which virtually all instructors depend, but also that it allows important aspects of the workings of culture and of cultural hegemony to go unexamined, such as “the underlying criteria for selection and restructuring, the underlying taste of the individual agents or of the community they belong to, of publishing and book-​market mechanisms, of fluctuations in cultural importance” (Seruya et al. 2013, 5). An important exception to that general scholarly disdain for anthologies and translation can be found in the work of scholars of classical languages and cultures. Studies of the Greek Anthology have not only contributed

Queering the gay anthology, part I  93 greatly to our understanding of the anthology as a cultural form but also to our appreciation of translation’s role in circulating these texts and in supporting scholarly discussion, leading Gideon Nisbet (2013, 35)  to declare, “In the Anthology’s particular case as in no other, attempts at canon formation are inseparable from translation history.”15 That being said, while many anthologies, and most “gay” anthologies, contain translations, they differ significantly in how they treat those translations. And so, in order to understand the role played by translations in specific anthologies, let me offer some categories of analysis: the presence or absence of translations; the placement of translations, when present; the presence or absence of translation commentary; and the nature of that commentary, when present. The role of translation is quite different in anthologies framed as national and in those framed as international. Among national anthologies, there is a distinct difference between anthologies documenting a domestic tradition and those documenting a foreign one. The latter typically contain only translations, while in the former translations occupy little or no place. In both cases, however, these national anthologies promote and enforce a vision of the nation as monolingual insofar as an anthology of, say, French poetry is likely to include only translations of French poems, not of any poems written in France’s regional languages, let  alone the languages of its immigrant communities. In anthologies of a domestic literary tradition, it is the absence of translations that confirms the monolingualism of the nation. As Stedman and Hutchinson (1889, I:vii) declare in the preface to their Library of American Literature: “Having to do with writings from the English tongue, we include no translations from the French and Spanish explorers of the Canadian and Southern costs and the Dutch settlers of New Netherlands.” Here the monolingual contents of this anthology of American literature is presented by the editors not as a result of choice but as a given. Influential translations from foreign languages into the national language are also typically left out of nation-​based anthologies, which display a marked preference for “original” writing as the privileged bearer of the national genius. In fact, still today many anthologies of American woman’s writing do not include translations—​not to mention texts written in languages other than English—​implying that to be an American woman writer is to write in English.16 In this way, anthologies contribute to what André Lefevere (1992, 24) referred to as the monolingualization of the modern nation-​state. We see this monolingual bias even in the Vintage Book of Indian Writing, 1947–​ 1997 (1997), edited by Salman Rushdie and Elizabeth West, which is surprising given the multilingualism of Indian society. The anthology, for which Rushdie provides “a very strong framing national narrative,” contains “novelistic excerpts with a thematic focus on India,” with only one selection from a bhasha language (Srivastava 2010, 157). In fact, we see a clear distinction in terms of the visibility of translations between nationally and internationally framed anthologies of Black writing in the early twentieth century, as discussed by Brent Hayes Edwards in The

94  Queering the gay anthology, part I Practice of Diaspora.The 1920s saw what Edwards describes as “a considerable obsession in anthologizing the Negro” (43), and translations played a notable role in those anthologies. For example, James Weldon Johnson’s Book of American Negro Poetry (1922) includes in the body of the anthology a translation of a poem by the Haitian poet Massillon Coicou, done by Jessie Gauset, and, in the appendix, two English translations of a poem by the Cuban writer Plácido. W. E. B. Du Bois uses some translations as epigrams in his Souls of Black Folk (1903), as well as a poem by Schiller in German. The role of translations in these US-​based anthologies is, however, marginal, betraying a fundamentally nationalist framing. As Edwards says of the translations of Plácido’s poem, “The Spanish evidence of ‘Aframerican’ writing sits at the back door, not quite counted in the body of American Negro Poetry” (50), leaving Johnson’s anthology fundamentally monolingual, for which he offers a rather imperialist justification in his introduction, noting “the great advantage possessed by the colored poet writing in the United States of writing in the world-​conquering English language” (8). If the monolingualism of these US-​based anthologies betrays a fundamentally nationalist framing, it stands in stark contrast to the celebration of multilingualism in Blaise Cendrars’s international Anthologie nègre (1921). The entire introduction is dedicated to praising the abundance and plasticity of African languages, with Cendrars (1947, 7)  declaring:  “No one in Europe has the right any more to ignore that the Africa of the Blacks is one of the most linguistically rich there is.”17 Moreover, the vast majority of the works in the volume are translations, leading Cendrars (1947, 8) to dedicate a paragraph of his short introduction to the nature and quality of the translations: I reproduced those stories as the missionaries and explorers recounted them in Europe and as they were published. These are not always the most original translations, nor the most faithful. It is regrettable that literary exactness wasn’t the only legitimate concern of these travelers of another time.18 The fact that the anthology is “un ouvrage de compilation” (8) leaves the anthologist with little choice but to publish what is available, namely, translations done by missionaries and explorers, whose aim in translating these texts did not always align with Cendrars’s aim in publishing them. Recent national anthologies of US literature display, however, a more critical and complicated understanding of the relationship between language and nation, as reflected in the visibility of translations. The Heath Anthology of American Literature, for example, includes translations of works originally composed in indigenous languages, Spanish and French. Moreover, several of the translated works are accompanied by a rather comprehensive footnote about the translator, which documents their often-​ambivalent position within the nation-​state.19 Some bilingual writing is included in later

Queering the gay anthology, part I  95 sections. What is left out of these anthologies, however, is the non-​English literary output of diasporic communities, denied access to the anthology due to the “unlikely national origins” (Cirillo 2004, 222) of their authors. And so, while lending translation unprecedented visibility in a “national” anthology, by placing those translated texts at the beginning of the chronologically organized volume, the Heath Anthology offers a reading of US literary history that is, like Stedman’s, fundamentally developmental—​namely, that nations pass through a stage of imitation and translation on the path to original writing and the consolidation of the Anglophone nation-​state. This enfolding of translation into a developmental history of national culture is done quite overtly in the introduction to the American Anthology of 1900, where Stedman (1900, xxiv) relegates Longfellow to the second tier of American poets for having sought his inspiration outside the borders of the United States: It is now pretty clear, notwithstanding the popularity of Longfellow in his day, that Emerson, Poe, and Whitman were those of our poets from whom the old world has most to learn; such is the worth, let the young writer note, of seeking inspiration from within, instead of copying the exquisite achievements of masters to whom we all resort for edification. Longfellow plays a significant role in Stedman’s developmental reading of American letters not only because he was a prolific translator but also because he included both original writing and translations in some of his collections, such as Voices of the Night (1839) and Ballads and Other Poems (1840). This mixing of translations and original writing was core to Longfellow’s attempt to enact Goethe’s concept of a World Literature as “an anti-​authoritative act of cultural communication” (Higgins 2014, 12).20 As Andrew C. Higgins (2014, 12) argues, Longfellow created “books of poetry that combined translations and original poems that drew on a wide variety of cultural traditions in such a way that the individual works spoke to each other.” Nevertheless, when Longfellow’s work is anthologized in collected editions, the translations are typically cordoned off, placed together at the very end, “thus weakening the intertextual conversations” (29) between his original writing and his translations, while also enforcing an essential—​and hierarchized distinction—​between the two.21 By associating translation or copying with tutelage, Stedman indexes the classic developmental trope of Bildung. Turning away from translation, glossed as subservience to older cultures (copying the old masters), to plumb the depths of one’s own national genius, is interpreted as a sign of a (national) culture’s maturity. In this way, Stedman connects originality with (national) origins, in what I’ve referred to elsewhere as the cult of the origin(al), which stands at the very core of Romantic nationalism (see Baer 2015, 12–16; Baer 2017).22 And so, while collected editions of Longfellow’s writings tend to relegate his translations, spatially, to the back, interpretive

96  Queering the gay anthology, part I histories, such as Stedman’s, relegate them, temporally, to the nation’s past. In either scenario, the cordoning off of translations appears as a necessary step in the consolidation of a monolingual national culture. The maturity of US letters, in Stedman’s reading, coincides not only with the emergence of a generation of writers who find their inspiration on US soil but also with the entrance of the United States onto the world stage, marked by its victory in the Spanish–​American War, which is referenced repeatedly by Stedman. Not surprisingly, Stedman’s celebratory discourse of national Bildung blinds him to the imperialist consequences of that war, which turned the United States into an empire. By suggesting that the consolidation of the monolingual nation is paradoxically a precondition for a nation to become an international player, Stedman lends tacit support to Sakai’s argument that the modern world order assumes a monolingual addressee. Unlike national anthologies, international anthologies typically include translations, and typically more translations than “original” writing. And while Nancy Cirillo (2004, 228) asserts a close connection between nations and anthologies—​“That the anthology comes into being during the heyday of the nation-​state is a truism, and that the ‘founding’ anthologies were in one sense or another essentially a kind of nation building as well as a process of canon formation is equally a truism”—​the truth is, international anthologies have been around just as long as national ones. In fact, one of the first books printed on English soil was a translation of a French anthology of sayings (Habenicht 1963, 20–​1). Moreover, there was an explosion of international anthologies in the heyday of nationalism in the nineteenth century. This was no doubt related to the emergence of a middle class and, later, a working-​class readership with little or no knowledge of ancient or modern languages but with a desire to acquire cultural capital and to become more “worldly.” Incidentally, this meaning of worldly as “sophisticated,” “experienced,” “cosmopolitan” enters the English language only in the nineteenth century (see Oxford English Dictionary), thus linking world literature “to the internationalization of culture that resulted from the emergence of capitalism as the dominant mode of production in modern Europe” (Hassan 2000, 39). Consider Charles Dudley Warner’s (1897, I:iii) description of his anthology as “a mint of wealth for every need of workers for human welfare or seekers of culture” or Henry Wellesley’s Anthologia Polyglotta, which included ancient Greek epigrams alongside translations not only into Latin but also into modern foreign languages and into English in order to serve the needs of a more varied student body. As Wellesley (1849, v) puts it, At a moment […] when every encouragement is needed to the enlarged system of study adopted in this place, the novelty and interest of a selection in which so many writers of our own and other countries will be compared and estimated, according to the laws and principles of translation, might give occasion to much profitable and amusing inquiry.

Queering the gay anthology, part I  97 One would think that the prominence of translation in international anthologies would warrant some discussion of translation quality or of selection criteria. True, most editors mention translation, but they typically do so in a rather perfunctory manner, as in this unadorned statement from the introduction to Eros: An Anthology of Friendship: “Much [of the anthology] is translation” (Anderson 1961, 12). Both Alden and Eliot elaborate on this in the introductions to their respective anthologies, putting forward the idea of translation as a necessary evil. As Alden (1885, I:7) writes: The literature embodied in foreign languages can here be presented only in translation and the best translations can be only inadequate representations of the originals. […] The best translator of Homer or Aeschylus or Aristophanes, of Virgil or Lucretius or Horace, of Dante Ariosto, of Goethe or Schiller, must fail more or less in making his author speak in another language, just as he spake in his own. Or in Eliot’s (1910, L:3–​4) formulation: It is impossible to reproduce perfectly in a translation the style and flavor of the original. The reader of this collection must not imagine that he can find in an English translation of Homer, Dante, Cervantes, or Goethe, all the beauty and charm of the original. In that regard, it is interesting to contrast Alden’s (1885, I:7) claim that even “the best translations can be only inadequate representations of the originals” to his unqualified confidence in the editor’s ability to select “such extracts from their writing as shall be sufficient to give an adequate representation of the characteristics of the authors.” The editor’s authority over the translator is further reflected in Alden’s decision to violate the integrity of a translator’s work by mining the best bits from multiple translations of the same text: “Selections will be made from several of these translations” (I:8). More recent anthologies tend to avoid the rhetoric of loss and distortion that makes translation into a necessary evil. For example, the third edition of the Norton Anthology of World Literature, one of the most widely used sources of translated texts in high school and university classrooms, now devotes a paragraph to translation in the introduction to each of its five volumes. There, the editors acknowledge the indispensable role played by translation in “the worldwide circulation of literature” and acknowledge translation to be “an art,” going on to describe translations as “recreations of works for new readers.” As proof of their “keen attention to translation” (ibid.), the editors (Puchner et  al. 2012, xviii) note that the new edition features “dozens of new translations that make classical texts newly readable and capture the original in compelling ways,” but how exactly readability was accommodated with capturing the original is unclear, and no guidance is offered on how instructors might address what Damrosch (2009, 8) refers

98  Queering the gay anthology, part I to as the “problematics of translation” in their classrooms. Moreover, that discussion of translations is restricted to a single paragraph. The situation regarding translation is, however, more complex with anthologies of minority communities, whose relationship to the dominant language is often troubled and contested. Two extreme examples of the treatment of translation in such anthologies are Native American Women’s Writing:  An Anthology (2000), edited by Karen L.  Kilcup, and On the Translation of Native American Literatures (1992), edited by Brian Swann. The former contains only works written in English by Native American women writers, which not only ignores but also tacitly legitimizes the violent history of suppression of indigenous languages. The latter, while not an anthology per se, contains translations of many works from indigenous languages, framing those translations in a thick description of the problematics of translation. As the editor Brian Swann (1992, viii) explains, “To questions of paraphrasis and metaphrasis, parataxis and syntactis, to epistemological, aesthetic, and theoretical considerations, are added problems of transcription and recording, as well as moral and political dimensions” (Swann 1992, xvi). Regarding the moral and political dimensions, Swann notes at the very beginning of his introduction:  “The fact that Indians were human took some time to sink in. The fact that their languages had value took longer. […] The fact that Indians had a literature of great significance took longest to be acknowledged.” All of these considerations lead Swann (1992, xvii) to articulate a theory of translation that problematizes it as a transparent instrument of documentation: The whole study of Native American Literature, moreover, is fraught with ironies, lives with ironies, starting with those three words themselves. Students and scholars need constantly to be aware of their own “cultural subjectivity,” even when it phrases itself as openness, when it calls for cherishing “otherness”—​part of a Western essentializing need (1975, 144). At its best, Native American translation has no desire to ignore such ironies, even if it could, but instead floats on them. The desire is not for appropriation but some sort of participation. Here Swann presents a vision of translation predicated on the inequality and nontransparency of languages, which makes any act of translation a gesture of participation in an endless process of cross-​cultural communication, not a definitive act of knowing or appropriation, a perspective that has much in common with the notion of queer translation outlined in Chapter 2. And where Swann cautions that the call to cherish otherness may in fact be part of a “Western essentializing need,” he appears to anticipate Slavoj Žižek ’s (1997, 44) observation that, “the multiculturalist respect for the Other’s specificity is the very form of asserting one’s own superiority.”

Queering the gay anthology, part I  99

The anthology as a mode of reading In addition to providing powerful readings of history, anthologies represent a distinct mode of reading, based on what Leah Price (2000, 7, 6) refers to as the “synecdochal esthetic,” through which the anthology realizes its “ambition to represent a whole through its parts.”23 This was in fact the stated intention of Meleager in describing his anthology as a garland of flowers. As Alan Cameron (1993, 6) notes, Again and again [Meleager] says that he has “entwined” these flowers into a “garland”—​whence (of course) his title. Thus, his achievement was twofold. Not only did he assemble perhaps as many as a thousand epigrams, he also arranged them artistically. Like a true garland, Meleager’s book was meant to be admired for itself, not just for its individual flowers. The miniature size of the epigram and the fact that “too many by the same writer on the same sort of themes, however excellent in themselves, might become monotonous” lead Cameron (1993, 4)  to declare the epigram to have been “destined by its very nature to be anthologized.” The editor of A Victorian Anthology (1895) and An American Anthology (1900), Edmund Clarence Stedman (1900, i; italics added), described that synecdochal aesthetic in the following way: “The anthologist well may follow the worker in mosaic or stained-​glass, to better his general effects. Humble bits, low in color, have values of juxtaposition, and often bring out to full advantage his more striking material.” Indeed, it is this aspect of the anthology as a mode of reading that lives on, despite the many permutations regarding the contents of anthologies or their arrangement. As Seruya et  al. (2013, 7) declare: “An anthology or collection is always more than the parts that the anthologist has selected,” making anthologies a powerful tool for producing “imaginary cultural unities” (Guillory 1993, 38), while mystifying the imaginary status of those cultural unities by presenting themselves as mere repositories of cultural artifacts. While this synecdochal aesthetic may be a constant feature of the anthology, what is conjured by it may change as the anthology assumes an increasingly overt didactic purpose over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Indeed, the editor of Loeb library’s edition of the Greek Anthology, W. R. Paton (1918, I:x), addresses this very issue in his preface: namely, can all the poems in the Palantine Anthology be considered “Greek” when they were written in very different historical periods, marked by significant differences in the Greek language, to which he fashions this curious response: In the intervals the iron hand of History had entirely recast and changed the spirit and the language of Greece, and much misunderstanding has

100  Queering the gay anthology, part I been caused by people quoting anything from the “Greek Anthology” as specifically “Greek.” We have to deal with three ages almost as widely separated as the Roman conquest, the Saxon conquest, and the Norman conquest of England. It is true that the poems of all the epochs are written in a language that professes to be one, but this is only due to the consciousness of the learned Greeks, a consciousness we still respect in them to-​day, that the glorious language of old Greece is their imperishable heritage, a heritage that the corruption of the ages should not be permitted to defile. That unity, which Paton glosses as “the consciousness of the learned Greeks,” must be conjured or imagined by the reader across linguistic and cultural differences. This is precisely what Benedict Anderson (1991, 33)  asserted was at the heart of the novelist format of newspapers, conjuring a national community in the mind of its readers: “The novelistic format of the newspaper assures [readers] that somewhere out there the character ‘Mali’ moves along quietly, awaiting his next appearance in the plot.” While the apparent purpose of Meleager’s Garland was to enhance the reader’s aesthetic experience, the various epigrams are now, in hindsight and when housed in a teaching anthology, used to conjure some notion of a Greek identity. In other words, the question is no longer, or not only, what constitutes the beauty or power of these epigrams, but rather, what makes them Greek? It is precisely this associative logic that constitutes the modernity of the anthology, leading Price (2000, 7) to connect the anthology with the novel, which “corresponds to an equally atomistic model of individual upward mobility.” The work of the anthology is also modern in the sense that it supports the illusion of the reader’s autonomy in making sense of the pieces. Indeed, the very idea of the modern anthology—​of giving readers access to the texts themselves rather than merely experts’ interpretations of those texts—​is grounded in the reformation idea of the individual layperson as a fully capable reader. As Roland Barthes (1977, 142) suggests in his essay “The Death of the Author”: “a text’s unity lies not in its origin but in its destination.”24 This is also related to Barthes’s description of the ways in which “reality” is conjured in realist fiction by referencing a random selection of objects. The anthology in this way feeds the modern myth of the reader’s autonomy to the extent that so much of its interpretive framing is either covert (one does not see all these texts that were not selected or the pieces of the text that were omitted or abridged) or semicovert, relegated to notes and prefaces.25 Indeed, the most authoritative Anglophone anthologies flaunt their commitment to providing “complete and unabridged” versions of the texts they contain, which may serve to deflect attention from their interpretive framing of those texts and to all the texts that were left out; of course, this makes size a determining factor in what can be included, leaving the most popular modern literary form, the novel,

Queering the gay anthology, part I  101 out of many literary anthologies. Here we see the synecdochal aesthetic at work on the metalevel, with short stories meant to represent a literary field dominated by the novel, something we will discuss at greater length in Chapter 5.

Conclusion The transformations that the anthology underwent over the course of the nineteenth century fashioned it into a powerful vehicle of developmental historiography. Once chronologized, the anthology also promoted a form of reading that privileged the synechdocal aesthetic, as developed in the realist novel. The centrality of this aesthetic to the modern national imaginary suggests a reading of metonymy that is at odds with the traditional poststructural construal of the trope as somehow less hegemonic than metaphor. My reading of metonymy is, therefore, closer to that of David Simpson’s in his analysis of Walt Whitman’s poetics of “nationalist expansionism.” Citing C.  Carroll Hollis’s argument, that “metonymy tends to remind us of what we already know; metaphor of what we do not know or had not thought of until that moment,” Simpson (1990, 191) presents metonomy as less aggressive than metaphor, less politically potent, and less liable to surprise the reader than the often unusual or unlikely comparisons put forward by metaphors. That surprise element, Simpson goes on to argue, is what constitutes metaphor’s potential as a site of resistance, an injunction to a resistant reading. Therefore, Simpson (1990, 191) claims, Any literature or criticism that is at all anxious about the ethics of representation—​what it means to think of a man as a wolf, for example—​is going to pay special attention to metaphor as at once the most persuasive and assertive of all forms of comparison. And so, metonymy could be said to mystify the ethics of representation by asserting a “self-​evident” connection between part and whole.26 The ideological workings of metonymy in the context of the gay anthology will be explored in the next chapter, and queer alternatives to the synecdochal aesthetic in Chapter 5.

Notes 1 Brent Hayes Edwards in his brilliant study of Black internationalism, The Practice of Diaspora (2003), shows a more nuanced relationship toward translation in anthologies of Black poetry and folklore published in the first three decades of the twentieth century. 2 Its original meaning, however, is still evident in the title of an Italian translation of a Latin collection of stories about St. Francis, Actus B. Francisci et Sociorum Ejus: Fioretti di San Francesco d’Assissi, or The Little Flowers of St. Francis of Assissi.

102  Queering the gay anthology, part I 3 As Donald Morton (1996, xi) explains, If an anthology is to have any purchase on contemporary reality and is therefore to be influential, it has to be at least partially affirmative of what has been achieved over the past several decades. In other words, for a writer/​ a book to have any critical credibility, he/​it has to earn that credibility by accepting—​at least in part—​what is already available. 4 As Essmann and Frank (1991, 66) note: Anthologies and collections can do for texts what museums do for artifacts and other objects considered of cultural importance: preserve and exhibit them, by selecting and arranging the exhibits, project and interpretation of a given field, make relations and values visible, maybe educate taste. 5 Gary Saul Morson (2011, 27)  makes the same point:  “[W]‌e find few serious studies of quotations (let along of anthologies of quotations as a form).” 6 The entangling of selection, arrangement, and framing in the workings of cultural memory more generally is underscored by Jack Halberstam (2011, 15): Memory is itself a disciplinary mechanism that Foucault calls “a ritual of power”; it selects for what is important (the histories of triumph), it reads a continuous narrative into one full of ruptures and contradictions, and it sets precedents for other “memorializations.” 7 That being said, some anthologists highlight their subjective role in the selection of texts. As Dagobert D. Runes (1956, vii) notes in his foreword to his Treasury of World Literature: A treasury of literature is a personal matter. It represents one man’s choice of creative writing taken from the vast reservoir at his disposal. Thus, what is inspiring to one may seem dull to another, and quite frequently shallow waters appear to have profound depths to one who is distant. 8 This is also the case with national anthologies, which often seek to situate themselves on the world literary scene. Stedman (1900, xxxi), in his American Anthology, is very aware of an international Anglophone audience: “The question as to a British or American production now must be, what is the verdict of the English-​speaking world? To that vast jury the United States now contributes the largest contingent of intelligent numbers.” He also references the growing importance of the United States, as symbolized in the US victory in the Spanish–​American War, which he mentions several times. In fact, Stedman (qtd. in Stedman 1900, xxv) quotes the Scottish drama critic William Archer as saying: “The whole world will one day come to hold Vicksburg and Gettysburg names of larger historic import than Waterloo or Sedan.” Elsewhere, he notes the “extraordinary import” of US poetry “to the world’s future” (xxii), and later: “of import in the past and to the future of America, and therefore of the world” (xxii). 9 Of course, contingency also plays a role in shaping the contents of anthologies, especially following the introduction of copyright laws and in international

Queering the gay anthology, part I  103 anthologies. In the former case, authors or agents might not grant permission to republish or may charge an exorbitant fee and, in the latter case, there may be no translation available or translator willing to undertake the translation. This is certainly one of the reasons why, in international anthologies, texts from the receiving culture, which do not require translation, are typically overrepresented. 10 It is tempting to see the description of literary works as gems to be conservative in their ahistorical construal of literary value, but things are more complicated than that. Consider the fact that Poe had been left out of some anthologies in the nineteenth century due to his immoral lifestyle. Stedman (1900, vvii), however, would invoke the metaphor of the gem to justify the separation of the man from his work: “I have not hesitated to use any fortunate poem, however unpromising its source. A ruby is a ruby, on the forehead of a Joss or found in the garment of a pilgrim.” 11 I would take issue here with Sarah Lawall’s (2004, 53)  judgment that Alden assumes “that British and American writing represents the pinnacle of cultural progress.” He asserts that they are no less, and had he been committed to representing them as the pinnacle of cultural progress, he could have adopted a chronological ordering of the texts that would have driven the point home. 12 The other competing conceptualization of culture was put forward by Arnold’s contemporary, Sir Edward Burnett Tylor, in what is widely considered the first work of modern anthropology, Primitive Culture (1871). While this conception of culture applied to all peoples, it was theorized from the start in developmental terms. Burnett believed that all cultures passed through three stages: from savagery, to barbarism, then to civilization. Once chronology is introduced as the organizing framework in literary anthologies, these two conceptualizations of culture collide, as Stedman will illustrate when he argues that chronology compels him to select at times not the best literary works but the most representative (of the literature’s evolution). 13 This does not mean that there were not chronologically arranged anthologies before Stedman or that there were not alphabetically arranged anthologies after him. Longfellow’s (1847) anthology The Poets and Poetry of Europe, for example, was arranged chronologically by language, while Dagobert D. Runes’s (1956) anthology Treasury of World Literature was arranged alphabetically. That being said, Stedman’s anthologies do represent a kind of turning point, after which chronologization became the dominant mode of arrangement. 14 Stedman (1895, xi) also draws a clear connection between this chronological ordering and the increasingly overt pedagogical function of the anthology: “In order that those who (as students of English poetry) avail themselves of the Anthology, and who have but a limited knowledge of the modern field, may readily understand the general and secondary divisions.” 15 Daniel Orrells (2011) also highlights the central role of translation in the nineteenth-​ century British reception of ancient Greek texts, as discussed in Chapter 2, while Iain Ross (2013, 81–​96) focuses specifically on Oscar Wilde’s translations of the Ancient Greeks. 16 While not an anthology, Nineteenth-​century American Women Writers (1997), which describes itself as “A Bio-​Biographica Critical Sourcebook,” does not reference a single author who wrote in a language other than English.

104  Queering the gay anthology, part I 17 The original French reads:  “Nul n’est plus en droit d’ignorer en Europe que l’Afrique des Noirs est un des pays linguistiques les plus riches que soient.” 18 The original French reads: J’ai reproduit ces contes tels que les missionaires et les explorateurs nous les ont rapportés en Europe et tels qu’ils les ont publiés. Ce ne sont pas toujours les versions les plus originales, ni les traductions les plus fidèles. Il est bien à regretter que l’exactitude littéraire ne soit pas le seul souci légitime de ces voyageurs lointains. 19 The first Indigenous tale, “Raven Makes a Girl Sick and Then Cures Her,” is accompanied by a footnote about the translator:  “This text was transcribed about 1850 by Ely S.  Parker, a full Seneca born on the Tonawanda Seneca Reservation in New York state. Educated at a missionary […]” (2004, 36). 20 There is, however, precedence for this even before Goethe formulated his concept of Weltliteratur. For example, Anne Ferry (2001, 15) describes a 1684 anthology, Miscellany Poems. Containing a New Translation [of Virgil, Ovid, Horace, and Others]: With Several Original Poems. By the most Eminent Hands, printed by Jacob Tonson with the collaboration of John Dryden, as a “boldly innovative mixture of translated and original poems.” 21 As Higgins (2014, 28)  argues, “By blending cultures in this way, Longfellow undermines rigid notions of national and cultural identities along with the imperial violence predicated upon them,” 22 Stedman’s (1900, xxii) view of translation as undermining the national literature is also reflected in his complaint that, “pirated foreign writings, sold cheaply everywhere, handicapped the evolution of a native prose school.” Elsewhere, he articulates a romantic view of the essential untranslatability of national languages, leading him to suggest that American writers would do better spending their time honing their capacities in English than translating from the French: “But there has not been an English-​speaking captive to the bewitchment of the French rhythm and symbolism who has not achieved far less than if he had held fast to the resources of his native tongue” (xxx). And: “That language [French] is so constituted that we cannot transmute its essential genius” (xxxi). 23 In proto-​gay culture, this “synedochal esthetic” was rehearsed in the practice of list-​making. While Byrne Fone (1981) dates the advent of such list-​making to the late eighteenth century, Woods (1998, 3) provides much earlier examples, citing, for example, the scene in Edward II by Christopher Marlowe “when Mortimaer Senio compares the king’s relationship with Piers Gaveston with Alexander’s love of Hephaestion, Hecules’ of Hylas, Patroclus’ of Achilles, Tully’s of Octavius and Socrates’ of Alcibiades” (I. iv, 390–​6). The deployment of such historical lists in support of tolerance and decriminalization of homosexuality and to disassociate homosexuality from effeminacy and vice is beautifully illustrated in the German biologist Gustav Jaeger’s Die Entdeckung der Seele [The Discovery of the Soul] (1880), translated by Edward Carpenter: Names like Alexander the Great, Socrates, Plato, Julius Caesare, Michel-​ Angelo, Charles XII of Sweden, William of Orang, and so forth. […] Consequently, the German penal code, in stamping homosexuality as a crime, puts the highest blossoms of humanity on the proscription list. (qtd. in Rowbotham 2004, 174)

Queering the gay anthology, part I  105 Such lists, Woods (1998, 3) argues, “would eventually turn into the content pages of our gay anthologies and our histories of gay literature.” (Of course, they would only turn into the pages of anthologies after the writings of those named in the lists had been translated and their texts arranged in chronological order.) 24 Harold Bloom defines an anthology as “a repository or means of creating a national cultural memory and canon as well as a universal canon (Bloom)” (qtd. in Seruya et al. 2013, 5), although how or where the creation takes places, that is, how the repository generates a national cultural memory, is left unidentified, while he implies that it takes place somewhere beyond the repository itself. 25 Here, I would disagree with Price’s (2000, 6) claim, “The anthology’s ambition to represent a whole through its parts is always undermined by readers’ awareness that the parts have been chosen for their difference from those left out.” Indeed, the enormous size of many anthologies seems designed to discourage readers from contemplating all that has been left out, so overwhelmed are they by all that has been included. 26 This is Simpson’s (1990, 191) description of the specific function of metonymy in Whitman’s poetry: Metonymy, or synecdoche, is the trope of self-​sufficient independence: each person or thing is imaged by a part or attribute of himself. The worker is complemented by his tool or voice, not put into interactive tension with any other tool or voice. It is the poet’s eye and mind that holds them together in a non-​competitive series.

4  Queering the gay anthology, part II From appropriation to consecration to incorporation

In the previous chapter, we traced the emergence of the anthology as a powerful vehicle for articulating, consolidating, and circulating a Western developmental understanding of history. This chapter traces the appropriation of the anthology by early gay rights activists to support the congenital argument and establish a usable history for the movement. While this might be considered a subversive minoritarian appropriation of a privileged cultural form, to the extent that the anthology also functions to enfold gay rights into a (Western) developmental reading of history, it also displays “the process of empire” (Said 1989, 214).1 This chapter will trace the queer history of the gay anthology from its earliest exemplar in the first half of the nineteenth century, which clearly patterned itself on Ancient Greek models, to the anthologies that appeared in the early twentieth century, which introduced not only a chronological, but also an “evolutionary” arrangement of texts, and in so doing inscribed gay liberation within a broader developmental history, which postcolonial scholars such as Chakrabarty have critiqued as distinctly Western. It is through the genre of the international gay anthology, I will argue, that a Western sexual epistemology (as a particular reading of history) was consolidated, but with a number of fault lines. In the final section, I  will examine the proliferation of Anglophone gay anthologies in the last quarter of the twentieth century, post-​Stonewall, and end with a discussion of how the genre of the gay anthology has been exported. In this way, we can date the emergence of homonationalism to the late nineteenth century, making it coterminous with the rise of the United States on the international scene, as embodied by the expansionist poetics of Whitman—​a reading of history articulated very clearly in Edward Carpenter’s anthology, Ioläus, which has been, in my opinion, woefully understudied. In addition, the chapter will trace the “evolution” of the gay anthology through its shifting treatment of translation. As alluded to in the title of this chapter, I will be using two concepts introduced by Pascale Casanova (2004) to describe translation in a literary field marked by the asymmetrical distribution of cultural capital:  appropriation and consecration. For Casanova, appropriation describes translation from a prestige language, or

Queering the gay anthology, part II  107 one with high cultural capital, to one with low cultural capital. Through translation, the latter “appropriates” or seeks to appropriate some of the cultural capital of the former. Consecration, on the other hand, describes translation from a culture with lower cultural capital to one with higher cultural capital. Through translation, the latter “consecrates” the translated work, by bestowing it with cultural capital. Casanova uses the terms synchronically to describe the state of affairs at any one time in the cultural field. I will use them diachronically in order to trace the shift in the relationship between ancient Greece and modern English over the course of the nineteenth century, as reflected in the gay anthology. While translation from ancient Greece represented an act of appropriation in the early nineteenth century, by the early-​twentieth-​century, English was in a position to consecrate ancient Greek works, situating them within a developmental history culminating in the rise of the Anglophone West. The term incorporation, which I take from Joseph Slaughter’s Human Rights, Inc., plays on the dual sense of “subject” as elaborated by Althusser and Foucault—​that one is made into a modern subject by being subjected to social norms and laws. Slaughter (2017, 10)  uses incorporation to describe the process “by which the individual is constituted and regulated as a creature of freedom, […] a creature capable of bearing rights and freedoms.” It is this connection between personal emancipation and subjection to the law that represents the double bind of Western liberalism and plays itself out in the proliferation and fragmentation of the post-​Stonewall gay anthology.

Hössli’s anthology, or translation as appropriation While Heinrich Hössli’s Eros is often referred to as the “first” gay anthology, I  would remiss if I  did not note the publication in England in 1749 of a collection of writings on sodomy, titled Ancient and Modern Pederasty Investigated and Exemplifiy’d, compiled by Thomas Gannon. We know of its existence from a publication registry and from legal documents: the author was brought up on charges of immorality. Excerpts from the pamphlet were introduced as evidence, and these excerpts survived in court archives (Gladfelder 2007b). One problem with analyzing the collection based on assorted excerpts is that, of course, it is impossible to know how the fragments were arranged in the complete version and what selection criteria might have been applied (Gladfelder 2007a, 30). That said, the extant fragments present a variety of sexual scenarios that exceed any one model of Greek pederasty, underscoring “the variability of desire and its objects, the way desire can multiply and migrate” (Gladfelder 2007a, 31). And while the discoverer and editor of the excerpts, Hal Gladfelder (2007a), refers to the collection as a “hodgepodge,” (30) a “chaotic miscellany,” (30) and an “incoherent anthology,” (32) the selections appear to be united by a common theme:  namely, pleasure justifies all.2 So, for example, in one fragment where a gentleman discovers that his young female lover is in fact

108  Queering the gay anthology, part II a male, he is unbothered as the pleasure is so great. Interesting too for our investigation of the role of translations in anthologies is the way the editor (Gladfelder 2007b, 41) justifies his translation approach based on that same pleasure principle: The Reader will prefer a Spirited, yet equally Just Version to a dull dogg’d Translation, perpetually failing in the ridiculous Attempt of transfusing unattainable Greek and Latin idioms into a meer modern Language [word illegible]. I paraphrase, or, use ancient Writers only as a Basis: If you like what you meet with, is it not enough? The contents of nineteenth-​century anthologies were decidedly more serious as was their approach to translation, although texts like those in Gannon’s anthology would continue to circulate informally (see Mitchell and Leavitt 1997). The publication of the Palantine Anthology, first by Richard François Philippe Brunck in 1776 and then in the critical edition of Christian Friedrich Wilhelm Jacobs (13 vols., 1794–​1803; revised 1813–​17), was a key event in the revival of more “serious” or sober interest in ancient Greek culture during the Romantic Age, referred to Winkelmann as Neoclassical Hellenism. As Linda Dowling (1994, 28) notes, “the prestige of Greece among educated middle-​class Victorians […] was so massive that invocations of Hellenism could cast a veil of respectability over even a hitherto unmentionable vice or crime.” The increasing respectability attributed to ancient Greek culture over the course of the nineteenth century made comic appropriations such as Cannon’s less thinkable. Moreover, this interest in ancient Greece in general and in the Greek Anthology in particular led to a spate of translations, which were both an effect of the new scholarly interest in ancient Greek culture and an impetus to further study. As Graham Robb (2003, 178) conjectures, the historical study of homosexuality in Ancient Greece began in Germany most probably because Germans “had at their disposal more editions and translations of classical texts than their neighbours.” This underscores translation’s role not only in the circulation of knowledge but also in its production.3 The Palantine Anthology lays the foundation for subsequent “gay” anthologies in that it established a connection not only between ancient Greece, with its enormous cultural capital, and homosexuality but also between homosexuality and the genre of the anthology. Swiss milliner Heinrich Hössli’s two-​volume defense of homosexuality, Eros: Die Männerliebe der Griechen, ihre Beziehung zur Geschichte, Erzeihung, Literatur und Gesetzgebung aller Zeiten [Eros:  The Greek Love of Men. Its Relationship to History, Education, Literature and Legislation of All Ages] (1836–​8) contains what many consider to be the first modern “gay” anthology, which he uses to appropriate the enormous cultural capital of the ancient Greeks. The political tract, which makes up the bulk of Hössli’s Eros and which the anthology is meant to support, is informed by Enlightenment thinkers while making

Queering the gay anthology, part II  109 use of a variety of political, legal, and literary discourses that would have had particular resonance for his audience.4 As Clayton J. Whisnant (2016, 20) describes it, “Hössli fashioned a fascinating argument against the persecution of homosexuality out of anti-​witch trial rhetoric, pleas for the legal emancipation of the Jews, and the admiration for Greek society then fashionable among German literati.” The role of the anthology’s texts was clearly to appropriate the enormous cultural capital of the ancient Greeks in support of the liberal argument for tolerance, as evident from the contents: Poetic and prosaic poets’ voices of different times and peoples with respect to the love between men (Poetische und prosaische Dichterstimmen verschiedener Zeiten und Völker in Bezug auf die Männerliebe):



1) The Five Flowers of the Persian Poet Saadi (Die Fünf Blumen des persischen Dichters Said) 1. Flower (Blume) 2. The Social Pain (Der gesellige Schmerz) 3. The Advantages of Beauty (Vortheile der Schönheit) 4. The Farewell (Der Abschied) 5. The Irreplaceable (Das Unersetzliche) 2) Horace in his Letter to Lollius and his Ninth Ode to Vallius (Horaz in seinem Briefe an Lollius und seine neunte Ode an den Vallius) 3) The Greek Anthology. (From Tafel’s Polyhymnia) [Griechische Anthologie. (Aus Tafels Polyhymnia)] The Beautiful Myiskos [Der schöne Myiskos] To Zephyros [An den Zephyros] The Blood of the Beloved [Das Blut des Geliebten] The Riding Apollodotos [Der reitende Apollodotos] The Kiss [Der Kuss] The Beloved [Der Geliebte] The Tomb [Das Grabmal] To the Gods of Love [An die Liebesgötter] Amorous Turmoil [Liebes-​Unruhe) To Zeus [An Zeus] Persian Poetries [Persische Dichtungen] 4) Aristotle (in his Politics) [Aristoteles (in dessen Politik)] 5) Socrates 6) Anacreon’s Tomb (From the Flowers of the Greek Anthology translated by Herder [Anakreons Grab (Aus den von Herder übersetzten Blumen der griechischen Anthologie)] Untitled excerpt

To Eros [Auf den Eros] To Bathyllus [An Bathyllen] Antinous and Hadrian [Antinous und Hadrian] The Island of Love [Die Insel der Liebe]

110  Queering the gay anthology, part II The influence of the Greek Anthology is quite obvious here. Many of the works are taken from the Anthology, many of the them are labelled Blumen, or “flowers,” and their arrangement appears random. Moreover, all the works included in Hössli’s anthology belong to the distant past, with the latest works belonging to the Persian poet Saadi, from the thirteenth century, reflecting a temporal gap between the ancients and the moderns. This allows us to describe these translations in Casanova’s terms as an act of appropriation, by which the receiving culture claims the greater cultural capital of the source culture, in this case, ancient Greece and Rome and Persia, through translation. That being said, Hössli also “modernizes” the genre of the anthology by extending the generic boundaries of the ancient anthology to include prose works, and the geographic boundaries, by including works from Persia, thus anticipating the trajectory the anthology would take over the course of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth century. At the same time, Hössli’s first gay anthology introduces the queer tension that would define all subsequent “gay” anthologies, namely, that the texts included in these anthologies, while meant to offer positive representations and expressions of same-​sex desire, also provided historical evidence that contradicted the minoritarian model they were deployed to support. For example, much of the same-​sex desire celebrated in these poetic works was age-​stratified and not representative of an exclusive, totalizing “identity.” This queer tension was present, therefore, at the very start of the modern gay rights movement and would become increasingly problematic throughout the nineteenth century, as discussed in Chapter 2.

Kupfner’s Lieblingminne and Carpenter’s Ioläus, or translation as consecration The enormous changes wrought in the genre of the anthology over the course of the nineteenth century are reflected in the next two gay anthologies, which appeared in the first decade of the twentieth century: Elisarion von Kupffer’s Lieblingminne und Freundsliebe in der Weltliteratur [Love of Favorites5 and Love between Friends in World Literature] and Edward Carpenter’s Ioläus: An Anthology of Friendship, described by Mark Mitchell and David Leavitt (1997, xiii) as perhaps “the first English-​ language anthology with a homosexual theme.”6 Both Kupffer and Carpenter played very visible roles in the emergence of a gay rights movement in Germany and England and were instrumental in laying the conceptual foundation for the eventual globalization of the movement, which they did, in part, through their anthologies. Although Carpenter had intended to publish his anthology in the early 1890s, the notoriety of Wilde’s trial on the charge of gross indecency led him to postpone the publication, so that it appeared two years after Kupffer’s and would be edited to include the Persian poets anthologized by Kupffer, as well as other excerpts from Kupffer’s anthology. And while Carpenter sought “a more outright way of expressing male-​male

Queering the gay anthology, part II  111 love than was possible under Whitman’s cloak of friendship” (Rowbotham 2008, 185), he would end up donning that cloak with his anthology, as did Kupffer, although the anthologies appeared at a time when that cloak was growing rather threadbare. Moreover, Carpenter (1904, n.p.) opens his anthology with an epigraph from Plutarch that leaves no doubt as to the actual subject matter of the anthology: And as to the loves of Hercules it is difficult to record them because of their number. But some who think that Ioläus was one of them, do to this day worship and honour him; and make their loved ones swear fidelity at his tomb. In fact, the Pagan Press edition of Ioläus places the epigraph prominently on the front cover. Moreover, the epigraph not only points to the actual theme of the anthology but also offers a description of the anthology as an act of fidelity to the past. Kupffer (1872–​1942) and Carpenter (1844–​1929) share a number of qualities that led them both to create anthologies of gay writing at virtually the same historical moment and that shaped their anthologies in ways that distinguished them both from those of their predecessors, Stratos and Hössli, and those that appeared after Stonewall. First, both men had very broad, universalist outlooks, Carpenter as a nature socialist and Kupffer as the founder of Clarismus, an aesthetic and philosophical movement, which Damien Delille (2014, 45) situates “at the intersection of esoterism and the dreamed antique.” (Kupffner’s Clarismus movement, however, contained elitist, misogynistic, and illiberal tendencies that were foreign to Carpenter’s thinking, while Carpenter’s outlook had imperial overtones that are not evident in Kupffer’s.)7 Carpenter had a similarly expansive vision. He identified as a nature socialist and travelled extensively throughout the world, publishing a detailed account of his travels to Southeast Asia, From Adam’s Peak to Elephanta: Sketches in Ceylon and India (1892). His progressive global outlook also led him to the work of the French geographer and anarchist Elisée Reclus, whose article “La Grande famille” (1897) Carpenter translated and published in 1913 as “The Great Kinship.” Like Reclus, Carpenter was a vegetarian and a conservationist, and both were proponents of sexual liberation. In fact, Reclus’s rejection of marriage in favor of “free unions” led him to leave France to avoid arrest. Second, both Kupffer and Carpenter were highly educated and were well versed in ancient and modern languages, which allowed them to contribute a good number of translations to their anthologies. As Sheila Rowbotham (2008, 191) points out, “[Carpenter’s] fluency in German, French and Italian enabled him to read works on sexual theory before they were translated into English,” and to translate them. Carpenter’s translations in his anthology are mostly from the German and are unmarked; we can assume these are Carpenter’s own translations as all the others are clearly attributed. Kupffer’s

112  Queering the gay anthology, part II translations are from ancient Greek and Latin, English, French, Italian, and Russian. (A Baltic German, Kupffer grew up in St. Petersburg and so spoke fluent Russian in addition to German.) In some cases, Kupffer used prose translations from languages he did not know and “translated” them into poetry. Altogether, Kupffer and his partner Eduard von Mayer provided more than half of the translations in the anthology. Both anthologies also contain what are probably indirect or relay translations. For example, Carpenter translates Persian poems from the German translations published in Kupffer’s anthology, while Kupffer includes a German translation of excerpts from the seventeenth-​century Japanese Nanshoku Okagami, by Ihara Saikaku, made from the English translation.8 The two men were also translators in a metaphoric sense, in that they worked across disciplinary boundaries, penning literary works, political manifestos, and quasi-​scientific articles—​Kupffer was also a prolific painter—​ reflecting “the dynamic rapport between, science, psychology, esotericism, and sexuality that characterized cultural production at the turn of the 20th century” in Europe (Delille 2014, 45; for more on the disciplinary synchretism of this time, see Tobin 2014). Carpenter (1908, 14) went further in this metaphoric direction, seeing homosexuals as cultural “intermediaries,” who “have a special work to do as reconcilers and interpreters of the two sexes to each other,” but also in the culture at large given their predisposition to the arts, in particular, literature. Such arguments were very much of the time.9 The German Jewish philosopher Martin Buber, for example, would argue that German Jews had a special historical role as mediators between the Orient and the Occident: “Europe has at its disposal a mediating people that has acquired all the wisdom and all the skills of the Occident without losing its original Oriental character” (qtd. in Seidman 2006, 154). That Buber understood translation to be an important aspect of that mediating work is suggested by the fact that he undertook two translations from the Chinese, Sayings and Parables of Zhuangzi (1910) and the Chinese Ghost and Love Stories (1911) by Pu Songling. Carpenter not only translated but was also concerned with the translation of his own works. During his lifetime, works by Carpenter were translated into German, Italian, French, Dutch, Russian, Bulgarian, Spanish, Norwegian and Danish, Swedish, and Japanese. (Incidentally, Lev Tolstoy wrote a preface to the Russian translation of Carpenter’s Critique of Science.) In fact, a significant portion of Chapter 9 of his memoir, “The Story of My Books,” is dedicated to his translators, whom he saw as collaborators in a common cause (Carpenter 1921, 190–​209). The chapter opens with the statement, “Among the many good things in my life which I owe to my books by no means the least has been my introduction through them to dear and valued foreign friends” (1921, 269).10 He even vacationed with his German translators (Rowbathan 2008, 288). And so, the activity of both Kupffer and Carpenter demonstrates “the importance of translation as both

Queering the gay anthology, part II  113 a linguistic and metaphoric act in fin-​de-​siècle writings concerning sexual and gender identities and behaviors” (Breen 2014, 2). Regarding their anthologies, both Kupffer and Carpenter adopt a chronological ordering. While all the texts in Hössli’s anthology were from the distant past and so were separated from the contemporary readership of Hössli’s anthology by a temporal gulf, both Kupffer’s and Carpenter’s anthologies start in the ancient world but end in the present day. Kupffer begins with a passage about King David from Second Samuel, in the translation by Martin Luther, and ends with some lyric verses by his lover, Dr. Eduard von Meyer, and himself. All the authors in Kupffer’s anthology, which include ancient Greek, Latin, and Persian authors, as well as English, French, Italian, Japanese, Russian, and a number of Germanophone authors, are presented in chronological order, based on the birth dates of the authors. Carpenter organizes his anthology into four chronological time periods:  Friendship-​customs in the Pagan and Early World; The Place of Friendship in Greek Life and Thought; Poetry of Friendship among Greeks and Romans; Friendship in Early Christian and Mediaeval Times; and The Renaissance and Modern Times.11 Insofar as both Carpenter and Kupffer adopt a chronological organization informed by contemporary concepts of evolution and development, they are very much of their time (see Lallaw 2004, 53–​5). That being said, there are important distinctions that should be made in regard to the developmental logic of each of these anthologies. The logic of Kupffer’s literary anthology is that of the individual Bildung to the extent that it moves not only from ancient foreign texts to contemporary German ones, but also from translations, done mainly by Kupffner himself, to Kupffner’s “original” verses. In that sense, the anthology traces Kupffner’s own development as a writer, as well as the development of a German “gay” literature (for more on the concept of Bildung in Kupffner’s writings, see Lukas 2016). Carpenter, on the other hand, includes nonliterary, ethnographic texts alongside literary texts, arranging them, as he states plainly in the introduction, “in a kind of rough chronological and evolutionary order from those dealing with primitive races onwards” (1907, v; italics added).12 Carpenter places texts about African customs written in the latter half of the nineteenth century by the English authors Rev. J. G. Wood and David Livingstone before ancient Greek texts, written about ancient Greeks by ancient Greeks. He also makes very liberal use of the word “primitive” in the opening section of the book. Of course, in a developmental framework, the text that ends an anthology is no less, if not more significant than the one that opens it, and Carpenter (1902, 166; italics added) closes his volume with selections from Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, which he introduces with the lofty rhetoric of universalism: I conclude this collection with a few quotations from Whitman, for whom “the love of comrades perhaps stands as the most intimate part of his message to the world. […] Whitman, by his great power, originality

114  Queering the gay anthology, part II and initiative, as well as by his deep insight and wide vision, is in many ways the inaugurator of a new era to mankind.” Interesting, too, in this regard is the fact that both anthologies begin with translated works (with Carpenter and Kupffer translating a good number themselves) and end with “original” writing in their respective native languages: verses by Kupffer himself and verses by Walt Whitman. This trajectory from translation to “original” writing also contributes to the developmental logic informing these anthologies, something distinctly lacking in Hössli’s, which was composed solely of translations. By presenting original writing in their native languages as the end of gay history, both anthologies could be said to make a distinct contribution to homonationalist historiography.13 Moreover, this chronological (read:  evolutionary) order allows Kupffer and Carpenter to incorporate texts from other times and places into a Western developmental view of history, which Chakrabarty (2000, 7) refers to as historicism. This is why the arrangement of texts in anthologies has perhaps greater ideological implications than the selection of texts, which is shaped by a number of contingencies, such as the simple availability of translations and translators. And so, it is not just the “selective inclusion of non-​Western texts in critical and pedagogical cadres” that “often reveals new configurations of power and domination” (Hassan 2000, 38)—​it is their arrangement within those critical and pedagogical cadres. Acknowledging the act of incorporation carried out by these anthologies is one way to challenge the innocent and ahistorical reading of the expansionist globalism of that time, according to which, “The rendering of access to queer stories in different languages answers the ever-​present yearning across cultures to hear stories that reflect queer desires and so affirm and nourish queer lives” (Breen 2014, 2). Carpenter’s decision to end his anthology with Whitman, that is, to present Whitman as the culmination of his evolutionary history of male friendship, accomplishes a number of things. First, in Carpenter’s (1902, 166–​7) view, Whitman brings the institution of comradeship to its final stage, its developmental climax: We have seen that in the Greek age, and more or less generally in the ancient and pagan world, comradeship was an institution; we have seen that in Christian and modern times, though existent, it was socially denied and ignored, and indeed to a great extent fell under a kind of ban; and now Whitman’s attitude towards it suggests to us that it really is destined to pass into its third stage, to arise again, and become a recognized factor of modern life, and even in a more extended and perfect form than at first. This idea of the American Whitman as representing the fulfillment and perfection of Greek culture works by analogy with the idea of Christ as the

Queering the gay anthology, part II  115 fulfillment and perfection of the law of the prophets. This is an analogy that Carpenter (1906, 78) makes rather directly in the chapter of his Days with Walt Whitman entitled “Whitman as Prophet”: In one respect [Whitman] is certainly unique among the prophets, and that is in the universality and breadth of his appeal. He seems to liberate the good tidings and give it a democratic scope and world-​wide application unknown in the elder prophets, even in the sayings of Buddha. So, Whitman is to ancient Greece what Christ was to ancient Israel.14 In fact, the phrase “liberate the good tidings” sounds like a secular rewriting of the scene in the gospel of Mark (16:15), where Christ inveighs his disciples: “Go into all the world, and preach the Good News to the whole creation,” laying the scriptural foundation for the Christian imperative to proselytize, which was later incorporated into the imperative to colonize. One of the ways in which Whitman “perfected” the Greeks was by resolving what Symonds alludes to as the “problem of Greek ethics,” namely, pederasty. He did so, first, by attenuating the age-​stratification that characterized Greek pederasty. As discussed in Chapter 2, high-​profile sex scandals at Oxford and Cambridge involving dons and their students, as well as growing concern over the protection of children more generally, would force gay liberationists to distance themselves from the Greeks. As Symonds (1984, 269) proclaimed toward the end of the century: “We cannot be Greek now.” Kate Fischer and Jana Funke (2019, 270) note that Carpenter, who was more accepting of age-​stratefied relationships than many of his contemporaries, nonetheless avoided translating the German term “Knabenliebe,” often glossed as love of boys, when translating Classicist Erich Bethe’s Die dorische Knabenliebe (1907), since it suggested “an inferiority of age too great.” Whitman’s celebration of adult “comradely” attachments allowed for a further distancing from Greek pederasty.15 Second, the lusty physicality celebrated in Whitman’s verse allowed queers of Carpenter’s generation to move beyond the distinction made by Plato in the Symposium between “heavenly love” between men and “common love” between a man and a woman. This distinction had been of strategic importance insofar as attenuating the physical aspects of homosexual desire by idealizing, spiritualizing, and aestheticizing same-​sex desire was a prerequisite for public discussion of “Greek love” (Mondimore 1996, 9). In his memoir, Symonds (1984, 99) mentions “a long-​cherished idealism” that spoke not to his body but to his soul, which he goes on to contrast to “the brutalities of vulgar lust at Harrow.” While initially comforting, the idealism of that Platonic image of same-​sex desire would make it difficult for Symonds to act on his own physical desire—​until he discovered Whitman.16 Whitman refused to separate the homoerotic from the homosocial or to spiritualize or aestheticize it, as Carpenter (1906, 56–​7) notes in his Days with Walt Whitman:

116  Queering the gay anthology, part II He was a man in whom the power of love was developed to an extraordinary degree. Yet (thanks to him) this was no attenuated or merely spiritual love, but was a large and generous passion, spiritual and emotional of course, but well rooted in the physical and sexual also. In him the various sides and manifestation of the passion were so blent, that instead of weakening they recognized and reinforced each other. As the perfection of Greek culture, Whitman’s homoerotic and masculinist poetry allowed homosexuality to be associated not only with sexual vigor but also with democracy and modernity, or democracy as modernity. Indeed, as Symonds (1893, 159–​60) noted, Whitman was willing “to fraternize in comradeship with men of all classes.” In this way, Whitman’s vision of democracy tempered the cultural and class elitism of Victorian Hellenism and made it possible for both Carpenter and Symonds to pursue fulfilling relationships with members of the working class, another way Whitman helped them resolve the problem of pederasty. Moreover, Carpenter saw his role in spreading the gospel of Whitman as one of cultural translation, first for himself—​ he initially claimed of Whitman’s Leaves of Grass: “I could not make the book out” (Rowbotham 2008, 38)—​and then for his fellow Englishmen. With his collection of verse Towards Democracy, “Carpenter enabled [his fellow Whitmanites] to translate Whitman who they celebrated faithfully with lilac and loving cup, into a comradeship of daily life” (Rowbotham 2008, 185; italics added). That being said, the fact that Whitman’s work did not need to be literally translated in order to be included in Carpenter’s anthology symbolically marks the ascendency of English and a shift in the role of translation in the circulation of “gay” culture. Indeed, Carpenter presents Whitman’s utopian concept of all-​inclusive “merging,” which jibed well with Carpenter’s brand of socialism, as modeling a process of global incorporation. Elsewhere, he describes this as Whitman’s voluminousness, especially evident in his Leaves of Grass, which for Carpenter (1906, 83–​4) represents a polity based on equality, inclusion, and tolerance: His utterance in its daemonic reach and sweep, is somewhat staggering! Through “Leaves of Grass” pours a torrent of trades, classes, characters, occupations, races, nations, morals, manners, incidents, opinions—​ things generally accounted beautiful, and things unbeautiful, things good or evil, proper or improper—​in huge indifference, all apparently accepted on an equality, dismissed on an equality. Carpenter (1906, 82)  goes on to connect that voluminousness with modernity: Whitman realized from the first that this universality was the very key and centre of his utterance, and set himself deliberately to emphasise

Queering the gay anthology, part II  117 it. Many things conspired, with him, to this result—​ the girdling of the earth in his time, and the extraordinary developments of locomotion and intercommunication which were bringing together East and West, and all races and classes, creed and customs, into close touch and acknowledgment of each other. Globalization allowed Whitman, in Carpenter’s assessment, to transcend the “ignorance and prejudice” of the past, while earlier prophets “still could only act and speak subject to the very definite limitations prevailing around them” (80). Whitman’s American expansionist vision of modernity was expressed not only in his thematics but also in his innovative poetic style, which represented a radical “break with conventional poetic metres” (Rowbotham 2008, 38). Whitman’s experimentation with free verse was seen as liberating poetry from the confines of traditional British forms and metrics, now construed as unnatural and insincere. As Rowbotham (2008, 38)  notes, “Unlike other American poets he did not emulate the British; instead he translated what he heard around him into poetry.” In this sense, Whitman’s work marks the shift in US culture within the world’s literary economy from a position of appropriation to one of consecration, which was also reflected in the subfield of homosexual literature. In 1913, Whitman would appear in an international list of homosexual-​ themed literature in the library of Dayneford, the hero of “Out of the Sun,” by American writer Edward Irenaeus Prime-​Stevenson. Whitman is in fact one of three US authors listed, alongside ancient Greek and Persian authors and contemporary German and French ones. Prime-​Stevenson would also include three works of his own in his hero’s library. Not surprisingly, Western scholars, as a rule, have been reluctant to connect Whitman’s expansionist poetics with American hegemony. As Walter Grünzweig (1998, 305) notes, Proceeding from his idea of America as a “composite” nation containing in itself all elements of humanity, Whitman develops a theory that America is by definition the one country that can serve as a model for all others. Thus, because imperialism is actually mandated in the interest of humanity, the imperialist charge would probably not have bothered him much. Emanating from progressive America, American imperialism would have appeared to him as benign, productive, and serving the common good.17 Rowbotham (2008, 39)  is somewhat more critical, making an allusion to Whitman’s racial prejudices:  “Whitman, who had begun his ‘Democratic Vistas’ as a passionate refutation of Carlyle, was becoming increasingly aware of the dangers of democracy in terms of corruption and manipulation, and after the Civil War oscillated in his attitudes to race.” She goes on, however,

118  Queering the gay anthology, part II to diminish those concerns, referring to them as “American nuances,” which, she notes, “were lost on Whitman’s British supporters” (39). Scholars and writers from the Global South, however, draw a direct connection between Whitman’s voluminousness and American imperialism, as evident in the title of Mauricio González de la Garza’s Walt Whitman:  Racista, Imperialista, Antimexicano (1971). As the famed Nicaraguan poet, journalist, and diplomat Rubén Darío (2005, 507–​8), despite his great admiration for the poet, writes: “Their Whitman with his hatchet hew verses is a democratic prophet in the service of Uncle Sam.” Along the same lines, David Simpson (1990, 192, 194) describes Whitman as the “voice of manifest destiny, and of the most confidant period of nationalist enthusiasm” who created a comprehensive poetics of “expansive nationalism” that effectively mystified the often-​violent class and racial tensions of US society of his time.18 As Simpson (1990, 188–​9) argues, The American spirit is deployed by Whitman as an energy able to synthesize disparate entities into a singleness of will and purpose; the image and agent of this process of manifest destiny is the American language. In the realm of words also, he is able to contend that a covertly hegemonic posture is in fact one of openness and accommodation. For all these reasons, Whitman could be said to inaugurate the second phase of the Western gay rights movement, marked by the ascendency of the United States and the hegemony of English, and characterized by translation as consecration. Whitman would become the sign under which contemporary gay writing would circulate, associating emancipation and progress with democratization and development. As Alan Sinfeld (2000, 26) remarks, “The effacement of difference is founded in an ideology of opportunity, democracy and rights, which crosses into gay culture all too conveniently via Walt Whitman in the guise of a comradely, manly, sexual democracy.”

The gay anthology after Stonewall: proliferation and identity crisis Although there would be several reeditions of Carpenter’s anthology into the 1920s, no new anthologies of homoerotic writing would appear until the gay rights movement of the 1960s and 1970s had produced a visible and viable gay subculture, representing a new readership now targeted by publishers and advertisers (see Chasin 2000; Shugart 2003). The first of this new generation of gay anthologies was in fact poised between the anthologies of the first decade of the twentieth century and those that would appear after Stonewall in terms of its labeling. Published in 1961, Eros: An Anthology of Friendship, edited by Patrick Anderson and Alistair Sutherland, continues to use the traditional euphemism of friendship in the subtitle while replacing the enigmatic titles of Carpenter and Kupffner—​Ioläus and

Queering the gay anthology, part II  119 Lieblingminne—​in favor of the more straightforward Eros. As Anderson (1961, 8)  makes clear in his introduction, the subject is “any friendship between men strong enough to deserve one of the more serious senses of the word ‘love.’ ” This anthology would also insist, at least initially, on its status as a work of historical scholarship, repeatedly mentioning scholars, scholarship, libraries, and references, and even scientific humanism, although it is quite likely that Alistair Sutherland, described in Anderson’s introduction as a shy young scholar, is fictional. Nevertheless, Anderson (1961, 9) appeals to a scholarly “sense of history” as a caution against appropriating the works of the past to condone contemporary practices: “A sense of history certainly militates against assuming the Greek ideal—​or, for that matter, the Greek license—​can be appealed to as condoning much that is prevalent today.” In hindsight, this collection can be seen as the last hurrah of a strategy to prevent the separation of homosexuality from homosociality by using the umbrella term of male friendship, symbolized by the anthologizing of texts featuring various manifestations of eros within a single book. As Anderson (1961, 12) notes: To those who deny the shifting spectrum of human feelings, and the mystery of their source, it may seem heresy to place Tennyson’s affection for Hallam alongside that of Wilde for Bosie or Proust’s for his chauffeur; can Giton and Billy Budd, “Posh” and Gide’s Arab, Bathyllos and David Blaise exist in one book? Indeed, Anderson describes the anthology not as “a specialized garden to browse in or avoid, but one of the roads through the familiar but ever surprising public park of humanity” (13). Of course, the fact that the public park was a popular gay cruising ground alerts one to the arch play with innuendo and double entendre that runs throughout the introduction, signaling a camp sensibility that distinguishes this anthology from previous anthologies and from those that would follow after Stonewall. Consider Anderson’s playful reference to the closet: “The question here may well be the nature of Eros—​and, as I  have already explained, I  have left this as I  found it, imprecise, veiled, if you will, in the radiance befitting a god” (12). This is a very campy play on the word “veil,” intimating, before the hedge, that the veil is hiding something, then revealing that the veiling in fact makes the thing more visible:  veiled in radiance. Anderson then goes on to say, “I do not think it is the job of an anthologist to be too firm about his categories, at least when the collection is something of a pioneer” (12).19 Toward the end of the introduction, Anderson retreats from the scholarly position he stakes out at the beginning, providing this desultory description of the anthology’s contents: “What is here is mostly western stuff, European and North American, with some influx from the Moors and Persians: the expected passages, I imagine, but with here and there a small surprise. Much is translation” (12).

120  Queering the gay anthology, part II After Stonewall, gay anthologies proliferated, but now distinctly labeled as gay or homosexual: Angels of the Lyre: A Gay Poetry Anthology (1973), edited by Winston Leyland; Hidden Heritage, History and the Gay Imagination: An Anthology, edited by Byrne R.  S. Fone; Calamus:  Male Homosexuality in Twentieth Century Literature (1982), edited by David Galloway and Christian Sabisch; The Penguin Book of Homosexual Verse (1983), edited by Stephen Coote; and Not Love Alone:  A Modern Gay Anthology (1985), edited by Martin Humphries. Others would follow a decade later: The Penguin Book of International Gay Writing (1995), edited by Mark Mitchell; The Gay and Lesbian Literary Heritage: A Reader’s Companion to the Writers and Their Works, from Antiquity to the Present (1995), edited by Claude J. Summers; and The Columbia Anthology of Gay Literature:  Readings from Western Antiquity to the Present Day (2001), edited by Byrne R.  S. Fone, not to mention the anthologies of theoretical or scholarly writings that began to appear in the 1990s, some labeled gay and others queer. On the one hand, the proliferation of gay anthologies would appear to consolidate the ontological status of “gay”—​at least from the outside. On the other hand, the labeling of pre-​Stonewall texts as gay or even homosexual precipitated an internal crisis. Texts that had hung together under the broad label of “eros” or “friendship” were now being anachronistically labeled as gay. And so, these anthologies, which marked the liberation of gay culture, its “coming out,” also problematized the whole question of queer history, in ways previous anthologies had not. As Charles Lambert (1997, 205) complains, The gayness of the writer is levelled out into a synchronic cultural constant spanning such diverse figures as Petronius and Marc Almond. There is nothing new about this ahistoricizing tendency, nor is it limited to the biographical approach. Thematic notions of “gayness” frequently inform anthologists. I would take issue here with Lambert’s claim that “there is nothing new about this ahistoricizing tendency.” It was the post-​Stonewall anthology, with its adoption of the modern labels of “gay” and “homosexual” that problematized queer history in a new way. This is evident in the fact that almost all the editors of these anthologies feel compelled to address the fundamental issue of what constitutes “gay” literature. In this way, the post-​ Stonewall gay anthology reflected a broader “concern with fragmentation and wholeness, and its alleged crisis of value and evaluation” (Korte 2000, 3)  during this period. As Galloway and Sabisch (1982, 12), the editors of Calamus, admit that “every anthology is the product of numerous compromises” and that the selection of texts in their own anthology is by no means final: “If our choices prompt the reader to compose his own, alternative table of contents, our goal has been achieved.” (They appear to disavow the anthology’s role in fixing value.20)

Queering the gay anthology, part II  121 That statement, however, is belied by the unresolved tension between universality and particularity that runs throughout their introduction. The purpose of an international collection, Galloway and Sabisch (1982, 26) state, even one bearing the name of an American poet’s verse, is to demonstrate the universality of same-​sex desire:  “Such recurrent prototypes, far from suggesting some implicit limitation of the homosexual imagination, underscore its universality”; and later: “In the selections that follow, numerous other figures emerge as ‘international.’ They highlight common elements in the homosexual experience” (52). To present this universalist vision under the sign of Whitman appears today as a tacit acknowledgment that the “world” presented in these anthologies is basically coterminous with the West. And the fact that an anthology named for a collection of poetry—​Calamus refers to a cycle of poems from Whitman’s Leaves of Grass that treat male comradeship and intimacy openly and that are seen as his most homoerotic—​but containing only prose works marks the victory of prose over poetry in the gay liberation movement, which I discuss in detail in Chapter 5. Moreover, while many of the texts in the collection are translated, no mention is made of the fact; translation is presented implicitly as a transparent medium for the circulation of international or “universal” gay literature. So, the volume could be seen as representing the next step in the consolidation of the expansionist vision laid out in Carpenter’s anthology characterized by the incorporation of other traditions. At the same time, we see a more nationalist framing of these international anthologies, making the “universal” vision put forward at this historical moment somewhat different from the one put forward by Carpenter and Kupffer at the very beginning of the century. This is reflected in the Calamus anthology not only in the naming of the anthology after the work of an American poet but also in the epigraph that opens the anthology:  one of Whitman’s Calamus poems, “Full of Life Now.” (Carpenter’s anthology opens with an epigraph from Plutarch and Kupffer’s with epigraphs by Goethe and D’Annunzio.) A  similar nationalist framing is evident in the French anthology that appeared two years later, Les amour masculines. Anthologie de l’homosexualité dan la littérature, edited by Michel Larivière. The volume opens with two epigraphs, one by the French dramatist Thierry Maulnier and the other by the French surrealist poet Robert Desnos. The introduction, written by Dominique Fernandez, a French writer who specializes in gay-​themed works, bears the title “Grandeur et décadence de la culture homosexuelle” [The grandeur and decadence of homosexual culture], an obvious intertextual allusion to the novel by Honoré de Balzac Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes [The Splenders and Miseries of Courtisanes].21 The post-​ Stonewall period witnessed a rapid proliferation of “gay” anthologies in the United States and elsewhere, while provoking a kind of existential crisis in the genre. In other words, a tension emerged between the ontological certainty that homosexuality existed and the epistemological

122  Queering the gay anthology, part II uncertainty about what it was. This tension is especially evident in the anthology of Indian lesbian writing, Facing the Mirror. While the trope of the mirror, as discussed in Chapter 3, lends ontological certainty to the phenomenon, the introduction presents an epistemological quandry. As the editor, Ashwini Sukthankar (1999, xix–​xx) writes: Even the terminology of desire is problematic. Some reject the word “lesbian” for its white or Western connotations, preferring samyonik (a term we have constructed from the Sanskrit roots sam = union and yoni = female genitalia), or Saheli. Others find it too politically loaded, and prefer terms such as “woman-​identified” or “woman-​centred”. Is “lesbian” a word which excludes in other ways? Some of us identify as bisexual. But we name ourselves here as lesbian, though it is a difficult word, and unsettles even those of us who live out our love for women every day. […] In this context, it is not difficult for lesbians to disappear into the gap between a word and what it signifies In historical anthologies, the post-​Stonewall packaging of them as gay or lesbian perhaps inevitably highlights the fact that many of the texts they contain are in fact quite queer. This was pointed out by a blogger in regard to Coote’s (1983) Penguin Book of Homosexual Verse: Compiling such an anthology could never have been an easy task. The fact that it ranged from the boy love of Ancient Greece to lesbians in the 20th century simply highlighted the inappropriateness of applying one word—​homosexual—​to such diverse behaviours and identities. (2013, online) This led, already in 1982, to Steve Abbott publishing an article in The Advocate, “In Search of a Muse:  The Politics of Gay Poetry,” in which he addressed the fundamental question of what makes a poem “gay.” And in 1985, Martin Humphries (1985, 7)  opens the introduction to his anthology, Not Love Alone: A Modern Gay Anthology, with the equivocal statement:  “This is and isn’t an anthology of gay poetry.”22 Humphries’s volume, in fact, represents a strategy for dealing with the problems posed by those transnational histories of “gay” literature that would become increasingly popular in the post-​Stonewall period: he restricts the contents to “modern” works written in English. The fundamental issues posed by the “gay” anthology remain largely unresolved, as evident in a more recent review of Out of the Blue: Russia’s Hidden Gay Literature. An Anthology, edited by Kevin Moss, written by US-​based Russian scholar Luc Beaudoin. I quote it at length as Beaudoin’s comments highlight enduring problems with gay anthologies in the post-​ Stonewall period,

Queering the gay anthology, part II  123 The selection of prose, poetry and plays in Out of the Blue seems to straddle two distinct concepts of what gay literature is, and does not always make this clear to the reader. All of the works chosen have gay themes, and a majority were written by writers known to be, or at least suspected to be, gay or bisexual. Questions arise, however, when the likes of Pushkin, Lermontov, and Tolstoy are included. The introductory paragraphs usually identify the gay authors and dispel any urge to shut the volume and tell everyone that Pushkin, for example, was gay, though by the same token including the famous poet merely because he wrote homoerotic poems in imitation of the Arabic (as was fashionable—​Goethe wrote these as well) seems tenuous. Including Fedor Sologub is equally perplexing: why include a selection from The Petty Demon, despite the portrayal in it of a hero who lusts “for his young male pupils” (127)? Since the biographical blurb does not mention anything more significant about Sologub than the publication date of this novel and the predilections of its hero, the choice seems almost gratuitous. The introduction to the poems of Anatoly Steiger only mentions that some of his poems address gay themes; yet in the introduction to the writer highlighted in the following entry, Georgy Ivanov (who was not gay), we discover that Ivanov was associated with the “gay poet Anatoly Steiger” (173). This type of narrative information would be perfectly adequate were it not that the book is an anthology which may or may not be read in a linear fashion; as it stands, the information on the authors could have been expanded, something which would have only strengthened the volume. (Beaudoin 1998, 149; italics added) While Beaudoin attempts to preserve the integrity of the anthology as genre and its association with a clearly articulated identity, other scholars and producers of anthologies have addressed this conceptual confusion with postmodern equivocation, as evident in Byrne R.  S. Fone’s (1998, xxxii) introduction to the Columbia Anthology of Gay Literature: Perhaps readers of this book may discover in the nearly two thousand years of texts here represented a shared tradition and a common language, traditions and tongues, which may seem somehow familiar to gay men everywhere. Or it may reveal instead that men who loved and desired other men in other time nevertheless inhabited alien worlds wherein indeed we might well have found ourselves strangers despite seemingly similar promptings of desire. While initially lending both readings equal validity, Fone (1998, xxxii) cannot resist coming down on the side of gay fraternity, understood in the universalizing terms of Whitman:

124  Queering the gay anthology, part II Whatever interpretation of the past that may be constructed from these texts, they will, I hope at least enable readers to answer in their own way the question that Whitman asked when he wondered if there were “men in other lands yearning and thoughtful” to whom “I should become attached […] as I do to men in my own land.” His answer was: “Oh I know we should be brethren and lovers.” Again, Whitman is invoked as the great resolver of all antinomies, mystifying the opposition of sameness and difference, self and other, love and lust. Another way to address the tensions provoked or highlighted by the post-​ Stonewall gay anthology was to imagine an anthology of the future in which the contents would fall more neatly under the label of gay. Charles Lambert (1997), for example, encourages “gay” poets to include more sexually explicit references in their work (see Lambert 1997) to clearly mark them as gay. This epistemological crisis is also reflected in a growing ambivalence toward translation. None of the post-​Stonewall anthologists was involved in translating works for their anthologies, as the polyglot Carpenter and Kupffer were. For example, in the Acknowledgments section of the Columbia Anthology of Gay Literature, Fone mentions a number of the translators who contributed to the project, but not in the introduction where he might have incorporated the whole question of translation into his discussion of how anthologies negotiate sameness and difference. At the same time, translation became an object of criticism, as in Gregory Wood’s (1998, 9) review of Coote’s anthology: Coote’s hope that his book will be treated as “a record, a history” of representations of “homosexual people” is obviously compromised by the editor’s—​and therefore the book’s—​willingness to assume a trans-​ historical and cross-​ cultural unifying definition of gay culture. This slippage has already occurred between the titles “homosexual verse” and the first sentence of the introduction’s “poems by and about gay people”. Add to this the fact that Coote’s own translation of the gay classics incorporate such culturally and historically specific epithets as “faggot”, “queer”, and “queen”, and one must reluctantly conclude that the academic uses of the book are limited; or, at least, that the book needs to be shelved next to a more skeptical volume of sexual history. Woods’s description of Coote’s anthology as a “skeptical volume” reflects the role translation assumed in distinguishing academic historiography from activism. Here we see an almost total reversal of the position of fin-​ de-​siècle scholar–​activists, like Carpenter and Symonds. Carpenter accused “straight” translators of cowardice and prudery in obscuring references to same-​sex desire through radically foreignizing approaches or omissions, leading Carpenter to advocate for a fearless objectivity—​“sans peur and sans raproche”—​in translations, as discussed in Chapter 2.23

Queering the gay anthology, part II  125 More ominously, already in the 1980s we see the emergence of gay anthologies that contain no translations whatsoever, but that assume or imply an internationalist framing, which in the past would have guaranteed the presence of translations. There are at least three different type of such translation-​free international anthologies. The first contains only texts written by gay-​identified Anglophones, although this is typically not indicated in the title, as with Martin Humphries’s Not Love Alone: A Modern Gay Anthology (1985) or Reed Woodhouse’s 1998 Unlimited Embrace: A Canon of Gay Fiction, 1945–​1995. The title of Woodhouse’s anthology indexes a Whitmanian celebration of expansiveness, which acquires imperialist overtones when one considers its exclusively Anglophone contents. The second type of translation-​free anthology, while containing no translations, gives an occasional nod to the existence of other languages and cultures. An example of this type is Martin Duberman’s A Queer World (1997). Despite the presence of “world” in the title, Duberman’s 700-​page translation-​free anthology contains only three chapters (out of 52)  that deal with non-​ Western contexts—​ the hirjas of India, lesbians in Chinese history, and French working-​class lesbians—​and only two that are written by non-​native speakers of English, although both authors are now living and working in the United States. Moreover, even in those few chapters that deal with non-​Anglophone contexts or speakers, one encounters only an occasional “token” reference to translation, such as “pushed to the other side, al otro lado” (Romo-​Carmona 1997, 36), or the provision of an English equivalent without the original term and without commentary. One of the only discussions of translation appears in the chapter on Asian-​Americans, where the author (Hanawa 1997, 55)  notes that the Japanese term for lesbian (resubian) “exists only as a transliteration in the Japanese language and for the most part in terms of a discursive locus of social problems, not a site of identity.” And while the author acknowledges the crucial importance of understanding “the construction of sexual identity in a socio-​cultural context” (55), this single mention of translation appears at the very end of the article rather than as an integral part of the organizing framework of the chapter. I  single out Duberman’s anthology for its audacity in including “world” in the title, but its asymmetrical mapping of the international field and the absence of translations or any discussion of translation is in fact common in many post-​Stonewall scholarly anthologies.24 The third type of translation-​ free international anthology includes those that present texts by international authors but that are all written in English, such as Torsten Højer’s paradoxically titled Speak My Language and Other Stories (2015), with an introduction by Stephen Fry. Despite the title of the anthology, the various national origins of the authors, and the fact that many of the stories are “set in countries including Australia, Cuba, England, Greece, Italy, Kenya, Portugal, Russia, Somalia, South Africa, Spain, Sri Lanka, and the USA,” the anthology contains no translations. This suggests an alternative, less benign—​if not hegemonic—​interpretation of the

126  Queering the gay anthology, part II “language” referenced in the title. It is English. Moreover, the use of “gay” in the subtitle appears to mystify if not erase the whole question of cultural and linguistic difference, guaranteeing an essential sameness across the various international settings of the stories. Indeed, the Western framing of the stories in Speak My Language as “gay” guarantees that what “differences” are presented in the stories—​to the extent that “late capital requires differentiation and the stylistic markers of ‘otherness’ ” (Grewal and Kaplan 1994, 12)—​can easily be incorporated into a Western vision of the “global gay.” This suggests a “big tent” model of global sexuality, with the tent being the Western epistemology of sexuality, which forces civilizations and cultures to be judged “along the vector of something called ‘sex,’ as well as its later derivative, ‘sexuality’ ” (Massad 2007, 6).25 Those historical anthologies of gay writing that continue to include translations typically relegate them to the past in order to tell a developmental history of gay rights that culminates in the Anglophone West. Robert Drake’s The Gay Canon is a good example of this type of anthology. The book is divided into three parts, which differ significantly in terms of the presence of translations.26 Part 2, titled The Age of Inspiration, contains only translations of texts from the ancient world, mostly from Greece and Rome, but not entirely—​there are excerpts from the Akkadian epic Gilgamesh and a paraphrase of the Chinese fable “The Cut Sleeve.” Part 2, titled The Age of the Enlightenment, stretches from the Renaissance to the 1960s and includes 40 Anglophone texts and 15 translations, 7 from French, 2 from Italian, 2 from Russian, 1 from German, 1 from Greek, 1 from Japanese, and 1 from Spanish, distributed rather evenly across the section. Part 3 covers the post-​ Stonewall period and is paradoxically titled The Age of Chaos. I say paradoxically because the section is dominated by Anglophone texts, suggesting that it is in fact an age of consolidation. Indeed, only 3 of the 25 selections are translations, and they are clustered toward the beginning. Of course, the cherry on the top of such developmental cakes is the final selection, which in Drake’s anthology is an excerpt from David Watmough’s novel I Told You So, the last in a semi-​autobiographical series of novels centered around Davey Bryant. Here Drake exposes the developmental thinking underlying his anthology by ending it with the culmination of a multivolume gay Bildungsroman, which he describes as a stunning capstone to the Davey Bryant chronicles [which] provides us, in a literary voice rich with the past, a modern stunner of a novel pared to the bone, hard-​wrought from histories public and private, a synthesis of everything, really, The Gay Canon is about. (1998, 468; italics added)27 With this, it would seem, the epistemological chaos announced in the title of the section is definitively dispelled.28

Queering the gay anthology, part II  127

Importing gay writing and exporting the gay anthology The post-​Stonewall period also sees the emergence of anthologies that contain only translations. These are anthologies dedicated exclusively to non-​ Western literary or cultural traditions, the kind championed by the San Francisco-​based editor of Gay Sunshine Press, Winston Leyland, beginning in the 1970s with two anthologies of queer writing from Latin America, Now the Volcano (1979) and My Deep Dark Pain Is Love (1983). Those would be followed more than a decade later by Partings at Dawn: Contemporary Japanese Gay Literature (1996), edited by Stephen D.  Miller, and Out of the Blue, Russia’s Hidden Gay Literature (1997), edited by Kevin Moss. As David Balderston and José Quiroga (2003, 97)  note in regard to the Latin-​American anthologies, Leyland was unabashed in positing the gay culture of post-​Stonewall San Francisco, what he refers to as “the Gay Cultural Renaissance,” as the developmental end of gay history, insofar as it has become “a worldwide phenomenon.” In this spirit, Leyland uses the anthology form to impose a Western sexual epistemology onto non-​Western cultures—​along with an epistemology of the closet, most evident in the subtitle of the Russian volume: Russia’s Hidden Gay Literature. That universalization of homosexual identity, which is accomplished not only by imposing a gay frame onto these writings but also by “creating the illusion that these writers speak to each other” (101), takes place alongside the exoticization—​ and sexualization—​of these cultures, especially evident in the visuals accompanying the texts (My Deep Dark Pain Is Love features the silhouette of a giant erect penis), in a way that “flirt[s]‌with sex tourism, pedophilia, random sex, one-​night stands, and the pursuit of a specific kind of sensation that was born and bred within a specific male context that could be translated in cultural but not in gender terms” (104). (These anthologies contain only works by male authors.) And so, Balderston and Quiroga conclude, “The picture that emerges is one where liberationist politics is never too distant from racism, and where the paradise of culture is revealed for the hungry sex it truly contains” (89). This sexualization is perhaps most evident in the Russian anthology, the cover of which features a shirtless young Russian man in a bucolic setting with a butterfly on his shoulder looking seductively into the camera. This offers another reading of the notion of a “hidden” literature, namely, as an orientalist topos, constructing Russian erotic culture as something seductively veiled for Westerners to “discover.” The young man on the cover photo, as well as the photos of nude Russian males that appear throughout the volume, presents post-​Soviet Russia as an untouched erotic destination, a new site of sexual tourism. This was a view supported by several books about homosexuality in Russia written by Western gay and lesbian observers that appeared at precisely this moment in the mid-​1990s, which I first discussed in the article Russian Gays, Western Gaze (Baer 2000). In several

128  Queering the gay anthology, part II of those works, including David Tuller’s Cracks in the Iron Closet, the Western narrators themselves are the ones who are “liberated,” in their case, from the confines of the Western minoritarian model, which allows them to experience new aspects of their own sexuality. These literary and journalistic ethnographies emerge at about the same time as pornographic films capitalizing on the exoticism of Eastern Europe as a sexual playground begin to appear on the global market (see Healey 2010). All these projects “limn the underside of the liberationist moment in US history by projecting a fantasy of liberation on an other who is always held in thrall by an unequal exchange” (Balderston and Quiroga 2003, 95). Like the Latin-​ American anthologies, Out of the Blue is given a minoritarian frame by the author of the introduction, Berkeley professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures Simon Karlinsky, who, like Leyland was part of the San Francisco Gay Cultural Renaissance. Karlinsky’s pioneering scholarship on Russian gay and lesbian culture was shaped by the identitarian politics of the early gay rights movement and by the polarized antinomies of Cold War politics. His history of gay literature in Russia, which first appeared in Leyland’s San Francisco newspaper The Gay Sunshine Press in 1976 and 1977, at the height of the gay liberation movement in the United States, is a good example of histories of gay and lesbian culture produced at the time: it is identitarian in form and nationalist in content, or as Charles Kirtley, another San Francisco author and editor, put it, combining “cultural uniqueness” with “the universal experience of being gay” (qtd. in Balderston and Quiroga 2003, 89). Karlinsky’s history has been repeatedly republished and anthologized, making it a definitive and often cited reading of Russian gay and lesbian literature. Karlinsky, for the most part, smooths over the philosophical problem of whether gay and lesbian—​ or for that matter “literature” itself—​ can be presumed to be a constant over time, presenting instead a stable, fixed Russian gay identity. For example, Karlinsky has no qualms in presenting the medieval Russian saints Boris and Gleb as gay, based only on the very dubious claim of the early twentieth century journalist and philosopher Vasilii Rozanov, who, in fact, defined homosexuals in a rather idiosyncratic way as essentially asexual, spiritual beings. In this way, the premise of Karlinsky’s historical project is circular insofar as it “presuppose[es] the very subject for which it seeks to give an account” (Butler 1997, 11). This anachronizing identitarian bias is also evident in Karlinsky’s use of the slogan “gay is good” to describe Russian attitudes toward homosexuality in the immediate prerevolutionary period. This is an expression coined by analogy with the civil rights slogan “Black is beautiful” and adopted in 1968 by the National Association of Homophile Organizations. Here the inscription of non-​Western cultures into a Western sexual epistemology is most overt. In fact, the connection Karlinsky makes to the civil rights movement belies what Joseph Slaughter (2007, 9) describes as “the dominant transition narrative of modernization, which both the Bildungsroman and

Queering the gay anthology, part II  129 human rights law take for granted and intensify in their progressive visions of human personality development.” According to the logic of this narrative, the coming out of individual gays and lesbians contributes to the coming out of society at large, conceived, in Slaughter’s words, as “the movement of the subject from pure subjection to self-​regulation” (9). For Karlinsky, an ardent anticommunist, Russia’s transition narrative of modernization was abruptly interrupted by the communist Revolution, which offered a very different, and Karlinsky might say, false narrative of modernization. Alongside the national or local anthologies produced by Leyland’s Gay Sunshine Press, there emerged in Eastern Europe following the fall of communism several international anthologies (i.e, anthologies that contain both translated and nontranslated texts). Among them were the Russian-​language anthology Liubov’ bez granits. Antologiia shedevrov mirovoi literatury [Love without borders. An anthology of masterpieces of world literature], edited by V.  N. Dumenkov and published in 1997 in Saint Petersburg, the same year as Out of the Blue; the Ukrainian-​language anthology 120 storinok Sodomu. Kvir-​antholgiia. Suchasna svitova lesby/​gei/​bi literatura [120 Days of Sodom. A  queer anthology. A  collection of world lesbian/​gay/​bi literature], edited by Irina Shuvalova, Al’bina Pozdniakova, and Oles’ Barlig, and published in Kyiv in 2009; the Slovenian anthology Moral bi spet priti. Sodobna evropska gejevska peizija [You should come back: Contemporary European gay poetry], edited by Brane Mozetič and published in Ljubljana in 2009; and the Russian-​language anthology Pod odnoi oblozhkoi: sbornik kvir-​poeziia [Under one cover:  A collection of queer poetry], edited by Mariia Vil’kovskaia and published in Almaty, Kazakhstan, in 2018. When analyzed in terms not only of the selection and arrangement of the contents but also of the packaging of the anthologies and the introductory material, these anthologies can be seen as representing complex cultural–​political assemblages, deployed to imagine or rather to reimagine “nation” and “world”—​and in some cases, “region”—​following the fall of communism. The presence of “world” in the subtitles of the Russian-​language anthology (“masterpieces of world literature”) and of the Ukrainian anthology (“contemporary world lesbi/​gay, bi-​literature”) is interesting in that neither of the anthologies includes any writers from outside the Global North. Note, by contrast, the almost total absence of any reference to the “world” in the early post-​Stonewall US anthologies, suggesting the reverse project of inscribing the world within a Western sexual epistemology, with “gay” or “homosexual” literally taking the place of world. The world invoked by these Eastern European anthologies, on the other hand, is the Occident, although their versions of the Occident are somewhat different. For example, the Russian-​language anthology is chronologized, which works to inscribe not just Russian authors, but also Soviet authors into the European literary tradition.29 In the Ukrainian anthology, however, all the authors are living, and most are young, suggesting less of an interest in recuperating Ukraine’s colonial past than in projecting a future. In any case, the specific

130  Queering the gay anthology, part II cultural work of these East European anthologies of gay literature—​that of reintegrating Eastern Europe into Europe—​is done most explicitly in the Slovenian anthology, which was published shortly after the Ukrainian one, under the title: Moral bi spet priti. Sodobna evropska gejevska peizija [You should come back:  Contemporary European gay poetry]. Slovenia was in fact one of the first post-​communist countries to “come back” to Europe, entering the European Union (and NATO) in 2004, and this anthology was subsidized by a grant from the European Union. Moreover, the fact that most of the editors of the Ukrainian anthology are not gay-​identified (Chernetsky 2016, 218) suggests that the gay anthology in these postcolonial contexts functions, perhaps inevitably, as a synecdoche for liberal democracy or the European Union, as alluded to by the fact that the postface to the Ukrainian anthology opens with an epigraph by Jean Baudrillard (1990, 5):  “Sex is everywhere, except in sexuality.” The specific cultural work of the Russian-​language anthology to write Russia back into an occidental world culture that had been rejected by the Soviets as decadent or bourgeois is evident in the main title, Love without Borders. The title plays with the polysemy of the Russian word granitsa, which can mean “borders” or “limits,” suggesting that the international anthology of gay writing transcends the traditional limits placed on sexual desire just as it transcends national borders. The desire to write Russia back into world culture is also evident in the cover of the anthology, which features a painting by Alexander Ivanov:  Dva naturshchika [Two artist’s models] (1822). Featuring two nude male models in a stylized wrestling pose, the painting references ancient Greek art and culture while connecting it, through Ivanov, to modern Russia—​which is also reflected in the contents of the volume, which I discuss below. The very stylized pose of the wrestlers, which conceals their genitalia, also reflects a traditional Russian strategy of attenuating the physical aspect of same-​sex desire—​what Symonds (1984, 99) referred to as the “the brutalities of vulgar lust”—​by emphasizing aesthetics (see Chapter 4 in Baer 2016). While both the Russian and the Ukrainian volumes present themselves as reinscribing their respective countries into world culture, the high culture approach of the Russian anthology is quite different from the approach taken by the Ukrainian anthology, which also invokes canonical cultural figures of the West, but to very different ends. The Ukrainian title, 120 Days of Sodom, highlights the physical aspect of homosexual desire, first, by refusing the practice of euphemism, second, by referencing the “sexual outlaws” Marquis de Sade and Pier Paolo Pasolini, and, third, by associating the anthology with a transgressive “in-​your-​face” politics, underscored by the use of “queer” in the subtitle. Moreover, the cover image is a “doctored” photograph of a heterosexual couple with a beard and moustache drawn on the woman’s face and a heart with an arrow through it on her chest, which one could read as a rejection of the traditional anthologists’ claim of objectivity. That postmodern acknowledgment of the contingent nature

Queering the gay anthology, part II  131 of knowledge is also reflected in the unprecedented attention paid to the translators who contributed to the anthology. In fact, the volume includes comments from the translators about the specific challenges they faced in rendering their source texts into Ukrainian. The three anthologies are also quite different in terms of their contents. The US anthology, as an anthology of a national tradition, includes only Russophone writers, but in prioritizing gay-​themed texts over gay-​ identified authors, the contents appear to contradict the identitarian framing offered by Karlinsky, leading to the critique by Beaudoin, quoted above. The Russian and Ukrainian volumes, on the other hand, are both international but offer quite different mappings of gay literature. The Russian volume contains mostly prose works from mostly Western writers, stretching from antiquity to the present day:  Anacreon, Sappho, Plato, Xenophon, Theocritus, Straton, Cicerone, Catullus, Tibulius, Seneca, Petronius, Achilles Tatius, Lucian, Michelangelo, Montaigne, Shakespeare, Diderot, de Sade, Hölderlin, Lermontov, Wilde, Rolland, Zinov’eva-​ Gannibal, Gide, Proust, Maugham, Stefan George, G. Danilovskii, Thomas Mann, Stephen Zweig, Pessoa, Ivnev, Esenin, Parandowski, Williams, Koeppen, Pratolini, Cortazar, Baldwin, Eco, Limonov, and Kharitonov. One of the great contributions of the volume is its integration of Russian and East European writers into this gay pantheon, just as the cover image integrated Russian art into a pan-​ European tradition originating with the ancient Greeks. The Ukrainian volume, on the other hand, includes mostly works of poetry and only by contemporary authors. Moreover, those contemporary authors are overwhelmingly from Eastern Europe and Eurasia:  seven from Russia, four from Ukraine, three from Poland, two from the Czech Republic, one from Belarus, one from Hungary, one from Slovenia, and one from Uzbekistan, totaling twenty. There are half as many from Western countries:  two from Germany, two from Spain, two from the United States, one from Austria, one from Greece, one from Scotland, and one from Switzerland, totaling ten. Moreover, both the US and Russian anthologies arrange the texts in ascending chronological order, reflecting the developmental logic of Kupffer’s and Carpenter’s anthologies. The Ukrainian anthology, which contains only contemporary authors, presents them in alphabetical order, beginning with the Ukrainian poet, Oles Barlig, which appears as a happy coincidence. The Russophone anthology of queer poetry, Under One Cover, is, in this respect, most similar to the Ukrainian volume. The poets featured are contemporary and young, the majority are female, and they hail from various parts of Eurasia—​Latvia, Ukraine, Russia, and Kazakstan—​where Russia remains a first or second language for many inhabitants. This volume, however, contains only one translation, of an English poem by the US-​based gender nonbinary performance artist and poet Alok Vaid-​Menon. As such, this volume may be reclaiming Russian as a progressivist, international language, an act of defiance in a region characterized by increasingly powerful

132  Queering the gay anthology, part II ethnonationalist movements, which typically promote traditional gender roles and heteronormative sexuality. Finally, the paratextual framing of these anthologies is also strikingly different. The introductory materials in the Russian and Ukrainian volumes are diametrically opposed. The Russian volume opens with a quotation from St. Paul’s letter to the Romans, “[…] there is nothing unclean of itself: but to him that esteemeth any thing to be unclean, to him it is unclean” (14:14), above a quotation from the novel Wings by the first openly “gay” Russian writer Mikhail Kuzmin, “[…] only a cynical opinion of love makes it corrupt,” reinforcing the aestheticizing approach of the volume as a whole as well as signaling the anthology’s work of inscribing Russian into world culture, with a Russian novel placed on a par with Scripture. The volume then opens with three texts meant to frame the writings that follow, all three authored by Russians: a very brief, one-​page introduction by the editor, an essay from the 1980s by the gay Russian writer Evgenii Kharitonov, and an essay from the early twentieth century by the Russian philosopher Vasilii Rozanov, “The Third Sex.” The Ukrainian volume, on the other hand, includes short introductory essays by the editors, “From the Compilers,” and by Andrii Bondar, “To Love Differently (In Place of a Preface),” as well as a lengthy postface by the anthropologist Mariia Maierchyk, provocatively entitled “Vtorzheniia gomoseksual’nosti” [The intrusion/​ invasion of homosexuality], which is headed by an epigram from the French postmodern philosopher Jean Beaudrillard translated into Ukrainian: “Sex is everywhere except in sexuality.” While the title of the essay may allude to the impression on the part of many people in the former Soviet Union that homosexuality was a Western import that “invaded” post-​Soviet countries following the fall of the USSR, it also reflects the general approach taken by the editors in presenting the anthology as an act of avant-​garde épatage, which Vitaly Chernetsky (2016, 220) describes as “deliberately and uncomfortably radical.” The essay then opens with a discussion of Michel Foucault’s writings and proceeds to cite a number of Western theorists and historians who work on gender/​ sexuality, such as Eve Levin, Francis Lee Bernstein, Dan Healey, Anthony Giddens, John D’Emilio, Annamarie Jagose, and Judith Halberstam, alongside several Ukrainian and Russian scholars. The first three listed above are Western-​based historians of gender and sexuality in Russia and the Soviet Union, while the others are typically described as queer theorists. So, while the contents of the Ukrainian volume are more local than that of the Russian volume, the theoretical framing is far more indebted to Western theory than in the Russian volume, complicating any binary understanding of the cultural positioning of these anthologies. The same can be said of the Russophone collection Under One Cover. Published under the auspices of the Kazakhstan Feminist Initiative Feminita, the volume’s introduction is thick with theoretical jargon, reflecting the attempt to create a common language of activist solidarity across the region, one that would allow the

Queering the gay anthology, part II  133 contributors from across Eurasia to coexist and communicate “under one cover.” Very different, too, were the publishing conditions and the reception of the anthologies. The US-​based anthology was published by the Gay Sunshine Press, which was a bastion of gay liberation politics in 1970s San Francisco. The gay-​identified editor of the Russian anthology, on the other hand, felt compelled to use a pseudonym; he published the volume through a small independent publishing house KET, with financial support from two of the most popular gay clubs of the time:  Club 69 in St. Petersburg and Three Monkeys in Moscow. The volume was not carried in the major bookstores and was, for the most part, distributed by the editor individually to buyers. So, there were no reviews of the volume in Russian publications and no public book launch. The editors of the Ukrainian volume were not gay-​ identified and published the volume under their own names: Irina Shuvalova, Al’bina Pozdniakova, and Olec’ Barlig. The publisher was the established Kiev-​based Kritika and, unlike the Russian anthology, the Ukrainian volume was produced on high quality paper with a well-​produced cover image. The Russophone anthology Under One Cover, published in Kazakhstan, is available online, a mode of circulation that reflects its goal of finding the means to talk across boundaries.

Conclusion While it is tempting to describe the politics informing these anthologies as antithetical, with the US volume representing an identitarian nationalist vision, the Russian volume, a traditional high art approach designed to obscure the physical dimension of same-​sex desire, and the Ukrainian volume taking a more provocative tac by fronting the act of sodomy, it is ultimately impossible to impose any simple binaries. The politics are too complicated, the various assemblages too queer. Karlinsky’s introduction to the US-​based anthology offers no theoretical framing, presenting his identitarian approach to the Russian texts as self-​evident. (The absence of “theory” in a volume produced in the United States, the birthplace of queer theory, is, in itself, interesting.) The editor of the Russian volume, V.  N. Dumenkov, while giving prominence to canonical Western writers, presents a theoretical framing that is distinctly Russian. The Ukrainian editors, on the other hand, select texts mostly from Eastern Europe while providing a theoretical framing that is clearly Western and postmodern. Moreover, the different publishing contexts for the volumes index the very different state of civil society in the United States, Russia, Ukraine and Central Asia over this period of time. The packaging of the Ukrainian anthology may also reflect a longstanding local interest in Western gender/​sexuality theory, as evidenced by the Gender Studies Summer School that ran for many years in Foros, Crimea, organized by the Khariv Center for Gender Studies with invited guest professors from the West. One can also contrast the embrace of Western

134  Queering the gay anthology, part II theory among Ukrainians at elite institutions to the ambivalent reception of Western theory in Russia—​see the 2010 edited volume “Vozmozhen li kvir po-​russki?” [Is queer possible in Russian?], edited by D.  Sozaev. Further complicating the politics of these anthologies is the evolving postcolonial relationship between Russia and Ukraine, which has made the open discussion of sexuality into a metonym for Western values and lifestyle. All of this underscores the relevance if not urgency of Boellstorff’s (2005, 4, 9) call for “new understandings of imbrication and transfer” that recognize sexuality as “existing at the intersection of multiple discourses.”

Notes 1 I think it is worth quoting the entire passage: “suggests the heedless appropriation and translation of the world by a process that for all its protestations of relativism, its displays of epistemological care and technical expertise, cannot easily be distinguished from the process of empire” (Said 1989, 213–​14). 2 In this sense, the anthology was very much of its time, and perhaps ahead of it, in its championing of pleasure as the ultimate good. As Faramerz Dabhoiwala (2014, online) comments on the English philosopher Jeremy Bentham: Bodily passion was not just a part of Bentham’s life:  it was fundamental to his thought. After all, the maximisation of pleasure was the central aim of utilitarian ethics. In place of the traditional Christian stress on bodily restraint and discipline, Bentham sought, like many other 18th-​ century philosophers, to promote the benefits of economic consumption, the enjoyment of worldly appetites and the liberty of natural passions. This modern, enlightened view of the purpose of life spawned a revolution in sexual attitudes, and no European scholar of the time pursued its implications as thoroughly as Bentham. To think about sex, he noted in 1785, was to consider “the greatest, and perhaps the only real pleasures of mankind”: it must therefore be “the subject of greatest interest to mortal men.” 3 As Nisbet (2013, 35) comments, “In the Anthology’s particular case as in no other, attempts at canon formation are inseparable from translation history.” 4 Perhaps, the most comprehensive treatment of Hössli’s project is given by Tobin (2012). 5 This word Lieblingminne is a neologism created by Kupffer from the words Liebling, meaning “darling” or “favorite” and Minne, which is a Middle High German term meaning “courtly love.” Minne was characterized by being unrequited, generally, but always involved the “fair lady” to whom one gave “Minne” and whom one served in “Minnedienst”—​the service of courtly love. For more on this, see Bab (1991, 53–​69) and Kupffer (1991, 35–​47). 6 Carpenter’s anthology went through several editions as he continued to add works. The editions of 1902 and 1906 shared the title Ioläus: An Anthology of Friendship, while the editions of 1915 and 1920 were titled An Anthology of Friendship (Ioläus). 7 Those illiberal tendencies and his misogyny are quite visible in the two opening paragraphs of Kuppfer’s (1900, 1–​2) lengthy introduction to his anthology:

Queering the gay anthology, part II  135 The times we live in, unfortunately, are so unmanly [“männlich” can be translated as “male,” “masculine” or “manly”] that standing up for the rights, not to speak of privileges, of men [literally: to stand up for manly/​ male rights, not to speak of privileges] is considered, and condemned as, an unmodern blasphemy and degradation of female supremacy. In order for the above sentence to be more than just a phrase, it is necessary to have a quick look at the word “manly” [or “male”/​“masculine”] and, as odd as it may be, to begin with a clarifying negation. (I note that these reflections cannot be but of a practical nature; considering the indefinitely subtle transitions of life, an absolute definition is perhaps impossible.) //​To be manly [or male, masculine] does not mean: to have specific superficial features or to be destitute of any sense for male beauty; nor does it mean:  to be rougher and more persevering than woman in every way and to put one’s powers in the service of women in order to protect them from dangers and comply with their sexual demands. No. To be manly [or male, masculine] means: to fight the battle with life using all one’s powers, to work for a fruitful existence, even if this means having to overcome dangers. Manliness means upholding self-​determination, personal freedom, and the common good, and the latter includes everybody and everything. When man entered almost exclusively into the service of woman and her taste, he lost his manliness [or masculinity] and kept but a sham supremacy. Woman has gained personal rights, also in juridical life; good, may she do that, as far as her personal powers go. But it is also time for man to think of himself, and, as strange as it may sound:  in the face of the emancipation, the self-​realization of woman we need an emancipation of man in order to revitalize a male [or manly, masculine] culture; and this [culture] is what I am speaking up for here. (Translation by Mirjam Müller) 8 Although not an anthology per se, we see a similar use of translation as documentary evidence in The Intersexes, by the American writer Edward Irenaeus Prime-​Stevenson. As Breen (2012, 5) notes, He provides translations of excerpts from German and French literary works, letters, and diaries, some texts fairly well known, other obscure. Many of these translations are his own, marked with an asterisk and the abbreviation X. M. (for Xavier Mayne). […] As these textual moments indicate, translation for Prime-​Stevenson literary translation in particular, was a form of queer activism. 9 That being said, the idea of queers as intermediaries is still around. See Anzaldúa’s (2012, 106–​7) remark: Being the supreme crossers of cultures, homosexuals have strong bonds with the queer white, Black, Asian, Native American, Latino and with the queer in Italy, Australia, and the rest of the planet. We come from all colors, all classes, all races, all time periods. Our role it to link people with each other—​the Blacks with Jews with Indians with Asians with whites with extraterrestrials. It is to transfer ideas and information from one culture to another.

136  Queering the gay anthology, part II Or, as Arnaldo Cruz-​Malavé and Martin F. Manalansan IV (2002, 1–​2; italics added) write in their introduction to Queer Globalizations: Citizenship and the Afterlife of Citizenship: [The position] occupied by queer sexualities and cultures in our globalized world as a mediating figure between nation and diaspora, home and state, the local and the global has not only been a site of dispossession, it has also been a creative site for queer agency and empowerment. 10 Although thoroughly cosmopolitan, it is important to note that Carpenter (1921, 274, 278)  was not adverse to stereotyping, as when he remarks, “It is curious, but perhaps not unexpected, that my best translators have been women” and later, about his Japanese translator:  “[He] was intelligent, and like many Orientals skillful with his fingers and apt at housework.” 11 Carpenter’s anthology, it should be noted, was preceded by his own list-​making, most evident in Homogenic Love, which was later incorporated into one of Carpenter’s most famous texts, The Intermediate Sex. There Carpenter provides a rather extensive list of “homogenic lovers,” classical and oriental authors of works containing “homogenic” passages, and then writers from the modern West, such as Michelangelo, Shakespeare, Winkelmann, Tennyson, and Whitman (Woods 1998, 3). 12 This developmental thinking is in fact visible throughout Carpenter’s oeuvre, as evident in tropes of maturation and directed movement in his collection of essays Love’s Coming of Age (1896) and his collection of poems Towards Democracy (1883), which was undoubtedly a nod to Whitman’s Democratic Vistas (1871). But that thinking is perhaps most evident in his Intermediate Types among Primitive Folk: A Study in Social Evolution (1914). 13 The list of works in Dayneford’s library presented in the short story “Out of the Sun” (1913) by Edward Irenaeus Prime-​ Stevenson reflects a similar chronologization, and, like Kupffer’s anthologies, ends with the author’s own works, although mentioned under his pseudonym, Xavier Mayne: Tibullus, Propertius and the Greek Antologists [sic] pressed against Al Hafsewah and Chaani and Hafis. A little further along stood Shakespeare’s Sonnets, and those by [Michelangelo] Buonarotti; along with Tennyson’s “In Memoriam,” Woodberry’s “The North-​ Shore Watch,” and Walt Whitman. Back to Platen’s bulky “Tagebuch” lay his poems. Next to them came Wibrandt’s “Fridolins Heimliche Ehe,” beside Rachilde’s “Les Hors Nature”; then Pernauhm’s “Die Infamen,” Emil Vacano’s “Humbug,” and a group of psychologic works by Krafft-​Ebbing and Ellis and Moll. There was a thin book in which were bound together, in a richly decorated arabesque cover, some six or seven stories from Mardrus’ French translation of “The Thousand Nights and a Night”—​remorsely [sic] separated from their original companions. On a lower shelf, rested David Christie Murray’s “Val Strange” and one of two other old novels; along with Dickens’ “David Copperfield,” the anonymous “Tim,” and Vachell’s “The Hill,” companioned by Mayne’s “Intersexes,” “Imre” and “Sebastian au Plus Bel Age.” (1997, xiv–​xv)

Queering the gay anthology, part II  137 14 Carpenter may have been intended to draw a connection between the contemporary American poet and the ancient Greeks by naming his collection an “anthology.” While an obvious reference to the Greek Anthology, this was not a term that was used in Britain at the time; rather, it was resurrected in the United States not long before Carpenter published Ioläus. As Anne Ferry (2001, 21) notes, “at the end of the nineteenth century, the ancient term anthology was revived in America, where it is still the preferred classifying term in titles,” appearing in the title of Edmund Clarence Stedman’s A Victorian Anthology of 1895 and in his An American Anthology of 1900; the latter included a number of works by Whitman. Stedman’s American Anthology is also interesting for being very upfront about the fact that the anthology was the product of the editor’s critical judgment, as stated in the subtitle:  Selections Illustrating the Editor’s Critical Review of American Poetry in the Nineteenth Century. In fact, Stedman (1900, i) opens his introduction with the statement: “THE READER will comprehend at once that this book was not designed as a Treasury of imperishable American poems.” 15 The fact that Whitman’s comradely love was often class-​stratified was interpreted as democratic, which would have been harder to do had he been British. 16 The testimony of rent boys and the evidence of soiled bedsheets at Wilde’s trial presented a vulgar picture of same-​sex relations—​with vulgar used here in both senses of the word, as crude and associated with the lower classes—​that undercut the lofty rhetoric of Wilde’s speech at his first trial, which had caused the audience to break spontaneously into applause (see Dowling 1994, 1). 17 As Grünzweig (1998) goes on to argue: While this naiveté may be shocking to those desiring a politically correct literature, imperialism was probably not a decisive moral issue for Whitman. In spite of an occasional uneasiness, he would have been unaware of the imperialism implicit in his globalist rhetoric. 18 From an eco-​perspective, too, Whitman’s expansiveness appears to presage US expansionism as well as the global spread of capitalism, fueled by the fantasy of limitless economic growth. In that light, one might question the positive associations attached to the notion of the endless “expanding of one’s horizons” in the cultural realm—​and to translation’s role in that celebration of expansion. 19 Anderson (1961, 13) ends the introduction by alluding to the didactic function of the anthology, making a distinction between modern educators and educators of the past in a way that is reminiscent of Carpenter’s critique of scholars who obscure or delete same-​sex content, mentioned in Chapter 2: One imagines that people concerned professionally with education and the helping of youth may find the subject-​matter of particular interest, for it is a youthful world that is presented; I hope that such readers will anyway be incapable of the brusque dismissal made by the favourite schoolmaster to whom I showed the copy of Petronius my father had given me at the age of fifteen or sixteen, “A very wicked man!” thus blocking adolescent curiosity and creative drive. 20 Almost 20 years later, Byrne Fone (1998, xxx) would provide a new activist definition of the gay anthology, describing it as “a modern recovery, re-​possession,

138  Queering the gay anthology, part II and re-​ reading of the past.” Nevertheless, addressing the question of what constitutes gay literature remains a mandatory rhetorical move. 21 The French resistance to the American minoritarian model of homosexuality, or the idea of an exclusive hetero/​homosexual binary, is reflected in the editor’s dedication of the volume to his 13-​year-​old daughter: “À ma fille Sophie, treize ans” (1984, n.p.), as well as in the consistent use of the plural in the title of that volume (Les amours masculines:  Homosexualité dans la littérature) and others: La Grande Encyclopédie des homosexualités: Trois milliards de pervers (1973) and Homosexualité(s) et littérature (2009), and in the avoidance of homosexuality as an adjective to define literature: never “homosexual literature,” but homosexuality and literature or homosexuality in literature. 22 Eventually, this would lead to very open definitions, such as the one offered by Graham Robb (2003, 225; italics added) in Strangers: “Gay literature”, if such a thing existed, was not just literature produced by gay writers or devoted to the subject of homosexuality. It was also the body of writing in which gay men and women discovered themselves, regardless of the author’s intentions or sexuality. Of course, this was easy for Robb to say as he wasn’t compiling an anthology. 23 James Jope (2005, 48) refers to this shift in positions in his academic critique of a new English translations of Stratos’s epigrams: The recent appearance of Daryl Hine’s fresh and imaginative translation may stimulate interest in Strato’s anthology. Hine himself is a poet. But precisely those qualities which make enjoyment of the poems more accessible for the general reader may cause difficulty when his book is consulted by people studying ancient sexuality. Whereas earlier translations used to distort erotic content for reasons of censorship, Hine makes brilliant adaptations to create amusing epigrams with erotic twists and sociocultural allusions to which a modern reader can relate. But sexual historians need an accurate conveyance of the original content. 24 Duberman’s collection is not an anomaly; most Anglophone scholarly collection present a similarly asymmetrical mapping of the field and almost never include translation. Consider, for example, Introducing the New Sexuality Studies (2011), edited by Steven Seidman, Nancy Fischer, and Chet Meeks. Of the collection’s 77 chapters, three take a transnational perspective (they are located in the section labelled Global and Transnational Sexualities), two deal with immigrant communities in the United States, one with images of ethnic others in US culture, and seven with cultures outside the United Staes: Lebanon (3), Iran (1), Israel (1), Netherlands (1), and Pakistan (1). Of the 77 authors, 70 are based in the Anglophone West (United States, Great Britain, Australia, and New Zealand), two in Western Europe (Denmark, the Netherlands), two in Lebanon (one at the American University of Beirut), two in Israel, and one in Hong Kong. There are no translations. The Routledge Queer Studies Reader (2013) also contains no translations, despite the constitutive influence of French writing on the emergence of queer theory.

Queering the gay anthology, part II  139 25 This is what constitutes the naiveté of many liberal calls to recognize “difference”: they ignore the investment of global capitalism in commodifying difference not just in eliminating it; there must be difference in order to promote foreign travel or the reading of foreign literature. The question then becomes not whether or not to “foreignize” texts but how to resist certain modes of commodifying foreignness. 26 I should note that Drake prominently features the translators directly below the title on the first page of every translated text and in the Suggested Reading Group Schedule at the end, and recommends a translation for each of the non-​English works, although the reasons behind those recommendations are not elucidated. 27 The use of the word “synthesis” here, along with the tripartite division of the anthology, would appear to reference the German philosophical triad of thesis–​antithesis–​synthesis. 28 This suggests that the “chaos” in the section title might in fact be referencing the “anarchy” in Matthew Arnold’s famous statement on high culture, Culture and Anarchy. True to Arnold’s argument, Drake presents the great books of the gay canon as holding the chaos at bay. 29 The use of the title “anthology” in the Russian edition is interesting in that this was not the common title for such works in Russian. In academic settings, such historical collections are referred to as khrestmatii. In this way, the Russian edition references the Greek anthology and, perhaps, Carpenter’s. Remember, Carpenter made a similar decision, namely, to use the term anthology, which was not used in Britain at the time, thereby overtly referencing the Greek anthology as well as the contemporary US context, which was dominated for Carpenter by Whitman. Whitman, however, is not included in the Russian anthology, which is rather surprising given the poet’s popularity in the Soviet Union and hence the availability of high-​quality translations.

5  Keep the lyric queer, or poetic translation as reparative reading

Critical engagements with World Literature have brought attention to the ways the field imposes Western periodizations—​what Appadurai (2000, 30)  calls “Eurochronology”—​and generic classifications (Heath 2004) onto non-​Western traditions, not to mention the primacy of writing over orality (Goldhill 2004). Far less attention has been paid, however, to the exporting of a distinctly Western mode of reading, one consolidated by the novel, and specifically the Bildungsroman, and the subgenre of the coming-​out novel. This chapter begins by exploring the  rise of the Bildungsroman and its relationship to an epistemology of the closet; it then shows how the rise of the novel has affected our approach to lyric poetry, leading both to its marginalization in gay anthologies and to its “novelization.” The chapter ends with a consideration of the queer translations of lyric poetry by the nineteenth-​century Russian poet Aleksei Apukhtin as demonstrating a distinctly lyrical understanding of the lyric—​and of reading more generally—​that can help us move beyond the kind of paranoid reading generated by an epistemology of the closet and to imagine the translation of lyric poetry as a distinct site of queer performance and reparative reading. My call to embrace the lyric in all its somatic power as an act of queer resistance to the Western regulation of sexual desire and pleasure is informed by the work of several scholars. First, Foucault, who, while working in the archives of the Bastille in the 1970s, envisioned a kind of anthology of existences, consisting of archival fragments “presented without interpretation or commentary” that would be read not as biographies but as “strange poems” (qtd. in Dinshaw 1999, 140). His description of the fragments as poems had to do with the strong somatic reaction they elicited when he chanced upon them in the archives: “I would find it difficult to say just what I felt when I found these fragments […] No doubt one of those impressions we call ‘physical’, as though there could be any other kind” (qtd. in Macey 1993, 361). More recently, Paul B.  Preciado ends his introduction to the 2018 English translation of Countersexual Manifesto with a plea for more poetry in a section titled “Poetry Is the

Keep the lyric queer  141 Only Politics.” In calling for the decolonization of the sexual body through the cultivation of “somatic communism,” Preciado (2018, 17) writes, It is precisely because the violence of the sexual and colonial regime is too serious that it is necessary to unfold the unconscious and deconstructing forces of poetry against it. Here we must draw upon everything that the artistic and minority movements have taught us. The counterhegemonic potential of poetry, in Preciado’s view, is based in its somatic power. Efaín Kristal (2002), in his response to Franco Moretti, argues against the hegemony of the novel over lyric forms, as played out in global literary histories. Kristal takes issue with Moretti’s (2000, 227) privileging of the novel in his model of canon formation, “for the simple reason that [novels] have been the most widespread literary form of the past two or three centuries.” Kristal (2002, 63) argues that this decision to focus on the novel essentially erases the literary tradition of Spanish South America where poetry was “the dominant literary genre until the 1960s.” This is in effect a double erasure insofar as the poet Rubén Darío not only emanicipated Spanish–​American poetry from European literary norms with his innovations in metrics but also introduced anti-​imperialist content. Failure to consider the dominance of poetry in Spanish America in turn leads Moretti (1996, 249) to present the new Latin-​American novel as enacting, in his terms, “a complicity between magic and empire,” which appears to come out of nowhere. Kristal (2002, 74–​5) concludes his critique of Moretti by arguing for a counterhegemonic approach to world literature, one in which the novel is not necessarily the privileged genre for understanding literary developments of social importance in the periphery; in which the West does not have a monopoly over the creation of forms that count; in which themes and forms can move in several directions […]; and in which strategies of transfer in any direction may involve rejections, swerves, as well as transformations of various kinds, even from one genre to another. The full imperial implications of Kristal’s argument become clear when we take into account the fact that only Western poetics is founded on mimesis, which reaches it apotheosis in the realist novel. As Earl Miner points out, “Lyric is the foundation genre for the poetics or systematic literary assumptions of cultures throughout the world. Only Western poetics differs” (Miner 2000, 4).1 And so, recognizing the lyric as a distinct and privileged form of queer expression, and its somatic power as a legitimate form of queer knowledge and world-​ making is crucial in resisting the Eurocentrism that continues to dominate the study of literature in general and of “gay” literature in particular.2

142  Keep the lyric queer

Gay identity and the synecdochal aesthetique In The Anthology and the Rise of the Novel, Leah Price connects the novel and the anthology as sharing a “synecdochal esthetique,” which encourages readers to read (or conjure) a whole from its parts. Benedict Anderson implies a connection between this synecdochal aesthetique and the modern nation in his discussion of newspapers, which lead readers to imagine a national unity from the disparate, unconnected news reports. The modern nation as imagined in newspapers then, Anderson (1991, 24)  argues, is based on a conception of simultaneity “marked not by prefiguring and fulfillment, but by temporal coincidence, and measured by clock and calendar.” Of course, the other cultural form that “made it possible for rapidly growing numbers of people to think about themselves, and to relate to others, in profoundly new ways” (Anderson 1991, 36) was the novel. In emphasizing the simultaneity of novels, that is, how they are like newspapers, however, Anderson fails to adequately deal with the major difference between newspapers and novels, which is chronology. As David Lloyd (1993, 154; italics added) writes, “Like Bakhtin, Anderson omits the crucial regulative function of the novel that puts in place a developmental narrative through which the nation apes empire and through which it orders internally a certain hierarchy of belonging, of identity within the nation.” Moretti (2000, 20) makes a similar point about the novel: “[I]‌t’s a form that (unlike an anthem or a monument) not only does not conceal the nation’s internal differences but manages to turn them into a story.” And so, the distinction between newspapers, which arrange their texts somewhat randomly—​ enabling what is often referred to as the serendipity of newspaper reading—​and novels, which tend to chronologize their narrations—​in fact, the serialization of novels throughout much of the nineteenth century reinforced the chronological unfolding of the plot through time—​are in some ways analogous to the distinction between anthologies that alphabetize their contents and anthologies that chronologize them. That being said, the anthologies that do not chronologize their texts are often associated with cultural conservatism (presenting literary works as timeless classics, or gems, that are not mere products of their time), while the nonchronology of newspapers is associated with the “homogenous empty time” of modernity and, as such, with the ephemeral. The ways in which the novel, with its developmental narrative, is implicated in nations aping empires, to use Lloyd’s phrase, is the theme of Joseph Slaughter’s Human Rights, Inc. The novel, Slaughter (2007, 110)  argues, and specifically, the Bildungsroman, with its “emancipatory plot-​logic of progressive linear improvement” provides the rhetorical means for resolving the gap between the individual and the social by aligning the hero’s private and public identities, that is, by making the hero’s private identity into a public one. “Both human rights and the Bildungsroman,” Slaughter writes, “[plot] a process of incorporation by which the individual

Keep the lyric queer  143 is constituted and regulated as a creature of freedom, […] a creature capable of bearing rights and freedoms” (10). It is this connection between personal emancipation and subjection to universal law that represents the double bind of Western liberalism. The hero’s individual story is, in turn, lent social or historical resonance as rehearsing the development of society as a whole, and the modernization of the world. It is this developmental logic of the Bildungsroman—​ its seductive story of emancipation that masks or mystifies the process of incorporation—​that allows nations to ape empires, as illustrated in Edmund Clarence Stedman’s developmental history of American literature, culminating in the US victory in the Spanish–​American war (see Chapter 3). America’s consolidation as a nation paradoxically marks its transformation into an overseas empire. In other words, the consolidation of the nation simply rehearses the process of incorporating the rest of the world. And so, paradoxically, the maturation of American letters, in Stedman’s view, involves rejecting foreign inspiration and models, culminating in the US victory over the Old World, which then leads to the uneasy incorporation of the “foreign” into the nation, as suggested by the 1901 US Supreme Court decision in Downes v. Bidwell, which declared Puerto Ricans to be “foreign in a domestic sense” (see Mack 2017). Slaughter traces the roots of Bildung to Kant, but its roots go back much further, to the emancipation narrative of the Old Testament (see Aberbach 2005), suggesting the extent to which this is a distinctly Western reading of history, which posits enslavement as a prerequisite for emancipation and, when universalized, becomes the mechanism by which other individuals and nations are incorporated into a Western religious–​political epistemology. Central to the workings of this emancipation narrative is the prerequisite that one first be enslaved. In the case of sexuality, it had first to be pathologized in the West before it could be liberated from that pathologization—​by the very field of sexology that had initially pathologized it. Of course, the difference between the Old Testament story of liberation that is played out again in the New Testament story of Christ liberating the world from sin differs from the Bildung in one important way: chronology. Those sacred stories mark a simple passage from slavery into freedom, which, in its Christian version led to the division of historical time into BC and AD . Bildung, however, involves a process of formation, development. The relevance of all this to our discussion of sexuality is that the liberal congenital argument that was the basis for calls for tolerance and decriminalization of sodomy in the West sent the gay rights movement down the path of nationhood (often referred to as the “civil rights model”) with all its ambivalences and contradictions, promising an emancipation that was always already a subjection and that inaugurated a process of incorporation. (This was also reflected in the movement’s shifting relationship to translation, as demonstrated in Chapter 4.) Joseph Massad captures many of these ambivalences and contradictions in his study of the way Middle Eastern societies were incorporated into

144  Keep the lyric queer the Western sexual epistemology, which, Massad argues (2007, 100, 163), cast itself as “a liberatory social approach whose telos included sexual and gender emancipation,” but that has produced “an effect that is less than liberatory.” As Massad (2007, 269) notes in a chapter entitled Deviant Fictions, the novel was the primary vehicle for consolidating and exporting the Western sexual epistemology: “The novel form is significant both in the type of labor it performs for social analysis and in its deployment of sexual allegories while representing social (and sexual) histories to address complex socioeconomic and political processes.” Through the novel, and specifically that subgenre of the Bildungsroman referred to as the coming-​out novel, the individual is made to embody a Western developmental reading of history, and the individual’s coming out is meant to reinforce the association of the West with freedom and liberation, often troped as visibility. In fact, what better definition of the coming-​out story could there be than this gloss of the Bildungsroman offered by Slaughter (2007, 3): “The didactic story of an individual who is socialized in the process of learning for oneself what everyone else (including the reader) presumably already knows.” We see this dual meaning of “subject” in fact in the title of the classic Western coming out novel, Edmund White’s A Boy’s Own Story, where “own” connects emancipation with property law, or ownership, which implies the incorporation of the individual as a subject of the law. (Incidentally, a minor cannot legally control property, so the connection to property could be said to mark the boy’s assumption of his majority, again, a legally defined identity.) Moreover, in literary histories, the rise of the novel is often presented as a story of progress, of increasing dominance over poetic forms, which are thereby, according to this developmental logic, relegated to the past and characterized as unmodern. Already in 1900, Stedman (1900, xxvii) notes the increasing dominance of the novel over lyric forms, associating this with modernity through references to speed, advances, and science: “The novelist has outsped the poet in absorbing a new ideationality conditioned by the advance of science.”3 So the rise of the novel plays out on a metalevel the developmental narrative that came to characterize its contents in the nineteenth century. As Stedman (1900, xxviii) points out, “Already books are written to show how an evolution of the novel has succeeded that of the poem.” Gregory Woods (1998, 136; italics added) tells a similar story in his history of gay literature, connecting the rise of the novel to the birth of the modern homosexual: [I]‌t is true that towards the end of the nineteenth century, at very roughly the same time that the existence of “the homosexual” as a distinct type of individual was being definitively established, the novel started to take over from poetry as the best place in which accessibly to express the quotidian realities of homosexual lives.

Keep the lyric queer  145 Interestingly, Woods appears to accept the supremacy of realism or mimesis in suggesting that the purpose of literature is to “express the quotidian realities of homosexual lives” and in a way that is maximally “accessible.” So a developmental logic is replayed at all levels, in the contents of the novel of formation, in the rise of the novel, and in novelistic histories, as Mark Lilly (1993, xi) demonstrates in the introduction to his Gay Men’s Literature in the Twentieth Century: “A key principle was coherence; that is, positively to choose a group of gay authors whose work could be discussed in the form, as it were, of a developing story.” As with the introduction of chronology into literary anthologies at the end of the nineteenth century, this connection of the individual to history was problematic insofar as it challenged core liberal beliefs in the autonomy of the individual. Remember Stedman’s comment that chronologizing the contents of his anthology made representativeness into a criterion of selection, instead of aesthetic quality alone. The great heroes of Bildungsromane are always products of their time. And so, when the conservative US economist Francis Fukuyama declared the fall of communism in Eastern Europe to be “the end of history,” he was exposing something about the ideology of democratic capitalism that had been repressed throughout much of the Soviet period—​namely, that it was no less teleological than Marxism. That revelation would be quickly dispelled by projecting it back onto Eastern Europe, which was described as being “in transition,” something we will discuss in greater length in Chapter 6. In other words, the West was at the end of its evolution, and so only other “developing” countries were subject to transitioning. And so, with those ideological connections in mind, it should come as no surprise that queer scholars have cast a critical eye on the synecdochal aesthetique and on the hegemony of mimesis. Lee Edelman, for example, fashioned a sophisticated queer critique of homosexual identity as a “mis-​ reading of metonymy for metaphor”—​that is, reading individual sexual acts for a totalizing identity. This critique was indebted, of course, to Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s brilliant analysis of a passage in Foucault’s History of Sexuality, where she demonstrates the way the epistemology of the closet informs Foucault’s own reading of the historical emergence of homosexuality as a totalizing identity in the late nineteenth century. We continue to see the epistemology of the closet at work in gay histories that relegate pre-​Stonewall authors such as Whitman, Lorca, and Proust to the closet. Similarly, from a contemporary identitarian perspective, “male friendship” becomes a coy euphemism, a metonym for the closet, rather than an attempt to imagine a homosocial continuum that might include homosexuality, rather than construing homosexuality as an irreparable rupture. (Of course, the emancipation narrative so central to the Western developmental model of history requires a closet so that one can come out of it.)

146  Keep the lyric queer The irreparable rupture, or definitive change of state, is in fact central to the logic of the Bildungsroman, especially its English version, described by Jurij Lotman as classificatory (1977, 231–​9). As Moretti (2000, 7) explains, When classification is strongest—​as in the English “family romance” and in the classical Bildungsroman—​narrative transformations have meaning in so far as they lead to a particularly marked ending: one that establishes a classification different from the initial one but nonetheless perfectly clear and stable—​definitive, in both senses this term has in English. This teleological rhetoric—​the meaning of events lies in their finality—​is the narrative equivalent of Hegelian thought, with which it shares a strong normative vocation: events acquire meaning when they lead to one ending, and one only. It is this permanent or definitive change of state that defines the “determined historicity” of the genre—​there is no going back—​and that distinguishes it from the lyric, as I will discuss below.

Novelizing the lyric The genre of the anthology, as discussed in Chapter 4, is a site at which the minoritarian model of sexual identity is put to the test, so to speak, as demonstrated in one of the few scholarly works to address the topic of the gay anthology, Charles Lambert’s “Speaking Its Name. The Poetic Expression of Gay Male Desire,” which appeared in the collected volume Language and Desire, Encoding Sex, Romance and Intimacy (1997), edited by Keith Harvey and Celia Shalom. At the beginning of the essay, Lambert notes the strange distribution of W. H. Auden’s poetic works among competing anthologies, with the Penguin Book of Love Poetry (Stallworthy 1976) including Auden’s best-​known love lyrics, “Lullaby” and “A Dream,” while the Penguin Book of Homosexual Verse (Coote 1983) contains only one poem by Auden, “Uncle Henry.” The first two poems do not mark the lovers as homosexual, while the third one does, but it is a completely satirical depiction of an aging pederast. Uncle Henry is a lisping, lecherous middle-​ aged homosexual who is traveling to the Middle East to indulge his lust for Arab youths, “Like a Gweek God and devoted: how delicious!” (Coote 1983, 320). Lambert (1997, 209)  describes the poem as “minor” and its inclusion in the anthology “a lapse of poetic and political taste on the part of the anthologist, or a recognition that much gay humour is directed at itself.” One might expect at this point for Lambert to advocate for “Lullaby” and “A Dream” to be included in gay anthologies. But, no. Within an epistemology of the closet, the absence of clear indicators of the gender of the lyric I and the poems’ addressee can only be interpreted as an act of self-​ censorship. According to this logic, homosexuality must be made textually visible, differentiated, and so, Lambert calls on gay poets to clearly mark

Keep the lyric queer  147 their love poetry as gay, without sinking into the kind of parody of “Uncle Henry.” In order to do so, they should, basically, double down on metonymy, in ways similar to pornographic writing, in order to meet what Lambert (1997, 219)  identifies as “the need to make space within traditional lyric discourse for the expression of an otherwise invisible, because undifferentiated, desire.” To the extent that the novel, at least since the rise of realism, is closely associated with a synecdochal aesthetique, Lambert’s focus on metonymy, meant to serve as a visible sign or clue of the sexual orientation of the lyric subject, could be said to reflect a novelization of the lyric. This becomes even more obvious in Lambert’s analysis of the workings of lyric poems, which he divides into three discrete roles: the lyric I, the addressee, and the reader. This is reminiscent of scholarly writing about novels, which typically distinguishes between the author, the narrator, and the characters. Even more novelistic is the way Lambert describes the competition between the reader and the addressee, for example, when the reader usurps the position of the addressee, relegating the addressee to the role of an “eavesdropper.” Such triangulation, and the rivalry it provokes is, according to René Girard in Deceit and Desire in the Novel (1976), central to the organization of the modern novel. (Note, at no point does Lambert entertain the notion that the reader might occupy the position of the lyric I.) Lambert’s analysis in fact reflects much of contemporary Western interpretations of the lyric, according to which, “the lyric is spoke by a persona whose situations and motivations one needs to reconstruct” (Culler 2015, 2). Such a conceptualization of the lyric, Jonathan Culler (2015, 2) contends, inevitably sends the reader down “a novelizing track.” As he goes on to explain: One result of the centrality of the novel to theoretical discourse as well as to the literary experience and literary education has been the development of a novelizing account of the lyric that fails to respond to what is most extravagant and most distinctive about it. (3) In this sense, the lyric form is colonized twice over by the novel—​first, by being marginalized in anthologies and scholarship and, second, by being interpreted in ways that basically novelize it, subjecting it to a hermeneutics of suspicion (Who is the lyric I?) or what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick calls a paranoid reading (Is s/​he gay?). We see this novelization of queer lyric poetry in the persistent (mis)reading of lyric indirection as “encryption.” This is evident in Eric Keenaghan’s (1998) analysis of American poet Jack Spicer’s translation of Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca’s “Oda a Walt Whitman” [Ode to Walt Whitman]. The premise of the analysis is that Garcia Lorca’s sexuality is closeted in his poetry, and that Spicer seeks to make it visible by using more sexually

148  Keep the lyric queer explicit terminology. Once we accept the premise that the poet’s sexual desire has been encrypted, the reader is sent down a track that is novelizing in at least two senses: first, it begs for interpretation of “clues” and, second, it ignores any consideration of rhyme, rhythm, and sound patterning in evaluating word choice, separating content from form, or expression. And this is an interpretation that is doomed to success. Let me offer a couple of examples from Keenaghan’s analysis. The first involves a comparison of two English translations of the verse line “con el sexo atravesado por una aguja,” one by Spicer (“With his prick pierced through by a needle”) and the other by a nongay-​identified translator, Ben Bellitt (“whose sex is transfixed by a needle”). Intent on showing that Bellitt’s translation “insinuates the period’s violence, whether physically or ideologically manifest, against the potentially homosexual visibility of male genitals” (1998, 279), Keenaghan gives no consideration to the echoing of the “ex” of sex in transfixed, or that the juxtaposition of sex and transfixed—​to be transfixed by someone’s sex?—​has erotic potential. Similarly, when Lorca describes a scene with Whitman and a friend in the line, “cuando al amigo come tu manzana” [when the friend eats your apple], Keenaghan must (mis)present what I find to be a very homoerotic image of Whitman perhaps feeding his friend the apple or of the friend taking his apple, as “a possible encoding of the act of fellatio” (287). He then reiterates, “This picaresque scene is deeply encrypted” (287). Once construed as encrypted, this cannot be a homoerotic act in and of itself, it must stand for a more sexually explicit act. As with Lambert, the thing encrypted turns out to be pornographic. And so, while Spicer’s translation of the line—​“And you give a friend an apple”—​might appear less erotic by omitting the possessive pronoun and by making “you” the active subject (“you give a friend an apple” vs. “when the friend eats your apple”), Keenaghan must argue the opposite: “Whitman [in Spicer’s rendition] does not simply share an apple with his friend but gives it to him” (288). The construal of Lorca’s work as encrypted is further justified by suggesting that the addressee of the poem, Walt Whitman, was not himself in the closet but placed there by his audience:  “Whitman’s homosexuality has been obfuscated in the critical reception of his work, a hiding of his sexuality urged by his reading public” (286). No mention is made of the fact that Whitman himself resisted any labeling of his desire as homosexual, and so, when John Addington Symonds sought to provoke Walt Whitman to “come out” as a homosexual, Whitman gave an answer pregnant with lyrical indirection: “I have six illegitimate children”—​this, to someone who himself had four legitimate children (Williams 2010, 122). The novelization of the lyric is then completed when Keenaghan (Spicer 1975, 11–​12) discusses Spicer’s introduction to the collection containing his translation of the Lorca poem:  “The reader, who is not a party to this singular tryst [between Lorca and Spicer], may be amused by what he overhears.” Once again, as with Lambert, the reader is cast in the role of eavesdropper,

Keep the lyric queer  149 signaling a thoroughly novelistic distribution of roles, the inevitable effect of a hermeneutics of suspicion. The hermeneutics of suspicion is central to what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (2003, 126)  theorizes as “paranoid reading” or the paranoid mode of inquiry that has come to seem “entirely co-​extensive with critical theoretical inquiry.” Sedgwick goes on to describe paranoia as reflexive and mimetic, which she elaborates through a reading of D.  A. Miller’s The Novel and the Police (1988). The problem with paranoia, Sedgwick avers, is that its mimeticism “circumscribes its potential as a medium of political or cultural struggle” (131). And so, Sedgwick proposes an alternative, what she labels reparative reading, which she describes as “a position from which it is possible in turn to use one’s own resources to assemble or ‘repair’ the murderous part-​objects into something like a whole—​though, I would emphasize, not necessarily like any preexisting whole” (126). However, many of the cultural practices that could be called reparative, Sedgwick argues, “become invisible and illegible under a paranoid optic” (147). And so, what I will argue below is that the nonmimeticism of lyric poetry, often rendered invisible and illegible under a paranoid (novelistic) optic, can become a site of reparative reading, as illustrated in the poetic translations of the nineteenth-​century Russian queer poet Aleksei Apukhtin. Tapping lyric poetry’s potential for political or cultural struggle can be accomplished, therefore, not by doubling down on metonomy, or a synecdochal aesthetic but by embracing lyric poetry’s reparative ability to conjure wholes. Isn’t this what Preciado (2018, 16) was getting at when he ended his introduction to the English translation of his Countersexual Manifesto with a call for more poetry in a section titled: “Poetry Is the Only Politics.”

Reclaiming the lyric The nonmimetic nature of lyric poetry distinguishes it in a number of ways from the novel. First, as Jonathan Culler elaborates in Theory of the Lyric (2015), it is not primarily narrative. Rather, as Culler (2015, 7) defines it, the lyric is “fundamentally nonmimetic, nonfictional, a distinctive linguistic event.” Its status as an event is a product of its distinctive use of language—​ rhyme, rhythm, and repetition—​to create an almost hallucinatory or incantatory effect designed to seduce the reader, what Barbara Godard (1995, 72)  refers to as “sonorous liaisons.” As such, those lyric elements resist interpretation, or what Culler refers to as “semantic recuperation” or a subordination to meaning (8), in favor of a somatic embodiment. Another way to put this is that interpretation was not the primary way in which readers engaged with lyric. As Culler argues, “[Readers] might parse, initiate, translate, memorize, evaluate, or identify allusions and rhetorical or prosodic strategies, but interpretation in the modern sense was not part of literary engagement until the twentieth century” (5; italics added). Note translation here as a distinctly lyrical form of engagement tied to repetition,

150  Keep the lyric queer or the aesthetic of imitatio (see Baer 2016, esp. Chapter 5). Lyric poetry, as Paul Valéry puts it, is “not just noticed and respected but desired and thus repeated” (qtd. in Culler 2015, 134). Or, as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (1993, 181) said of a beloved poem from her childhood: “I know its two-​beat line as well as I know my own pulse.” Moreover, its reliance on rhythm, rhyme, and sound patterning means that lyrics are meant to be read aloud, giving the lyric a “somatic quality”; it is an embodied reading. As Horace A. Eaton (1913, 151)  declares in a 1913 article on the importance of reading poetry aloud: “So, the ear must be appealed to if the student is to understand literature aright, or to appreciate at all the sensuous beauty which is latent in it.” The role of the sensuous to understanding here would appear to challenge any exclusive separation of mind and body of the kind reflected in the tendency in Western hermeneutics to separate content from form, or expression, which is what Susan Sontag (1966, 4) argues in “Against Interpretation”: The fact is, all Western consciousness of and reflection upon art have remained within the confines staked out by the Greek theory of art as mimesis or representation. It is through this theory that art as such—​ above and beyond given works of art—​becomes problematic, in need of defense. And it is the defense of art which gives birth to the odd vision by which something we have learned to call “form” is separated off from something we learned to call “content,” and to the well-​intentioned move which makes content essential and form accessory. This is why, Sontag concludes, we don’t need a hermeneutics of art, we need an erotics of art. Oscar Wilde stages the conflict between hermeneutics and erotics in his short story “The Portrait of Mr. W.H.,” placing a scene of sensuous lyric reading at the very end, confounding the story’s anticipated telos—​the discovery of W. H.’s true identity—​with a reparative return to the body and erotics. Often misread as Wilde’s “outing” of Shakespeare, the short story in fact challenges the novelization of art, as epitomized in the detective story, with its hermeneutics of suspicion. Unable to solve the mystery of W.  H.’s identity and of whether he and Shakespeare were lovers, the narrator sets up a kind of shrine, placing a forged portrait of Willie Hewes on his desk. Then, with the portrait before him, he opens Shakespeare’s sonnets and begins to read: I took out of the library my copy of Shakespeare’s sonnets, and Mr. Tyler’s fascinating edition of the Quarto, and began to go carefully through them. Each poem seemed to corroborate Cyril Graham’s theory. I felt as if I had my hand upon Shakespeare’s heart, and was counting each separate throb and pulse of passion. I  thought of the wonderful boy actor, and saw his face in every line. (Wilde 1966, 1162)

Keep the lyric queer  151 The ending utterly confounds the expected denouement of a detective story, replacing it with a distinctly lyric fantasy, the truth of which is inscribed in the reader’s body. Of course, Wilde highlights the distinct nature of the lyric event in a prose narrative, presaging, perhaps, the increasing novelization of the lyric over the course of the twentieth century. In a similarly paradoxical way, the Calamus anthology of gay prose discussed in Chapter 4 opens with the following epigraph from Walt Whitman’s lyric “Full of Life Now,” which dramatizes the blurring of author and reader in the lyric event: When you read these I that was visible am become invisible, Now it is you, compact, visible, realizing my poems, seeking me, Fancying how happy you were if I could be with you and become your comrade; Be it as if I were with you. (Be not too certain but I am now with you.) (Galloway and Sabisch 1982, 21) The distinct somatic power of lyric poetry derives from the fact that the reader, during the event of the lyric, inhabits the site of enunciation. John Vincent makes this point in Queer Lyrics. Difficulty and Closure in American Poetry, connecting it to the whole question of legibility. Discussing John Ashbery’s poem “Or in My Throat,” Vincent (2002, xix) writes, But Ashbery’s title also emphasizes an aspect of the lyric that is not unrelated to imagining all bodies as penetrable. Is the poem in the poet’s throat or in the reader’s throat? The voice that speaks the lyric is and is not the reader’s; identity slippage and interpenetration is central to any lyric. A confusion of tongues (whose tongue is in whose throat?) occurs between the poet, persona, or speaker(s) and the reader. This is unique to the genre. Unless, of course, we insist on reading the lyric like a novel. Not surprisingly, then, lyric poetry continuously confounds Western mimetic theories of translation, typically presented as the exception to the rule. As the Soviet translator Samuil Marshak (1990, 216)  puts it in his 1962 essay “Poeziia perevoda” [The Poetry of Translation]: “The translation of lyric poetry is impossible. Every time is an exception.” The initial cordoning off of somatics from semantics in Western hermeneutics, virtually guarantees that the lyric will be illegible in theories of translation, especially in the postwar period when translation theories were deeply influenced by military code-​breaking, that is, transmitting messages. (It was the role of translation in ending the war and in the international organizations meant to prevent future wars that produced the first translator and interpreter training programs in many parts of the world, alongside the first writings on machine translation.) The problem posed by somatics to theories of

152  Keep the lyric queer translation is wonderfully traced by Roman Jakobson in his seminal essay of 1959 “On Linguistic Aspects of Translation.” While in the first part of the essay, Jakobson (2000, 116)  stakes out a position of total translatability when he declares, “Languages differ essentially in what they must convey not in what they may convey,” he then begins a slow retreat from that position by delving into instances of language use where form shapes the content. One example relates to grammatical gender, which in Part 1 was discussed in relation to the Russian word rabotnista, referring to a female worker. While a single term may not exist in English, one could easily add a modifier to indicate the worker’s gender. The situation is complicated, however, when a concept is allegorized as this may transform the contingent grammatical gender of the concept into the essential biological gender of the allegorized figure. For example, the Russian word for death, “smert,” is feminine and so is often allegorized with a feminine image, whereas the German word, der Tod, is masculine and so is often allegorized with a masculine image, posing problems for the translator that go beyond those posed by the use of rabotnitsa in everyday speech. He then ends the essay with a discussion of poetry, in which form and content are inextricably linked, which, he argues, necessitates “creative transposition” (118), something he thereby distinguishes from translation proper. Poet-​translators, however, recognize that incorporating lyric poetry into a theory of translation requires, in the formulation of Polish poet, translator, and theorist Stanislaw Baranczak (2020, online), that we “pass from the semiotic to the somatic.” Baranczak justifies this move by asserting that the reason for reading poetry in the first place is “for its unity in multiplicity to send us a shiver. A metaphysical shiver, but a quite literally physiological one too.” James Holmes (1989, 57; italics added), often referred to as the founder of Translation Studies for his essay “The Name and Nature of Translation Studies” (1988), describes his initial encounter with translation in quite irrational, somatic terms: “And for some reason or other, from the very beginning, learning another language—​I was, of course, terribly hooked on poetry—​got all tied up with immediately trying to translate poems from that other language into English.” Or, as Spivak (2000, 372) argues, Paradoxically, it is not possible for us as ethical agents to imagine otherness or alterity maximally. We have to turn the other into something like the self in order to be ethical. To surrender in translation is more erotic than ethical. With this in mind, and insisting on a distinction between eroticism and pornography, I hope to show how Aleksei Apukhtin’s queer translations of lyric poetry can be understood as a form of reparative reading, or, as Culler (2015, 8–​9) puts it, “a form of social action which contributes to the construction of a world and works to resist other forms of world-​making carried out by instrumental rationality and reified common sense.” By censoring

Keep the lyric queer  153 heterosexual markers, not homosexual ones, Apukhtin universalizes the site of enunciation, turning these translations into sites of queer performativity that cannot easily be incorporated into an epistemology of the closet or subjected to a hermeneutics of suspicion.

Apukhtin’s queer translations Aleksei Apukhtin (1840–​93) and Oscar Wilde (1854–​1900) were contemporaries, although Apukhtin did not live to experience the effect of Wilde’s trial on charges of gross indecency on the expression of queer desire—​which coincided with the founding of the first gay rights organization in Great Britain, in 1894.4 Nonetheless, assessments of Apukhtin’s poetic oeuvre are typically informed by a very contemporary epistemology of the closet. As Kostya Rotikov (1998, 267), the pen name of the late Iurii Piriutko, writes in his “gay” history of the Russian capital Drugoi Peterburg [The Other Petersburg], Apukhtin’s verses were “astonishing in their time for their openness,” while Alexander Poznansky (1996, 5) describes Apukhtin as leading “an openly homosexual life-​style, embarrassed by nothing, fearful of nothing, and making his life-​style the butt of his own jokes.” Apukhtin in fact, like Wilde before his incarceration, developed an elaborate poetics of indirection, which, I will argue, when read alongside his translations, cannot be read retrospectively as closeted, but rather, enact a distinctly lyrical mode of queer performativity. Let’s look first at Apukhtin’s original poetry, which heavily relies on metonymy and tends to avoid any gender indicators. Because the Russian language has three grammatical genders—​masculine, feminine, and neuter—​ that are reflected in the endings of nouns, adjectives, and past tense verbs, it is often difficult to avoid any reference whatsoever to the gender of the lyric subject or of the poem’s addressee. In the famous love lyric by Aleksandr Pushkin (1978, 198), “Ia pomniu chudnoe mgnovenie” [I Remember That Miraculous Moment], for example, the addressee is revealed to be female in line two through the poet’s use of “iavilas,” the past tense of the verb “to appear,” with its feminine singular ending. And so, while Modest Chaikovskii insists that Apukhtin’s poem “Sukhie, redkie, nechaiannye vstrechi” [Dry, Infrequent, Unintended Meetings] was addressed to Apukhtin’s love interest at the time and Modest’s classmate at the juridical institute, Aleksei Alekseevich Valuev, nothing on the textual surface of the poem reveals the gender of the addressee: Sukhie, redkie, nechaiannye vstrechi,       Pustoi, nichtozhnyi razgovor, Tvoi umyshlenno-​uklonchivye rechi,       I tvoi namerenno-​kholodnyi, strogii vzor, -​-​ Vse govorit, chto nado nam rasstat’sia,       Chto schast’e bylo i proshlo…

154  Keep the lyric queer No v etom tak zhe gor’ko mne soznat’sia,       Kak konchit’ s zhizn’iu tiazhelo. (1991, 154) [The dry, infrequent, and sorrowful meetings,       The empty, meaningless conversation, Your deliberately evasive speeches       And your intentionally cold, stern glance –​ All this says that we must part       That the happiness that was is gone… But it’s as bitter for me to acknowledge that       As it is difficult to part with life.]5 Here Apukhtin’s poetics of suggestion is achieved through the use of metonymy (“Your deliberately evasive speeches” and “your intentionally cold, stern glance”), which allows the poet to avoid any indication of the addressee’s gender. In the poem “In the Theater,” Apukhtin reveals his own gender as male, while obscuring that of his addressee by again relying on a string of metonyms (1991, 131). Similarly, in an untitled poem from 1884, “Dva serdtsa liubiashchikh i chaiushchikh otveta” [Two Hearts in Love and Hoping for a Response], Apukhtin avoids indicating the gender of the two lovers described in the poem by referring to them with the metonym “two hearts.” (Moreover, the Russian word for “heart,” serdtse, is grammatically neuter.) At the beginning of stanza two, he teases the queer reader by using the singular pronoun nem, which references a masculine noun, but then reveals in the following line that the pronoun refers to “day” (the word “den” is grammatically masculine): “I nochi tselye ia dumaiu o nem /​Ob etom blizskom dne” [And for entire nights I think of it [or: him] /​Of that approaching day] (1991, 237). In this way, Apukhtin plays with the noncoincidence of grammatical and biological gender. In addition to metonomy, Apukhtin avoids making any direct reference to the addressee’s gender by using only present or future tenses and/​or the imperative mood, which do not reflect the gender of the grammatical subject. This strategy is evident in the poem “Otvet na pis’mo” [An Answer to a Letter] where the gender of the addressee, referred to repeatedly as Vy (you, plural), is never revealed in the 42 lines of the poem (1991, 240–​1). Reliance on the word drug also plays an important role in Apukhtin’s poetics of indirection—​and in that of other Russian queer poets. A masculine singular noun meaning “friend” or “beloved,” drug can be used to refer to either a man or a woman, and in both cases will take masculine adjectives. Another crucial element in Apukhtin’s poetics of indirection involves implicitation, made possible by shared background knowledge among a select group of “shrewd readers,” to use Loseff’s term. Among such cues we can include references to queer hangouts such as the restaurant Medved [The Bear] (1991, 226–​7) in the poem “Son” [The Dream], where he describes the figures on the wallpaper. Similarly, readers who knew the

Keep the lyric queer  155 nature of Apukhtin’s relationship with Chaikovsky might read the title of the poem addressed to the composer as Dorogói (masc. sing. nominative case), or “dear,” instead of Dorógoi (fem. sing. instrumental case), or “on the road” (1991, 226–​7). On occasion, Apukhtin queers his lyric verse by adopting the Byronic stance of the despised outsider, which, for those who know the poet’s sexual orientation, is easily read as defiantly queer, as in the following oft-​quoted verses from the poem “Kogda, v ob”iatiiakh prodazhnykh zamiraia” [When, reconciling in mercenary embraces] Tebia ne ustrashat ni gnev sud’by surovoi, Ni tsepi tiazhkie, ni poshlyi sud liudei… I ty otdash’ vsiu zhizn’ za laskovoe slovo, Za milyi, dobryi vzgliad zadumchivykh ochei! (1991, 260)

[You are not frightened by the wrath of a cruel fate, Nor by heavy chains, nor by the vulgar judgement of people… You would give your whole life for a gentle word, For a sweet, kind look from pensive eyes!] The sex of the lyric subject is not revealed nor is the sex of the addressee and of the addressee’s love interest, relying on nonsex-​specific metonyms, such as “pensive eyes.” But all this is, one might say, dog bites man. More radical are Apukhtin’s translations, in which he queers poetic works authored by nongay-​identified poets by removing heterosexual gender indicators, thereby queering the very site of enunciation while foreclosing any reading of such universality as a symptom of the closet. In other words, this cannot be read as the closeting or repression of a minoritarian identity. Fluent in French, Italian, and German—​ Apukhtin in fact composed verses in French—​Apukhtin pursued his queer translation project in a number of different ways, which I describe below. Simply removing gender-​specific language is one of the most common strategies he employs. In the poem “Ständchen” by Ludwig Rellstab, for example, he does not render the feminine singular adjective Holde, which clearly indicates the gender of the poem’s addressee as female, and translates Liebchen (neuter diminutive form in German), as drug prekrasnyi, or “excellent friend” (masc. sing.): Serenada Shuberta Noch’ unosit golos strastnyi, Blizok den’ truda… O, ne medli, drug prekrasnyi, O, pridi siuda!

156  Keep the lyric queer Zdes’ svezho rosy dykhan’e, Zvuchen plesk ruch’ia, Zdes’ tak polny obaian’ia Pesni solov’ia! I tak vniatny v etom pen’e, V etot chas liubvi, Vse rydan’ia, vse muchen’ia, Vse mol’by moi! (1991, 347)

[A Schubert Serenade Night carries away a passionate voice,         The workday is nigh… O, do not tarry, excellent friend,         Come hither! Here the breath of dew is fresh,         The babbling of the brook rings out, How filled with charm         The nightingale’s song! And how distinct amid this singing,         In this hour of love, Is all my torment, all my weeping,         All my supplications!] The marked placement of “Come hither” in the translation may also serve to echo Aleksandr Pushkin’s “Conjury,” which ends with the “Ko mne, moi drug, siuda, siuda!” [To me, my friend [masc.], hither, hither!] I will discuss the connection of lyric poetry to conjury in the conclusion. Similarly, in translating a romantic lyric by Schiller, Apukhtin replaces the original title “Amalie” with the generic “Iz Schillera” [From Schiller], thus removing the only indication in the poem that the lyric subject is female, the opening stanza of which is a paean to male beauty: Chuden byl on, tochno angel raia, Krasotoiu kto b sravnilsia s nim? Vzor ego –​kak luch ot solntsa maia, Otrazhenyi morem golubym. (1991, 347)

[Miraculous was he, a true angel from paradise, Who in beauty could compare to him? His gaze was like a ray of May sunlight Reflected off an azure sea.]

Keep the lyric queer  157 Apukhtin is also drawn in his selection of texts for translation to lyrics featuring the Romantic outsider, such as Byron’s “Among Them but Not of Them,” taken from Childe Harold. The original reads: I have not loved the world, nor the world me; I have not flatter’d its rank breath, nor bow’d To its idolatries a patient knee,—​ Nor coin’d my cheek to smiles,—​nor cried aloud In worship of an echo; in the crowd They could not deem me one of such; I stood Among them, but not of them; in a shroud Of thoughts which were not their thoughts, and still could, Had I not filled my mind, which thus itself subdued. (Canto iii, Stanza 113) In Apukhtin’s rather free translation, the ending is decidedly more defiant than in Byron’s original: Iz Bairona S dushoiu, dlia liubvi otkrytoiu shiriko, Prishel doverchivo ty k nim? Zachem zhe v ikh tolpe stoish’ ty odinoko I dumoi gorkoiu tomim? Priveta teplogo dusha tvoia iskala, No net ego v sukhikh serdtsakh: Pred zolotim tel’tsom oni, zhretsy Vaala, Lezhat prostertye vo prakh… Ne setui, ne ropshchi –​khot’ chasto serdtsu bol’no, Bud’ gord i tverd v likhoi borb’be –​ I ver’, chto nedalek tot den’, kogda nevol’no Oni pokloniatsia tebe! (1991, 358)

[Did you soulfully, for a wide-​open love,       Go trustingly to them? Why do you stand alone there in their crowd       And wallow in bitter thoughts? Your soul sought a warm greeting,       But there was none in their dry hearts: Before the golden calf, they, priests of Baal,       Lie prostrate in the dust.

158  Keep the lyric queer Neither lament nor grumble —​though your heart may ache,       Be proud and firm in the heat of battle, And believe the day is nigh, when despite themselves       They will bow down to you.] We see a similar outsider’s perspective in Apukhtin’s translation of a French poem, the source of which is unknown, which Apukhtin titles simply S frantsuzskogo [From the French]: S frantsuzskogo O, smeisia nado mnoi za to, chto bezuchastno, Ia v mire ne idu probitoiu tropoi, Za to, chto pesen dar i zhizn’ ia szheg naprasno, Za to, chto gibnu ia … O, smeisia nado mnoi! Glumis’ i khokhochi s bezzhaloctnym ukorom –​ Tolpa pochtit tvoi smekh sochustviem zhivym; Vse budet za tebia, prokliat’ia grianut khorom, I kamni poletiat poslushno za tvoim. I esli, sovpadat’ s toskoiu ne umeia, Iznyvshaia dusha zastonet, zadrozhit… Skorei sdavi mne grud’, prervi moi ston skoree, A to, byt’ mozhet, Bog uslyshit i prostit. (1991, 257)

[O, do not laugh at me for apathetically Failing to take the more-​travelled path, For burning through the gift of song and my life for naught, For dying… O, do not laugh at me! Mock and guffaw in merciless reproach—​ The crowd honors your laughter with a lively sympathy; Everyone will be after you, a chorus of curses will rise up, And stones will fly obediently after yours. And if, unable to control the ennui, My soul lets out a moan and trembles… I’d better squeeze my chest, interrupt my moan, And then, perhaps, God will hear and forgive.] The defiant stance of the outsider was similarly appropriated by the queer translator Ivan Likhachev when he translated Baudelaire’s “Epigraphe à un livre condamné” while in the Gulag, a poem that ends with the line: “Pity me, or else I curse you!” (For more on this, see Baer 2011b.) Here, we see the role of translation, with its attenuation of responsibility for the words

Keep the lyric queer  159 of the poem, in allowing these men to speak not in hushed whispers but in distinctly defiant tones. Perhaps the most complex or layered act of queering, however, occurs in Apukhtin’s translation of the French poet Delphine Gay’s lyric “Il m’aimait tant,” in which the translator, one could say, ventriloquizes a female voice. In assuming the position of the female lyric subject, the queer reciter of the verse can utter the line that ends every stanza: On tak menia liubil! On tak menia liubil! [He loved me so! He loved me so!] (1991, 352–​3). His translation was then set to music by his friend and one-​time lover Chaikovsky, suggesting a multitude of queer overtones. As Philip Ross Bullock explains: Gay published her collected poems as “Madame Emile de Girardin,” using her husband’s name to strike a decorous balance between feminine modesty and masculine authority. Subsequently translated into Russian by an infamous aesthete and homosexual, and set to music by a composer whose sexuality constitutes part of his own constructed identity (whether expressed or concealed), the poem serves less as a tribute to sincerity and stability than as a shrewd exercise in the ambiguous projection of character. The poem survives not as originally written, but in the polyphonic rendering of Tchaikovsky’s multiply displaced setting, in which the gender of the lyric heroine is revealed to be performative fantasy. (2008, 115; italics added) Apukhtin’s queering of lyric poems through translation is predicated on opening up the site of enunciation, making it a productive site of queer performance, which is fundamentally at odds with the determined historicity of the Bildungsroman. Moreover, that opening up is achieved not only by removing any gender markers in the texts but also by their very status as translations, which introduces a double-​voicedeness into the text and attenuates the whole question of textual ownership, and of completion—​texts can be translated ad infinitum. The fact that the choice of texts is not based on the original author’s sexual orientation also suggests a radically text-​centered rather than author-​centered approach to the production of queer literature, one that does not seek to incorporate queer subjects but to provide opportunities for queer performance. This is an aesthetics based less on identity than on (dis)identification, less on mimesis than on performative fantasy. As such, it is fundamentally different from Lambert’s call for gay poets to inscribe their identity in poems through the use of sexually-explicit metonymy.

Lyric conjury and reparative reading The command “pridi siuda” (come hither), located in the final line of stanza one of Apukhtin’s translation of Rellstab’s “Ständchen,” invokes the quintessential lyric address, insofar as lyric appears “at its most spectacular and

160  Keep the lyric queer blatant in the invocation of absent or nonhuman addressees” (Culler 2015, 8). Moreover, the command makes at least two intertextual references to well-​ known Russian lyrics. (Yes, translations can make intertextual reference to other target language works, and not just subconsciously, as Venuti suggests (2004),6 but also quite intentionally, as Susanna Witt (2016) demonstrates, a fact that argues for the complete integration of translations into literary studies.) One intertextual reference is to Lensky’s aria in Piotr Chaikovsky’s opera Evgenii Onegin.7 The aria, written by Konstantin Shilovsky, with the composer and his younger brother Modest, repeats the command “pridi” throughout, while employing exclusively male nouns and modifiers to refer to both the lyric I and the addressee: Zhelannyi drug—​pridi ia tvoi suprug, Pridi, ia tvoi suprug. Pridi, pridi. Ia zhdu tebia, zhelanny drug, Pridi, pridi, ia tvoi suprug. [Desired friend (masc. sing.)—​Come, I am your spouse (masc. sing.) Come, I am your spouse (masc. sing.) Come, come! I await you, desired friend (masc. sing.), Come, come, I am your spouse (masc. sing.)] The aria is ostensibly addressed to a future spouse, who is referred to throughout as drug, the masculine singular word for “friend.” Moreover, drug is rhymed with suprug, creating what in poetics is referred to as a masculine rhyme. If René Girard had known Russian, he would have no doubt interpreted the aria as alluding to the fact that the relationship between Lensky and Onegin is far more intense than the one between Lensky and the doe-​eyed Olga. The second intertextual reference is to Alexander Pushkin’s lyric poem “Zaklinanie,” translated as either “Conjury” or “Incantation.” In this lyric, the lyric I, like Lensky, is attempting to conjure his beloved, who is either far away or deceased. So, in both cases, the command “pridi” is an act of conjury that also obviates the need to indicate the addressee’s gender. The relationship between poetry and conjury is, of course, ancient, and something that distinguishes the lyric from prose forms, like the novel, as laid out by Culler (2015). In fact, when I was translating Pushkin’s “Conjury” for a collection of essays on cultural memory by the semiotician Juri Lotman, I initially translated the kak that is repeated throughout the poem as “like.” But Igor Pilshchikov pointed out to me that this kak was used not to create similes; rather, it has an “essive semantics”: “as; in the form of; under the disguise of.” In this way, we can understand lyric reading not as a misreading of metonymy for metaphor but as a conjuring of wholes, but specifically the kind of tentative wholes

Keep the lyric queer  161 imagined by Sedgwick, “something like a whole—​though, I would emphasize, not necessarily like any preexisting whole” (2013, 167). It is interesting in that light to reexamine Maria Tymoczko’s widely cited claim that translations are essentially metonymic, always rendering only parts of the original (Tymoczko 1999). Tymoczko argues that, because basically everything is a part of something greater—​every text for example is part of a genre—​everything is then metonymic. Even metaphors, she notes, are part of something greater, at which point they too become metonyms. The problem is, a metonym does not simply represent a part-​to-​whole relationship; it is a trope, in which the part stands in for the whole but need not be confused for the whole. To take an example Tymoczko uses, “Thus, twelve keels sailed the sea,” no one who knows what a keel is thinks that it is a ship. While as a trope it designates a ship, the reader nonetheless realizes the keel is only part of the ship. Therefore, in colonial contexts, if texts were read as metonyms, this would be a good thing insofar as they would be seen as only parts of the whole. The problem, as Lee Edelman argues, is when the part is confused for the whole, or when metonyms are misread as metaphors. Nevertheless, in much poststructuralist criticism metonymy is construed as liberatory, and metaphor as oppressive and regulatory, reflecting what Steven Best (1989, 361) describes as a poststructuralist “dictatorship of the fragments.” For example, Doris Sommer (1993, 420), in her reading of the Western misprision of Rigoberta Mechú’s memoir, associates metaphor with appropriation and metonymy with solidarity. Tymoczko does the same, and in so doing greatly circumscribes translation’s “potential as a medium of political or cultural struggle” (Sedgwick 2003, 131). This proliferation of metonymy, its rise to prominence as the privileged trope of a counterhegemonic scholarship, could be seen as yet another effect of a novelistic perspective, of a paranoid reading, atomizing, and fragmenting the possibility of the kind of holistic embodied experience represented by the lyric. It is no coincidence then that poetic translations suffer most from such atomizing reading practices, which divorce the semantic from the somatic, as evident in this remark by Primo Levi (2017, 145): “Since a literary work is born from a profound interaction between the creativity of the author and the language in which he expresses himself, there is an inevitable loss in translation, comparable to the loss when one exchanges currency. […] It is usually minimal with technical or scientific texts […] and maximal with poetry.” Moreover, if we see the prominence of metonymy alongside the rise of the synecdochal aesthetic of the novel as reflecting capitalism’s fragmentation of social life and of “an atomizing, disciplinary specialization of knowledge itself” (Floyd 2009, 6), then the resistant potential of metonymy becomes even less obvious, as does how such a construal of translation could possibly contribute to “empowering translators” (Tymoczko 1997). (See also Simpson’s (2011, 191) association of metonymy in Whitman’s poetry with the mystification of class, race and imperial expansion, discussed in Chapter 4.)

162  Keep the lyric queer Kate Briggs offers what I would call a lyrical response to this problematic politics of fragmentation as reflected in the metonymization of culture in her description of the translator as “a maker of wholes” (2017, 134, 221, 231, 260), underscoring the role of wholes, however tentative, in world-​ making. A  similar point is made by Rosmarie Waldrop (2002, 7)  in her meditation on translation, Lavish Absence:  “So what do I  want to serve? Clearly the whole.” Briggs (2017, 160)  goes on to explore alternatives to the poststructuralist obsession with metonymy when she discusses Barthes’s fascination with the Japanese haiku: Adrienne Ghaly has proposed new ways of thinking relationality on a micro-​scale; connecting, however fleetingly or long-​lastingly, a body to the atmosphere, a body to an idea or to a line from a book and in this way, perhaps, to another reading and writing body, and doing so in a manner that is neither generalizing nor flattening, neither crushing nor reducing. This models a reparative reading practice that is neither geneticist nor teleological as the connections described here are profoundly contingent and essive.

Conclusion If the rise of the novel has led to the novelization of the lyric, or the tendency to read the lyric as one would a novel—​in order to interpret it—​queer history provides a number of examples of lyrical readings of novels, that is readings that are characterized by the kind of intense, reparative embodiment typically associated with the lyric. There is the scene of John Addington Symonds staying up until dawn reading Carey’s translation of Plato, cited in Chapter 2; of Harvard professor Alain Locke reading Carpenter’s anthology of male friendship “at one sitting” (qtd. in Norton 1997, 72); of Keith Harvey’s adolescent reading of Proust, Genet, and Gide as discussed in the introduction to his Intercultural Movements (1997, 17); and of Jonathan Goldberg’s (1997, 465)  reading of Willa Cather’s “The Novel Démeublé,” which he found “intense, atmospheric, heavy with something that was not said, which I  nonetheless recognized,” and that he found “irresistible.” To this list we might add James Baldwin’s (1976, 7; qtd. in Muñoz 1999, 15) queer viewing of a film, during which he suddenly sees himself in the white Hollywood film actress Bette Davis, “pop eyes popping” who “walked like a nigga.” These moments of rapt reading and viewing—​in which queer subjects somehow find themselves where they should not be—​could be said to represent reparative, lyrical readings of narratives.8 Marked by an almost physical intensity and a sense of being outside time, such readings suggest that identification is always to some extent disidentification, as Muñoz theorizes it. Or as the translator Kate Briggs (2017, 228) puts it:

Keep the lyric queer  163 The point seems to be this: left to its own devices, the path of reading is very rarely chronologically ordered, thematically coherent, limited by language or respectful of borders. Books open out onto, they cross with and follow haphazardly on from one another. Left to its own devices, the path of reading strays all over the place. When such intensely lyrical experiences of (dis)identification are subjected to a paranoid reading, however, they are inevitably misrecognized as closeted. We see this in Keith Harvey’s own attempt to distance himself from such a reading. While acknowledging the importance of proto-​gay or queer authors, such as Proust, Genet, and Gide, to his understanding of himself as “gay”—​“Without these paperbacks in translation, I do not know where I  would have turned for homosexual voices”—​he nonetheless feels compelled to label this “ironic” (2003, 17). He then goes on to describe his reading of those novels as quintessentially “novelistic”—​that is, as a search for clues: “After Genet, I scoured Gide and Proust—​still in translation—​for passages that would help me make sense (as I saw it) of self and project an imagined community” (ibid.; italics added). To the extent the synecdochal aesthetic requires interpretation, it stands in fundamental opposition to the lyric mode of reading, which, because it is intense and embodied, is necessarily fleeting and so resists consolidation as an identity; that is, it does not signal a permanent change of state, as in the Bildungsroman. Dependent on the periodicity of rhythm, lyric time eschews the determined historicity of Bildung in favor of something more like the cycles of desire, perhaps, which is, of course, another way to read Whitman’s “Full of Life Now.”9

Notes 1 This distinctly Western focus on mimetics makes the novel a privileged vehicle of a western epistemology—​as demonstrated in Indra Levy’s Sirens of the Western Shore:  The Westernesque Femme Fatale, Translation and Vernacular Style in Modern Japanese Literature (2006). 2 Not only does lyric poetry remain a vital form of queer expression in Russia (see Baer 2018), there is also a marked resistance to the coming out novel. In my study of post-​Soviet “gay” novels, I found a pronounced avoidance of coming out as an organizing principle, focusing instead on tragic love affairs, which reflected a traditional Russian aversion to the “happy ending” (Baer 2009). Evgenii Bershtein contends that Russian homoerotic, or gay, literature largely rejected the Bildungsroman, as represented by Mikhail Kuzmin’s 1906 novel Wings, in favor of the philosophical fragment, represented by the work of the early-​twentieth-​ century writer Vasilii Rozanov. As Bershtein (2011, 85) explains, Rooted in the rationalist Enlightenment tradition, the Bildungsroman follows the individual’s search for a place in a community. It is within the community that the stasis is reached. The opposite is true of the fragment, for which the isolation from the surrounding world is a crucial characteristic.

164  Keep the lyric queer This suggests an aesthetics that is at odds with the modern Western drive to narrativize, or novelize, queer lives. “Completion, inherent in Bildung,” writes Bershtein (2011, 85), “has no place in the dynamic and infinite fragment.” 3 Stedman (1900, xvii–​xviii) goes on to say, [The novelist] has cleverly adjusted his work to the facilities and modern drawbacks of journalism. It is not strange that there should be a distaste for poetic illusion in an era when economics, no longer the dismal science, becomes a more fascinating study than letters, while its teachers have their fill of undergraduate hero-​worship. 4 The following presentation and analysis of Apukhtin’s translations was first published as pages 55–​ 62 of the chapter “A Poetics of Evasion:  The Queer Translations of Aleksei Apukhtin,” in the volume Queer in Translation, edited by B. J. Epstein and Robert Gillett (Routledge, 2017). 5 All translation from the Russian are mine unless otherwise indicated. 6 As Venuti (2004, 499)  explains it, “Translating releases a surplus of meanings which refer to domestic cultural traditions through deviations from the current standard dialect or otherwise standardized languages—​through archaisms, for example, or colloquialisms.” 7 In the opera Evgenii Onegin, there are indeed homoerotic motifs that appear at the intersection of the music and libretto. The duel scene is particularly striking in that regard, which has been stressed in various productions (and in the Soviet film opera, and in Vikram Seth’s Golden Gate). 8 Acknowledging the creative agency of queer readers is also important in breaking down the divide between queer scholars and queer subjects. This is a point made on a blog for readers: Writers and their work are sometimes put in categories that relate to geography, race and culture, such as “American fiction” or “Africana”. These categories affect how their books reach audiences and how their work is read. But in reading or hearing the literature itself, readers often discover unexpected ways of identifying with the characters, contexts or experiences expressed in the writing. (“Identifying with Literature” 2017, online; italics added) The writer of the blog acknowledges the agency of readers but appears unable to fully take in the queer import of this insight, titling the blog Postcolonial Writers Make Worlds. 9 Another way to understand the opposition of a novelistic mode of reading to a lyrical one is suggested by Frederick Jameson, who describes realism as characterized by a tension between the impulse to narrate and the impulse of affect (Jameson 2013).

6  From sexual dissidence to sexual dissonance Translating the queer life of Charlotte von Mahlsdorf

In Disturbing Attachments:  Genet, Modern Pederasty, and Queer History (2017), Kadji Amin offers an example of the kind of unflinching self-​ reflexivity that has come to characterize queer theory. Finding himself ultimately unable to accommodate Jean Genet and his work into some vision of queer futurity, Amin becomes aware of a certain field expectation in queer studies, namely, the tendency to idealize the radicality of queer subjects like Genet. This idealization leads scholars to ignore or obscure the “mismatches” between the historical attachments of their research subjects and the expectations of the field. And so, by critically examining the process of idealization, Amin argues (2017, 4), scholars can better “account for the textures of racial, historical, and geographical difference—​precisely those differences marginalized across the history of queer inquiry.” This is not, however, a call to a traditional, desire-​free objectivity. As Amin explains, Rather than presuming the possibility of a neutral objectivity within the field (and rather than pretending that my claiming of Genet will be the definitive or true one), I explore how, in the moment of an ideal’s deflation, disturbing attachments—​to race, history, and geopolitics—​may be revealed. (4)1 Exploring those disturbing attachments allows us, in place of idealizing these queer subjects, to grant them what Avery Gordon (1997, 4) calls, “the right to complex personhood” or, as Amin (2017, 11) puts it, “the right to be damaged, psychically complex, or merely otherwise occupied.” Amin’s call to deidealize queer subjects alongside Jack Halberstam’s (2017) call for queer scholars to resist mastery and embrace unease, irreparability, and failure is especially important for metropolitan scholars studying sexuality outside the West who seek to avoid replicating what Said (1989, 214) called “the process of empire.” In my early work on sexuality in post-​Soviet Russia, for example, I became uncomfortably aware of a tendency to idealize not just non-​Western queer subjects but also non-​Western queer cultures. A number of Western observers, all gay-​or queer-​identified,

166  Sexual dissidence to sexual dissonance produced ethnographic and quasiethnographic studies of the region just after the fall of communism. In reading those accounts, I was struck by how a well-​intentioned resistance to construing that culture as “underdeveloped” led many of these observers to do the opposite, presenting Russia as a kind of queer paradise, free from the restrictions or the “straightjackets” of an exclusive gay/​straight binary. That idealization, which presented post-​Soviet Russia as a vision of our queer past and of our queer future, had, to my mind, disturbing attachments to the burgeoning field of sex tourism and the centuries-​long tradition of Orientalizing Eastern Europe.2 I began to see how translation might contribute to our understanding of the various attachments structuring the study of sexuality in that region when I began to investigate the global circulation of the memoir of Charlotte von Mahlsdorf, a self-​identified transvestite who survived Nazism and East German socialism, as Doug Wright (2004, 76) put it, “in a pair of heels.” Her memoir and its initial translations appeared in the early years following the fall of communism in Eastern Europe, often labeled by Western politicians and journalists as “the transition.” The first Anglophone edition of the memoir promoted the idealization of von Mahlsdorf as a “gay hero”—​until her Stasi file was released in the mid-​1990s, at which point, we see “What happens when culture fails the expectations with which theory approaches it” (Amin 2017, 6–​7).

Framing queer lives and queering the frames Representations of the life of the East German transvestite Charlotte von Mahlsdorf, which began to circulate internationally not long after the fall of communism in Eastern Europe, raise fundamental questions about the act of framing—​that is, the application of conceptual categories to make sense of people and events and to market representations of those lives to specific audiences. Especially interesting are the ways in which the personal and the political aspects of von Mahlsdorf’s biography, which spans the entire troubled history of twentieth-​century Germany, become entangled—​ in different ways across different languages and genres—​to produce specific readings of East European history and politics. An examination of the shifting frames used to package von Mahlsdorf’s life story for Western audiences in a post-​Cold War era—​and the ambivalent role of translation in these acts of framing—​reveals how such frames enable and foreclose readings of queer lives and transnational history. Charlotte von Mahlsdorf was born Lothar Berfelde in Berlin-​Malhsdorf in 1928. She came of age during the rise of Nazism, and her abusive father appeared to embody the increasing violence of the regime. In fact, the father was a leader in the local Nazi party and forced his son to join the Hitler Youth. In 1944 von Mahlsdorf would murder her father, beating him to death with a rolling pin, in order to protect her mother from his abuse, as a consequence of which she was sentenced to four years in prison. She was

Sexual dissidence to sexual dissonance  167 released, however, at the end of the war, when all prisoners were released from German prisons, at which point she continued to make ends meet by foraging for antiques in abandoned homes and apartments. When she first took up this activity before the war, she was foraging in apartments abandoned by Jewish families, lending a dubious moral cast to her occupation. After the war, she foraged in dwellings abandoned by Germans who had fled to the West after the communist takeover. She eventually set up a museum of everyday objects in the former estate of the von Mahlsdorf family, from which she took her aristocratic name Charlotte von Mahlsdorf—​Charlotte, incidentally, was the name of her lesbian aunt’s lover. Although there were periodic attempts made by the government to shut down the museum, and von Mahlsdorf was the subject of periodic harassment, she lived a largely peaceful life in the German Democratic Republic. In 1991, after the fall of communism and the reunification of Germany, her museum was attacked by a group of neo-​Nazis. For having preserved cultural artifacts, including a Weimar-​ era bar and cabaret, which she installed in the basement of the manor house, von Mahlsdorf was awarded the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany in 1992. She became a symbol of a new democratic Germany, at least until the release of secret police records revealing von Mahlsdorf to have collaborated with the Stasi as an informer. She left Germany in the late 1990s and lived the rest of her life in Sweden; she died in 2002 while on a visit to Berlin. In a life that spanned most of modern Germany history, from the Weimar Republic through Nazi Germany, Socialist East Germany, and a unified post-​ communist Germany, it was perhaps inevitable that von Mahlsdorf’s life story would become thoroughly entangled with—​and framed by—​the ideological narratives surrounding the fall of communism in Eastern Europe and the triumph of Western neoliberalism. The concept of framing was introduced in Translation Studies in the 1980s, during the so-​called “textual turn,” when scholars in the field, influenced by sociolinguistics, shifted away from treating language as an abstract system to focusing on the sociocultural mediation of individual speech acts, discussed by Mikhail Bakhtin as “speech genres” (Bakhtin 1986) and later by Albrecht Neubert and Christiane Nord as text-​types. In Translation as Text (1992), Albrecht Neubert and Gregory Shreve (1992, 60) devote a section to frames, which they define, following Erving Goffman, as, “the knowledge repertoires from which producers and comprehenders make their choices.” These repertoires, they go on to say, “are not random repositories of linguistic and world knowledge. They are highly structured. This organization of experience may be referred to as framing and the knowledge structures themselves as frames” (60). Like Judith Butler’s notion of implicit censorship, a conceptual framing defines the conditions of legibility and, therefore, what is sayable. As such, it is similar to Sara Ahmed’s (2006) phenomenological discussion of orientation. Von Mahlsdorf seems acutely aware of the power of frames in shaping our view of reality when she recounts how, as an

168  Sexual dissidence to sexual dissonance adolescent, she purchased a woman’s coat, one of her first forays into public transvestism. Her abusive father, luckily, noticed nothing, “blind as he was to anything that did not fit into his scheme of things. I don’t think he ever realized that I was a girl in a boy’s body” (Mahlsdorf 2004, 43). In the following section, Neubert and Shreve discuss scenarios, schemas, plans, and scripts, describing them as “organizational structures which establish connections and progressions between frames at the time of frame actualization” (63). The mention here of connections and progressions delineates two types of framing, one that is conceptual and more or less static, and the other, which moves through time. Mona Baker (2015, 247)  has focused attention on the latter type of framing, which she discusses in terms of narrative, as, “a story that unfolds in time, with a (perceived) beginning and a (projected) end.” Borrowing a typology from narrative theory, Baker (2006, 28–​49) delineates four types of narrative: ontological (narratives of the self), also referred to as personal narratives; public narratives; conceptual (disciplinary) narratives; and meta-​(master) narratives. While these classifications are certainly useful, queer theory’s suspicion of discrete and exclusive categories should encourage us to investigate where these frames overlap, blur into one another, or become entangled in order to produce very powerful, totalizing narratives. Totalizing narratives derive their power by appearing ubiquitous, reflected in personal and public narratives, in disciplinary theories and concepts, and in readings of national and world history. Baker (2006, 29)  acknowledges the entangling of personal and public narratives when she notes that private narratives are “dependent on and informed by the collective narratives in which they are situated,” while at the same time, they are “crucial for the elaboration and maintenance” of those public narratives. Joseph Slaughter (2007, 4) makes a similar point in Human Rights, Inc., where he traces how “the novel genre and liberal human rights discourse are more than coincidentally, or casually, interconnected,” describing them as “mutually enabling fictions.” The power of such entanglements, Slaughter argues, is that they allow these discourses “to imagine, normalize, and realize” (4) a Western vision of political subjectivity and historical progression that is all-​encompassing. “This [Western] story of modernization,” Slaughter asserts, “is typically depicted as the course of human emancipation—​for humanity in general and repeated in the life of each individual” (9; italics added). In her memoir, von Mahlsdorf (2004, 41) demonstrates the entangling of disciplinary and personal levels of framing when she finds a copy of Magnus Hirschfeld’s 1910 monograph Die Transvestiten [Tranvestites] on the bookshelf in her Aunt Louisa’s home. Her initial reaction is that it had nothing to do with her, until she comes across the dedication to her aunt: “Now the book piqued my interest; I began to read.” Her aunt then enters the room and encourages her to continue reading: “ ‘Read it carefully,’ she said, and again surprised me, ‘It’s about both of us’ ” (41). Von Mahlsdorf discovers

Sexual dissidence to sexual dissonance  169 at that moment that her aunt, too, was a cross-​dresser. The story lends a personal and affective dimension to this disciplinary narrative, a foundation text in the science of sexology. This may be why von Mahlsdorf remained so deeply attached to Hirschfeld’s concepts and terminology, referring to herself throughout her life in the somewhat archaic terms of Hirschfeld’s time, as “a female soul in a man’s body.”3 David Valentine (2007, 14) recounts a more ambivalent reaction to disciplinary framing among the subjects of his ethnography in regard to “the recent (and spectacular) rise and institutionalization of transgender as a collective term to incorporate all and any variance from imagined gendered norms.” While for some, the disciplinary framing of “transgender” was empowering and liberatory, others found it restrictive and imposed from above. While never explicitly discussing framing as a methodology or a theoretical concept—​framing is not included in the book’s index—​Valentine (2007, 14)  repeatedly uses “frame” as a noun and a verb to capture the ambivalent position of his ethnographic subjects, as illustrated below: Transexuality in the United States was both celebrated and contested from the 1950s in popular culture, medical, and scholarly contexts, but claims and counter-​claims over this subject position also emerged among those who saw themselves framed by its terms. (34; italics added) Claims of conflation rely on an assumption that those things we call sexuality and gender have always been experienced as distinct and privilege contemporary theoretical framings as the truth of that experience. (61; italics added to “framings”) On a metanarrative level, von Mahlsdorf’s life story was framed by the fall of communism, which implicated her life story in the neoliberal metanarrative of the capitalist West’s triumph over communism. This initial period was labelled a transition, a word “saturated with ideological significance” (Verdery 1996, 10). Indexing a progressivist, developmental model of history, which Dipesh Chakrabarty refers to as Western historicism, the postcommunist transition narrative was meant to plot the triumphant (re) incorporation of Eastern Europe into this developmental history.4 But this wasn’t just any transition; to the extent that it definitively foreclosed other, competing paths to modernity, such as communism or socialism, it marked the “end of history,” as theorized by the conservative economist Francis Fukuyama (1992). Moreover, the disciplinary narrative of homosexuality, discussed above, is neatly enfolded into this neoliberal metanarrative. As Valentine (2007, 15)  puts it, the depathologization of homosexuality is “one of the oft-​told progressivist stories of the late twentieth century.”5 In this way, von Mahlsdorf’s memoir, which could be glossed as a personal/​ public narrative, was framed within two mutually reinforcing progressivist

170  Sexual dissidence to sexual dissonance narratives—​a disciplinary narrative and a historical metanarrative—​which is perhaps an inevitable consequence of its appearance within “a time frame that maps onto the ascendance of identity-​based politics in the United States” (Valentine 2007, 18) and the triumph of neoliberal capitalism on the world scene, which “reframed ‘rights’ in terms of a framework of consumption in the United States and beyond” (Valentine 2007, 18).6 This enfolding of personal, public, and disciplinary narratives within the metanarrative of the West’s triumph over communism is illustrated by an event that appears toward the end of both the autobiography and the documentary, when von Mahlsdorf and some queer friends, on the very day the border between East and West Germany is opened, go to the cinema Kino International to attend the premier of the first East German film to offer a sympathetic portrayal of same-​sex desire. The film, directed by Heiner Carow, has the English title Coming Out (1991). The English title of the film and the timing of the premier invite a metaphoric association between the individual’s “coming out” as gay and East Germany’s transition to a (Western) neoliberal democracy. A closer look at the film, however, reveals a more complex engagement with the West and with Western “gay” culture, which I discuss in the conclusion.

Von Mahsdorf as one of us The meaning of von Mahlsdorf’s life was, one could say, overdetermined by the historical moment in which she gained international notoriety—​the “so-​ called” transition period following the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe.7 She became something of a media darling after 1989, reflecting what Doug Wright (2004, x) describes as “the [Western] media’s thirst for human interest stories following the fall of the [Berlin] wall,” appearing on German television and in newspapers and magazines. In 1992, a documentary film about von Mahlsdorf by the West German gay activist and filmmaker Rosa von Praunheim appeared under the title Ich bin meine eigene Frau: die Lebensgeschichte der Charlotte von Mahlsdorf [I Am My Own Wife:  The Life Story of Charlotte von Mahlsdorf]. That same year, the first German edition of von Mahlsdorf’s autobiography appeared under the title:  Ich bin meine eigene Frau:  ein Leben [I Am My Own Wife:  A Life]. Translations of the autobiography into a variety of languages soon followed—​the first were the Spanish and Dutch translations in 1994, Yu soj mi propia mujer, translated by Teófilo d Lozoya (Barcelona: Tusquets), and Ik ben mijn eigen vrouw, translated by Gerda Meijerink (Antwerp, Amsterdam:  Mantau), followed by the English translation in 1995, I Am My Own Woman, translated by Jean Hollander (San Franciso: Cleis); the Russian translation in 1997, Ia sam sebe zhena:  Tainaia zhizn’Sharlotty fon Mal’sdorf, samogo izvestnogo berlinskogo transvestita, translated by Aleksandr Shatalov (Moscow:  Glagol); and the Hungarian translation in

Sexual dissidence to sexual dissonance  171 2000, A magma asszonya vagyok:  egy életút, translated by Németh Zita (Budapest: Rana in Fabula). The first translation of von Mahlsdorf’s autobiography into English, undertaken by Jean Hollander, was published by Clies Press in 1995. The title of the book was rendered in English as “I Am My Own Woman.” Although the translation of Frau as “woman” is semantically possible given the polysemous nature of the German word Frau, which means both “woman” and “wife,” it does not accurately reflect the usage of the word in the body of the memoir: von Mahlsdorf utters the now iconic statement in response to her mother’s suggestion that she marry. Keenly aware of this, Hollander (1995, 5)  adds a Translator’s Note at the beginning of the edition to justify her translation of the title: Although the title I Am My Own Woman is a valid translation of the German Ich bin meine eigene Frau, the context in which the phrase appears makes it clear that the author may also mean “I am my own wife.” Near the end of the book, in a conversation with his mother, he quotes her as saying, “As much as I like to have you with me, you are now really at an age to get married.” His witty, self-​aware answer is, “I am my own wife,” an answer that leaves the mother smiling. The choice of “my own woman,” by analogy with the English expression “to be one’s own person,” is crucial to the initial Anglophone framing of von Mahlsdorf as a gay hero, indexing a discourse of self-​empowerment. Von Mahlsdorf is presented as an independent, even defiant activist avant la lettre.8 “I am my own woman” was also the English translation used for von Prunheim’s (1992) documentary film about von Mahlsdorf’s life (released in English in 1994). The translated title as well as the promotional material accompanying the English version of the DVD—​“A courageous outsider and born fighter!”—​underscores this activist framing of von Mahlsdorf. In fact, von Mahlsdorf utters the statement twice in the documentary film, and both times it is translated into English as “I am my own woman.”9 It is unclear whether von Praunheim had any say in the translation of the title of her film into English, but the choice of “woman” instead of “wife” certainly reflected von Praunheim’s own activist, anti-​bourgeois bent. Born Holger Bernhard Bruno Mischwitzky in East Berlin in 1942, von Praunheim escaped to West Germany in 1953. Mischwitzky became a writer and gay activist in West Berlin in the sixties, when he adopted the female artistic name of Rosa von Praunheim, with Praunheim referring to a neighborhood in Frankfurt and Rosa referring to the pink triangles homosexuals were forced to wear in Nazi concentration camps. (While using female pronouns, von Praunheim never presented as a woman.) Von Praunheim made many other films with a gay activist agenda both before and after Ich bin meine eigene Frau, such as the 1977 Nicht der Homosexuelle ist pervers, sondern

172  Sexual dissidence to sexual dissonance die Situation, in der er lebt [It’s Not the Homosexual Who is Perverse, but the Society in which He Lives] and Der Einstein des Sex [The Einstein of Sex], dedicated to the life and work of Magnus Hirschfeld, released in 1999. The packaging of von Mahlsdorf as an activist is further underscored by the DVD cover for the English edition of the documentary, which includes a quotation from the critic for the gay periodical The Advocate, Lawrence Frascella, who pronounces von Mahlsdorf:  “A Gay Hero!” This image of von Mahlsdorf was reinforced by the cross-​marketing of the autobiography and the DVD: the DVD ends with an advertisement for the autobiography, and a note in the autobiography mentions the documentary film. But what is interesting here is not just what interpretations or framings the choice of “woman” enables, but also what framings—​or disturbing attachments—​the choice of “woman” instead of “wife” disables. Von Mahlsdorf’s repeated description of herself as a Hausfrau, or “housewife,” might, for example, problematize a progressive feminist reading.10 The subtitle of the English translation of von Mahlsdorf’s autobiography adds to the framing of von Mahlsdorf as an activist rebel:  “The Outlaw Life of Charlotte von Mahlsdorf, Berlin’s Most Distinguished Transvestite,” which is quite different from the laconic German subtitle “Ein Leben” [A Life]. This framing was no doubt undertaken at the urging of the publisher, Cleis Press, which specializes in provocation, as evident still today on their website, where the press’s offerings are described in the following way: Outriders. Outwriters. Outliers. Cleis Press publishes provocative, intelligent books across genres. Whether literary fiction, human rights, mystery, romance, erotica, LGBTQ studies, sex guides, pulp fiction, or memoir, you know that if it’s outside the ordinary, it’s Cleis Press. (accessed 17 December 2014)11 By presenting von Mahlsdorf as a radical activist, the English edition reflects not only the press’s specific marketing profile but also the broader context of reception, characterized by, among other things, the rise of more confrontational activist groups in the United States, such as Queer Nation and ActUP, in response to the AIDS crisis.12 We also see the trope of the queer outlaw in works such as John Rechy’s The Sexual Outlaw (1977), Jonathan Dollimore’s Sexual Dissidence (1991), and Kate Bornstein’s Gender Outlaw (2016).13 To the extent this benign use of outlaw indexes “cozy [Anglophone?] narratives of sexual freedom and rebellion” (Halberstam 2017, 149), it is interesting to look at the word in the actual translation. There, it appears only once and is used sarcastically to refer to homosexuals who come together to celebrate birthdays as a kind of accidental family, but whom the East German government has “outlawed” (2004, 158). Another way to provincialize this Anglophone framing of von Mahlsdorf’s life story, that is, to reveal its specifical cultural contours, is to compare it with the Russian translation, which was published just two years later, in 1997.

Sexual dissidence to sexual dissonance  173 Published by Glagol Press, the Russian version of the memoir was translated by the publisher Aleksandr Shatalov, who also provided the introduction. Like English, Russian has two separate words to designate either “woman” [zhenshchina] or “wife” [zhena]. The title uses zhena: Ia sam sebe zhena [I Am My Own Wife]. The lengthy subtitle of the Russian translation is even more interesting in that it appears to have been patterned after the English edition’s subtitle, not that of the German edition:  Tainaia zhizn’ Sharlotty fon Mal’sdorf, samogo izvestnogo berlinskogo transvetita [The Secret Life of Charlotte von Mahlsdorf, Berlin’s Most Famous Transvestite]. There is a telling shift from the English, however, which involves replacing outlaw with secret. The full import of this substitution becomes clear in Shatalov’s introduction (1997, 5, 6), where von Mahlsdorf is cast not as an out and proud activist but as an ordinary person seeking to protect her private life: Kniga i postavlennyi po nei fil’m [...] sdelali imia Sharlotty populiarnym, blagodaria chemu skromnyi nemetskii rabotnik, kakim, sobstvenno govoria, ona i iavliaetsia, nevol’no stal samym izvestnym evropeiskim transvestitom. [The book and film about her made the name of Charlotte popular, thanks to which this modest German worker, which, strictly speaking, she is, unwittingly became the most famous European transvestite.] Zdes’, v prigorode sovremennogo Berlina, pered nami shla obyknovennaia zhizn’, s ee bytovymi zabotami, neuriditsami i redkimi radostiami. Prosto obyknovennaia zhizn’. [Here, in the outskirts of contemporary Berlin, there unfolded before us an ordinary life, with its everyday care, its squabbling and occasional joys. Just an ordinary life.] Later, Shatalov (1997, 6; italics added), confusing transvestites with drag queens, remarks, “Unlike many transvestites [von Mahlsdorf] was directed less toward outward effect […] than toward a search for inner harmony.” Note the use of feminine pronouns in referring to von Mahlsdorf in the Russian edition, whereas Hollander uses masculine pronouns in her translator’s note. (Von Mahlsdorf preferred to be addressed in the feminine.) The framing of von Mahlsdorf clearly highlights the differences between the political needs of post-​Soviet Russians and those of Americans at that time. Following years of invasive surveillance by the Soviet regime, many Russian queers, like many Russians in general, wanted protections on their privacy, not the right to march in the streets, which for many was associated with Soviet political propaganda. The anthropologist Lev Klein (2000, 15–​ 16) made this clear in the introduction to his monumental 400-​page history of homosexuality, “Drugaia liubov” [The Other Love], which was published in 2000:

174  Sexual dissidence to sexual dissonance Already in my previous book I  put forward the view that no self-​ respecting government should peer through the keyhole into my bedroom or examine the behinds of my guests (which was done). […] The question of my sexual proclivities, even from the point of view of the Soviet state, is my deeply personal business. The scholar Jens Giersdorf (2006, 172), who was born and raised in East German, made a very similar point when analyzing a scene in von Mahlsdorf’s memoir in which she greets Stasi officers who visit her home with a curtsey, a gesture that might not appear as political to a Western observer: Minority resistance to national systems of state power [in the West] has tended to create and rely on strong community identifications, such as civil rights or gay and lesbian movements. In contrast, East German citizens experienced a serious abuse of national identity and community in Nazi Germany and under the socialist regime. These experiences created a strong suspicion of group identifications and an emphasis on individuality for resistant acts. These issues were powerfully dramatized in the recent film Victory Day (2016), by Alina Rudnitskaya. The film is structured around interviews with six Russian gay and lesbian couples in their apartments in St. Petersburg against the backdrop of Victory Day celebrations taking place on the city’s major streets and squares. The film visually captures the enormous gap in today’s Russia between the private realm, in which these queer couples are building their lives together, and the Putin-​era public square. Moreover, the fact that the title is in English only reinforces the unbridgeable nature of that gap, suggesting that the film’s intended audience is in the West.

Von Mahlsdorf as enigma The persistence of communist majorities in “postsocialist” Eastern Europe, the return of authoritarian forms of government, and increasing discrimination and violence against queers challenged the developmental framing of the transition as the 1990s wore on. Against this backdrop, von Mahlsdorf’s Stasi file was released, suggesting she had collaborated with the East German secret police. All this initiated a reframing of von Mahlsdorf’s life story—​ and of Eastern European history—​as a deflation of Western hopes.14 That deflation became the subject of an English-​language play by Doug Wright, entitled I Am My Own Wife. Wright’s play, which had its Broadway debut in 2003, was based not only on the autobiography of von Mahlsdorf but also on many interviews that Wright conducted with von Mahlsdorf herself. It was greeted with both popular and critical acclaim, receiving the 2004 Pulitzer Prize, as well as a Tony Award and a Drama Desk Award. In the

Sexual dissidence to sexual dissonance  175 play, however, von Mahlsdorf is no longer presented as a gay activist and rebel—​as one of us—​but as radically other, an enigma.15 Wright (2004, xi, 76)  is in fact upfront in the play about his personal investment in the narrative of von Mahldorf as a “a bona fide gay hero” who “maintain[ed] an unwavering sense of herself during such repressive times,” or, as his character puts it in the play itself: someone who “navigated a path between the two most repressive regimes the Western world has ever known—​the Nazis and the Communists—​in a pair of heels.” In his introduction to the published version of the play, titled “Portrait of an Enigma,” Wright tells the story of his “disillusionment”:  “My gay hero had been a Soviet-​sponsored spy” (xiii). But even worse, Wright goes on: At the time, readers of her autobiography felt betrayed; why hadn’t she disclosed the information in her own book? Gay men and women who had placed her on a pedestal were outraged; perhaps she wasn’t such an effective poster girl, after all. And the general citizenry didn’t look too kindly on complicity. I feared that—​if I included the detailed information contained in her file—​my play might stoke the fires of outrage against her. Did I want to bear culpability for that? (xxi) Later, he refers to Charlotte’s “duplicity” (xxi). In telling this story of deflation, Wright decides to highlight his own subject position—​as an American from Texas who speaks very little German—​ and as the teller of a version of von Mahlsdorf’s life story.16 As he writes in the introduction: “[the play] is not meant as definitive biography” (xxiv), a point he reinforces in the play’s subtitle: Studies for a Play about the Life of Charlotte von Mahlsdorf. As he queries in the introduction:  “When past events are ambiguous, should the historian strive to posit definitive answers or leave uncertainty intact?” (xvi). He even acknowledges that von Mahlsdorf has something to teach him about the Germany’s contribution to the LGBT movement: “You are teaching me a history I never knew I had” (28), although this reinforces Wright’s role as the real protagonist of the play, the one who learns, changes, while von Mahlsdorf remains the same. It also serves to relegate von Mahlsdorf’s knowledge to the past, foreclosing any contribution her story might make to imagining a queer future. That foreclosing of any connection between von Mahlsdorf and a queer future is also evident in one of the more striking manipulations of von Mahlsdorf’s life story as she tells it in the memoir. Von Mahlsdorf opens the memoir with the attack on her house-​museum by neo-​Nazi skinheads after the fall of communism and the reunification of Germany. Wright, on the other hand, mentions the attack by the neo-​Nazis alongside his discovery of von Mahlsdorf’s Stasi file—​construing both as “German” problems. While Wright’s “localizing” of his position as teller of the tale lends a postmodern air to the play, the localizing of communism and fascism to Eastern Europe

176  Sexual dissidence to sexual dissonance limits the resonance of von Mahlsdorf’s story. It becomes a kind of historical artifact, a point underscored by Wright when he remarks: “If Charlotte were a curator of nineteenth-​century antiquities, I would present myself in the play as a curator of her” (xv). Wright effects this transformation of von Mahlsdorf into a historical artifact, marked by radical alterity, in a number of ways. He does so most obviously with the severity of her costume—​she dresses all in black—​and in her speech. Wright’s von Mahlsdorf speaks a heavily accented English, sprinkled with many German words, such as willkommen, ja, or nein, along with some (mis)translations. (This is quite different from von Mahlsdorf’s language in the memoir, which is rendered in fluent English.) In fact, Wright has Charlotte use the German word Transvestit twice in the play, lending the concept of transvestite a somewhat foreign if not anachronizing ring, localizing it and, against the backdrop of the rise of “transgender,” relegating it to the past. On a metanarrative level, Wright radically others communism, foreclosing it as a future option, by presenting it as a prison. For example, Wright describes early postcommunist Mahlsdorf as “a grim place [where] vast apartment complexes rise like cement gulags” (14; italics added). The opening scene of Act II, which takes place in Alfred Kirschner’s prison cell, begins with “the rollicking sound of an old pianola” and “ends with the loud slam of a prison door” (47). Two scenes later, when Charlotte recounts the arrest of Kirschner by the Stasi, the stage directions indicate again “the brutal slam of a prison door” (58). In a letter from prison, Alfred writes to Charlotte, “For your sake, I won’t give up, and I’ll live patiently for the day I’ll be set free” (48; italics added). Wright also invokes the Cold War specter of communism in the title of his introduction—​“Portrait of an Enigma”—​ which establishes an intertextual reference to Winston Churchill’s famous description of communist Russia as “a riddle, wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.” The association with communism is also evident in von Mahlsdorf’s costume in the play, which is stark, all black, and severely cut, unlike the matronly embroidered dress she is wearing on the cover of her memoir. The theme of oppression is further supported by Wright’s marked preference for the more politically charged term “communist” while von Mahlsdorf rarely uses the term, preferring the more benign-​sounding “socialist.” In fact, von Mahlsdorf refers to communism only three times in the entire memoir, but in all three cases, it has a distinctly positive valence, as when she describes her beloved great uncle who was a Christian communist before the War, and later when she describes her living arrangement in Mahlsdorf with the lesbian couple, Beate and Silvia, as a Homokommune, or “homo-​commune” (201), translated by Hollander as “homo-​community” (184). Moreover, in the memoir von Mahlsdorf attentuates any association of the East German regime with communism by referring to the ruling party by its acronym, the SED, and to East Germany as the GDR. In Wright’s play, however, the

Sexual dissidence to sexual dissonance  177 word socialism never appears and references to communism are numerous, overt, and invariably negative as, for example, when Charlotte describes the Stasi as “the Communist secret police, the most feared government spies of all the world” (24). While von Mahlsdorf mentions the Stasi by name only 12 times in the memoir, Wright makes 22 references in the play. (The play, incidentally, is less than one-​fifth the size of the memoir.) Indeed, Wright’s association of communism with the Stasi not only underscores the negative connotations of communism in the play but also supports the narrative of (Western) liberation by presenting East Germany as a giant prison. Along the same lines, Wright prefers the medicolegal-​ sounding term homosexual, while von Mahlsdorf overwhelmingly favors the more colloquial term “schwul,” which is commonly used among gays and lesbians in Germany—​a term closer to “gay” than to “homosexual” but with a longer history than “gay.”17 Schwul is used 21 times in the memoir and lesbi, 19 times, while some form of Homosexual is used only 9 times, and invariably toward the end of the play to refer to gay organizations, which von Mahlsdorf describes in rather benign terms. Those organizations provided support to von Mahlsdorf, for which she expresses her gratitude. Wright, on the other hand, maps homosexual and gay geographically, not chronologically, as in the memoir. He thus associates homosexual with East Germany and gay with the West. One of his anonymous East German characters is named “A Homosexual Man,” and both von Mahlsdorf and her one-​time lover Alfred describe themselves as “homosexual.” He uses the word gay to refer to Americans, describing himself as “a gay man” and the American Mark Finley as “a gay activist.” This ideological othering of Germany is further driven home by Wright’s use of the modifier East to describe the various locales mentioned:  East Berlin, East Prussia, and East Germany. This is something von Mahlsdorf herself rarely does, preferring Old Berlin, Prussia, and the GDR. And so, if von Mahlsdorf’s broken English serves to other her, the repetition of the negatively inflected terms communist and homosexual—​and, perhaps, too, the German Transvestit—​serves to other East Germany, presenting it as a place of violent oppression, locked in its own history, unable to transition. In these ways, Wright reframes von Mahlsdorf’s life story within a distinctly Cold War frame. In fact, the Cold War is explicitly mentioned three times in the play but not once in the autobiography. Wright’s Cold War reframing is also achieved by playing down the Nazi era, which was central in the memoir. In fact, Nazis are referenced 56 times in the memoir and only 9 times in the play, and Jews are referenced 41 times in the memoir and only 4 times in the play. One place where Wright uses the word Nazi more than von Mahlsdorf is when Charlotte recounts the attack on her museum by skinheads, something that occurred after the fall of communism and the reunification of Germany. Whereas in the autobiography von Mahlsdorf first refers to the thugs as skinheads in English, and only then as “neo Nazis” and later “young Nazis,” Wright presents the attack from the start as a historical

178  Sexual dissidence to sexual dissonance return: “The Brown plague had come back again. Kristallnacht once more.” Wright’s Charlotte goes on to note that one of the skinheads “had a swastika tattooed on his arm.” And then the first skinhead says to Charlotte, “Hitler forgot to shove you in an oven in Sachsenhausen” (2004, 70). By closely connecting von Mahlsdorf’s skinheads to German Nazism, Wright effectively forecloses any association between the skinhead movement and the brutal neoliberal economic policies—​the shock therapy—​of the early postcommunist period, thus absolving the West, which advocated for such economic policies, and placing the blame for the failed transition firmly on the East. Moreover, while von Mahlsdorf begins her memoir with this incident, effectively disabling any attempt to cast the fall of communism in terms of liberation, Wright’s Nazification of the attack and his placement of the attack toward the end of the play suggests a vision of Eastern Europe as trapped in its own history. Consumerism also becomes a major theme in the play in a way it was not in the memoir. In the memoir, von Mahlsdorf presents her collecting as a response to the destruction of her Age—​an attempt to preserve the past—​ while Wright presents it as a kind of consumer fetishism. At one point in the play he has von Mahlsdorf mistranslate the German verb bekommen, “to receive,” as “to become”: [von Malhsdorf’s] broken English suddenly constituted a remarkable kind of poetry. For example, a word in German for “to receive” is bekommen. In the past tense, Charlotte would say, “Ich bekam diese Möbel” or “I received this furniture.” But when she translated that from German to English, she would say, “I became this furniture.” How beautiful and true! I realized her own maliprop-​ridden syntax was far better than any language I could invent on her behalf. (xvi) This framing is covert to the extent that Wright uses von Mahlsdorf’s “own” words—​although he knows them to be a mistranslation. This construal of von Mahlsdorf as object or commodity is reinforced earlier in the play when Wright’s character says to a friend: “She doesn’t run a museum, she is one! The rarest artifact she has isn’t a grandfather clock or a Beidermeier tall-​boy. It’s her” (36). Contrast this to German scholar Katharina Gerstenberger’s construal of von Mahlsdorf’s collecting as an act of resistance “against the physical and social destruction of minority lives” (1998, 116). She then recounts how von Mahlsdorf, when exhibiting a bookcase she had acquired from a Jewish household, “told the story of its owners to the visitors, and later donated it to a new Jewish museum in West Berlin” (1998, 116). Wright’s presentation of von Mahlsdorf as consumer fetishist and as a consumer good stands in contrast to his presentation of US inventor Thomas Alva Edison, mentioned twice in very marked positions at the very beginning and the very end of the play, where von Mahlsdorf describes him as

Sexual dissidence to sexual dissonance  179 “the inventor of the first talking machine in the world,” later mentioning the location of his company in Orange, New Jersey.18 Here, Wright suggests an opposition of American inventors and producers to East German consumers and collectors, invoking a hoary developmental narrative, by which Western Europe, since the Enlightenment, constructed Eastern Europe as old, imitative, and economically and politically backward (Wolff 1994). The political and economic superiority of the West is underscored later in the opening monolog, when von Mahlsdorf says: In the Second World War, when the airplanes flew over Mahlsdorf, and the bombs were coming down, I played British and American records. And I thought, “They can hear in the airplanes that I am playing Edison records.” I thought, If they hear me they will know I’m their friend (11) This reference to America’s role as liberator of Europe in the Second World War obscures the reality that the Red Army liberated von Mahlsdorf’s Berlin. This is something to which von Mahlsdorf dedicates several pages of her memoir; von Praunheim, too, portrays the Russian liberators in the documentary film. In fact, both the memoir and the documentary offer a nuanced and largely benign portrayal of the Russians. Wright, on the other hand, references the Russians only once in the entire play, after which Charlotte switches to “the Allies”: “And I saw the large Russian tanks. And behind the tanks were coming horses with painted wagons. The Allies were coming to Berlin” (34; italics added). By radically othering the communist East, Wright offers a resolution not only to the problem of von Mahlsdorf’s collaboration with the Stasi but also to the East’s failed transition to neoliberal democracy: the communist regime had so perverted its subjects, they were unfit to transition. Despite his critique of consumerism in the final scenes of the play and of American naiveté throughout, Wright’s demonizing of communism effectively removes it as a viable political and economic alternative, relegating the history of the communist East to the past. While Wright others von Mahlsdorf as an East German, he normalizes her queer sexuality, ensuring that, while she might have something to teach Wright about his past, she has nothing to teach him about his future. Wright presents von Mahlsdorf not as a sexual radical—​as von Praunheim does in the documentary, which includes, among other things, an S&M scene featured on the cover of the German video—​but rather as a largely asexual representative of the petty bourgeoisie, as underscored by his decision to translate the Frau in the title of the memoir as “wife” instead of “woman.” “Wright’s decision to remove any sexuality from his theatrical presentation of von Mahlsdorf,” Giersdorf (2006, 186, 171)  maintains, “assures emphasis on the national over the queer,” allowing von Mahlsdorf’s “all-​ but-​normal life” to be repackaged into something that was “successfully

180  Sexual dissidence to sexual dissonance safe for mainstream consumption in the United States, a country that […] is conservative in its official recognition of nonnormative sexuality and even sexuality in general.” Wright further normalizes von Mahlsdorf’s sexuality by referring to her throughout with masculine pronouns. Indeed, Wright opens the play with the statement: “This is, in fact, a man” (9) and includes as the frontispiece of the published edition of the play a photograph of von Mahlsdorf as a youth, dressed as a boy, to which he alludes in the final scene, entitled “Between Two Lions.” In this way, Wright diffuses much of the queer potential of von Mahlsdorf’s sexuality, prioritizing her biological birth identity over her chosen identity. Hollander also uses masculine pronouns in her translator’s note in the 1995 edition of the translation, whereas the Russian translator did not, which further complicates any simplistic progressivist mapping of East and West. A similar normalization of von Mahlsdorf took place in Germany in the early 2000s, when friends of von Mahlsdorf sought to erect a monument in her honor with the now iconic quotation from her autobiography engraved on the front: Ich bin meine eigene Frau. Von Mahlsdorf’s family, however, objected to the inscription and exerted their legal rights, forcing the proposed inscription to be replaced by something far more conventional, stressing von Malhsdorf’s respectable occupation as the founder of a museum, as well as her biological male gender:  “Lothar Berfelde, 1928–​ 2002, genannt Charlotte von Mahlsdorf. Dem Museumsgründer zur Erinnerung” [Lothar Berfelde, 1928–​2002, known as Charlotte von Mahlsdorf. In memory of the founder (masc.) of the museum]. With this public memorialization, one could say, von Mahlsdorf was reincorporated into the heteronormative German state.

Von Mahlsdorf as paradox? The success of Wright’s play did not spell the end to the reframing of von Mahldorf’s life story. It led, in fact, to a reedition of the English translation of the memoir, but with a new title, I Am My Own Wife:  The True Story of Charlotte von Mahlsdorf (2004), and a glossy color headshot of von Mahlsdorf, wearing a string of pearls, on the cover. Nothing else was changed in Hollander’s translation—​except for the translator’s note, which was shortened, reduced to very small type, and placed across from the frontispiece: I would like to thank Regine Weissert for her helpful solutions to some knotty problems, and Robert Hollander for his careful reading of my text. This translation is dedicated to N., who died while I was at work on this text, and whom I loved. (2004, n.p.)19

Sexual dissidence to sexual dissonance  181 The repackaging of the memoir reflects the twin imperatives of the capitalist market: aligning it with a product having greater cultural capital—​the play had won almost every possible drama award—​while also positively distinguishing it from that product. In service of the first imperative, there is a sentence across the top of the front cover that reads: “The story that inspired the Pulitzer Prize-​winning play.” At the same time, calling it “the true story” of Charlotte von Mahlsdorf exploits the truth claims of the memoir as genre, contrasting it favorably to Wright’s semi-​fictionalized account. If “I Am My Own Woman” reads as a declaration of empowerment and independence, “I Am My Own Wife” has a very different valence, reading more like a riddle, along the lines of the novelty song composed by Dwight Latham and Moe Jaffe, “I Am My Own Grandpa.”20 Perhaps, some historical distance from both the idealization of von Mahlsdorf in the 1990s and the subsequent deflation that occurred in the 2000s, marked by this final renaming, may allow us to read von Mahlsdorf’s memoir no longer as a confirmation of Western historicism—​a positive confirmation in the first instance and a negative one in the second—​but as a riddle or paradox, as defined by Joseph Slaughter (2007, 12): Paradox is the rhetorical form of self-​ contradiction that challenges received opinion and disturbs the hermeticism of tautological self-​ evidence to report that, despite appearances, man may not in all cases be man. Paradox publicizes the nonsense in common sense, the unorthodox within orthodoxy.21 That being said, the publisher may have hoped to counter any such resistant reading provoked by the new title by also changing the image of von Mahlsdorf on the cover, replacing the stark black and white photo of the original 1995 edition with a color headshot of von Mahlsdorf, smiling and wearing a short-​sleeve black sweater and a string of pearls. Indeed, one might see in that early photograph, which featured von Mahlsdorf standing in front of her house-​museum wearing a black mid-​length dress with embroidery on the hem, and with a neutral expression on her face, an effort to keep the reader “at arm’s length,” an “obstinacy to assimilation,” as Doris Sommer (1993, 421) described Rigoberta Menchú’s positioning of herself in her memoir. To read von Mahlsdorf as a paradox then would require a commitment to read her life story against the grain of the packaging of her life story. For example, we might acknowledge how prescient she was in opening her memoir with the neo-​Nazi attack on her museum, presaging the rise of ethno-​nationalist movements not just in Germany but throughout the world. And we might be more attuned to all the ways she sought to foreclose a reading of her memoir as a progressivist emancipation narrative. As mentioned earlier, she was very blasé about the fall of the Berlin wall and

182  Sexual dissidence to sexual dissonance the allures of Western capitalism, confidant “they’ll all cross over, look at the Ku’damm, and be back by tomorrow morning” (2004, 174). She also seemed intent that the fall of communism in Eastern Europe should not spell the end of socialism as a political alternative. She implies this in her description of her beloved uncle, who was a Christian communist,22 and of the happy years she spent living with a lesbian couple in what she calls a Homo-​Kommune, or “homo-​commune,”23 as well as in her repeated criticism of unfettered development and industrialization, not to mention private ownership—​indeed, where else but communist Eastern Europe could a poor Hausfrau live in a palace? This point is more explicitly made, however, toward the end of the memoir, where she writes: We should guard against equating the DDR dictatorship with National Socialism. It is possible to draw comparisons—​and there are parallels—​ if they serve to help our understanding. But one thing is certain:  The assembly line murder of millions of people from 1933 to 1945 by the Germans remains a gruesome exception, against which any other comparison becomes invalid. My admiration and sympathy go to all those who wanted to make socialist ideas a reality, but failed, were doomed to fail because of the inadequacy of human beings. The idea remains a good one, even when discredited by the reality of socialism. (168) This point is especially important today as the effects of neoliberal policies—​ such as, the historic disparity in wealth distribution, rampant consumerism, and the epidemic of diseases of despair, such as alcoholism, drug addiction, and suicide—​are being felt with ever greater severity, as are the disastrous effects of the foreign interventionism that was paradoxically enabled by the fall of the Soviet Union. (I say paradoxically because the struggle against communism was one of the great Cold War justifications for interventionism.) Moreover, that (mis)reading of the fall of communism as the end of history cannot be dismissed as a neoconservative fantasy. It was presaged by powerful Cold War narratives generated in the West that cast Eastern Europe as a giant prison, as indexed by Wright with the image of “cement gulags.” This made it perhaps inevitable that the fall of communism would be read as the ultimate feel-​good story of liberation/​incorporation. But by failing to see that the West, too, had been profoundly affected by this mutually defining relationship with the Soviet Union and communism, the West missed its opportunity to “transition,” that is, to assess how the Cold War had fundamentally altered Western democratic norms and institutions, and to readjust. I’m referring here not just to McCarthyism, with its distinctly Soviet-​style public persecution of covert political enemies, but also to the fact that “In God We Trust” was printed on US currency and “under God” was inserted in the Pledge of Allegiance in the 1950s as a way to define

Sexual dissidence to sexual dissonance  183 the United States against a godless Russia. This initiated a confusion of church and state, a theocratization of US politics, the effects of which are ongoing today. And so, while Donald E. Pease (1993, 22) is surely correct in saying that “the breakdown of cold war ideology made formerly submerged heterogeneous cultural histories available to public and scholarly discourse,” could we have avoided reading those histories outside the powerful frame of transition? While leftist scholars were quick to dismiss Fukayama’s “end of history” as a conservative delusion, they found it difficult to entirely break free of the developmental logic underlying it and to propose viable alternatives. For example, the editors of the collection Altering States: Ethnographies of Transition in Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union (Berdahl, Bunzl, and Lampland 2000, 1) acknowledge the trope of transition to be deeply problematic, insofar as it “entails a certain linear, teleological thinking in relation to the direction of change,” but nonetheless use it over 30 times in their 12-​page introduction.24 The trope of transition, in fact, remains alive and well in government and financial circles, as reflected in a 2014 report by the International Monetary Fund: 25 Years of Transition: Post-​communist Europe and the IMF (Roaf et al. 2014). The Journal of Communist Studies and Transition Politics changed its name to East European Politics only in 2012. The problem with the project of mapping landscapes of “transition” is that those landscapes are typically confined to the region of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. Indeed, this is the case with all the chapters in the volume Altering States, implying that the collapse of this mutually defining relationship was somehow disorienting only to the countries of the East—​thereby construing the West as staying the same. In this way, the declaration of victory in the Cold War authorized a disavowal of any responsibility on the West’s part to transition, that is, “to ponder the impact of the Soviet Union’s dissolution and the meanings of socialism and communism, the complex bodies of thought that have been invoked throughout the twentieth century to signify what imperialism ruthlessly forestalls” (Cain 1993, 457). It may not, however, be too late. This is the hope of the Open Memory Box Project, which has collected hundreds of hours of personal videos from East Germany with the aim of “transform[ing] stereotypes from a history that’s sometimes misunderstood” (Deutsche Welle 2019, online). As Barbara Langerwisch, a retired schoolteacher in Berlin, commented about that period referred to in Germany by the less teleological word Wende, or “turn”: It was crazy and terrific. But I  also have to say that I  had imagined, like many others, that we would have brought some things from our country. But in the end, we were simply appropriated. That’s a pity, and many things that were actually quite good were shut down. (qtd. in Caners 2019, online)

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Conclusion While von Mahlsdorf makes an important distinction between fascism and communism as ideologies, her sentiments about those in power, whatever their political orientation, express profound skepticism over the viability of political action. Such skepticism is considered one of the factors fueling the current rise of ethnonationalism and the deepening of the despair among those who would oppose it. As von Mahlsdorf (2004, 71; italicized in the original) was fond of saying: “The same stalls, only different pigs.” And so, while attending to the paradoxes of her memoir is one way to resist the appropriation of her queer life story in the service of exporting or projecting “dominant paradigms of queer identity from North America” (Giersdorf 2006, 171), we should also resist the temptation to idealize her choices and her individual path of resistance. This is not meant in any way to dismiss her incredible queer life but rather to grant her, at long last, “the right to be damaged, psychically complex, or merely otherwise occupied” (Amin 2017, 11)—​and to grant those of us in the West that same right. And finally, if we cannot abandon our attachment to transition, then we might short circuit its association with a triumphant developmentalism by reconceptualizing it along the lines mapped out by Jack Halberstam (2018, 4) in Trans*: The asterisk [at the end of trans] modifies the meaning of transitivity by refusing to situate transition in relation to a destination, a final form, a specific shape, or an established configuration of desire and identity. The asterisk holds off the certainty of diagnosis; it keeps at bay any sense of knowing in advance what the meaning of this or that gender variant might be, and perhaps, most importantly, it makes trans* people the authors of their own categorizations. This conceptualization recognizes the distinct experience of embodiment of transgender individuals without foreclosing the possibility of broad solidarity—​for we all have bodies, bodies that are always transitioning. Indeed, Preciado (2018, 13)  argues that the fact that so many people today are turning to pharmaceuticals and surgery may mark the end of Laqueur’s two-​ gender model and the emergence of a postidentitary pharmacopornographic regime, which will open up political opportunities in the wake of the failure of the Left “to redefine sovereignty in terms other than in relation to the Western, white, biomale, partriarchal body.” Preciado then goes on to imagine a politics of the future, one that echoes von Mahldorf’s homo-​kommune: “The only way to global mutation today is to construct a planetary somatic communism, a communism of (all) living bodies with and together with the earth” (13).

Sexual dissidence to sexual dissonance  185

Notes 1 The idealization also sets up these queer subjects for a fall. Consider, for example, the way in which the Anglophone reception of the memoir of Guatemalan Indian rights activist Rigoberta Menchú was framed by its English title:  I, Rigoberta Menchú (1983). The construction is quite marked, used almost exclusively in the courtroom when a witness is being sworn in. Compare it to the less marked Spanish title:  Me llamo Rigoberta Menchú [My name is Rigoberta Menchú, or They call me Rigoberta Menchú]. This may help to explain the outrage and sense of betrayal when it turned out Menchú was not an “eye witness” to all the events she recounted. The title incorporated her within a Western legal epistemology, which may have been foreign to her. The fact that the memoir was created with the participation of a French anthropologist suggests that we may never know what Menchú thought her memoir was. In any case, the English title made it perhaps inevitable that she would be charged with perjury and giving false testimony. Incidentally, Wright (2004, 43) may be alluding to Menchú when he titles a scene “I, Lothar Berfelde.” In the scene, Charlotte describes the “agreement” she signed with the Secret Police: “I, Lothar Berfelde, commit myself willingly and freely to working together with the Ministry for State Security.” 2 Several years later, I was again struck by the unease of Western observers when faced with other sexual cultures following the US invasion of Afghanistan. Western journalists confronting the phenomenon of man–​boy love in the Pashtun region adopted what I found to be rather contradictory approaches, both of which were distinctly Western, and which often appeared side by side in the same article. On the one hand, the Pashtun men were treated with light comic derision for habits and dress that appeared to the journalists to be effeminate—​one Pashtun man was described as “prancing” in high heeled shoes—​while on the other hand, the tradition of man–​boy love was treated with the utmost seriousness as child abuse. What struck me was that these two Western frames did more to obscure the reader’s understanding of this culture than to illuminate it (Baer 2003). Not being a specialist in the region, my focus was simply on the contradictions and dissonances in the journalists’ accounts of the sexual culture there, their unease. Nevertheless, a letter to the journal’s editor accused me of supporting child abuse, which brought home to me how fraught the study of sexuality is, how filled with disturbing attachments. 3 It is interesting to note that von Mahlsdorf entered the international stage at precisely the moment when the concept of “transgender” was emerging in the West. Without access to the term, however, von Mahlsdorf continued to classify herself as a transvestite, and this was also how her memoir was classified by the Library of Congress, under the key words “gay” and “transvestite.” This disciplinary framing may be responsible in part for the fact that von Mahlsdorf has been largely ignored in Transgender Studies. Von Mahlsdorf, it seems, fell between two disciplinary frames. In fact, the first time “transgender” appears in the marketing of the memoir is in the second edition, issued in 2004, where it appears in an excerpt from a review in the Village Voice. The choice of “gay” as a search term is perhaps no less anachronizing than “ ‘transvestite” insofar as it has associations with the liberation movement, which the German original “schwul” does not have.

186  Sexual dissidence to sexual dissonance 4 As Chakrabarty argues in Provincializing Europe: It was historicism that allowed Marx to say that the “country that is more developed industrially only shows, to the less developed, the image of its own future.” […] Historicism thus posited historical time as a measure of the cultural distance (at least in institutional development) that was assumed to exist between the West and the non-​West. (2000, 7) 5 One factor that might explain why transgender arose in the Anglophone world is language. While grammatical gender exists in English, it is only reflected in the use of some pronouns, whereas many other languages classify all nouns and modifiers as either masculine or feminine (i.e., French) or as masculine, feminine, or neuter (i.e., German and Russian). In some languages, gender is also reflected in the past tense form of verbs (i.e., Russian) and in past participles (i.e., Russian, and in some cases, German and French), too. 6 Valentine (2007, 18) defines neoliberalism in this way, “since the early 1970s a broad (and sometimes contradictory) range of neoliberal policies have asserted business rights over public life, increasingly privatized public services and public space, undercut labor and class based progressive alliances.” 7 Compare the implied progressivist narrative embedded in the English word transition to the more temporally neutral term used by the Germans to describe this period: die Wende, or ‘the turn.’ 8 When translating the actual passage in the memoir, however, Hollander chooses to translate Frau as “wife.” 9 It is not unthinkable, given von Mahlsdorf’s familiarity with Germany’s queer archive, that she also intended her catchphrase to reference the first German homophile magazine Der Eigene (1896–​1932), which in turn led to the creation of a homophile association the Gemeinschaft der Eigenen [Community of the Exceptional] (see Wilper 2016, 56–​8). If it is a veiled reference, it likely an ironic one, as this organization and its journal became associated with a masculinist ideology. 10 Interestingly, this gets translated in Wright’s play as “maidservant” (2004, 18), another gesture that normalizes von Mahlsdorf’s queer performance of domesticity. She was the mistress of the house, not the maidservant. 11 The translator, Jean Hollander, confirmed to me in an e-​mail of 27 December 2014 that she had no role in the creation of the subtitle. 12 We see this English translation in some of the critical literature surrounding von Mahlsdorf’s autobiography, as well. For example, in his 2006 article about von Mahlsdorf, Giersdorf (2006, 180)  uses the English translation I Am My Own Woman in reference to the memoir, without mentioning the other possible translation, in order to support his reconstruction of von Mahlsdorf’s intentions: “Even though she reiterates the phrase about the woman living in a male body,” Wright explains, she titles [sic] her autobiography I Am My Own Woman. The title suggests that von Mahlsdorf is not suppressing one or the other side of her corporeal identity. Rather, she creates an identity that includes male as well as female elements of her corporeality.

Sexual dissidence to sexual dissonance  187 13 In a later essay, Rechy (2000) presents this “outlaw sensibility” as a distinct aspect of the gay experience. 14 I became aware of the scope of this disenchantment as I was studying reviews of translated books in the New  York Times in three years:  1900, 1950, and 2000. The 2000 corpus stood out in that it was the only time German-​language source texts were more represented than French, and most of those German texts contained ambivalent depictions of the fall of communism and the reunification of Germany, and when the texts themselves didn’t address the topic, the reviewer did. I also witnessed a parallel phenomenon in the 2000 corpus: the translation criticism, where present, tended to be largely pessimistic in regard to translation’s capacity to successfully negotiate cultural differences (see Baer 2017). 15 Wright’s play was translated into several foreign languages and was successfully performed in the Czech Republic in 2008, in Quebec in 2009, in Mexico in 2010, and in Athens in 2011. 16 Wright’s character in the play speaks with a pronounced “Texas twang” (11); his German, as he himself admits in the play, “sucks” (44)—​indeed, several scenes in the play feature Wright speaking very bad German—​and, again by his own admission, he “didn’t even really know what the Cold War was until it ended […]” (37). Moreover, in the first letter he writes to von Mahlsdorf, he reveals himself to be someone unused to communicating with non-​native speakers of English, by using the expressions “Bible Belt” and “a slam dunk,” which in turn draws a subtle connection between Wright and the boorish American soldiers who buy clocks from von Mahlsdorf as souvenirs in Act II. Later, in a scene titled “Eine Spende” [A Gift], Wright’s character calls his friend in Germany at four in the morning, having forgotten about the time difference, another subtle way Wright highlights his character’s insensitivity to cultural distinctions. 17 English translations of the term vary, however. In the East German film Coming Out (1989), for example, an early scene in which Mattias confesses his homosexuality to the doctor in the hospital after his suicide attempt, schwul is translated in the subtitle as “queer.” 18 One could say that Wright’s use of the American term “The Gay Nineties” to describe the German Grunderzeit period betrays a clearly Western, and perhaps specifically United States, frame of reference. 19 When I  asked the translator who the N.  was to whom she had dedicated her translation of von Mahlsdorf’s memoir, she regretfully admitted that she didn’t remember. I had surmised that it might have been a friend of Hollander’s who had died of AIDS, but this cannot be confirmed. This is the N. to whom I have dedicated this book. 20 Katharina Gerstenberger (1998, 114; italics added), I should note, does attempt to give a fairly straightforward political reading of the title: The “I” that claims a possessive relationship to the “self as wife” in the self-​referential title I Am My Own Woman asserts a sense of (hetero-​) sociosexual autonomy: The man who is his own wife does not physically reproduce or adopt a paternal role vis-​à-​vis others. 21 Lest we idealize the counterhegemonic potential of paradox, consider this less benign assessment of its effects, which appears in Brent Hayes Edwards’s (2003, 5; italics added) introduction to The Practice of Diaspora:

188  Sexual dissidence to sexual dissonance The cultures of black internationalism are formed only within the “paradoxes” [Tyler] Stovall mentions [namely, that French colonialism and primitivism served as the foundation for a vision of pan-​African unity], with the result that—​as much as they allow new and unforeseen alliances and interventions on a global stage—​they also are characterized by unavoidable misapprehensions and misreadings, persistent blindnesses and solipsisms, self-​defeating and abortive collaborations, a failure to translate even a basic grammar of blackness. 22 In describing her uncle, von Mahlsdorf (2004, 7) uses a favorite expression, “to fall between two stools”: The gist of his message was that Christ was the first communist. My uncle was of the opinion that socialism should be reconciled with Christianity. Thus, he fell between two stools. Although a believer, he forfeited the support of the Church, who were suspicious of “red” tendencies; and he lost out with the socialists who thought him too pious. 23 Hollander translates this as“homo-community,”thereby attenuating its connection to communism. 24 Another example is Valerie Sperling’s 1999 volume Organizing Women in Contemporary Russia. The subtitle is Engendering Transition, but the concept of transition is not mentioned in the introduction, and the term does not appear in the index.

 189

Conclusion Uneasy reading, or putting the trans* in Translation Studies

In Seeing Like a State, James C. Scott (1999, 183) describes legibility as “a condition of manipulation,” which then leads him to propose illegibility as “a reliable source for political autonomy.” What I have been proposing in this book, however, is that the political opposite of legibility is not illegibility, but rather the kind of uneasy reading described by Briggs (2017, 69): This sentence, on the other hand: I am able to read it, I feel fairly sure that I understand it. But until I start translating it, I’m not yet in a position to tell you exactly where, of what order or of what combination of orders (lexical, syntactical, atmosphere, psychological, ethical […]), its difficulties will turn out to be. In this sense, I’m not sure I could practise for them. This not knowing—​this not knowing ahead of time, ahead of engaging with the actual doing of it—​is a source of—​what? Excitement, I’d call it. Great nervous excited excitement. By analogy, the political opposite of transposability is not untranslatability, but rather the “problematic translations” proposed by Katie King (2002) or the focus-​grouped translations of Mack et al. (2013)—​that is, translations that acknowledge the contingent nature of knowledge and puncture “the illusion that what is said is immediately equivalent to what is meant” (Adorno 1991a, 189). And so, in this conclusion, I would like to outline some concrete ways that translation can be incorporated into a queer counterhegemonic pedagogy, one that is grounded in Dinshaw’s notion of indeterminateness, Halberstam’s notion of the queer art of failure, and Amin’s notion of unease. Central to such a pedagogy would be the uneasy reading of texts in translation, one that does not seek to resolve that unease by radically othering queer voices or by incorporating them neatly into a Western sexual epistemology. Rather, I present the uneasy reading of translated texts as an alternative to what Alyosxa Tudor (2017, 20) glosses as “romanticised knowledge productions of crossing national and gendered borders,” on the one hand, and the complete disavowal of translatorial unease, on the other, a disavowal expressed by treating translation as a transparent instrument or by

190 Conclusion circumventing translation altogether through the hegemonic use of English. An uneasy reading of translated texts is also necessarily a slow reading, inspired by Jack Halberstam’s (2018, 94)  description of the trans* body, which “not only asks that we slow down the lightening-​fast calculations by which we assign genders to bodies, but also stalls systems of signification that attach masculinity to maleness, femininity to femaleness, leaving nothing in between.”1 Such uneasy reading would entail not simply making our students aware that a text is a translation, done by a specific individual at a specific point in time and for a specific purpose, but also drawing their attention to the many ways translators signal their unease, and in so doing, intentionally or not, puncture the “regime of fluency” promoted by Anglophone publishers and decried by Lawrence Venuti in the Translator’s Invisibility (1995, 1). A  counterhegemonic reading of texts in translation, then, would take the translator’s unease as a privileged point of entry for exposing translations as negotiated textual realities that are “multisubjective, power-​laden, and incongruent” (Clifford, 1986, 15).2 So, let’s begin with what is perhaps the most blatant manifestation of translatorial unease: the translator’s footnote.

The translator’s footnote While studying the importation of a Western sexual epistemology into Russia following the fall of communism and the lifting of censorship restrictions, I came across a 1998 Russian translation of a 1964 book, Love and Orgasm, by the American psychologist Alexander Lowen. I knew Lowen’s name but was unfamiliar with his work, probably because in the West he had been cast into the dustbin of history for, among other things, his pathologization of homosexuality.3 So, I was surprised to find the book had been published in a Russian series titled Classics of Foreign Psychology and that there was no introduction to historicize or problematize Lowen’s theories. Then, as I opened the book to examine the translation, I was struck by a footnote at the end of the title of Chapter 1:  Sexual Sophistication versus Sexual Immaturity. I wondered what sense of unease had inspired the translator to insert a footnote here? It seems, he had found the collocation “sexual sophistication” so odd sounding, he felt compelled to provide several alternative translations of sophistication in a footnote. After more than 50  years of Soviet silence on the subject of sex and sexuality, the idea of sexual sophistication seemed dissonant to the ear of the post-​Soviet translator, as did, perhaps, the whole idea that sex is or should be “central to individual identity” (Herzog 2011, 2). In any case, such a footnote does not fix or settle the meaning of the collocation but rather invites the reader to ponder it. A more complicated example of an uneasy translator’s footnote appears at the very front of the English translation of Charlotte von Mahlsdorf’s memoir, I Am My Own Woman, which I  discussed in Chapter 6.  In that note, the translator, Jean Hollander, seeks to justify her decision to translate

Conclusion  191 the polysemous German word Frau as “woman” in the title of the book, while alerting readers to the fact that she has translated it as “wife” in the body of the text. And so, the footnote, like an act of overt censorship, paradoxically brings attention to the problem that it was meant to resolve. If in the body of the text, it seemed right to translate Frau as “wife,” why is it then “valid” to translate it as “woman” in the title? Simply because “woman” is one of the definitions listed in a bilingual German–​English dictionary? Is it “valid” then for a translator to ignore the context of an utterance? And what led her to refer to von Mahlsdorf in this note with masculine pronouns? Is this a way to frame the memoir as the testimonial of a man who identifies as a woman as opposed to a woman-​identified person who identifies as a wife, another justification for her choice of “woman” for the title? Far from resolving the issue, this footnote underscores the often intractable or indeterminate nature of such translation problems. A similarly uncomfortable footnote, this one written by the editors, not the translator, can be found at the beginning of the English translation of Herculine Barbin’s memoir, discussed in Chapter 1: In the English translation of the text, it is difficult to render the play of the masculine and feminine adjective which Alexina applies to herself. They are, for the most part, feminine before she possessed Sara and masculine afterward. But this systematization, which is denoted by the use of italics, does not seem to describe a consciousness of being a woman becoming a consciousness of being a man; rather, it is an ironic reminder of grammatical, medical, and juridical categories that language must utilize but that the content of the narrative contradicts. The editors of the English-​language edition have followed Herculine’s system wherever possible, italicizing the feminine nouns which she used in referring to herself. (1980, xiii–​xiv) The footnote is revealing in its contradictions. First, the editors acknowledge the challenges of rendering Alexina’s play with linguistic gender from a language that is heavily gendered, such as French, into a language that is lightly gendered, such as English. This is true, but it also expresses an acceptance of the reigning English-​language norms rather than a willingness to find alternatives. The editors then suggest that Barbin’s use of gendered language simply reflects the official diagnoses of the medical establishment—​as a female at birth and then later, in adulthood, as a male—​which basically removes any agency from Alexina. This, as C. J. Gomolka (2012, 69) demonstrates, is simply untrue: “This seemingly innocent advancement seems to prove not only counterfactual from the very start of Herculine’s narrative, but remains even more controversial as the narrative continues.” The editors then go on to assert that the use of gendered forms does not reflect Barbin’s coming into consciousness of herself as a man, thereby reinforcing the interpretation of

192 Conclusion their use as simply a reflection of the official diagnoses, an act, therefore, of capitulation rather than agency. Finally, the play with gendered forms is written off as ironic rather than presented as an authentic expression of transgender embodiment in language. Compare this to the very respectful footnotes with which Ambroise Tardieu (1874, 63)  opens his edition of the memoir. In footnote 2, he writes: “I shall respect the form, which bears a particular stamp of captivating sincerity and emotion,” and in footnote 3: “The words printed here in italics are underlined in the manuscript because the author had a visible affectation for speaking of himself as much in the masculine as in the feminine.”4 Comparing the footnote of the English edition to those of the first French edition, separated by more than 100 years, it becomes difficult to construct a simple dichotomy between a primitive past and an enlightened present. While Tardieu was intent on making bodies legible and refers to Barbin in the masculine, which, he believes, reflects the “correct” diagnosis, he also treats Alexina’s “affectation” with greater respect than the editors of the English translation. Isn’t this precisely what Gayatri Spivak meant in “The Politics of Translation” when she called on translators of subaltern writers to pay attention to their rhetoric, to allow them their rhetoric? The English version, on the other hand, “strips the narrative of any possible narrative trans-​ subversiveness leaving behind the vestiges of the heteronormative imperative that the French version seems to resist” (Gomolka 2012, 66). As such, the 1980 US edition of Barbin’s memoir could be said to mark a distinct moment in the hegemonic expansion of Anglophone scholarship in the field of sexuality studies. It traffics in Foucault’s celebrity in a way that violates the intention behind the 1978 French edition. Indeed, its heavy framing has more in common with Tardieu’s 1874 edition than with Foucault’s very lightly framed French edition. Even more disturbing, however, is its general dismissal of Barbin’s use of the resources of the French language to express a trans* identity. We see the legacy of this in a general tendency to conflate the Anglophone experience of transgender with the universal. For example, when Gayle Salamon (2010, 172) describes Jan Morris’s Conundrum as “an autobiographical work that has come to function as the model for many of the transautobiographies that have followed” and as “a foundational text in trans studies,” she does not qualify the statement. The French tradition of transautobiography is in fact quite distinct, characterized in part by the very play with grammatical gender that was dismissed by the US editors of Barbin’s memoir. As Gomolka (2012, 64) notes: Today, numerous trans-​autobiographical works can be found on bookshelves in Fnac or on amazon.fr; Né homme, comment je suis devenue femme, by Brigitte Martel (1981), Alain, transsexuelle by Inge Stephens (1983), Diane par Diane (1987), and Je serai elle by Sylviane Dullak (1983) to name a few. Besides being autobiographical and focusing on male-​to-​female transsexuals, these trans-​narratives also share another

Conclusion  193 aspect: a narrative alternation between masculine and feminine gender concord as a means of linguistic and therefore gender dissention. A careful critical reading of the opening footnote in the US edition of Barbin’s memoir could, therefore, be an effective means of generating ethical unease over the framing of Barbin’s queer life in English translation and over the consequences of the hegemony of English on transgender expression and on the emergence of transgender as a conceptual and disciplinary category. Moreover, this is not an unease that can be easily dispelled with a “correct” translation, as Gomolka seems to suggest. Such a translation, Gomolka (2012 80) writes, is one that: might offer readers a more complete understanding of the identity that Herculine intended to present. This might be achieved by betraying form for function and rephrasing h/​er story in the third and not the first person. A third-​person narration might give readers the chance to experience the story the way a French reader would: through the constant intermingling of gendered language and experience. But the French reader experiences the story as a first-​person narrative with all its “captivating sincerity and emotion.” That being said, I am not dismissing Gomolka’s suggestion as wrong, but questioning the will to mastery underlying the desire for “a more complete understanding” and for a translation that would somehow allow an Anglophone reader “to experience the story the way a French reader would”—​especially when that understanding would be purchased at the expense of another, no less significant aspect of Barbin’s rhetoric.

Foreign words Foreign words, or borrowings, are another productive queer point of entry into a translated text. Like the Freudian slip, they often index moments of unease provoked by a perceived semantic mismatch or even a clash of epistemes. As the German philosopher Theodor Adorno (1991a, 199) puts it, “The problem of foreign words is truly a problem, and that is not merely a manner of speaking.” To the extent that linguistic nationalists, or purists, construe foreign words as “assailing the [national] body of language,” Adorno (1991b, 288) insists that any legitimation of foreign words must be grounded “in a different conception of language,” one that is nonorganic. As he goes on to explain: A worthy task for folklore would be to examine how foreign words operate beneath the sphere of culture but without fusing with the body of language—​at the deepest level of language, in political jargon, in the slang of love, and in an everyday way of speaking that from the

194 Conclusion standpoint of organic language and linguistic purity would have to be called corrupt, but in which we may see the contours of a language to come that cannot be understood either in terms of the idea of the organic or in terms of education. (1991b, 290)5 Elsewhere Adorno (1991a, 189) describes the “ideal of indigenousness” in language as illusory, as illustrated by failed efforts to replace foreign words with neologisms, “which always sound more forced than the genuine foreign words themselves.” And so, taking Adorno at his word, that foreign words are not merely a manner of speaking, I would like to outline how the queer use of foreign words in translated texts can highlight key issues related to the global circulation of queer knowledge and the nature of queer agency. Although Adorno imbeds his discussion of foreign words in very specific historical moments, much of the scholarly writing on foreign words in literary texts sees them as an instance of linguistic self-​reflexivity. Karin Beck (2007: 4), for example, claims that the use of foreign words in Tolstoy’s War and Peace “is a way to draw attention to language and its use: it is not itself a goal.” Daniel Karlin (2005, 7) makes a similar point in his study of English words in Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu: “[…] the presence of the English language in A la recherche has more than a thematic significance; it is also a reflexive sign of the novel’s preoccupation with language itself.” And Adorno (1991b, 289) himself describes the foreign word “as an expression of alienation itself.” But the use of foreign words both in original writing and in translated texts is rarely an expression of linguistic self-​reflexivity alone. Nor does it simply challenge the logic of the monolingual nation-​state, by revealing the national language to be lacking. Rather, it exposes the double bind of the monolingual nation-​state, namely, that national languages must be incommensurable, hence a privileged vehicle of the national genius, but also transposable; there must be “deux mots pour chaque chose” [Two words for each thing] to quote the title of an essay by the Canadian translation theorist Susanne de Lotbinière-​Harwood. Lotbinière-​Harwood goes on to discuss a situation in which there is no established target language equivalent of a key term, compelling her to construct one, an extreme example, one might say, of translator agency. When inverted, the phrase alludes to the phenomenon of polysemy, that in any one language, there are often two or more words for any one thing, which underscores the decision-​making involved in any act of translation. The erotics of Lotbinière-​Harwood’s bilingualism renders the question of equivalence moot, as the act of translation brings together two words that cannot be the same, first, because they are polysemous and the range of meanings in one language rarely, if ever, aligns with the range of meanings in another, and, second, because they have lived different lives in their respective languages. Words have histories, or, as Bakhtin argues, there are no neutral words, as discussed in Chapter 2. And it is the historicity of words that allows us to move beyond the analysis of foreign words as a

Conclusion  195 simple act of linguistic self-​reflexivity or as an instance of untranslatability to reveal the relationship between foreign and domestic to be profoundly contingent and in a state of constant flux. Foreign words are in fact quite common in translated texts dealing with sex and sexuality, and are often easy to recognize, as they tend to be italicized or bolded. In some cases, words from a third language are used, which subverts the binary of source and target texts. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, that third language was often Latin, as in Burton’s One Thousand and One Nights or W. R. Paton’s translations of the Greek Anthology (Nisbet 2013, 268 n115). One can conjecture that using the language of medicine and the Church was meant to blunt the impact of a sexually explicit word for the reader who knew Latin or to completely block the meaning for readers who didn’t—​those readers, women, children, and members of the lower classes, were thought to be especially vulnerable to moral corruption. Walter Ker simply omitted passages from his translations of Martial for the Loeb series, while an earlier version rendered them in Italian (Lawton 2012, 191–​3; Livingstone and Nisbet 2010, 113), another interesting subversion of the binary of source and target language. Moreover, these foreign words are often bolded, italicized, or footnoted, marking them visually as eruptions in the text. Such moments of unease are also exploited in artistic works, typically presented as instances of code-​switching. Foreign words in such cases introduce alternative histories, thereby historicizing and potentially provincializing the term in the dominant language. Consider the scene from season 4 of the US television serial The Sopranos. Tony’s Uncle Junior is shown in bed with his girlfriend, who is basking in postcoital glow. The girlfriend compliments Uncle Junior on his masterful love-​ making. Uncle Junior beams. She then notes his particular aptitude for oral sex, which clearly irritates Uncle Junior. When she repeats the compliment, saying that she’s going to tell all her girlfriends, he firmly instructs her not to. When she presses him as to why, he exclaims, “They’ll think I’m a fenuc.” By using the Italian slang term, Uncle Junior is not merely substituting an Italian term for the English “gay”—​this occurs frequently in the series—​but signals an alternative conceptualization of homosexuality, one with its own historicity. The slang term fenuc is diasporic slang derived from the Italian word for fennel, finnochio, which has a long and disputed association with homosexuality. But, regardless of the history of the Italian word, the very presence of the foreign word troubles the conventional understanding of heterosexuality, as desire for someone of the opposite sex, by adding a performative dimension. In other words, it is not sufficient for Uncle Junior to successfully demonstrate his desire for someone of the opposite sex, he must perform that desire in a certain way, one that, we might conjecture from his unease, involves penetration by the penis. To the extent that one’s desire must be demonstrated in specific ways, the specter of the fenuc can never be definitively expelled. And to the extent that the historicity of fenuc

196 Conclusion resists incorporation into gay, it highlights the “overlapping, contradictory, and conflictual definitional forces” that characterize the modern field of sexuality.6 An even more curious example is the first (and last) East German film to deal openly with the question of homosexuality Coming Out (1989), curious not only because the film bears an English title but also because it premiered on 9 November 1989, the day the border was opened between East and West Germany, inviting a symbolic reading.7 Could the fall of communism be read as a coming out?8 Moreover, the only scene that could in any way be construed as a coming out occurs at the beginning of the film and features the main character’s lover, Matthias, who, we learn later in the film, is already out to his parents and friends. In that scene, Matthias is on a stretcher in the hallway of a hospital after having had his stomach pumped following a suicide attempt. The female doctor consoles him, asking him what’s the matter. He finally responds: “Ich bin schwul. Ich bin homosexuel.” His use of two words is interesting, as if he felt the need to translate the slang schwul into the medical homosexual, displaying a semantic slippage in the very moment of coming out. Moreover, both words are German:schwul is roughly equivalent to “gay” but with a much longer history, and the quasimedical term homosexuel was coined in a German text in 1864. This is the first indication that the film is going to offer a critical look at “coming out” as an Anglophone concept, certainly complicating any model of simple, passive appropriation. In fact, the final scene of the film features the main character, Philipp, standing at the head of his classroom. He is a high school teacher and rumors of his behavior have led to an observation by the principal and two other teachers. They wait for him to begin class, but he just stands there silently, with an enigmatic look on his face. Finally, the exasperated principal addresses him: “Colleague Klarmann,” to which he responds: “Yes.” The scene ends there and the next and final scene shows him exiting his apartment building with a bicycle, which he then mounts and rides through the city streets, another inverted reference to the opening scene of the film which featured an ambulance racing through those same city streets at night, underneath a display of fireworks, carrying Matthias. Did he come out? The viewer does not know. Moreover, his surname literally means “clear man,” playfully connecting the notion of coming out with transparency, which the ending refuses. While the film does not dismiss “coming out” as a foreign import, utterly inapplicable to an East German context—​in fact, Phillip is clearly impressed that Matthias is “out” to his parents, who attend his birthday party, and Phillip does leave his girlfriend for Matthias—​it does suggest that the process will be shaped and informed by a distinctly German queer archive. While a good portion of the film is shot in bars and clubs, we hear only two Anglophone songs, one at the beginning and one at the end. Moreover, both are frothy and light, unlike the sentimental German pop song, “Gold in deinen Augen” [Gold in your eyes] by Frank Schöbel, that is playing when

Conclusion  197 Matthias and Philipp first lock eyes in a German gay bar, with Matthias dressed as a harlequin. In fact, one of the running motives of the film is the inseparability of sadness and joy—​for example, the flashing colored lights of the ambulance appear in the opening scene of the film against a firework display, and later during a raucous dance party in the gay bar, the camera suddenly shifts to a solitary young man crying, which sets this Eastern European world apart from what Jack Halberstam describes as the “toxic positivity” of US popular culture. The rest of Philipp’s queer archive is decidedly Germanophone and quite eclectic. It includes  a lyric poem by Bertold Brecht, “Ich benötige keinen Grabstein, aber” [I do not need a gravestone, but], written a year before his death; the duet between Papagena and Papageno from Mozart’s Magic Flute, which could be described as a mirthful play on sameness and difference; excerpts from a German novel featuring a homoerotic relationship between a captain and colonel in the army, which his wife asks him to read aloud to her; excerpts from Goethe’s Mignon, described by James Sime as “one of the strangest, most pathetic figures” in world literature; as well as a song from the Jewish Ghetto, sung by the student Lutz, who will become Matthias’s lover after Matthias and Philipp break up. The song begins “My mother no longer calls me by my name. She is dead. My father no longer calls me by my name. He is far away,” and so on. The archive is a varied assortment of works that deal with memorialization, naming, attraction, minoritization, and discrimination. Add to these artist works, the life stories recounted to Phillip by the motherly café owner who lost her son at age 19 in a car accident (Matthias has just turned 20), or by Charlotte von Mahlsdorf, who makes a cameo in the film as the bartender; she recounts the story of when she tried on a gown she found in the attic of her aunt’s house, only to be caught by the aunt. But the aunt, who was dressed in men’s clothes and, as von Mahlsdorf says, was probably a lesbian, tells her: “Nature’s has been fooling around with us. You should be a girl. I should be a man.” Then, in one of the final scenes of the film, an elderly gentlemen recounts how he was arrested by the Gestapo and sent to a concentration camp when he was outed as a homosexual. After the war, he became a dedicated communist; he than notes that today one can work alongside other minorities, but not homosexuals. And so, this first and last cinematic production from Eastern Europe on the theme of queer sexuality is quite sophisticated—​even cosmopolitan—​in its treatment of the elephant in the room: Anglophone global gay culture. It recognizes its existence with the English title of the film but refuses either to dismiss it as utterly irrelevant to East German life or to embrace it as directly applicable, easily transposable. Instead, the film demonstrates, quite poignantly, how coming out will necessarily assume a distinct resonance in the context of East Germany, in terms that are shaped by the distinct nature of the German queer archive. (See Bassi 2017 on the localization of global gay culture through translation.) At the same time, that process of translation

198 Conclusion subjects the hegemonic Anglophone model of coming out to a critical interrogation, provincializing it in the process. Isn’t this what Kate Briggs (2017, 140) describes as the “to and fro” of translation: “a relay: a venturing of something new on the very close basis of something that already and persistently exists”?

Notes 1 The translator’s unease that I am theorizing here is akin to what David Halperin refers to as “a situation that one can’t write one’s way out of” (1995, 10). “The impasse,” Halperin continues, “may be a clue to something real, an indication that one has stumbled upon something of potentially wider significance than one’s own limitations, onto some major organizing structure of social meaning or some irreducible law of cultural discourse” (10). 2 This aligns with comments made by José Quiroga in regard to pedagogy, In my day-​to-​day work I am less interested in pointing out whether a writer is lesbian or gay than in noticing how students react to indeterminate questions. […] I  attach greater importance to the circuits of production that underlie a text’s publication than to the difference that homosexualities seem to claim. (2003, 133) 3 While advocating for the importance of sexual pleasure for heterosexuals, Lowen offers a damming portrayal of homosexuality: “Despite the protestations of some confirmed homosexuals that homosexuality is a ‘normal’ way of life, the average invert is aware that his propensity amounts to an emotional illness” (Lowen 1965: 61). As Nick Totton comments, “[Alexander Lowen] combines a strongly affirmative attitude towards ‘normal’ heterosexual activity with an equally strong pathologization of homosexuality” (Totton 2006: 129). 4 Footnote 2 reads in the original French: “[…] partout je respecterai la forme qui a un cachet particulier de sincérité et émotion saisissantes.” And footnote 3: “Les mots imprimés ici en italique sont soulignés dans le manuscript, car l’auteur a mis une visible affectation à parler de lui tantôt au masculin, tantôt au feminin” (1874, 63). 5 Adorno’s mention here of the “slang of love” is not the only time issues of sex and sexuality enter his discussion of foreign words. In his earlier essay, “Words from Abroad,” Adorno (1991a, 195) discusses the words Sexus and Geschlecht, as they appear in his “Short Commentaries on Proust”: The foreign word is better whenever its literal translation is not literal, for whatever reason. “Sexus” [sex], at a somewhat later point (p. 180) means “Geschlecht” [sex, race, genus]. But the German word, Geschlecht, covers a substantially greater range of meaning than the Latin word, Sexus; it includes what is called the “gens” in Latin, the clan or tribe. And above all, it has much more pathos than the foreign word, less sensual, one might say. He goes on to note that it is the illicit quality of sex implied by the foreign word that is crucial for his discussion of the passage in question.

Conclusion  199 6 In Imagining Transgender, David Valentine models an approach to sexuality scholarship that attends closely to such moments of unease, while refusing to discipline them. See the discussion of his queer ethnography in Chapter 1. 7 Coming out is in fact a concept that does not travel easily into non-​Western contexts, given its close connection to a Western “confessional discourse that begins with an interior self and works outward to body, family, and society” (Boellstorff 2005, 171). In Indonesia and much of Southeast Asia, Boellstorff explains, “the boundary between inner and outer self is weak, and each can be affected by the other” (2005, 171). José Quiroga (2000, 19) documents a similar resistance to the concept among Latin American queers. In the West, too, the notion of coming out, and especially the outing of others, is contested, as David Halperin discusses in the introduction to Saint Foucault: until that moment, I hadn’t realized that I shared with all other lesbian and gay people in our society, a vulnerability I foolishly thought I had managed to escape by coming out. The point of coming out, I had thought, was precisely to deprive other people of their privileged knowingness about me and my sexuality; […] As I  discovered at my cost, however, it turns out that if you are known to be lesbian or gay your very openness, far from preempting malicious gossip about your sexuality, simply exposes you to the possibility that, no matter what you actually do, people can say absolutely whatever they like about you in the well-​grounded confidence that it will be credited. (1995, 13) 8 The West German film critic, Monika Zimmermann, suggests just this in her review of the film that appeared in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (1 December 1989) under the title “Wo Schranken fallen,” or “When Barriers Fall”: “Being a gay teacher, do you know what it means?” This central question, which is posed in the film Coming Out, cannot be seen as out-​dated just because the entire population of the GDR is itself experiencing a coming-​ out of a political nature. (2014, 232) And later, toward the end of the review: “Speaking at the premiere of Coming Out, which took place the day the East German border was opened (and thus on the day that one external barrier fell” (234). That being said, homosexuality was decriminalized in East Germany in 1988, but in the unified Federal Republic of Germany only in 1994. Moreover, the film did not mark the first positive portrayal of homosexuality in the GDR. The short documentary film Die Andere Liebe (The Other Love), directed by Helmut Kissling and Axel Otten, premiered on 2 November 1988, marking “the slow and monumental progress that had been made in the realm of gay rights in East Germany” (Frackman 2018, 225).

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Index

Aberbach, David 143 Ablancourt, Nicolas Perrot de 78 Aciman, André 57 activism 70, 124; social 22 activists 22, 70–​1, 106, 124, 137, 170–​2, 177; social 58 Adorno, Theodor 8, 20, 31, 189, 193–​4, 198 affect 2, 66, 70, 164 agency 1–​2, 59–​60, 76, 164, 191–​2 Ahmed, Sarah 49, 167 AIDS 187 AIDS crisis 5, 22, 172 Alden, John B. 83, 87–​9, 92, 97, 103 Aldrich, Robert 65 alteritism 55 Anderson, Benedict 100, 142 Anderson, Patrick 97, 118–​19, 137 anthologies 10–​11, 16–​18, 77, 82–​106, 108, 110–​14, 118–​27, 129–​35, 137–​9, 142, 145–​7; alphabetical arrangement of 89–​91, 131, 142; anthologies of 83; chronological arrangement of 88–​91, 103, 105, 113, 131, 136; selection of texts in 11, 86–​7, 90, 92–​3, 96–​7, 102, 107, 113–​14, 120–​1, 123, 126, 129 Anzaldúa, Gloria 22, 30, 32–​4, 42, 50, 135 appropriation 51, 98, 106–​8, 110, 117, 134, 161, 184 Archer, William 102 ars erotica 23 autobiography 170, 172, 174–​5, 177, 180, 186, 192 Baer, Brian James 5, 28, 130, 150, 158, 163, 185, 187 Baker, Mona 2, 168

Bakhtin, Mikhail 19, 75, 142, 167, 194 Balderston, David 127–​8 Barbin, Herculine 3–​4, 10, 12, 21, 25, 35–​41, 51, 191–​3 Barlig, Oles’ 129, 131, 133 Barthes, Roland 74, 100, 162 Bassi, Serena 15, 197 Bauer, Heike 14, 21 Beaudoin, Luc 122–​3, 131 Beck, Karin 194 Berdahl, Daphne 183 Bersani, Leo 28 Best, Steven 161 Bildung 71, 90, 95, 143, 164 Bildungsroman 42, 128, 140, 142–​4, 146, 159, 163 bilingualism 5, 33 Binnie, Jon 59–​60, 64–​5 bisexual 20, 122–​3 bisexuality 57 Bleys, Rudy C. 53 Bloom, Harold 86, 105 Boas, George 72 Boellstorff, Tom 31, 134, 199 Bondar, Andrii 132 Boone, Joseph A. 1, 16, 23–​4, 41, 55, 59–​60 borders 3–​4, 8, 32–​3, 91, 95, 129–​30, 163, 170 Borges 80 borrowings see foreign words Boswell, John 64, 73, 80 Boulogne, Pieter 35 Bowersock, Glen Warren 68 Bray, Alan 27, 73 Briggs, Kate 74, 162, 189, 198 Bristow, Joseph 54 Bullock, Philip Ross 159 Bunzl, Matti 183

222 Index Butler, Judith 11, 21, 38, 40, 51, 128, 167 Cain, William E. 183 Cameron, Alan 99 Caners, Kevin 183 Carow, Heiner 170 Carpenter, Edward 9, 13, 21, 68–​70, 73, 75, 110–​16, 118, 121, 124, 136–​7, 139; Ioläus. An Anthology of Friendship 18, 26, 77, 84, 106, 110–​1, 118, 134, 137; My Days and Dreams 112, 136; The Psychology of Poet Shelley 69; Towards Democracy 116, 136 Casanova, Pascale 33–​4, 47, 106–​7, 110 censorship 21, 29, 70, 78–​9, 138, 190; implicit 11, 21, 167; overt 191 Chakrabarty, Dipesh 10, 59–​60, 88, 106, 114, 169, 186 Chamberlain, Lori 6 Chasin, Alexandra 118 Chauncey, George 25, 28, 59–​60 Chen, Mel Y. 50, 75 Chernetsky, Vitaly 130, 132 Cho, Heekyoung 6, 35 Chua, Lynette 19 Cirillo, Nancy 95–​6 Clifford, James 77, 190 closet 17, 19, 25, 140, 145, 148, 153, 155; epistemology of 17, 25, 29, 40, 127, 140, 145–​6, 153 collaborative translation 78 Colligan, Colette 7 colonialism 26, 54, 188; sexual 77 coming out 48, 52, 129, 144, 163, 170, 187, 191, 196–​9 consecration 68, 106–​7, 110, 117–​18 Coote, Stephen 55–​6, 120, 122, 124, 146 cosmopolitanism 7, 61, 96, 136, 197 counterhegemony 2–​3, 9, 141, 161, 187, 190 creolization 62 Cross, Anthony 53 Cruz, Jules de la 80 Cruz-​Malavé, Arnaldo 60, 136 Culler, Jonathan 17, 147, 149–​50, 152, 160 Curran, Beverley 52 Damrosch, David 97 Darío, Rubén 118, 141

De Casanova, Erynn Masi 59 Delille, Damien 111–​12 Derrida, Jacques 8, 11, 21, 30, 92 diaspora 10, 60–​2, 95, 101, 136, 187, 195 dictionaries 22, 32, 44–​6, 96, 191 Dingwaney, Anuradha 74 Dinshaw, Carolyn 2, 8–​11, 14, 18, 20, 27, 64, 66, 72 disidentification 162 Dobie, Madeleine 53 domestication 9–​10, 55 Dowling, Linda 67–​8, 72, 78–​9, 108, 137 Drake, Robert 126, 139 Du Bois, W.E.B. 94 dubbing 61–​2, 78 Duberman, Martin 125, 138 Dumenkov, V.N. 129, 133 Eaton, Horace 150 Edelman, Lee 5, 22, 24, 27, 30–​2, 34, 46, 145 Edwards, Brent Hayes 9–​12, 85, 91, 93, 101, 187 effeminacy 67, 78, 104 Eliot, Charles W. 87, 97 Emmerich, Karen 8, 41 epigram 79, 83, 86, 88, 94, 96, 99–​100, 132, 138 epigraph 41, 111, 121, 130, 151 epistemology 14, 17, 25, 29, 50, 53, 85, 140, 145–​6, 153 Epstein, Brett Jocelyn 14, 164 equivalence 2, 10, 28, 30, 32–​3, 41–​3, 47–​8, 194; false 30 Eribon, Didier 13, 21, 40–​1, 51 Erickson, Bruce 5 eros 17, 97, 108–​9, 118–​20 erotics 15, 60, 148, 150, 152 ethnography 24, 59, 62–​3, 66, 77, 113, 166, 169 ethnonationalism 132, 181, 184 Evangelista, Stefano 68, 72 Fassin, Eric 39 faux amis 31 Fedorov, Andrei 5 Ferry, Anne 85, 88–​9, 104, 137 Fiks, Yevgeniy 15 Findlay, Jean 56 Fischer, Kate 115 Fitz, Earl E. 64 Floyd, Kevin 161

Index  223 Fone, Byrne 104, 120, 123–​4, 137 footnote 94, 191; translator’s 190 foreign words 2, 8, 18, 20, 31, 70, 74, 193–​5, 198 foreignization 10, 49, 55, 70, 124, 139 Forster, Edward Morgan 78 Foucault 10, 12, 20, 22–​3, 25–​7, 36–​41, 50–​1, 102, 107, 140, 145, 192 Frackman, Kyle 199 Fradenburg, Louise 27, 66 framing 11–​13, 16–​17, 37, 93–​4, 98, 100, 102, 121, 125–​6, 131–​3, 166–​9, 171–​4, 192–​3; see also paratextual framing Freccero, Carla 27, 66 Freeman, Elizabeth 27, 71, 79 Fukuyama, Francis 145, 169 Funke, Jana 72, 115 Fuss, Diana 22, 26, 54 Galloway, David 120–​1, 151 Gates Jr., Henry Louis 82 gay 12–​13, 17–​19, 40–​1, 62–​4, 70–​1, 83–​5, 108, 110–​11, 120–​4, 126, 128–​30, 147, 163, 170, 174–​5, 177, 185, 195–​6, 198–​9; activism 171, 175; culture 118, 120, 124, 127, 197; imperialism 16; subculture 118 gay anthology 16–​17, 19, 82, 101, 105–​7, 110–​11, 118, 120–​32, 137, 140, 146 gay literature 56, 117, 120–​1, 123–​4, 128, 130–​1, 138, 144 gay rights 14, 17, 106, 110, 118, 126, 128, 143 Gay Sunshine Press 127–​9, 133 gender 5, 14, 16, 132, 146, 152–​5, 159, 186, 190; grammatical 152–​3, 186, 192 geopolitics 13, 64, 165 Gerstenberger, Katharina 178, 187 Giersdorf, Jens 174, 179, 184, 186 Gillett, Robert 14, 164 Girard, René 147, 160 Gladfelder, Hal 107–​8 Glick, Elisa 1 globalization 2, 15, 59–​60, 62, 65, 110, 117, 136 Godard, Barbara 149 Goffman, Erving 167 Goldberg, Jonathan 3, 53, 58–​9, 162 Goldhill, Simon 140

Gomolka, C.J. 36, 50, 191–​3 González de la Garza, Mauricio 118 Gordon, Avery 165 Goytisolo, Juan 9 Gramling, David 5, 14–​15, 29–​30, 43, 51 Grewal, Inderpal 33, 49, 60, 126 Grünzweig, Walter 117, 137 Guillory, John 99 Ha, Marie-​Paule  53 Habenicht, Rudolph E. 96 Halberstam 5, 18, 27, 74–​5, 81, 172, 189 Halberstam, Jack 12, 19, 29, 49–​50, 78, 184, 190, 197 Halberstam, Judith 75–​6, 132 Hall, Radclyffe 24 Hall, Stuart 81 Halliday, Michael A. K. 43 Halperin, David 14, 23, 50, 55, 79, 198–​9 Hames-​Garcia, Michael  26 Hanawa, Yukiko 125 Haraway, Donna 8, 21 Harvey, Keith 2, 9–​10, 13–​15, 21, 40, 65, 76, 162–​3 Hassan, Waïl S. 85, 96, 114 Healey, Dan 128, 132 hegemony 2, 9, 13, 18, 58, 65, 117–​18, 125, 141, 145, 192–​3; cultural 2, 28, 35, 92; linguistic 65 Held, David 59 Hermans, Theo 2, 31 Herzog, Dagmar 25–​6, 190 Higgins, Andrew C. 95, 104 Hine, Daryl 79, 138 historicism 10, 71, 88, 114, 169, 181, 186 historicity 50–​2, 75–​6, 146, 159, 163, 194–​5 historiography 67; academic 56, 124; developmental 101; homonationalist 114; nationalist 56, 91; queer 25, 50 history, developmental 18, 95, 106–​7, 126, 169 HIV prevention 76 Hoffman, Eva 6 Hojer, Torsten 125 Holleran, Andrew 56 Holmes, James Stratton 1, 77, 152 Holquist, Michael 88

224 Index homogenic 9 homographesis 24, 29 homographs 30–​1, 34 homonationalism 8, 16–​17, 56, 106 homonymy 30 Honig, Bonnie 20 Hössli, Heinrich 88–​9, 107–​11, 113–​14, 134 Huffer, Lynne 23 human rights 58, 76–​7, 129, 168 Humphries, Martin 120, 122, 125 hybridity 13, 62 identification 8, 28, 52, 57, 66, 159, 162–​3, 174 incommensurability 4–​6, 29 incorporation 8–​9, 49–​50, 106–​7, 114, 116, 121, 142–​4, 169 Ioläus 111 Irmscher, Michael 92 irreparability 145–​6, 165 Jackson, Peter A. 60 Jaffe, Alexandra 5 Jaffe, Moe 181 Jagose, Annamarie 42–​3, 45, 48, 132 Jameson, Frederick 164 Johnson, Barbara 23 Johnson, James Weldon 94 Jolly, Margaret 65 Jope, James 79, 138 Jordan, June 15 Kaplan, Caren 49, 60, 126 Karlin, Daniel 194 Katz, Jonathan 85 Keenaghan, Eric 147–​8 Kilcup, Karen L. 98 King, Katie 76, 189 Kiukhelbeker, Wilhelm 6 Klein, Lev 173 Kulik, Don 19 Kulpa, Robert 60 Kupffer, Elisarion von 110–​14, 121, 124, 131, 134, 136 kvir 28, 129 Lambert, Charles 120, 124, 146–​8, 159 Lampland, Martha 183 Laqueur, Thomas 4, 20, 25, 27, 29, 184 Larkosh, Christopher 14, 19, 34 Latham, Dwight 181 Lawall, Sarah 85, 88, 91, 103

Lawton, Philip 195 Leavitt, David 108, 110 Lefevere, André 93 lesbian literature 3, 24, 128 lesbians 84–​5, 87, 122, 125, 128–​9, 174, 176–​7, 182, 197–​9 Levi, Primo 161 Levin, Eve 132 Levy, Indra 163 Leyland, Winston 120, 127–​8 LGBT communities 17 LGBT movement 175 LGBTQ studies 172 Lilly, Mark 145 Limbeck, Sven 78 linguistic reflexivity 59 linguistic self-​reflexivity  194–​5 Liu, Lydia 28 Livesey, Matthew 12, 41 Livingstone, David 113, 195 Livingstone, Niall 195 Lloyd, David 142 localization 15, 197 Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth 95, 103–​4 Loseff, Lev 154 Lotbinière-​Harwood, Susanne de 51, 194 Lotman, Juri 21, 43, 91, 146, 160 Love, Heather 20, 22 Lowe, Elizabeth 64 Lowen, Alexander 190, 198 Lukas, Liina 113 Lychev, D.V. 3 lyric poetry 17, 140, 147, 149–​52, 156, 159, 163, 197 Macey, David 37, 39, 140 Mahlsdorf, Charlotte von 17, 35–​6, 165–​81, 184–​8, 190–​1, 197 Maia, Rita Bueno 35 Maier, Carol 52, 74 Maierchyk, Mariia 132 Mak, Geertje 21, 51 Mamo, Laura 5 Manalansan, Martin F., IV 54, 60–​1, 136 Manderson, Lenore 65 Marshak, Samuil 151 masculinist ideologies 27–​8, 186 masculinity 135, 190 Massad, Joseph 9, 26, 53–​6, 58, 65, 80, 126, 143–​4 McGrew, Anthony 59

Index  225 McKay, Nellie Y. 82 memoir 3–​4, 17, 35–​9, 41, 112, 115, 166, 168, 171–​3, 175–​82, 184–​6, 191–​3 Menchú, Rigoberta 80, 181, 185 Mendelsohn, Daniel 67 metanarrative 169–​70, 176 metaphor 9, 19, 28, 30, 46, 59, 61–​2, 75, 77, 101, 103, 160–​1 metonymy 28, 30, 101, 105, 145, 147, 153–​5, 159–​62 Mignolo, Walter 16, 49 Miller, D.A. 149 Miller, Stephen D. 127 mimesis 8, 46, 48, 51, 141, 145, 150, 159 Miner, Earl 141 Mitchell, Mark 108, 110, 120 Mitkov, Ruslan 31 Mizielinska, Joanna 60 modernity 2, 60–​1, 72, 100, 116–​17, 142, 144, 169 modernization 128–​9, 143, 168 Moncrieff, C. K. Scott 56, 80 monolingual 4–​5, 15, 29, 93–​4, 96; bias 93; nation 2, 61, 96, 194; privilege 29 monolingual nation-​state 2, 61, 96, 194 monolingualism 6, 15, 29, 31–​4, 93–​4; mythic 15; sexual 6 monolingualization 93 Moretti, Franco 141–​2, 146 Morson, Gary Saul 75, 102 Mortimer-​Sandilands, Catriona  5 Morton, Donald 87, 102 Mose, Tamara R. 59 Moss, Kevin 122, 127 Mosse, George L. 20 Mozetič, Brane 129 Mueller-​Vollmer, Kurt  92 Müller, Carl Otfried 68, 79 Mullins, Greg 65, 78 multiculturalism 13, 64 Muñoz, José 27, 29, 162 Narizhna, Viktoriia 84 narratives 12, 16, 49, 58, 162, 168, 170, 172 neoliberalism 18, 167, 169–​70, 178–​9, 182, 186 neologisms 2, 134, 194 Neubert, Albrecht 167–​8 Nisbet, Gideon 67, 86, 91, 93, 195 Norton, Rictor 162

Olearius, Adam 53 Orrells, Daniel 68, 71–​3, 103 othering 17–​18, 177, 179, 189 otherness 2–​3, 49, 55, 74, 98, 126, 152 packaging 11, 35, 38, 122, 129, 172, 181 paradox 26, 30, 40, 42, 46, 180–​1, 184, 187–​8 paranoid readings 17, 52, 140, 147, 149, 161, 163 paratext 12; paratextual framing 12, 132 Paton, W.R. 83, 86, 88, 99–​100, 195 Pease, Donald E. 183 pedagogy 18, 72–​3, 189, 198; queer counterhegemonic 18, 189 performativity 17, 51, 153, 159, 195 Perreau, Bruno 4–​5, 21, 27–​9, 34, 40–​1, 58 pharmacopornographic regime 29, 184 Phelan, Shane 3 Pieta, Hanna 35 pleasure 198 Plutarch 38–​9, 51, 111, 121 poetics 106, 117–​18, 141, 153–​4, 160, 164 poetry 90, 95, 117, 121, 123, 129–​31, 140–​1, 144, 147, 149, 152, 160–​1; see also lyric poetry politics 11, 19, 73, 79–​80, 133–​4, 141, 162, 166; identitarian 128; identity 21–​2, 170; liberationist 127; queer 14; resistant 161; sexual 25 polysemy 3, 42, 51, 75, 130, 171, 191, 194 Porter, Roger J. 38 positioning: activist 23; cultural 132; market 10 Pozdniakova, Al’bina 129, 133 Poznansky, Alexander 153 Praunheim, Rosa von 170–​1, 179 Preciado, Paul B. 4, 6, 8–​9, 29, 49–​50, 140–​1, 149, 184 Price, Leah 99–​100, 105, 142 Prime-​Stevenson, Edward Irenaeus 12, 117, 135–​6 pseudo-​translation  52 Puar, Jasbir 27 Puchner, Martin 97 Pushkin, Aleksandr 123, 153, 156, 160 queer 3–​4, 14–​15, 17–​19, 21–​5, 27–​9, 39, 41, 48, 50, 60–​3, 114–​15, 133–​5, 155,

226 Index 166, 174–​5, 179–​80; activism 22, 135; agency 60, 136, 194; etymologies of 4, 11, 30; historiography 25, 50 queer life writing 11 queer performance 17, 140, 159; embodied 17 queer scholars 5, 15, 26, 29, 145, 164–​5; second-​generation  26 queer sexualities 1–​4, 6–​7, 11, 60, 136, 179, 197 queer studies 1, 32, 70, 165 queer theory 1, 3, 5, 8, 14, 16–​18, 21–​5, 27–​9, 40, 49–​50, 55, 58, 60, 132–​3 queerness 5, 7, 9, 16, 24, 27, 42 Quiroga, José 127–​8, 198–​9 Rafael, Vicente 9 readers 7, 36–​7, 67–​8, 78–​80, 86–​8, 100–​1, 105, 123–​4, 137–​8, 142, 147–​9, 151, 154, 164, 190–​1, 193, 195 realism 145, 147, 164 reappropriation 24 reception 1, 76, 79, 103, 133–​4, 148, 172, 185 Rechy, John 172, 187 Renan, Ernest 8 repackaging see packaging reparative reading 17, 140, 149, 152, 159, 162 resistance 9–​10, 14, 25, 60–​2, 64, 101, 178, 184; cultural 40; minority 174 Roaf, James 183 Robb, Graham 3, 79, 83–​4, 108, 138 Robinson, Douglas 15–​16 Romo-​Carmona, Mariana  125 Rosa, Alexandra Assis 35, 171 Ross, Iain 103 Rotikov, Kostya 153 Rousseau, George 72 Rousseau, Jean-​Jacques  7 Rowbotham, Sheila 68, 104, 111, 116–​17 Rudnitskaya, Alina 174 Ruvalcaba, Héctor Domínquez 14, 28, 50 Sabisch, Christian 120–​1, 151 Said, Edward 21, 65 Sakai, Naoki 5, 15, 32, 48, 96 Salamon, Gayle 29, 192 Sayers, W. 4, 22 Schleiermacher, Freidrich 5

scientia sexualis 23 Scott, James C. 189 Scott, Walter 91 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky 17, 22, 25, 27, 29, 40–​1, 147, 149, 160–​1 self-​censorship 57, 78, 146 self-​reflexivity 77, 86, 165 Sennett, Richard 50 Seruya, Teresa 85, 91–​2, 99, 105 sexual orientation 1, 147, 155, 159 sexualization 127 Shopland, Nora 73, 80 Shread, Carolyn 12 Shreve, Gregory 167–​8 Shugart, Helene 118 Shuvalova, Irina 129, 133 silence 21, 50, 190 Simpson, David 101, 105, 118, 161 Sinfeld, Alan 118 Slaughter, Joseph R. 26, 58, 76–​7, 107, 128–​9, 142–​4, 168, 181 Smith, Barbara Hernnstein 83 Snorton, C. Riley 29 somatic communism 49, 141, 184 somatics 29, 47, 140–​1, 149–​52 Sontag, Susan 150 Sozaev, D. 134 Sperling, Valerie 188 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty 9, 74–​5, 152, 192 Spurlin, William J. 14, 34 Stallings, L. H. 15, 29 Stallworthy, Jon 146 Stasinska, Agata 60 Stedman, Edmund Clarence 6, 8, 20, 51, 86–​7, 89–​91, 93, 95–​6, 99, 102–​4, 137, 143–​5 Steiner, George 55 Stoler, Ann Laura 23, 26 subaltern 2, 26, 54, 59–​60, 62, 65–​6, 192 subjectivities 10, 19, 60, 80; cultural 98; political 168 subtitle 29, 33, 35–​6, 47, 126–​7, 129–​30, 137, 172–​3, 175, 186–​7 Sukthankar, Ashwini 84, 122 Summers, Claude J. 120 Swann, Brian 55, 98 Symonds, John Addington 13, 66–​8, 70, 72, 115–​16, 124, 130, 148; Male Love 72; Memoirs 67, 72, 115, 130 synecdochal aesthetique 101, 142, 145, 147

Index  227 synecdochal esthetique 99, 142 synecdoche 5, 105, 130 Tageldin, Shaden 66, 78 Tardieu, Ambroise 4, 12, 21, 35–​8, 50, 192 techne 7–​10, 20, 62, 78 theory, narrative 168 Thiong’o, Ngugi wa 81 Tobin, Robert Deam 21, 27, 53, 82, 112, 134 Todorov, Tsvetan 53 Totton, Nick 198 Toury, Gideon 1 transautobiography 192 transgenderism 15, 24, 29, 49–​50, 169, 176, 184–​6, 192–​3 translations 1–​19, 21, 28–​37, 40–​4, 46–​8, 50–​66, 68–​80, 82, 91–​8, 103–​4, 106–​8, 110–​14, 124–​7, 134–​5, 138–​9, 151–​3, 159–​64, 166–​7, 170–​2, 189–​90; absence of 93, 125; act of 16, 31, 91, 98, 194; annotated 65; indirect 35; interlingual 32, 74; inter-​semiotic  57; intralingual 74; problematics of 98; process of 10, 40, 74, 197 transposability 16, 44–​8, 55, 57, 76, 189 Tsuzuki, Chushichi 84 Tudor, Alyosxa 189 Tymoczko, Maria 49, 161 untranslatability 2, 5, 80, 104, 189, 195

Venuti, Lawrence 15, 18, 49, 55, 160, 164, 190 Verdery, Katherine 169 Vil’kovskaia, Mariia 129 Vincent, John 151 Viteri, Maria Amelia 62–​3 Waldrop, Rosemarie 162 Warner, Charles Dudley 86, 89, 96 Warren, Michelle R. 55 Webb, Jennifer 37 Wellesley, Henry 96 Whisnant, Clayton J. 109 White, Chris 19 Wilde, Oscar 68, 72, 79, 103, 110, 131, 137, 150–​1, 153 Williams, C.K. 148 Williams, Jeffrey J. 92 Wilper, James P. 3, 12, 186 Wing, Nathaniel 51 Witt, Susanna 160 Wolff, Larry 179 Woodhouse, Reed 125 Woods, Gregory 55–​7, 70, 77, 104–​5, 113, 124, 136, 144–​5 Wright, Doug 17, 166, 170, 174–​82, 185–​7 Yildiz, Yasemin 5, 8 Ze’evi, Dror 65 Zimmermann, Monika 199 Žižek, Slavoj 55, 98