The Routledge handbook of translation, feminism and gender 2020000889, 9781138066946, 9781315158938

Citation preview

The Routledge Handbook of Translation, Feminism and Gender

The Routledge Handbook of Translation, Feminism and Gender provides a comprehensive, state-ofthe-art overview of feminism and gender awareness in translation and translation studies today. Bringing together work from more than 20 different countries – from Russia to Chile, Yemen, Turkey, China, India, Egypt, and the Maghreb as well as the UK, Canada, the USA, and Europe – this handbook represents a transnational approach to this topic, which is in development in many parts of the world. With 41 chapters, this book presents, discusses, and critically examines many different aspects of gender in translation and its effects, both local and transnational. Providing overviews of key questions and case studies of work currently in progress, this handbook is the essential reference and resource for students and researchers of translation, feminism, and gender. Luise von Flotow has taught translation studies at the University of Ottawa in Canada since 1996, publishing widely in the field of feminism, gender, and translation. She most recently co-edited Translating Women. Different Voices and New Horizons with Farzaneh Farhazad (Routledge 2016) and co-translated Tout le monde parle de la pluie et du beau temps. Pas nous, a book about Ulrike Meinhof (2018) with Isabelle Totikaev. Hala Kamal is Professor of English and Gender Studies in the Department of English, Faculty of Arts, Cairo University. Her research interests and publications in both Arabic and English are in the areas of feminist literary criticism, translation studies, and the history of the Egyptian feminist movement. She has translated several books on feminism and gender into Arabic.

Routledge Handbooks in Translation and Interpreting Studies

Routledge Handbooks in Translation and Interpreting Studies provide comprehensive overviews of the key topics in translation and interpreting studies. All entries for the handbooks are specially commissioned and written by leading scholars in the field. Clear, accessible and carefully edited, Routledge Handbooks in Translation and Interpreting Studies are the ideal resource for both advanced undergraduates and postgraduate students. THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF TRANSLATION AND PHILOSOPHY Edited by Piers Rawling and Philip Wilson THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF TRANSLATION AND PRAGMATICS Edited by Rebecca Tipton and Louisa Desilla THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF TRANSLATION AND TECHNOLOGY Edited by Minako O’Hagan THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF TRANSLATION AND EDUCATION Edited by Sara Laviosa and Maria González-Davies THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF TRANSLATION AND ACTIVISM Edited by Rebecca Ruth Gould and Kayvan Tahmasebian THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF TRANSLATION, FEMINISM AND GENDER Edited by Luise von Flotow and Hala Kamal THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF TRANSLATION AND COGNITION Edited by Fabio Alves and Arnt Lykke Jakobsen For a full list of titles in this series, please visit https://www.routledge.com/Routledge-Hand books-in-Translation-and-Interpreting-Studies/book-series/RHTI.

The Routledge Handbook of Translation, Feminism and Gender

Edited by Luise von Flotow and Hala Kamal

First published 2020 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 © 2020 selection and editorial matter, Luise von Flotow and Hala Kamal; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Luise von Flotow and Hala Kamal to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted 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: von Flotow, Luise, 1951– editor. | Kamāl, Hālah, editor. Title: The Routledge handbook of translation, feminism and gender / edited by Luise von Flotow and Hala Kamal. Description: 1. | New York : Taylor and Francis, 2020. | Series: Routledge handbooks in translation and interpreting studies | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020000889 | ISBN 9781138066946 (hardback) | ISBN 9781315158938 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Translating and interpreting. | Literature—Women authors— History and criticism. | Women and literature—History—20th century. | Women translators—History—20th century. Classification: LCC P306.2 .R684 2020 | DDC 809/.89287—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020000889 ISBN: 978-1-138-06694-6 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-15893-8 (ebk) Typeset in Bembo by Apex CoVantage, LLC

To our collaborators, peer reviewers, readers, students, and our children

Contents

List of illustrations xii List of contributors xiii Acknowledgementsxx Introduction Luise von Flotow and Hala Kamal   1 Women (re)writing authority: a roundtable discussion on feminist translation Emek Ergun, Denise Kripper, Siobhan Meï, Sandra Joy Russell, Sara Rutkowski, Carolyn Shread, and Ida Hove Solberg

1

5

PART I

Translating and publishing women

15

  2 Volga as an international agent of feminist translation Rajkumar Eligedi

17

  3 Translation of women-centred literature in Iran: macro and micro analysis Sima Sharifi

32

  4 Pathways of solidarity in transit: Iraqi women writers’ story-making in English translation Ruth Abou Rached   5 Maghrebi women’s literature in translation Sanaa Benmessaoud   6 Translation and gender in South America: the representation of South American women writers in an unequal cultural scenario Rosa Basaure, Marcela Contreras, Andrea Campaña, and Mónica Ahumada

48 64

83

vii

Contents

  7 Translating metonymies that construct gender: testimonial narratives by 20th-century Latin American women Gabriela Yañez

93

  8 Polish women translators: a herstory Ewa Rajewska

107

  9 Women translators in early modern Europe Hilary Brown

117

10 Women writers in translation in the UK: the “Year of Publishing Women” (2018) as a platform for collective change? Olga Castro and Helen Vassallo

127

11 Censorship and women writers in translation: focus on Spain under Francoism Pilar Godayol

147

12 Gender and interpreting: an overview and case study of a woman interpreter’s media representation Biyu ( Jade) Du

159

PART II

Translating feminist writers

171

13 The Wollstonecraft meme: translations, appropriations, and receptions of Mary Wollstonecraft’s feminism Elisabeth Gibbels

173

14 An Indian woman’s room of one’s own: a reflection on Hindi translations of Virginia Woolf ’s A Room of One’s Own184 Garima Sharma 15 A tale of two translations: (re)interpreting Beauvoir in Japan, 1953–1997196 Julia Bullock 16 Bridging the cultural gap: the translation of Simone de Beauvoir into Arabic Hala G. Sami

205

17 Translating French feminist philosophers into English: the case of Simone de Beauvoir Marlène Bichet

224

viii

Contents

18 On Borderlands and translation: the Spanish versions of Gloria Anzaldúa’s seminal work María Laura Spoturno

239

PART III

Feminism, gender, and queer in translation

253

19 At the confluence of queer and translation: subversions, fluidities, and performances Pauline Henry-Tierney

255

20 Feminism in the post-communist world in/as translation Kornelia Slavova 21 The uneasy transfer of feminist ideas and gender theory: post-Soviet English-Russian translations Tatiana Barchunova 22 Virginia Woolf ’s A Room of One’s Own, Simone de Beauvoir’s Le Deuxième Sexe, and Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble in Polish: feminism, translation, and political history Ewa Kraskowska and Weronika Szwebs 23 Translating feminism in China: a historical perspective Zhongli Yu 24 Queer transfeminism and its militant translation: collective, independent, and self-managed Laura Fontanella 25 Translating queer: reading caste, decolonizing praxis Nishant Upadhyay and Sandeep Bakshi 26 Sinicizing non-normative sexualities: through translation’s looking glass Wangtaolue Guo

266

276

291 308

319 336

345

PART IV

Gender in grammar, technologies, and audiovisual translation361 27 Grammatical gender and translation: a cross-linguistic overview Bruna Di Sabato and Antonio Perri

363

ix

Contents

28 Le président est une femme: the challenges of translating gender in UN texts Enora Lessinger

374

29 Identifying and countering sexist labels in Arabic translation: the politics of language in cleaning products Sama Dawood

390

30 Egypt: Arab women’s feminist activism in volunteer subtitled social media Nihad Mansour

401

31 The sexist translator and the feminist heroine: politically incorrect language in films and TV Irene Ranzato

413

32 Women in audiovisual translation: the Arabic context Nada Qanbar 33 Gender in war video games: the linguacultural representation and localization of female roles between reality and fictionality Silvia Pettini 34 Gender issues in machine translation: an unsolved problem? Johanna Monti

429

444 457

PART V

Discourses in translation

469

35 Translating the Bible into English: how translations transformed gendered meanings and relations Mathilde Michaud

471

36 Negotiation of meaning in translating ‘Islamic feminist’ texts into Arabic: mapping the terrain Doaa Embabi

481

37 Feminist strategies in women’s translations of the Qur’an Rim Hassen

496

38 Translation and women’s health in post-reform China: a case study of the 1998 Chinese translation of Our Bodies, Ourselves508 Boya Li x

Contents

39 Translating feminist texts on women’s sexual and reproductive health Nesrine Bessaïh and Anna Bogic

518

40 Children’s literature, feminism, adaptation, and translation Handegül Demirhan

528

Epilogue541 41 Recognition, risk, and relationships: feminism and translation as modes of embodied engagement Beverley Curran

543

Index555

xi

Illustrations

Figures 5.1 10.1 10.3 32.1 33.1 34.1 34.2

Languages of translation WIT books by language MIT books by language Ratio of women to men in AVT companies surveyed in Jordan The reality-fictionality spectrum axis Vauquois triangle (Vauquois 1968) Example of translation of the single gender-neutral word ‘nurse’ from English into Italian 38.1 Original OBOS image in the US version 38.2 Modified OBOS image in the 1998 Chinese translation

70 133 135 433 447 460 464 512 513

Images 1 0.2 10.4 30.1 41.1 41.2 41.3 41.4

WIT books by country 134 MIT books by country 137 Screen capture: ‘She and the Elections’, min 0.46 (.com) 409 Two covers of Otouto no otto – My Brother’s Husband547 Bonus images provided by the Japanese publisher 548 Additional images of the English translation 549 Cover and title of Sora no ito551

Tables 2.1 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 3.5 10.1 10.2 16.1 21.1

xii

Feminist texts by Volga Library search results of somewhat feminist translations: 1970s Library search results of mostly feminist translations: 1980s Number of translations concerned with social justice (1930s–1970s) Number of translations of feminist books (1980s) Number of translations of feminist books (1990s and beyond) Appendix I Women in Translation in our corpus (2018) Appendix II Men in Translation in our corpus (2018) Simone de Beauvoir’s works translated into Arabic Definition of gender by Joan W. Scott in Russian translation

18 35 36 38 39 39 143 145 219 283

Contributors

Ruth Abou Rached is a postdoctoral researcher for the ERC research project PalREAD: Country of Words: Reading and Reception of Palestinian Literature from 1948 to the Present, Freie Universität Berlin. Her research interests include Arab diasporic literatures and women’s writing and intersectional feminist translation theories. She is editor for New Voices in Translation Studies, International Association of Translation and Intercultural Studies. Mónica Ahumada is a part-time professor in the Linguistics and Literature Department at

Universidad de Santiago de Chile. Her research focuses on the contribution of translation in international relations. Sandeep Bakshi is Associate Professor of Postcolonial and Queer Literatures and Literary Translation at the University of Paris Diderot/Paris VII. He researches on transnational queer and decolonial enunciation of knowledge and is the co-editor of Decolonizing Sexualities: Transnational Perspectives, Critical Interventions (Oxford, 2016) with Suhraiya Jivraj and Silvia Posocco. Tatiana Barchunova has a PhD in philosophy of science. She is an associate professor at the Institute of Philosophy and Law of Novosibirsk State University, and teaches gender studies, political philosophy, and philosophical anthropology. She co-authored a popular book on gender studies – Gender dlia chainikov [Gender for Beginners], (Moscow, 2006). Rosa Basaure is an assistant professor in the Linguistics and Literature Department at Universidad de Santiago de Chile. Her research centres on cross-cultural communication and the contribution of translation to international relations. Sanaa Benmessaoud is Assistant Professor in Translation and Comparative Studies at the

American University of Ras Al Khaimah. Her research interests include literary translation, the sociology of translation, gender in translation, contemporary Arabic literature, and critical discourse analysis. Her articles have appeared in such translation journals as The Translator and Turjuman: Journal of Translation. Nesrine Bessaïh, PhD candidate at the University of Ottawa, is an anthropologist and a translator specialized in reproductive justice, an emerging field at the intersection of social justice and sexual and reproductive health. She coordinates the collective translation and adaptation of Our Bodies, Ourselves in French for Quebec. The first volume, Corps Accord: Guide de sexualité positive (2019), is published in Canada, France, and Belgium. xiii

Contributors

Marlène Bichet teaches English at the Université de Franche-Comté (France). Her current research explores the translation of feminist philosophy, with particular focus on de Beauvoir’s work. Anna Bogic holds a PhD in women’s studies and a master’s degree in translation studies from the University of Ottawa, Canada. Her research has centred on the Serbian translation of the American feminist health classic Our Bodies, Ourselves and the first English translation of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex. She is a Research Associate with the Institute of Feminist and Gender Studies at the University of Ottawa. Hilary Brown is Lecturer in Translation Studies at the University of Birmingham, UK. She has published widely on transnational cultural history in the early modern period, with a particular focus on women. Her current research on women translators is funded by a fellowship from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. Julia Bullock is an associate professor of Japanese studies at Emory University. She is the author of two books and numerous other publications on feminism and gender in modern Japan, and is currently working on a book manuscript titled Beauvoir in Japan: Postwar Japanese Feminism and The Second Sex. Andrea Campaña is a full-time professor in the Linguistics and Literature Department at

Universidad de Santiago de Chile. Her research centres on the contribution of literature in the teaching of English and the multimedia teaching of literature. Olga Castro lectures in translation studies at the University of Warwick, UK. Her main area of

research is feminist translation studies. Her current research focuses on the operation of power in translation across transnational borders, particularly as it manifests in relation to feminism in minorized/stateless cultures within multilingual settings. She tweets at @olgacastro80. Marcela Contreras is a full-time professor in the Linguistics and Literature Department at

Universidad de Santiago de Chile. Her research focuses on translator training, translation and literature, and specialized translation. Beverley Curran is a lecturer of linguistic, cultural, and media translation at International

Christian University (ICU) in Tokyo and Associate Director of the Center for Teaching and Learning. Her most recent publications include the essay collection Multiple Translation Communities in Contemporary Japan (2015), co-edited with Nana Sato-Rossberg and Akiko Tanabe, and Sky Navigation Homeward: New and Selected Poems (2019), poems by Mikiro Sasaki, co-translated with Mitsuko Ohno and Nobuaki Tochigi. Sama Dawood is Associate Professor of Translation and Interpreting in the Department of

English at Misr International University (Egypt). She has publications in the fields of journalistic translation, simultaneous interpreting, and literary translation. Dawood’s current research interests include computer-assisted translation and interpreting, and the impact of the digital age on translation theory and practice. Handegül Demirhan is a lecturer in the Translation and Interpreting Studies department

and a board member of the Gender and Women’s Studies Research Center at İstanbul Gedik xiv

Contributors

University. Her main areas of research in translation include gender, feminism, feminist pedagogy and translation of children’s literature, and women’s writing. She is the translator of Pollyanna (2018). Bruna Di Sabato is Full Professor of Language Education at the University of Naples Suor Orsola Benincasa. She holds a PhD in English for specific purposes. Her principal research interests include educational linguistics, pedagogic translation, and English linguistics. She is the author of numerous articles and academic volumes pertaining to the aforementioned subjects. Biyu (Jade) Du is a lecturer in translation and interpreting at Newcastle University, UK. She

is interested in the legal, social, and sociolinguistic approach to translation/interpreting. Her research areas cover gender-related issues in interpreting, interpreter-mediated communication in public service settings, migration and multilingualism, and legal translation. Rajkumar Eligedi is an assistant professor in English at Prince Sattam Bin Abdulaziz University, Saudi Arabia. He has a PhD in English from EFL-University, Hyderabad. He is a recipient of the DAAD fellowship of Technische Universität, Dresden, for his doctoral studies. His research interests include translation, gender, literature, and language. Doaa Embabi is a literature and translation researcher based at Ain Shams University, Egypt. She has published on different areas of translation studies and developed an interest in translation of Islamic feminist texts, including an article titled “Production of Knowledge by Translating ‘Islamic Feminist’ Works: The Case of Amina Wadud’s Work.” Emek Ergun is an activist-translator and assistant professor of women’s and gender studies &

global studies at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. Her research focuses on the geopolitical role of translation in connecting feminist activists, discourses, and movements across borders. She recently co-edited, with Olga Castro, Feminist Translation Studies: Local and Transnational Perspectives (Routledge, 2017). Laura Fontanella is a postgraduate in European and extra-European languages and literature at

the State University of Milan. Her research interests include translation studies, feminist studies, and gender studies. Elisabeth Gibbels was born in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) and was denied an

academic career due to her activity in the opposition. Her academic work focuses on gender, translation, and power. Gibbels currently teaches at Humboldt University Berlin. Her latest publication is a lexicon of German women translators from the beginnings to the mid-19th century. Pilar Godayol is a professor of translation at the Central University of Catalonia. Her research

interests include history and theory of translation, gender studies, and censorship. She is the author of over 100 publications, including Tres escritoras censuradas. Simone de Beauvoir, Betty Friedan y Mary McCarthy (2017). Wangtaolue Guo is a first-year PhD student in transnational and comparative literatures at the

University of Alberta. His research interests include queer translation, translingualism, sexuality studies, and Sinophone studies. xv

Contributors

Rim Hassen holds an MA and a PhD in translation and comparative cultural studies from the University of Warwick. She currently works as a bilingual education officer at Durham City Council in the UK. Her main interests are women’s translations of the Quran, gender and translation, feminist translation theory, and translations of classical Arabic poetry into English, French, and German. Pauline Henry-Tierney is a lecturer in French and translation studies at Newcastle University, UK. Her current research focuses on the translation of queer and feminist theoretical texts. Recent publications explore topics including feminist translation pedagogy, translation, and sexual alterity in women’s autofiction, matrophobia, and women’s erotic writing in French. Ewa Kraskowska is Professor at the Institute of Polish Philology at the Adam Mickiewicz

University in Poznań, and Chair of the Department of 20th Century Literature, Literary Theory, and the Art of Translation. She is the author of books and articles regarding translation and women’s literature. Denise Kripper is Assistant Professor of Spanish in the Modern Languages Department at Lake

Forest College. She is a literary translator from Buenos Aires, Argentina, and holds a PhD in literature and cultural studies from Georgetown University. Her research interests include Latin American literature and translation studies. Enora Lessinger is an alumna of the Ecole Normale Supérieure and currently a PhD student at the Sorbonne Nouvelle in Paris, France. Her research topic, “Translating Silence in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Novels: Testing the Explicitation Hypothesis on Unreliable Narratives,” is at the intersection between literary studies and translation studies and involves six different languages. Boya Li is a PhD candidate in translation studies at the University of Ottawa, Canada. She has a master’s degree in women’s studies from the same university. Her research interests include translation and gender, translation of general knowledge, amateur translator communities, and knowledge transmission between West and East. Nihad Mansour is a professor of translation studies and Head of the Institute of Applied

Linguistics & Translation, Alexandria University. Professor Mansour has a long experience in teaching translation and interpreting studies and linguistics modules. She has authored refereed publications in the fields of translation and interpreting studies, multimodality, and political discourse analysis, and she supervised several academic dissertations in translation and interpreting studies. Siobhan Meï is a PhD candidate in comparative literature at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Her research interests include Caribbean and African diaspora literatures, translation theory, and Caribbean philosophy. Her translations and original poetry have appeared in carte blanche, The Adirondack Review, Transference, and Asymptote. She is co-editor of “Haiti in Translation.” Mathilde Michaud is a doctoral researcher in history at the University of Glasgow. Her current

research focuses on the impact of Catholic discourses in 19th-century Québec in constructing modern gender roles and identities.

xvi

Contributors

Johanna Monti is Professor in Translation Technology and Computational Linguistics at

the University of Naples “L’Orientale.” Her current research focuses on hybrid approaches to machine translation, the development of linguistic resources for natural language processing applications, and the evaluation of translation technology. Antonio Perri is Associate Professor of General Linguistics and Sociolinguistics at the University of Naples Suor Orsola Benincasa. His main research interests include the anthropological and linguistic features of writing systems and notations (in particular Aztec writing), translation theory (more specifically, intersemiotic translation), and the problem of gender in translation. Silvia Pettini is a postdoctoral research fellow in translation studies at Roma Tre University,

Italy. Her main research interests are game localization, audiovisual translation, and bilingual lexicography. She has published papers in Translation Spaces and The Journal of Internationalization and Localization and book chapters in Language for Specific Purposes: Research and Translation across Cultures and Media (2016) and Linguistic and Cultural Representation in Audiovisual Translation (Routledge, 2018). Nada Qanbar is an associate professor in linguistics in the College of Arts and Literature at Taiz University, Yemen. Her current research focuses on audiovisual translation, gender, and language in context. Ewa Rajewska is a Polish translation scholar and a literary translator from English. Among

her books are Stanisław Barańczak – poeta i tłumacz [Stanisław Barańczak – the Poet and the Translator] (2007), Domysł portretu. O twórczości oryginalnej i przekładowej Ludmiły Marjańskiej [A Guess at a Portrait. On the Original and Translation Oeuvre by Ludmiła Marjańska] (2016). Irene Ranzato has a PhD in translation studies, and teaches English language and translation at Sapienza University of Rome. Her research focuses on the intersections between linguistic and ideological issues in audiovisual translation. Among her most recent publications are Translating Culture Specific References: The Case of Dubbing (Routledge, 2016) and Linguistic and Cultural Representation in Audiovisual Translation (co-editor) (Routledge, 2018). Sandra Joy Russell is a PhD candidate in comparative literature at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Her research interests include Ukrainian post-Soviet and diasporic literature and film, memory studies, and transnational development(s) of queer and feminist thought. She is also a translator and editor for the English edition of Krytyka magazine. Sara Rutkowski is an assistant professor of English at the City University of New York:

Kingsborough Community College. She is the author of The Literary Legacies of the Federal Writers’ Project: Voices of the Depression in the American Postwar Era (2017), and has published other work on Depression-era and post-war American writers and the cultural and political contexts of 20th-century global literature. Hala G. Sami is Associate Professor of English Language and Literature at the English Department, Faculty of Arts, Cairo University, Egypt. She has published on female cultural myths, women and the poetics of space, the representation of women in literature and popular culture, as well as women’s role in revolutions and resistance. Her publications include “A Strategic Use of

xvii

Contributors

Culture: Egyptian Women’s Subversion and Resignification of Gender Norms” in Maha El Said, et al. eds. Rethinking Gender in Revolutions and Resistance: Lessons from the Arab World (2015). Sima Sharifi holds a PhD in translation studies, 2017, and bachelor and master’s degrees in linguistics from Canadian universities. Her interests include the comparative study of Canadian feminist novels in Persian translations, writing fictionalized non-fiction, and Canada’s North with the Arctic Inspiration Prize, which she co-founded in 2012. Garima Sharma is a PhD student of German literature at Leipzig University, Germany. Her master’s thesis analyzed the three German translations of Virginia Woolf ’s A Room of One’s Own from a feminist perspective. Her current research focuses on body poetics in selected works by German and Indian women writers. Carolyn Shread is Lecturer in French at Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts, USA, and she also teaches translation at Smith College. She has translated ten books, including five by French philosopher Catherine Malabou. Her research addresses two main areas: the implications of Malabou’s concept of plasticity for translation studies and the process of translating Haitian author Marie Vieux-Chauvet’s Les Rapaces from French into English. She wrote the entry on “Translating Feminist Philosophers” in the Routledge Handbook of Translation Studies and Philosophy (2019). Kornelia Slavova is a professor of American literature and culture in the Department of English

and American Studies, St. Kliment Ohridski University of Sofia, Bulgaria. Her current research focuses on the translation of gender and feminist theory as well as translation for the theatre. Ida Hove Solberg holds a PhD in translation studies at the Stockholm University, Sweden. She

is particularly interested in feminist, activist, and other kinds of ideologically framed translation. She is also co-founder and editor of the Norwegian literary magazine Mellom, Norway’s first magazine devoted to literary translation, established in 2014. María Laura Spoturno is Associate Professor of Literary Translation and US Literature at Universidad Nacional de La Plata and a researcher with Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas (Argentina). Her current research focuses on the study of subjectivity and gender in minority writing and (self )-(re)translation practices. Weronika Szwebs is a PhD candidate at the Faculty of Polish and Classical Philology, Adam

Mickiewicz University. She is working on a thesis that concerns the translation of theoretical discourses in the Polish humanities at the turn of the 20th and 21st centuries. Her research interests revolve around translation studies, 20th-century Polish literature, and literary theory. Nishant Upadhyay is an assistant professor of ethnic studies at the University of Colorado

Boulder and University of Massachusetts. Their research and teaching draws upon decolonial, intersectional, and transnational feminist, queer, and trans studies, and critical ethnic studies. Helen Vassallo is Senior Lecturer in French at the University of Exeter, UK. She is founder of

the Translating Women project, and her primary research focus is gender parity in translated literature, particularly within the UK publishing industry. She reviews women in translation titles at https://blogs.exeter.ac.uk/translatingwomen, and tweets at @translatewomen. xviii

Contributors

Gabriela Yañez, translator and interpreter, works as a professor and researcher in the School

of Humanities and Education Sciences at the University of La Plata, Argentina. Her current research focuses on the translation of minority writing, specifically of testimonial narratives by Argentine women writers in the 20th century. Zhongli Yu is an associate professor in translation studies in the School of Education and

English at the University of Nottingham Ningbo China, holding a PhD in translation and intercultural studies (Manchester). Her research interests include gender/women/feminism in/and translation, museum narratives and translation, war interpreting/interpreter, translation education, and intercultural communication.

xix

Acknowledgements

The editors of The  Routledge Handbook of Translation, Feminism and Gender wish to express their grateful thanks to our students and colleagues, who helped at different stages of our work on the Handbook. We are grateful to the research assistants, who did invaluable work checking, managing, keeping track, hunting down details, and helping finalize and collate these 41 chapters from around the world. A special thank you goes to Shaily Zolfaghari (PhD student, University of Ottawa) who accompanied and managed the details of the entire project, and to Nesrine Bessaïh (PhD candidate, University of Ottawa) and Alexandra Yazeva (PhD student, University of Ottawa) who helped finish up. We also wish to thank the peer reviewers from outside the project, whose insightful comments helped in the development of the chapters of the Handbook. Thanks are due to Tahia Abdel Nasser (American University in Cairo, Egypt), Omaima Abou-Bakr (Cairo University, Egypt), Mirella Agorni (Ca’Foscari University, Italy), Hebatalah Aref (Cairo University, Egypt), Amani Badawy (Cairo University, Egypt), Brian Baer (Kent State University, USA), Michaela Baldo (University of Hull, UK), Jorge Diaz Cintas (University College, London, UK), Nadia El-Kholy (Cairo University, Egypt), Hoda Elsadda (Cairo University, Egypt), Farzaneh Farahzad (Allameh Tabataba’i University, Iran), Hiroko Furukawa (Tohoku Gakuin University, Japan), Ferial Ghazoul (American University in Cairo, Egypt), Magda Heydel ( Jagiellonian University, Poland), Marion Lerner (University of Iceland), Carmen Mangiron (Universidad Autonoma de Barcelona, Spain), Susan Pickford (Université de Paris IV, France), Eran Shuali (Université de Strasbourg, France), Sherry Simon (Concordia University, Canada), Darryl Sterk (Lingnan University, Hong Kong), Şehnaz Tahir Gurcalar (Bosphorous University, Turkey), Nancy Tsai (Middlebury Institute for International Studies at Monterey, USA), Sergey Tyulenev (Durham University, UK).

xx

Introduction Luise von Flotow and Hala Kamal

The Routledge Handbook of Translation, Feminism and Gender brings together a collection of essays representing a variety of approaches at the intersection of translation, feminism, and gender. The conceptualization of this volume started in 2016 as a transnational feminist translation project, initiated by two editors coming from two different parts of the world, Canada and Egypt, connected by our involvement in feminist translation scholarship and practice, yet marked by our distinct academic experiences and cultural locations. From our earliest discussions about the Handbook, it was clear to us that we shared a similar vision: a volume that would bring together the most prominent and relevant research in translation studies, which is grounded in feminist theory and gender studies. Our aim was twofold: 1 To provide an overview of the history, theorizing, and current critical contributions at the intersection of translation, feminism, and gender already established in mostly North America and Western Europe. 2 To encourage the development of scholarly interest in other parts of the world both among colleagues already working in the area of translation studies, urging them to adopt feminist approaches and gender tools, and among feminist literary and social critics, whom we invited to address questions of translation. We approached known specialists in the area, sent out a Call for Papers for as wide a circulation as possible through all available networks in East, West, North and South, and encouraged promising scholars to expand their work to include translation studies and/or feminism and gender. The response was both gratifying and challenging, as we received almost 50 interesting and compelling abstracts, placing us, as editors, in the difficult position of selection. At this stage, we did accept almost all the abstracts, and started the long process of seeing them develop into chapters. Halfway through the process we were lucky to be able to organize a meeting for the prospective authors of the Handbook in order to share the work carried out so far, discuss the challenges, and agree on the structures of the chapters that would allow a degree of harmony with some variety. The meeting was generously hosted by the Faculty of Polish and Classical Philology at the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, Poland, owing to the initiative of Ewa Kraskowska, 1

Luise von Flotow and Hala Kamal

professor and chair of the Institute of Polish Philology, who organised a conference on “Feminism and Gender in Translation” (13–14 April 2018). The agenda included a general overview of the Handbook, the various approaches adopted by the authors, and the challenges related to the great diversity in areas of specialization, academic writing conventions, and the position of the English language as the lingua franca of international academic publishing. As importantly, it marked an opportunity for participants coming from universities in Canada, Austria, Germany, France, Italy, Scotland, the United Kingdom, Poland, Bulgaria, Egypt, the Maghreb, and the United Arab Emirates to communicate, while those authors who could not attend were later informed of the discussion and decisions taken during the meeting. Apart from the different approaches, methods, and theoretical frameworks considered during the meeting, we agreed to structure each of the chapters to include the following sections: an introduction, historical overview, critical contributions, current research and/or case study, future directions, and suggested further readings. Thus, most of the chapters included in this Handbook include these points in their texts. As editors, we faced two main challenges. The first was structure, which revolved around how to structure a book that addresses such deeply seated cultural and sociopolitical questions as gender and feminism, and adds the complexities of transnational and transcultural translation. Overarching topics were created to organize what is extremely diverse: history, criticism, analysis, and case studies. Yet, once the chapters took their final shape, it was easier to group them into the current five parts, preceded by a prologue and followed by an epilogue. The Prologue presents a report on a roundtable discussion of “Women (Re)Writing Authority” by a group of feminist translators and translation scholars. It reflects on how feminist approaches to translation destabilize authorship and authority. Although originally submitted as a chapter, it is now the entry point to the whole Handbook, with the authors’ representation of epistemological, geohistorical, linguistic, and cultural multiplicity and diversity reflecting the Handbook project in general, and the following chapters. Similarly, the Epilogue chapter entitled “Recognition, Risk, and Relationships: Feminism and Translation as Modes of Embodied Engagement” presented an apt closure of the Handbook, offering a general commentary on feminism, translation, and engagement. Part I “Translating and Publishing Women” includes 11 chapters which explore translations of women writers from and into English in India, Iran, Iraq, the Maghreb, South America, Latin America, Poland, Spain, early Modern Europe, and the UK. The chapters also discuss various issues such as the practices of feminist translation, cultural representation, interpretation, publishing, and censorship, as well as specific feminist concepts such as solidarity and herstory. In Part II “Translating Feminist Writers,” we assembled the six chapters dealing with the translations and receptions of foundational feminist texts (mostly from English and French) into different languages and within various cultures. These texts include a study of the translation, adaptation, and reception of Mary Wollstonecraft; the translation of Virginia Woolf ’s A Room of One’s Own into Hindi; and the problematics of various translations of Simone de Beauvoir into English, Arabic, and Japanese, as well as the Spanish versions of Gloria Anzaldua’s Borderlands. Part III “Feminism, Gender, and Queer in Translation” is composed of eight chapters which deal in more general terms with feminist, gender, and queer intersections with translation in different parts of the world such as Poland, Russia, and other post-communist countries, as well as in Italy, China, and India. These chapters, moreover, address issues related to political history, social structures, and in relation to concepts – largely developed in the “West” – such as transfeminism, gender, subversion, and decolonization. Another group of eight chapters is included in Part IV “Gender in Grammar, Technologies, and Audiovisual Translation.” The chapters deal with

2

Introduction

a variety of issues such as grammatical gender, translating gender, sexist translation, political incorrectness, feminist activism, as well as language issues in audiovisual translation, subtitling, video game translation, and machine translation. The analyzed texts, from different parts of the world, include UN documents, social media, video games, and TV programmes and films. The last part, Part V “Discourses in Translation,” consists of six chapters that focus on the translation of specific discourses: religion, health, and children’s education. Thus, several chapters discuss the translation of sacred texts from a feminist perspective while others address the translation of books on women’s sexual and reproductive lives, and a study of the adaptation and translation of children’s literature closes this section. All in all, the Handbook, in its five parts, prologue, and epilogue, expands the study of translation, feminism, and gender geographically, historically, and epistemologically into the realms of transnational feminist translation praxis. The second challenge arose from the transnational aspect of this project, in particular the publishing language, English. Thirty-five of the 41 chapters were written by scholars whose first language is not English. While the dominance of English academic publishing may be a fact in many parts of the world, there are as many drawbacks as there are advantages to this fact, especially in the humanities. The advantages include broader accessibility to academic texts worldwide for readers who function in English, as a first, second, or additional language. This Handbook is an example of such accessible international dissemination of academic work. For monolingual English speakers, the dominance of English publishing also makes work available from other parts of the world to which they might otherwise have little access: in the case of this Handbook, this means China, India, South America, and the Middle East. This is valuable, and we hope that the work collected here will prove useful in this regard. However, the drawback of such publishing is that local academics and local readers, who are not readers of English, are excluded. One of the chapters on translating feminist writing from Europe and North America into Telugu makes this exclusion very clear: the source texts – in English, French, Italian, or Russian – did not reach the general local public until the translator ‘Volga’ took it upon herself to make them available, thus fomenting discussion and change. Today, the drive to publish in English continues to exclude large populations from such development, and translation is a costly and not always successful enterprise. A further difficulty that publication in English raises is the issue of editing. There are many ways of writing an academic text, and different cultures have different traditions. English is one such culture. Yet publishing in English imposes English structures and writing conventions, and demands mastery of the language. Further, authors writing about local topics, histories, cultures – which is inevitable in the study of translation – end up having to explain many details of the context of their work that would be understood by local readers. References to irony, for example, require much more detail: irony works with complicity and requires knowledge of the local situation which is being referenced. Over explaining irony can kill it. Similarly, translation studies requires references to translated texts, the changes they undergo, the losses and gains and misinterpretations that can be detailed; when a Spanish, or German, or Arabic-speaking writer analyzes the Spanish, German, or Arabic translation of a certain text, they will cite examples. For the purposes of English publication, these examples must then be ‘translated’ into English for the international readers to understand the effects of translation translated and retranslated. These are important matters; they have considerable impact on the transnational aspect of feminist and gender-aware approaches to any academic study. The predominance of English, if only as a gatekeeper excluding work that doesn’t meet its standard, and the power of ideas and theories emanating from Anglo-America and Europe, expressed in English and referred to as ‘the West’ in many of the chapters, create an imbalance that affects the dynamics of transnational

3

Luise von Flotow and Hala Kamal

exchange. This has already been explored in postcolonial terms by authors of the 1990s, but it continues to be a factor undermining the collaborative and reciprocal creation and exchange of information sought in transnational feminist and gender studies. Still, in the face of these challenges, we are proud to have been able to collect such a diverse array of material on translation, feminism, and gender, and we hope that our international English readers will learn as much from these chapters as we did assembling, editing, and finalizing them. Luise von Flotow (Ottawa) Hala Kamal (Cairo) 25 November 2019

4

1 Women (re)writing authority A roundtable discussion on feminist translation Emek Ergun, Denise Kripper, Siobhan Meï, Sandra Joy Russell, Sara Rutkowski, Carolyn Shread, and Ida Hove Solberg

This collectively authored reflection on translation began as a roundtable discussion by a group of feminists considering how translation can subvert, rewrite, or question hegemonic definitions of authorship, as well as how it can disrupt or dismantle intersecting regimes of power. This text is the product of our conversations since that initial meeting, including both in person and online exchanges. Authorizing ourselves to explore a new form of collective writing enabled by digital technologies, one that both recognizes individual ideas and weaves them into the representation of a communal understanding, we explore the theoretical formulations and practical negotiations of the textual authority of translators within the interdisciplinary contexts of feminist studies, literary studies, and translation studies. The dialogic convergence of those three disciplinary territories allows for an in-depth examination of power and resistance in relation to women’s transformative roles as authors, translators, and social justice activists in different geohistorical contexts. Moreover, such criticism is useful in revealing the past and present silencing of women’s contributions to social change as cultural and political agents. The goal of this chapter is to consider how translation brings local and transnational feminisms into dialogue across time and place, and in doing so, challenges legacies of hegemonic cultural authority that too often reproduce heteropatriarchal, colonial formations. Some questions that guided our discussions include: How can translation disrupt or dismantle intersecting regimes of power? What is the role of women translators in histories of resistance (e.g. feminist movements)? How does translation subvert, rewrite, or question hegemonic definitions of authorship? What promising areas of collaboration remain between feminist and translation theories as they continue to evolve? The participants of this roundtable chapter, coming from different interdisciplinary and transnational backgrounds, approach questions of feminist politics and philosophies of authorship and translation with their uniquely positioned epistemic voices. In doing so, they help expand critical understandings of translation in general and feminist translation in particular, and offer a multifaceted meditation that works from our various perspectives and experiences to go beyond (mis)perceptions of authorship towards practices of solidarity in translation.

5

Emek Ergun et al.

Critiquing the modern concept of author, inventing multiple translatorship The modern concept of the author as the sole and individual originator of their own work is comparatively new in the West, as research on the literary cultures of the medieval and early modern periods in Europe demonstrates. At the roundtable, Siobhan Meï reminded us of different descriptions of the medieval woman author by defining ‘authorship’ in both its modern and medieval contexts, as well as exploring the various avenues in which cultural and spiritual authority could be accessed by women of the time. Just as the agency and authority of the translator is often called into question, early modern and medieval women writers occupied an equally precarious role within the patriarchal intellectual and spiritual conventions of their time. Due to women’s historical exclusion from intellectual circles and institutions of learning, the way towards authorship and spiritual authority for women writers was neither straightforward nor, in some instances, without social consequences. In a chapter from The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Women’s Writing (2003) titled “Women and Authorship,” Jennifer Summit describes the multitude of ways in which we might consider the possibility of the medieval woman author, a project that involves defining ‘authorship’ in both its modern and medieval contexts, as well as exploring the various avenues in which cultural and spiritual authority could be accessed by women of the time. Authorship, according to Summit, is a historically variable term whose meaning shifts according to institutional and historical contexts. Where the modern author is identified and culturally valued as the sole creator of their work, medieval and early modern forms of authorship are based in the concept of auctoritas, a term used as a “marker of doctrinal authority” whose ideological power is derived from its “link to tradition, defined as a stream of continuous influence by its root tradere, to pass on” (Summit 2003, 92). Living medieval writers thus cultivated their cultural and intellectual authority from within a recognizable network of sources, including the philosophies and poetics of ancient theologians, classical writers, scripture, and, even, as visionary writing exemplifies, the direct and divine will of God. Writing as “a suspension rather than an assertion of selfhood” (Summit 2003, 96) and as textual demonstration of total submission to God’s will serve as examples of the ways in which women visionaries were engaged as authorial participants in medieval literary culture. An example of one such visionary writer is Marguerite Porete (1250–1310), a 13th-century French-speaking mystic and author of Le miroir des âmes simples et anéanties (The Mirror of Simple Souls) (1295). Le miroir is a complex and highly abstract prose piece written in the style of a Boethian dialogue that evokes the courtly tradition of fine amor celebrated in works such as Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun’s 13th-century allegorical poem Le Roman de la Rose (Ernst Langlois 1914–1924). In Porete’s text, multiple feminine allegorical voices, including Reason, Love, and the Soul, address one another. Porete’s work is unique in the context of Christian visionary writing in that it does not document corporeal revelation, but rather intimately describes an ongoing spiritual and cerebral negotiation of the self in relation to God’s will. Written in the vernacular, Le miroir was deemed heretical and Porete was burned at the stake in 1310. Porete’s spiritual and literary legacy did not die with her however, as there is strong evidence pointing to connections between Porete’s Miroir and the writing and translations of Marguerite de Navarre (1492–1549), sister to King François I and a known evangelist sympathizer during the tumultuous early years of the Protestant Reformation in France. Meï suggested that while intellectual submission and textual self-negation would initially seem to contradict or dissolve authorial possibility, the identification of a divine source for one’s writing, which exists not only beyond the self, but also supersedes individual consciousness, generates a space of creative 6

Women (re)writing authority

agency and flexibility in which transmission and reception – rather than ownership – become the goals of cultural production and spiritual enlightenment. Still prevalent today, the idea of the solitary author has been questioned and contested by literary studies scholars such as Hanne Jansen and Anna Wegener (2013), who, building on Jack Stillinger’s (1991) concept of multiple authorship, coined the term multiple translatorship. Traditionally, the multiplicity of agents behind a translation has been understood in terms of collaboration or cooperation, yet it may also involve discrepancies and disagreements. By disclosing the multiplicity of agents involved, traces of negotiations challenge common conceptions of authorship. On these grounds, Ida Hove Solberg reminded the roundtable that opposing viewpoints between agents are likely to surface in translations of ideological works, such as feminist texts, due to the frequent personal ideological involvement of the agents. Keith Harvey finds “bindings” (Harvey 2003) – cover texts, illustrations, promotional material, etc. – to be key sites for negotiation between competing ideological viewpoints. One example Solberg shared is the first Norwegian translation of Simone de Beauvoir’s Le Deuxième Sexe in 1970 by an intellectual first-wave feminist that was released by a small, predominantly male left-wing publishing house. Its ‘bindings’ present it simultaneously as a work on questions of sexuality, with a faceless naked woman on the cover, and as an existentialist discussion of women’s situation. In the translation, the topic of sexuality is toned down or even omitted, and much of the existentialist vocabulary is simplified. The paradoxical dissonance between what is on the cover and the book’s content is an example of multiple translatorship, but to whom should these choices be attributed, the translator or the editorial team? Negotiations of different conceptions of the book, evident in its bindings and supported by correspondence between agents, illustrate the possibility for both productive dialectical opposition as well as mutual influence and interplay between translational agents. Similarly, re-conceiving translation as a specific form of authorship, at the roundtable Carolyn Shread drew on her own work as a translator of several works by contemporary French philosopher Catherine Malabou, beginning with Plasticity at the Dusk of Writing (2009). She recounted how she self-reflexively began to construe Malabou’s signature concept of ‘­plasticity’ – defined as the giving, receiving, or even explosion of form – as relevant to translation. For instance, conventional conceptions of translation can be characterized as an ‘elastic’ model in that translation is measured against a discrete and autonomous original to which the translation always refers back and is inevitably found to be lacking and subservient. The equivalences of the exchanges fail and the translation is never commensurate with the original. By contrast, a ‘plastic’ paradigm views translation as a morphing process by which a text develops precisely through translations. To replace textual elasticity with plasticity is also to adopt a generative framework that aligns with feminist conceptions of relationality as opposed to a discrete subject/object divide. Moreover, because plasticity accounts not only for the giving and receiving of form but also its destruction, this revised conception allows us to understand the ‘accidents’ of translation. Plasticity parses the ways in which translation is involved in reworkings and in the production of the new. In our discussion, Emek Ergun agreed that if our premise is that translations and originals are differently assembled and marked texts, then neither is purely original or copied. They are both creatively produced through different meaning-making mechanisms and they both continue to make and shed meanings when they encounter readers who bring their own locally crafted interpretive schemes to the reading process.

Representing others for others This insight allows us to ask, as Meï put it, on whose behalf are we speaking/translating? As an activity that is built on processes of mediation and negotiation, in what ways and under 7

Emek Ergun et al.

which conditions does translation allow agents and communities to speak for themselves? When and how does translation as a representational practice submerge or erase voices, histories, and knowledge? This last question is particularly relevant in the construction of feminist translation epistemologies that seek to challenge regimes of power. Genealogical excavations of liberalism have exposed the racially exclusionary foundations of the Western legal, social, and philosophical frameworks through which bodies become legible as human and the processes through which various narratives congeal and circulate as History. As a porous and de-centred site of critical inquiry that is interested in how community forms across borders and sociocultural differences, feminist translation is also a space in which liberal conceptualizations of freedom, individuality, autonomy, and agency are explored and interrogated. Even so, in our conversation, Sandra Joy Russell raised the question: what does it mean for women translators to be able to engage with the act of translation when the female body has been, and continues to be, regulated by various spheres, not only sexual and reproductive, but also within political and activist spheres of power, as in the spaces of protest and revolution? This interrogation allows us to consider translation’s unique offering of not only the ‘possession’ of a text but, more subversively, the repossession of a textual body through the reproductive act of rewriting through translation, and, moreover, the extent to which this repossession is translatable between geographic and ideological spaces. In other words, the challenge of textual repossession is especially present for feminist translators, whose work requires active recognition of how feminism(s), transnationally and transculturally, has formed and developed under different ideological and historical conditions. For women translators who have historically confronted expectations of invisibility and the assumed absence of authorship, the symbolic representation or imagining of the human body as a space of ownership takes on a new significance, one that is specifically feminist: it participates in the act of reclaiming authority over a textual body. In Russel’s unpublished translations of women’s poetry written during Ukraine’s 2013–2014 Euromaidan Revolution from a collection entitled Materyns’ka moltyva [Maternal Prayer], the figure of berehynia, an ancient Slavic goddess or ‘hearth mother,’ emerged as a poetic symbol for women’s roles in the protests. Often fetishized, the image of the berehynia in contemporary Ukraine has been tied to the maternal body and become a catch-all for describing women’s participation in the revolution. Rendering this image in English in a Western context prompted Russel to ask what would it mean to disrupt this figure as a way to reconstruct it as more subversively feminist, as an opposition to, rather than protector of, patriarchy? This impulse is problematic, however, within a Ukrainian activist context, since such rewriting re-performs the revolution in order to meet the criteria of Western feminism. While rewriting through translation can reclaim the female body as feminist, translating from a post-imperial context (Ukraine) to an imperial one (US), we have to ask how power and authority are wielded in translation. More specifically, how does such power, through its representations of the symbolic and corporeal body, reinforce hegemonic and imperialistic formations of feminism? Thinking about these questions as pertinent concerns across the globe, Meï made a connection to the work of feminist activist Gina Athena Ulysse, who, in Why Haiti Needs New Narratives: a Post-Quake Chronicle (2015), deploys translation as a complex and intimate process of representation for Haiti, a nation that has been constrained by the persistence of stereotypes that alienate and victimize its communities. In this trilingual (English, Haitian Creole, and French) text, Ulysse deconstructs, revisits, and challenges these narratives. Ulysse, a member of the Haitian diaspora, consistently returns to the issue of representation – to the question of who can speak on behalf of whom. The auto-ethnographic reflexivity of Ulysse’s written work and her mobilization of embodied performance challenge how certain narratives are constructed and circulate. Ulysse’s artistic oeuvre offers key insights into what a feminist translational praxis can 8

Women (re)writing authority

look like: one that is always attentive to the ways in which politics and poetics of representation traverse and conjoin the public and private spheres of meaning-making.

Expanding boundaries of authorship The pairing of feminism and translation as discourses and practices produces a rich space for thinking through the politics of speaking and storytelling in transnational contexts, particularly with regard to these questions of representation. In our discussion, Sara Rutkowski shared her interest in contemporary instances in which the translator tears down traditional models of textual authority thereby expanding the boundaries of authorship. A striking example is Ann Goldstein, who has become a virtual stand-in for the celebrated, though anonymous, Italian writer Elena Ferrante, author of the widely popular four novels that comprise the Neapolitan series: My Brilliant Friend (2012), The Story of a New Name (2013), Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay (2014), and The Story of the Lost Child (2015). Indeed, it is Ferrante’s determination to remain unknown that has allowed for a more expansive view of translation as collaboration and co-authorship (although it should be noted that in 2016, Italian journalist Claudio Gatti concluded that Anita Raja, herself a translator, was the actual author of the Neapolitan novels – a claim that Ferrante vehemently denied). Goldstein, who translated all four novels into English, has become the embodiment of the hidden writer, the sole conduit to the source, and by her own admission, even mistaken for the source. Her public status in the author’s absence has helped turn on its head the historical and ideological construction of translation, the very problem that initially drives feminist critique – namely, the notion that translation is subordinate to the original and as such is parallel to women’s role as submissive, reproductive, the handmaiden to the master. The famed translator and invisible writer upend that social order and contribute to the rising cultural cachet of translators. In fact, Solberg confirmed that the same can be said of Ferrante’s translators in Norway (Kristin Sørsdal), Sweden ( Johanna Hedenberg), and Denmark (Nina Gross), all three of whom have served as authors-by-proxy, attending public events, giving extensive interviews, and generally becoming well-known literary figures in Ferrante’s absence. Moreover, Ferrante’s novels themselves are particularly germane to the topic of feminist translation because they are in many respects about the power of translation and its vital role in expanding the boundaries of women’s social and political identities. One example is the narrator’s struggle to reconcile her two languages, the Neapolitan dialect, which intractably represents the intimacy of home, the working-class, anger, and violence, and standard Italian, which signals the aspirational world beyond the domestic, itself oppressively constructed. It is only when she becomes a writer that the narrator is empowered, and not by the language in which she writes, but by the act of translating. Translation is a central motif for crossing over linguistic, national, and gendered borders. The story both around and inside Ferrante’s novels highlights translation as an act of subversion, a claiming of territory that has been habitually denied to both women and translators.

Fictionalizing translation and translators Along with the growing public interest in, and awareness of, individual translators, there has also been a global upsurge in the representation of the act of translation and the task of the translator in literature itself. This fictional turn is fundamental because it foregrounds translation by allocating a leading role to translators and interpreters, who have been largely erased, even though they have always been central to the production and circulation of texts. As a literary device, translation prompts us to reconsider the way we perceive fiction. At the roundtable, 9

Emek Ergun et al.

Denise Kripper presented her research on how fictional women translators and their practices are portrayed in contemporary literature in Spanish. In these works, they challenge the original/ copy dynamic celebrating irreverent translation as an act of subversion. They mistranslate and they do so on purpose, with a political agenda in mind. So what happens when a ‘bad’ translation becomes a good one? What happens when meanings are subverted deliberately? In the same way that Chicana feminist writers have reclaimed and reappropriated the figure of La Malinche (see for example Norma Alarcón 1989), the indigenous interpreter who aided the Spaniards in the conquest of Mexico and has been historically rendered as a traitor, these works release the woman translator from a servile, invisible, and inferior position. Feminist translation thus becomes a creative and empowering approach whereby, through an exercise of mistranslation, a productive new work is created. Their strategies vary from impeding communication by refusing to translate to overshadowing the original by mistranslating it, attempting to resist regimes of power such as the hegemony of English, patriarchy and male-dominated spaces, and even the very reign of the original. For example, the short story “Never Marry a Mexican” by Chicana writer Sandra Cisneros (1992) is sprinkled with Spanish terms, followed by their explanation, translation, or (re)elaboration by its code-switching translator protagonist. Thus, a US-based empowered English-speaking target readership is suddenly dependent on her for understanding; readers are forced to rely on a character ambiguously depicted as treacherous, while, by contrast, a Hispanic bilingual audience is invited into a complicit reading. Moreover, the novel Inclúyanme afuera (2014) by Argentine writer Maria Sonia Cristoff narrates the experiment of its protagonist, a woman tired of her machine-like job as a simultaneous interpreter stuck in a booth, who eventually decides to remain silent for a year. Silence becomes her counteroffensive, her tool of resistance and the novel dwells on what happens when the world is deprived of translation. As Kripper proposed, these and other feminist fictional translators tamper with globalization’s running wheel, hinder its fluidity, slow down readers, forcing them to take a pause and reflect, or even suspect, mistrust the process. They make translation visible.

Considering pedagogical questions In our discussions since the roundtable, one of the most pressing questions we asked ourselves was what can we do as feminist scholars, translators, and educators? Ergun pointed out that it is not a given that feminist translation is intersectional since it may easily be disrupted or curbed by global machineries of communication. Indeed, the existing Eurocentric feminist translation scholarship has largely adhered to a gender-only focus in its theories and practices and only recently, both with the emergent geopolitical expansion of the field and with the deep interrogation and transformation of Western feminist praxes by the intersectional critiques of feminists of color, queer feminists, and third world feminists, feminist translation scholars have explicitly begun to claim intersectionality as a crucial signpost for their translation praxes. After all, any translation that only takes into consideration gender injustice can reproduce other forms of oppression along the axes of race, ethnicity, sexuality, nationality, geopolitics, etc. Given that translation always takes place across linguistic, cultural, national, and geopolitical borders that are ridden with various asymmetrical power relations, intersectionality thus appears as an essential framework for feminist translation, whose ultimate goal is to intervene into discourses of domination and help forge connectivities and solidarities across differences and hierarchies. In a world of violent borderings that are designed to undermine, if not disallow, translations practiced for socioeconomic justice for all, feminist translators have an ethical imperative to pursue intersectionality so that their work does not end up replicating the very structures of power that we mean to disrupt. To prevent this from happening, Solberg pointed out the importance 10

Women (re)writing authority

of translating feminist literature from minoritized languages in order to counter the dominant translational flow, as well as including such texts in syllabi. She brought up the example of Norwegian feminist and lesbian activist Gerd Brantenberg’s Egalias Døtre (1977), translated by Louis Mackay as Egalia’s Daughters (1985), an innovative novel that swaps gender roles. On a related note, Kripper mentioned the need to refresh the canon with new translation perspectives, such as Emily Wilson’s recent version of The Odyssey (2017), translated into English by a woman for the first time. These new translations have the potential to reinvigorate not only the cultural discourse but also our critical pedagogy. Ergun put theory to practice by considering feminist classrooms, particularly those that interrogate the neoliberal, white-supremacist, and hetero/sexist forces of globalization, as spaces of engagement where we can develop a vision of feminist translation as a vital part of transnational feminist politics. Her undergraduate course “Transnational Feminism” became just such an experimental space in 2017 by adopting Hilary Klein’s Compañeras: Zapatista Women’s Stories (2015) as textbook. While translation is not at the centre of the book as a topic of discussion, it is everywhere in this text. Zapatista women’s stories of creating common grounds of resistance among various indigenous communities, each with its own language; producing and distributing their decolonial feminist agendas through pamphlets and women’s laws; implementing workshops and cooperatives for local sustenance and economic independence; and sharing their political demands and visions on larger nationwide and worldwide platforms are also stories of feminist translation. Compañeras not only reveals the possibility of building commonality within difference but also the strategic use of hegemonic languages, Spanish in this case, in service of communities of resistance, particularly those marginalized at the intersections of colonial and patriarchal power relations. Numerous stories in the book revealed to students the power of translation to disrupt male hegemony over discourse and knowledge and helped them reframe translation as an enabler of cross-border solidarities and polyphonic assemblages that pursue liberation and justice.

Translating in the digital revolution Carolyn Shread built on Emek Ergun’s interest in feminist pedagogy by recalling that practices of solidarity are undergoing dramatic changes as a result of the digital revolution. In this context, she discussed her recent translation of Catherine Malabou’s Morphing Intelligence: From IQ Measurements to Artificial Brains (2019) in which the author explores the way that natural intelligence and brain plasticity, upon which she had formerly based democratic claims (What Should We Do with Our Brain? 2008), are being transformed by technological advances that move towards the creation of a synthetic brain. In this human-machine adaptation, we observe corresponding modes of power that we have yet to fully comprehend. Within this digital transition, translation offers a practice that helps us grasp intersecting regimes of power that are unlike any hitherto engaged. Thus, while feminist translation previously sought to alter the paradigms by which translation was framed, its analysis now helps us anticipate new forms and modes of exchange that are emerging and that feminists must learn to negotiate. The question becomes how does artificial intelligence reframe authority in translation? While there is a generalized belief in the superiority of human translation over machine translation, the condescending jokes about Google Translate mask both an underlying anxiety and the fact that we are developing an increasing tolerance for, indeed a habit of, interacting with both automated and mediated forms of intelligence. Sooner or later, depending on the languages, machine translation will be very effective. Authority and authorship will be rewritten by agents that do not resemble those we know now. As the instrumental relation to our tools gives way to 11

Emek Ergun et al.

the adaptation human plasticity is experiencing, we are in uncharted territory. Collective intelligence, amassed and oriented via artificial intelligence, may crowdsource solutions and dissolve the lines upon which a male heroic narrative of solo authorship established itself. How do these technology futures affect feminist translation? While in the immediate it calls for an intersectional critique to identify the sexist, racist, and other biased foundations of algorithms, along with analysis of the effects of building translation from a corpora that draws on a male and Western canon, reinforcing patriarchy in automated reflexes, it also allows us to imagine machines outside a gendered body and to ask what happens to humans when they accommodate themselves to artificial intelligences. As we consider the future of feminist translation, it is important to ask how do we position ourselves not only in relation to other feminisms, but also in response to emerging augmented intelligences? When we arrive at artificial authorship in translation, what is the place of feminism? Moreover, following Michael Cronin’s argument in Eco-Translation: Translation and Ecology in the Age of the Anthropocene (2017), how does feminist translation respond to the imperative to reduce the energy consumption implicated in translation technologies when human authority is overridden by the fact of climate change?

Towards solidarity in translation At this point Meï encouraged us to consider how modern, hegemonic framings of authorship continue to efface, undermine, and mute the various ways in which we are entangled with one another – humans, animals, things, and even technologies. These earthly and digital entanglements and the diverse relationalities and frictions they produce have been central sites of exploration for transnational and interdisciplinary feminist work at the intersections of biology, environmental studies, anthropology, sociology, and literature. In response, Ergun suggested that we focus on our encounter to discuss the unique significatory potential of translation to connect stories and subjectivities across borders – borders that are usually promoted to polarize and segregate, rather than to bring closer and connect. Translation, by facilitating cross-border travels and encounters of differently originated, assembled, and situated stories and discourses, helps reveal our semiotic gaps, interpretive habits, epistemic illusions, and subjective imperfections. It is precisely due to this power to defamiliarize our (half )truths by welcoming difference that translation appears as threatening to the self, when it is imagined and performed in opposition to the other. However, this supposed threat is the very celebratory aspect of translation. It is how translation is created and creates: it lures the self into a vulnerable state of hosting the other and becoming anew with them. When we welcome translation with sincere hospitality and open our ‘home’ to that beloved or unknown guest arriving from a long journey and bringing us stories from a distant land (or perhaps not as distant as we think it is), we have the opportunity not only to become aware of the partiality and limits of our reflections and imaginations but also to grow with those stories and appreciate the incompleteness and permeability of our interconnectivity. Translation enables our subjectivities, individual and collective, to grow beyond – beyond where the language/s we speak can take us. It is by encountering translated originals that we become original translations ourselves – unique transnational assemblages of ‘home-made’ stories partially and indefinably borrowed from others, some of whom we do not share a language with. It is in this sense that we argue that an entrenched fear/hatred of the other can come to an end with the demise of the entrenched fear/hatred of translation. This is about reimagining relationships to worlds and words, some we know, some we don’t, but we are of them, they are of us, and it is only through an ethics of hospitality, vulnerability, plurality, and solidarity – a translational ethics – that we learn to become with each other and co-exist in our differences. In this sense, we claim 12

Women (re)writing authority

feminist translation as utopian. It is the very principle, practice, and promise of transnationality. When reconceived as such, not in opposition to authorship, but as a transnational form of coauthorship, translation means hope – not loss or failure – for a future in polyphony.

Further reading Copeland, Rita. 1995. Rhetoric, Hermeneutics, and Translation in the Middle Ages: Academic Traditions and Vernacular Texts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. This text explores the role of translation in the emergence of vernacular literature in medieval Europe. It is an excellent resource for researchers interested in the historical intersection of translation and literary culture in the European context. Doerr, Nicole. 2018. Political Translation: How Social Movement Democracies Survive. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Doerr presents her counterintuitive field findings that a multilingual environment – one that depends on interpreters – is more democratic than a monolingual setting. Her research challenges long-standing assumptions about effective modes of communication to show that translation has the potential to be a powerful political tool. Castro, Olga and Emek Ergun, eds. 2017. Feminist Translation Studies: Local and Transnational Perspectives. New York: Routledge. This recent collection is composed of 16 essays that explore translation as a form of local and transnational feminist activism from different interdisciplinary perspectives, while at the same time seeking to geopolitically expand the Anglo-Eurocentric boundaries of the field. It also includes a roundtable discussion on translation with leading scholars on feminist politics. Herrero Lopez, Isis, Cecilia Alvstad, Johanna Akujärvi, and Synnøve Skarsbø Lindtner, eds. 2018. Gender and Translation: Understanding Agents in Transnational Reception. Montréal: Vita Traductiva–Éditions québécoises de l’œuvre. This anthology presents new research on the roles that gender plays in the complex processes of translation, transnational transfer, and reception of translated texts. It focuses on Scandinavia in particular. Baer, Brian James and Klaus Kaindl. 2018. Queering Translation, Translating the Queer: Theory, Practice, Activism. New York: Routledge. This anthology engages with emerging interdisciplinary research on queer (including feminist) dimensions of translation and interpretation.

References Alarcón, Norma. 1989. Traddutora, Traditora: A Paradigmatic Figure of Chicana Feminism. Cultural Critique, 57–87. Beauvoir, Simone de. 1970. Det annet kjønn. Translated by Rønnaug Eliassen and Atle Kittang. Oslo: Pax. Brantenberg, Gerd. 1977. Egalias døtre: en roman. Oslo: Pax. Brantenberg, Gerd. 1985. Egalia’s Daughters: A Satire of the Sexes. Translated by Louis Mackay in cooperation with Gerd Brantenberg. Seattle: The Seal Press. Cisneros, Sandra. 1992. Never Marry a Mexican, in Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories. New York: Vintage Books, 68–83. Cristoff, Maria Sonia. 2014. Inclúyanme afuera. Buenos Aires: Mardulce. Cronin, Michael. 2017. Eco-Translation: Translation and Ecology in the Age of the Anthropocene. New York: Routledge. Ferrante, Elena. 2012. My Brilliant Friend. Translated by Ann Goldstein. New York: Europa. Ferrante, Elena. 2013. The Story of a New Name. Translated by Ann Goldstein. New York: Europa. Ferrante, Elena. 2014. Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay. Translated by Ann Goldstein. New York: Europa. Ferrante, Elena. 2015. The Story of the Lost Child. Translated by Ann Goldstein. New York: Europa. Harvey, Keith. 2003. “Events” and “Horizons”. Reading Ideology in the “Bindings” of Translation, in Maria Calzada Pérez, ed., Apropos of Ideology: Translation Studies on Ideology–Ideologies in Translation Studies. Manchester: St. Jerome, 43–69. 13

Emek Ergun et al.

Homer. 700BC [2017]. The Odyssey. Translated by Emily Wilson. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. Jansen, Hanne and Anna Wegener. 2013. Multiple Translatorship, in Hanne Jansen and Anna Wegener, eds., Authorial and Editorial Voices in Translation. Montréal: Éditions Québécoises de l’œuvre, 1–39. Klein, Hilary. 2015. Compañeras: Zapatista Women’s Stories. New York and Oakland: Seven Stories Press. Langlois, Ernest, ed. 1914–1924. Le Roman de la Rose par Guillaume de Lorris et Jean de Meun. 5 vols. Société des Anciens Textes Français. Paris: Firmin Didot. Malabou, Catherine. 2009. Plasticity at the Dusk of Writing: Dialectic, Destruction, Deconstruction. Translated by Carolyn Shread. New York: Columbia University Press. Malabou, Catherine. 2008. What Should We Do with Our Brain? Translated by Sebastien Rand. New York: Fordham University Press. Malabou, Catherine. 2019. Morphing Intelligence: From IQ Measurements to Artificial Brains. Translated by Carolyn Shread. New York: Columbia University Press. Stillinger, Jack. 1991. Multiple Authorship and the Myth of Solitary Genius. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. Summit, Jennifer. 2003. Women and Authorship. in Carolyn Dinshaw and David Wallace, eds., The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Women’s Writing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ulysse, Gina Athena. 2015. Why Haiti Needs New Narratives: A Post-Quake Chronicle. Translated by Nadève Ménard and Évelyne Trouillot. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press.

14

Part I

Translating and publishing women

2 Volga as an international agent of feminist translation Rajkumar Eligedi

Introduction The ‘cultural turn’ that took place in translation studies in the 1980s liberating the discipline from strictly linguistic approaches and moving towards descriptive approaches as discussed by Gideon Toury (1995) brought the study of the context and the sociocultural aspects of translation as well as the place and function of the translation within the target culture to prominence. The emergence of feminist approaches to translation studies in the 1990s, focusing on the question of gender as an interdisciplinary area of research and translation practice (e.g. Simon 1996; Flotow 1997), added a further sociopolitical dimension to the field. However, despite the extensive translation activity that takes place in India, translation studies remain an emerging or a marginal area of research, and even more so feminist translation. In relation to the Indian context, Spivak (1993) initiated a discussion of feminist translation in postcolonial contexts, followed by scholars such as Niranjana Tejaswini (1998), Devika (2008), Kamala (2009), Tharakeshwar and Usha (2010), who contributed to this discourse. This chapter builds on these scholarly efforts by exploring the role played by Volga, an Indian feminist translator, in translating feminism into Telugu. It discusses her work as an agent of translation, working from mainly English to Telugu, and analyzes Volga’s role in stimulating a debate on feminism in Telugu through her translations. This chapter also addresses the opposition Volga faced in translating feminist texts and ideas into Telugu and how she dealt with this in her struggle to establish feminism as a serious discipline of thought and make it possible and even acceptable to discuss feminism in the public sphere. Volga is regarded as the first significant feminist translator in the Telugu public sphere (refer to Table 2.1). She selected and translated texts that focus on issues of marriage, domestic abuse, sexuality, reproductive rights, motherhood, and freedom. She played a significant role in spreading knowledge on feminist politics in Telugu and emphasized how women need to question and fight against patriarchal values through her translations. She tried to reduce misconceptions about feminism through her translations and her writing, and systematically used translation as a tool to bring feminist ideas into Telugu culture, and support that culture’s own efforts in feminist matters. Volga faced strong opposition from certain ‘leftist’ male intellectuals and also certain women, who resisted the translation of feminist work as a foreign idea that might divide the indigenous social movements in the name of gender and encourage individualism. This was the primary 17

Rajkumar Eligedi Table 2.1 Feminist texts by Volga Sl. Name of the book No. 1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

18

Feminist translations Agnes Smedley’s Portraits of Chinese Women in Revolution (1976) is translated as Samanyula Sahasam Agnes Smedley’s Daughter of Earth (1929) is translated as Bhumi Putrika Alexandra Kollontai’s Three Generations (1929) is translated as Mudu Taralu Oriana Falacci’s Letter to a Child Never Born (1975) is translated as Puttani Biddaku Talli Uttaram Ariel Darfman’s Widows (1983) is translated as Missing Kamala Basin’s What Is Patriarchy, Kali for Women (1993) is translated as Pitruswamyam A collection of papers on black feminist theory translated as Kombahi River Collective Prakatana Naval El Sadavi’s Women at Point Zero (1983) is translated as Urikoyya Anchuna Sushma Deshpande’s Vhay, Mee Savitribai (Yes, I Am Savitribai) is translated as Nenu Savitribaini A collection of research papers are translated into Telugu as Akshara Yuddalu (War of Words) Feminist theoretical texts Tholi Velugulu – Strivaada Siddhanta Vikasam (First Illumination – Feminist Theory)

Genre

Author/ translator

Year of Publisher publication

Memoir/biography

Volga

1984

Hyderabad Book Trust

Semiautobiographical novel

Volga

1985

Hyderabad Book Trust

Volga

1988

Feminist Study Circle

Volga

1989

Feminist Study Circle

Volga

1994

Maanavi Prachuranalu

Pamphlet

Volga

1996

Vantinti MasiSthrivaadha Prachuranalu

Feminist theory

Volga

1996

Vantinti MasiSthrivaada Prachuranalu

Novel

Volga

2000

Swechcha Prachuranalu

Biography

Volga

2000

Asmita

Collection of articles Volga

2009

Asmita

Feminist theory

2003

Swechcha Prachuranalu

Volga

Volga – agent of feminist translation

Sl. Name of the book No.

Genre

Author/ translator

Year of Publisher publication

12

Feminist and Marxist theory

Volga

2004

Swechcha Prachuranalu

Introduction to Feminism

Volga

1989

Feminist Study Circle

Anthology of feminist poetry

Volga

1993

Asmita

Swechcha Prachuranalu Swechcha Prachuranalu

13

Kutumba Vyavastha Marxism – Feminism (Family System-MarxismFeminism) Maaku Godalu Levu (We Do Not Have Walls)

14

Anthology of feminist poetry Nelimeghalu (Blue Clouds)

15

Feminist Novels Sahaja

Novel

Volga

1986

16

Swechcha (Liberty)

Novel

Volga

1987

Feminist stories

Volga

1993

Feminist stories

Volga

1995

Feminist stories

Alladi Uma 1997 and M. Sridhar Ari 2006 Sitaramayya

Authors and Writers India Limited National Book Trust (NBT)

Madhu H. 2007 Kaza, and Ari Sitaramayya

Swechcha Publishers

17 18

19

20

21

Anthologies of short stories Rajakeeya Kathalu (Political Stories) Prayogam (Experiment – ajakeeya Kathalu-2) Translations of Volga’s texts into English Selected short stories of Volga translated as The Woman Unbound Volga’s Novel Swechcha (1987) is translated as A Quest for Freedom (2006) Volga’s Rajakeeya Kathalu (1993) is translated as Political Stories (2007)

Feminist novel

Feminist stories

Swechcha Prachuranalu Maanavi Prachuranalu

reason for the strong opposition that arose against her translations in the 1980s. However, Volga has argued and shown through her writing and her translations that feminism is not aimed at dividing social movements but in fact, aimed at defending the rights of women who are part of these movements and organizations. The Telugu public sphere1 has been one of the more vibrant spaces in India in terms of social movements. Leftist activism, the Dalit movement, and women’s movements have emerged demanding liberation and representation as well as confronting the established hegemonic structures. Due to the multiplicity of languages used in the different political movements across the country, various activists involved in these movements connect with and influence one another through translation across local languages, demonstrating how translation can act as an agent of social change through its transfer of thought across various social and political contexts. In this 19

Rajkumar Eligedi

sense, translation can be seen to contribute to social and political movements as much as these movements impact translation. Anthony Pym (2002) notes that one of the main tasks of translation is to help solve social problems. It may also work as a catalyst for social change (Lin Kenan 2002) or operate as an agent of change (Eva Hung 2005). Within the context of the Indian Savarna2 and Dalit feminist movements, Telugu feminists have played a significant role trying to bring social change to the existing patriarchal society by introducing a version of feminism which combines theory with practice, and was made accessible to the Telugu-speaking readership through translation. These pioneer feminist efforts included bringing to light the painful narratives of women’s sufferings, voicing different forms of their suppression and telling subsequent stories of their journeys to liberation from dominant patriarchal institutions. Popuri Lalitha Kumari, popularly known as Volga (pen name), was born on 27 November 1950 in Guntur, Andhra Pradesh. Venkata Subba Rao, Volga’s father was a communist, and well versed in Russian literature. At a very early age Volga had also read the translated versions of Russian literature and was influenced by Marxist philosophy. She is considered a pioneer of the Telugu feminist literary movement, immensely contributing to the field of feminism and feminist writing by introducing feminist thought to the literary and political spheres of Telugu society. She was an active member of the Student Federation of India (SFI) at Andhra University and participated in the Naxalbari movement3 in the late 1960s as a member of the Communist Party of India (Marxist–Leninist), continuing her active involvement with the Marxist Leninist (ML) movement throughout the 1960s and 1970s. In addition to her political activism, she worked with Viplava Rachayitala Sangam (Revolutionary Writers’ Association) and Janasahiti (People’s Literary Organization) in the 1970s. At a later stage, Volga took the initiative of forming a feminist study circle4 in 1988, while maintaining a cordial relationship with the members of Stree Shakti Sangatana5 (Women Power Organization), a women’s organization established in 1977. Later, she worked with Anveshi (established in 1985) over a period of time and subsequently joined Asmita.6 Volga and other translators who introduced a feminist perspective into Telugu have been subjected to serious criticism from progressive writers and thinkers. Despite this strong opposition, however, feminist translators like Volga, P. Satyavathi,7 and organizations like Stree Shakti Sanghatana (Women Power Organization), the Feminist Study Circle, Anveshi and Asmita, and the publishing houses like Hyderabad Book Trust8 and magazines like Bhumika (Role) and Mahila Margam (Women’s Path) continue to translate feminist ideas and make the discussion on feminism in Telugu possible and acceptable.

Historical perspectives on feminist thought In the globalized world, ideas travel in various settings: from one language to another, one culture to another, and from one society to an altogether different one. “Like people and Schools of Criticism, ideas and theories travel – from person to person, from situation to situation, from one period to another,” Edward Said argues in his path-breaking essay “Travelling Theory” (1983, 226). In her study “Travelling Concepts in Translation” (2018), Hala Kamal discusses ‘feminism’ and ‘gender’ as travelling concepts that move across histories, geographies, cultures, disciplines, languages, and politics. Feminist ideas, too, have travelled across the world via translations and in defiance of opposition and criticism from the local cultures and societies that may resist the challenges to patriarchal orders that such ideas represent. The ‘travel’ from the international context into the Telugu society was made necessary by the needs of women and the demands of the women’s movement. The evolution of the history of feminism in India can be classified into three periods: the social reform era of the 19th century, the nationalist era of the 20th century, and the new 20

Volga – agent of feminist translation

feminist era that began in the 1970s. During the 1960s and 70s, the women’s movement in Telugu society was influenced by Marxist and Leftist thought. With the entry of feminism after the 1970s, there was a great change in the women’s movements across India and in the Telugu region as feminist activists and translators influenced by international feminist thought translated feminist ideas into Telugu to mobilize women against patriarchal norms. When the UN declared 1975 the International Women’s Year and then extended this into an international women’s decade (1975–1985), this gave further impetus to feminist activism in the Telugu public sphere as many autonomous women’s organizations emerged out of these contexts. These organizations led the movements against social practices such as male domination and the dowry system, as well as crimes against women that manifested in sexual harassment, rape, domestic violence, and gender violence. This activism was inspired and supported by various national and international women’s movements as well as the translation of women’s literature and feminist writing. The worldwide feminist movement and its experiences provided a theoretical base for feminist organizations to engage with the women’s question in the Telugu society.

The first feminist socialist organization The POW (Progressive Organization for Women) was established in Hyderabad in 1974 by a group of women students who were influenced by Marxist-Leninist thought and socialist feminism. It was considered the first feminist socialist organization in Hyderabad. In the Telugu context, ‘feminism’ originated in the Srikakulam Naxalbari movement and the Telangana Armed Struggle stimulated by questions raised by women about ‘male domination’ and the ‘patriarchal nature’ of the revolutionary groups. The POW was dissolved in 1975 due to state repression and ideological differences between the women leaders and the Marxist-Leninist Party (M-LP) with regard to women’s issues. Most of the leaders from the organization left the M-LP and established such organizations as the Stree Shakti Sanghatana (SSS), which was formed in 1977. Members of the group were influenced by Western feminism and their own political experience. K. Lalitha, Geeta Ramaswamy, Rukmini Menon (of POW), and members of SSS (Stree Shakti Sanghatana) studied classic feminist texts like Betty Friedan’s Feminine Mystique (1963), German Greer’s Female Eunuch (1970), Shulamith Firestone’s Dialectics of Sex (1970), Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (1949), and Kate Millet’s Sexual Politics (1970). They were also influenced by readings of Marx, Lenin, Che Guevara, and Mao. One of the early discussions in the SSS was on the women in China, with a focus on the Chinese revolution, women’s roles in that revolution, and the conditions of women in China after the revolution. Thus, various versions of feminism emerged in the Telugu context through translation, and it was through SSS publications that the idea of the ‘personal is political’ was propagated from a feminist perspective in the Telugu public sphere. Eventually, the SSS stopped functioning (1984), but it gave birth to two new feminist organizations: Anveshi in 1985 and Asmita in 1991, which built their activism on their predecessors, POW and SSS, and pursued ideas that have some transnational impact. These are the beginnings of feminism in the Telugu context. There were international influences on this feminism, with the most important coming from China, the Soviet Union, and the mostly Anglo-American feminism of the West.

Critical issues: problems encountered in translating feminist texts or ideas into Telugu Volga faced considerable resistance to her questions and feminist thoughts while she was working in the Marxist-Leninist groups. She left the revolutionary organizations9 as a protest against 21

Rajkumar Eligedi

the male domination she experienced there and began translating feminist texts to educate and enlighten the progressive groups and others about the basic concepts of feminism such as patriarchy, oppression, sexuality, motherhood, reproductive rights, and sexual freedom. She faced stiff opposition to her feminist writing from civil society after she left the revolutionary organizations, especially with regard to her novels and translations. Her novel Swechcha (Liberty) (1987) is considered the first feminist novel in Telugu, and was criticized precisely for its feminist content. Political parties, literary persons, organizations, and common people alike in Telugu public sphere expressed their opinions, objections, and criticisms of this novel (Volga 1987, v– xiv). Similarly, many of her translations such as Mudu Taralu (Three Generations), Puttani Biddaku Talli Uttaram (Letter to a Child Never Born) were subjected to similar criticism for introducing new feminist ideas into the Telugu context. Jwalamukhi, a well-known leftist writer, argued that feminism is an international imperialist conspiracy, implemented through non-government organizations (NGOs). He asserts that as part of the conspiracy feminism has spread widely only after the UN declaring 1975–1985 as international women’s decade. He expresses his fear that feminism might stop the (communist/leftist) revolution in India, and says that the description of sexual intercourse, or the pain women experience after intercourse constitutes “porn poetry” (Satyanarayana and Suryaprakash 1997, 38). His critique is that women writers are “doing business with their body” (Satyanarayana and Suryaprakash 1997, 9–13, 38–40). In another vein, Raavi Sastri, a Telugu revolutionary writer argues that feminism is an issue of middle-class women, that feminists are those who don’t have any work and are ‘gayyalulu’ (quarrelsome) (Satyanarayana and Suryaprakash 1997, 40–41). Raavi Sastri’s argument is upheld by S.V. Satyanarayana, a leftist writer, who says the so-called women’s poetry does not represent the woman. It just represents the desires of elite urban women (Satyanarayana and Suryaprakash 1997, 42). In this context, Volga and other feminist writers engaged in writing, translating feminist literature, and countering the arguments of leftist writers. They are criticized for translating feminist texts into Telugu as these bring Western ideas that have created radical change in the source culture. While it was not an easy task for Volga to translate feminist texts in the face of these regular criticisms, she took it as a challenge and continued her work to bring feminist ideas into the Telugu context.

Current research: Volga Until the 1980s, there was little writing in Telugu from a feminist perspective, while women continued to face various issues like dowry, eve teasing,10 and sexual harassment, and started protesting against these and other forms of oppression. However, they lacked an ideological framework to articulate a political stance since the concept of ‘feminism’ was deemed unacceptable and the term itself was used as an offensive expression throughout the 1970s and 80s in the Telugu public sphere. Terms such as ‘feminism’ and ‘male domination’ troubled the revolutionary groups in the Telugu society in this period, as even the progressive thinkers saw it as a dangerous Western encroachment on the revolutionary movements. It was also viewed as a part of a conspiracy to divide the people on the basis of gender. Feminists were seen as overfed, selfindulgent urban upper-class women who smoked cigarettes, cut their hair short, wore sleeveless blouses, and demanded unmitigated freedom. Hence, there was a strong opposition to the translation of feminist texts into Telugu in the 1980s. Yet, gradually, a curiosity developed around this term in the literary and revolutionary circles. In this context, a number of other feminist writers began to bring feminist theory into Telugu, taking the risk of being attacked, even by the politically progressive circles, for translating such materials into Telugu.

22

Volga – agent of feminist translation

Volga is among the most prominent of these feminist translators. Her translation philosophy was based on a strategy of close translation, as she believed that the TL text should be faithful to both the intentions of the original author and the contextual meaning of the SL text. In a conversation with this researcher, she said, “I translated the original text without sacrificing the flavour of the original. I have been faithful to the original in all my translations. I feel that translated text should reach the readers without any injustice to the original text” (Eligedi, 20/11/2013). She is aware of the problematics of ‘faithful’ and literal translation in relation to feminist translation, where it could fail to make a text accessible to the TL readers. She says: If we translate a feminist text as it is into Telugu, it won’t reach Telugu readers. The main reason for this problem is that English feminist writers write theory from their own experiences, which does not reach the Telugu readers. Therefore, I have taken the theory developed by feminist writers. I used to write essays and books with feminist theory from my experiences and the experiences in Telugu Public Sphere. (Eligedi, 20/11/2013) Her translation is informed by feminist theory, which she combines with her own political experience as well as the experiences of people in the Telugu public sphere, thus constructing a text accessible to her Telugu readers. Volga also compares the importance of writers in relation to translators, commenting on the role of translators and writers in the following words: The writer is very important. There is no translator without a writer but the ideas, ideologies of the writer are translated into another language by the translator. The translator also brings new readers to the writer in another language. The important task of the translator is to take the ideas and ideologies of the writer to the new readers in a different language. (Eligedi, 20/11/2013) As a writer and translator, Volga considers the role of the writer more significant than that of translator, as the translator ‘exists’ because of the writer. However, the translator is also important as he/she is acting as an intermediary between readers and writer. Therefore, both are important in the process of translating or transferring ideas into a new language. Despite fierce opposition and criticism from leftist groups, Volga continued her translation work. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, she translated collections of essays and wrote some significant feminist essays to reduce the negative approach towards feminist thinking in the Telugu public sphere. Initially, these were published in various Telugu magazines like Edureetha (Swim Against Tide), Udayam (Morning), and Nalupu (Black). In 2003, these essays were published as a collection entitled Tholi Velugulu–Sthrivadha Siddhantha Vikasam (First Illumination–Evolution of Feminist Theory (2003)). The book includes 19 essays on feminist theory, translated mostly from English, and published by Swechcha Prachuranalu (Liberty Publications)11 in Hyderabad. Many of these essays can be considered summary translations, as they are translated, rewritten, and adapted from multiple sources in English. However, it is important to note that this form of translation was used by Volga, and many other feminists, to bring international feminist knowledge into Telugu, and offer a historical account of feminist thought across the world. The volume begins with groundbreaking feminist texts, written by pioneers of the feminist movement and offers a comprehensive discussion of feminist ideas. One of Volga’s essays, titled “Feminism Ante” (Feminism Means) was published on 26 May 1988 in the Udayam (Morning) magazine. In this essay, Volga discusses the misconceptions around

23

Rajkumar Eligedi

feminism, trying the redress its negative implications in the Telugu culture. She explains the connotations of ‘feminism,’ saying: “Many people do not like the two words feminism and women’s liberation. Traditionalists think that feminism and women’s lib are related to the modern women who cut their hair, wear sleeveless blouse and smoke cigarettes” (Volga 2003, 96). In this instance, Volga not only confronts the traditionalists but also addresses the male social scientists who assumed that feminism was imported from the West. In this essay, she argues that feminism and the women’s liberation movement have been present in society from the time women first started resisting oppression in its various forms (2003, 96). In other words, she contends that feminism is not a Western import but has emerged from the lived experiences of the people and the political movements. She published another essay in 1988, in the July 21–28 issue of Udayam (Morning) magazine, entitled “Socialist feminisamlo dorakochchu samaadaanaalu” (Answers May Be Found in Socialist Feminism) as a response to some of the questions raised in regard to her essay “What Is Feminism?” These questions were about the difference between Marxist theory and feminist theory as many people in the Telugu public sphere assumed feminism was communist theory. Volga discussed the differences between Marxist and socialist feminists to address this issue. Volga published many essays on oppression, liberation, love, friendship, sexuality, domestic work, and pregnancy. From 1988 to 1995 she translated and introduced into Telugu the lives and groundbreaking texts of Alexandra Kollontai, Clara Zetkin, John Stuart Mill, Mary Wollstonecraft, Francis Wright, Judith Sargent Murray, Emma Goldman, Margaret Sanger, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, Suzanne Clara La Follette, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman. She translated most of these texts from English into Telugu as they were originally written in English. She also translated Kollontai’s works into Telugu from English translations of the original Russian. She introduced the ideas in On the Equality of Sexes (1779), A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), The Subjugation of Women (1869), Women and Economics (1898) and Concerning Women (1926) in the translations. All these translations and essays focused on a wide range of feminist issues like male domination, women’s oppression, and reproductive rights, and thus triggered a debate on feminism in Telugu. These essays triggered heated discussions among leftist organizations in regard to women’s issues, as the women engaged in these organizations had started questioning the male domination in the organizations and in society in general. These essays also enabled Telugu readers to understand the development of feminist theory in various parts of the world. Volga’s translations and explanations thus played a crucial role in enhancing the Telugu readers’ understanding of feminism in the face of criticism from Marxist/ revolutionary groups.

Translated texts Volga also faced opposition for her translation of feminist writings from Chinese, Russian and Italian works. Coming from a Marxist background, she was interested in looking at the conditions of women in leftwing movements across the world. Her choice of theoretical texts was based on their relevance to the Telugu sociocultural context, in terms of their themes and the issues discussed in them. For example, Oriana Fallaci’s A Letter to a Child Never Born (1976) raised many questions about reproductive rights and single mothers. Referring to the text, Volga said the following in a conversation: These questions are very significant. If it is translated into Telugu, there will be discussion about it. I thought this book would be useful in our context. So, I have translated it into Telugu as Puttani Biddaku Talli Uttaram (Letter to a Child Never Born). I read feminist texts in 24

Volga – agent of feminist translation

English. Some of them raise very pertinent questions. When I think it is relevant and these questions raise discussion in our society, I translate them into Telugu. (Eligedi, 20/11/2013) Volga played an important role in not only translating but in selecting the feminist texts that might raise questions about such topics as reproductive rights and encourage progressive discussion in the society. In the 1980s, she started translating the works of Agnes Smedley, who documented the lives of the Chinese women she knew personally, and the events she herself witnessed in the revolutionary movements. Volga started with Portraits of Chinese Women in Revolution (Samanyula Sahasam 1984), which is useful in understanding the lives of Chinese women activists in the 1920s and 1930s. Volga also translated Agnes Smedley’s autobiographical novel, Daughter of Earth12 as Bhumi Putrika (1985), which is a semi-autobiographical novel, describing Smedley’s role in the Chinese revolution and her struggle for the liberation of women. This book also gives a detailed account of Smedley’s involvement with social and revolutionary movements across the world, and her involvement in both revolutionary and feminist activism. Volga seems to have identified with Agnes Smedley and chosen this text for its relevance to both the leftist and the women’s movements, emphasizing the interconnectedness between feminist and revolutionary politics. Volga also translated Oriana Fallaci’s novel Letter to a Child Never Born (1976) as Puttani Biddaku Talli Uttaram in 1989. It was first published in Italian in 1975 and was soon translated into English in 1976. Volga translated the English version into Telugu, and it was published by the Feminist Study Circle13 in 1989. Oriana Fallaci (1929–2006) was an Italian author and journalist who wrote this novel in the form of a letter from a young woman to the fetus she carries. It portrays a woman’s struggle as she is caught in a situation that forces her to choose between continuing in a career she loves and motherhood, due to an unexpected pregnancy – a struggle that ends with a miscarriage, and opens a discussion about reproductive rights and politics. By translating the book, Volga introduced and propagated the controversial notion of “vyakthigatham kuda rajakeeyame” (the personal is political) into the Telugu public sphere. The translated book triggered a debate on reproductive rights as the translation raised the following questions, among others: Why is motherhood glorified in literature? Why is there no focus on the complications of pregnancy and the problems women face after pregnancy? How does the state control women’s reproductive rights through society itself but also the institutions of science, technology, medicine, and law? How are family relations, pregnancy, children, and gender relations not merely personal but also sociopolitical issues? Volga translated Alexandra Kollontai’s The Loves of Three Generations (1929) as Mudu Taralu in 1988, working from the English translation. The Telugu version was published by the Feminist Study Circle. Alexandra Kollontai (1872–1952) was a Russian revolutionary, feminist, and the first female Soviet diplomat. She advocated for and wrote extensively about radical sexual politics and free love as she looked at family and marriage as oppressive institutions: “She was instrumental in the legalization of abortion and homosexuality, the creation of a system of quick and easy divorce, and the introduction of a crèche system” (Kirstyiane, 27/05/2008). The book is about an inter-generational conflict between three women: Maria, the grandmother; Olga, the mother; and Genia, the daughter. It describes the experiences and thoughts of these three women about love and the sexual relations of the daughter Genia, revealing the contradictory opinions of the older and younger communist women in the family about life, love, marriage, sexual pleasure, feelings, desires, and relationships. The main message conveyed through this text is that women should not be judged based on their relationships, as it is a common practice to stigmatize women as ‘loose women’ (women of easy virtue) if they have had a relationship with 25

Rajkumar Eligedi

more than one man. The translation of this text into Telugu aimed to introduce yet another feminist perspective and thus shake up traditional notions of womanhood, even though the act of translation and publication could stigmatize both translator and publisher. Volga’s Mudu Taralu became one of the most debated translations in Telugu. It was reviewed by many Telugu writers in popular Telugu magazines in the 1980s, creating a heated debate and raising questions about gender relations in general and within revolutionary movements in particular. A Telugu Marxist woman writer, Muppala Ranganayakamma (1989, 48–49), criticized the translation for encouraging women and men to have multiple sexual relationships. She also argued that the three generations of women are portrayed in a negative light: the behaviour of Maria, of the first generation, was shameless and self-disrespectful, while Olga and Genia (of the second and third generations) have lost their minds in the name of ‘love’ and ‘liberty.’ Ranganayakamma adds that, “this story also showed that as soon as the political activities are developed, sexual relations also get developed. While showing that Olga, the mother participated in the political activities more than her grandmother, Maria and her daughter, Genia participate in political activities even more than her; it demonstrated that their sexual relations also developed in a similar way” (50). In this comment, Ranganayakamma discusses the connection between these women’s sexual relations and their political activities over three generations. She was critical of this translation as she considered that it might encourage sexual promiscuity. On the other hand, many Telugu feminist activists saw Mudu Taralu as a historical necessity, as it was translated in a context of public discussions about feminism, relationships, and sexuality in the Telugu public sphere. In the introduction to this translation, Volga and the Feminist Study Circle note that a wide range of discussions about gender relations and sexuality has been addressed and clarified in Mudu Taralu. They also point out that the idea of translating and publishing the book was considered very seriously because of the possible stigma that could be attached to them as ‘loose women.’ They also revealed their awareness of the society’s views on women’s sexuality, and particularly women’s ‘virginity,’ arguing that this is little more than a myth and a cultural construct that needs dismantling. Finally, they assert their vision of the three women as worthy of the respect they received from their own society, for their services to the country, as communists, regardless of their views on love and sex (Volga 1988, iii–v). Volga used translation as a tool to bring feminist ideas into Telugu in direct opposition to leftist politics of the time. These translated texts show Volga’s interest in various languages and cultures but she always translated from English. It was the ideology of feminism in its different international versions that motivated her to translate and bring international feminist ideas and thoughts into Telugu for the benefit of the Telugu reading public. Her choice of translations demonstrates her intention to change the thinking of male-dominated society. All her translations (summary translations, essays, books) introduced new ideas into Telugu and contributed to the growth of feminist literature in the Telugu context.

Volga’s response to contemporary Dalit-Bahujan feminist translations Eventually, Volga also faced criticism from Dalit woman writers for not seriously engaging with Dalit women’s writing. The Dalit14 movement15 gained prominence in the 1980s and 1990s in Andhra Pradesh, under the influence of Dalit intellectuals such as Kancha Ilaiah and Katti Padma Rao, who raised the caste question with regard to Dalit women and other lower caste women. In the post-Ambedkar period,16 Dalit women used literature as a weapon to counter

26

Volga – agent of feminist translation

mainstream feminist writing. When asked about Anveshi’s perspective in dealing with Dalit and Muslim questions in Andhra Pradesh, Susie Tharu, a well-known Indian writer and intellectual responded saying: Anveshi has been much more open and concerned about issues of difference. [. . .] Consistently, for almost twenty years, we have been invested in it and taken it forward. We have been very interested in seeing the connection between feminist thinking and other kinds of thinking and why it is that the old form of feminism is not hospitable and does not easily invite Dalit women or Muslim women. They do not feel that this is their place. That criticism and that thinking are very central to Anveshi. (Eligedi, 25/7/2013) This was a time when feminist organizations and savarna feminists began to think about Dalit and Muslim women’s issues, as Dalit women writers like Gogu Shyamala, Joopaka Subadra, Challapalli Swarupa Rani, and M.M. Vinodhini started questioning the positions of dominant caste feminist writers for ignoring Dalit women’s problems. Volga welcomes the questions and criticisms brought forth by Dalit feminist writers and in an interview with The Hindu, she responds,“That is a good thing. Let their anger flow. . . . We have to wash ourselves in their anger and grow more sensitive to their questions.” However, she does warn that it is “important for them to question patriarchy within the Dalit world and with the same sharpness” (Bageshree, 20/01/2013). The Indian feminist movement was initiated by upper caste/class women, but the questions that they asked are relevant to women from all Indian communities. In India, feminism continues to be a largely urban middle-class movement. Many of the dominant caste feminists realized that there is caste violence and different identity politics facing women from Dalit communities. In a conversation with Volga about caste/class and gender, she says: I think there is nothing wrong in upper caste/class women raising feminist questions or raising the problems of their own. However, Dalit women have been thinking whether these questions are relevant to them or if not, how to make them relevant to their backgrounds. Since feminist ideology is accepted, people also felt that feminist questions have some sense of justice, these questions; struggles bring some change in the society. This discussion created a space where Dalit women are asserting as Dalit feminists, BC (Backward Caste) women as BC feminists and Muslim women as Muslim feminists. (Eligedi, 20/11/2013) Subsequently, with the criticism from the Dalit movement and Dalit feminist thinkers, Volga and other feminist writers also turned to Dalit women’s issues. Volga, Vasantha Kannabiran, and Vindya translated The Combahee River Collective, the Combahee River Collective Statement: Black Feminist Organizing in the Seventies and Eighties, published as Kombahi River Collective Prakatana– Nallajathi Strivaadhula Swaram in 1996. Introduced by the African American feminist, Barbara Smith, one of the pioneers of ‘black feminism,’ the book includes a collection of essays on black feminist theory, black feminist politics, identity politics, the challenges facing black feminist organizing. Obviously, the purpose of this translation was to make black feminist theory available in Telugu so that it contributes to the development of Dalit feminism. In a conversation about this book, Volga said, “I have translated it with the intention that this Black Feminist theory would be useful for the growth of the Dalit Feminist theory in Telugu” (Eligedi, 20/11/2013).

27

Rajkumar Eligedi

Volga also translated Sushma Deshpande’s play Nenu Savitribaini or “Yes, I Am Savitribai” in 2000 from Marathi into Telugu. It was titled Vhay, Mee Savitri Bai or “Yes, I Am Savitribai” in Marathi, and first published in Telugu by Asmita in 2000, then reprinted in 2005. The Dalit feminist leader, Savitribai Phule, was a woman teacher and a crusader for women’s education in India, and together with Jyotirao Phule fought the exploitation of Dalits at the hands of Brahmins and other upper caste people. Jyotirao encouraged Savitri to teach in a school, and as soon as she started teaching, voices were heard critical of a lower caste woman becoming a teacher, considering it shameful to the country. Later on, both Jyotirao Phule and Savitribai Phule established schools for the lower caste girls in the state of Maharashtra. In her interviews, Volga pointed out that she was inspired by Savitribai Phule: I thought that the ideologies of Ambedkar and Phule needed to be discussed. I was inspired by Savitribai Phule when I read the original text. I did not know much about her before reading this text. As I was inspired, I also thought that many people would be inspired if they read this text. This will bring a change also. I also felt that many people would come to know about Phule, Savitribai and their thoughts. I am the first one to translate Savitribai Phule into Telugu. (Eligedi, 20/11/2013) Volga’s translation of Savitribai Phule resulted in many other translations of her work into Telugu, drawing Telugu scholars’ and activists’ attention to the writings of Jyotirao Phule and Savitribai Phule on post-Dalit and Bahujan movements. Today, several Indian social, political, and caste movements are inspired by the work of Savitri and Jyotirao Phule, and many feminists as well as Dalit and Bahujan activists were inspired by their visions, owing to the translation of Nenu Savitri Baini (Yes, I Am Savitribai).

Conclusion Volga acted throughout as an intermediary and an agent of change, having dedicated her life to feminist ideology. She has played a very significant role in translating and introducing ‘feminism’ to Telugu, using her translated feminist texts as tools to aid in the empowerment of women through feminism. Without her translations, feminist thought was accessible only to Englisheducated women capable of identifying and reading these texts. It was only in the 1980s that Volga began translating them into Telugu, thus immensely contributing to the development of feminist writing and activism in Telugu. Owing to her, Telugu women have been empowered by the feminist notion of “the personal is also political,” and her translations remain a source of inspiration to generations of women and relevant to the present social context. Her work has introduced feminism, raising awareness about gender discrimination, and generating political and intellectual debates within leftist, progressive circles and beyond. Today, feminism is accepted as a serious ideology in the Telugu leftist, progressive, and literary circles, as a result of the relentless efforts of Volga through her translations, her original writings, and her activism. In this sense, Volga’s work is a model of feminist activism through translation.

Future directions This study has mainly looked at the ‘travel’ of feminist knowledge from English into Telugu. There is, however, scope for further studies looking at Volga’s translations from Telugu into English. As there are many translations from Telugu into English, it would be interesting to 28

Volga – agent of feminist translation

study how feminist knowledge from Telugu has travelled into English and what impact it has had on International feminism. The following research questions may be worth considering: How does the translation of feminist texts shape sociopolitical/identity movements? What is the role of sociopolitical/identity movements in pushing or promoting the translations of feminist texts in Telugu? How do translation and political movements shape each other?

Further reading Tharu, Susie and K. Lalita, eds. 1991. Women’s Writing in India: Volume 1, 600 B.C. to the Early Twentieth Century. New York: The Feminist Press. Tharu, Susie and K. Lalita, eds. 1993. Women’s Writing in India: Volume II, the Twentieth Century. New York: The Feminist Press. Tharu, Susie and K. Lalitha, eds. Women Writing in India: 600 B.C. to the Present in two volumes. Women’s Writing in India has been used as an authentic text on Indian women’s writing across the world. These two volumes offer around 140 texts (poetry, fiction, drama, biographical notes) written by women in 13 Indian languages in India. These volumes include the translations of the work of many Telugu women writers into English. Niranjana, Tejaswini. 1998. Feminism and Translation in India: Contexts, Politics, Futures. Cultural Dynamics, SAGE Publications, 10(2), 133–146. This is one of the significant texts in the field of feminism and translation in the Indian context. It offers an analysis of feminism in India through postcolonial inquiry into translation. It shows that the discourse of feminism and feminist politics might open up new conceptual–political formulations/ strategies through translation. Spivak, Gayatri C. 2000. The Politics of Translation, in Lawrence Venuti, ed., The Translation Studies Reader. London and New York: Routledge, 397–416. This is one of the seminal essays in the field of feminist translation in postcolonial contexts. It argues that the translator must surrender to the text as translation is the most intimate act of reading. It offers insights into feminist and postcolonial approaches to translation. Devika, J. 2008. Being “In-translation” in a Post-colony. Translation Studies, 1(2), 182–196. In her study of the context of Kerala the author reflects on the translation of feminism into Malayalam. She looks at the efforts of translating feminism into Malayalam within two distinct modes of translation: the ‘faithful’ mode and the ‘grounded’ mode. This study looks at the work of many feminists in Kerala who have been translating feminist concepts produced in first-world contexts into the local language. Kamala, N., ed. 2009. Translating Women: Indian Interventions. New Delhi: Zubaan. This is a collection of essays on translation and women in the Indian context. These essays explore various questions on women’s writing, women’s language, politics of language, women translators, and the agency of translators. Sravanthi, Kollu. 2009. Mapping the Feminist Subject: A Reading of the Women’s Movement(s) in Andhra Pradesh (M. Phil dissertation). Available at: http://www.efluniversity.ac.in/these_cultural_studies.php In this study on women’s movement(s) in Andhra Pradesh, the author attempts to map the debates that emerged around feminism in the last few decades through a focus on the feminist subject. This study is based on interviews with eight feminist scholars from various women’s organizations. Tharakeshwar, V.B. and M. Usha. 2010. Survey and Analysis of Social Science Higher Education Material Production Initiative in Kannada; Translation Strategies, Stories of Success/Failures. Mumbai: Ratan Tata Trust. This project looks at earlier initiatives to produce higher education material in Indian languages. It examines the reasons for their success or failure in the context of Kannada. It has a chapter on gender studies/women’s studies material in Kannada. It offers a brief history of the discussion on women in Kannada, the emergence of feminism in Kannada, the department/centres of women’s studies in Karnataka. It also includes a report on the workshop on the translation of gender studies into Kannada. 29

Rajkumar Eligedi

Related topics Translating feminism; gender and translation; activism and translation; translation and resistance; ideology and translation; translation and agency

Notes 1 Telugu is an Indian language belonging to the Dravidian family of languages. It is the official language of the Indian states of Telangana and Andhra Pradesh. It is the second largest language spoken in India after Hindi and has around 75 million speakers across the world. The Dravidian language family consists of around 80 language varieties. They are spoken mostly in southern and central India. Telugu, Tamil, Kannada, and Malayalam are the largest languages in this language family. 2 Savarna feminism refers to upper caste feminism that addresses the concerns of upper caste women without any (or with less) regard for Dalit and other lower caste women. 3 This was an armed peasant struggle that began in 1967 in Naxalberi, a village in the state of West Bengal with the objective to occupy the lands of Zamindars (big landowners) and redistribute them among the landless labourers. The slogan of the movement was “The land belongs to those who till it.” It was a violent movement aiming to overthrow landowners and the state. 4 The feminist study circle was started by Volga and other Telugu feminist writers in 1988 with the objective to familiarize people with feminism as an ideology. It played a crucial role in introducing and disseminating knowledge on feminism through its publications and discussions in public forums. 5 Stree Shakti Sangatana (Women Power Organization SSS) was an autonomous woman’s group established in 1977 by a group of women activists. K. Lalitha, Veena Shatrugna, Vasantha Kannabiran, Susie Tharu, Ratnamala, Ambika, Swarna, and Vasantha were among the founders. They worked on the issues like dowry deaths, rapes, single women’s rights, and price rise. They used to read, discuss, research, and document local women’s histories. The demise of SSS gave birth to the two feminist organizations: Anveshi in 1985 and Asmita in 1991. Volga worked with Anveshi for some time. Later, Volga and Vasantha Kannabiran established Asmita. While Volga worked as the first president of the organization, Kalpana Kannabiran was the secretary of the organization. 6 Anveshi and Asmita have been very active in shaping the discussions on feminism and gender in the Telugu public sphere. 7 Satyavathi is a writer and translator who has worked as an English lecturer. 8 Hyderabad Book Trust is a non-profit publishing collective formed in 1980. It supports feminism by publishing translated/feminist texts. 9 Viplava Rachayitala Sangam (Revolutionary Writers’ Association) and Janasahiti (People’s Literary Organization). 10 Sexual harassment or molestation of a woman by a man in a public place. It also refers to unwanted sexual remarks/advances, groping, etc. 11 Swechcha Prachuranalu (Liberty Publications) is specialized in publishing feminist texts. 12 Daughter of Earth was published in 1929 in English. It was republished in 1987 by the feminist press with a foreword by Alice Walker and an afterword by Nancy Hoffman. It was published in Telugu in 1985 by Hyderabad Book Trust. 13 The Feminist Study Circle started with the objective to familiarize people with feminism as an ideology. The study circle held many discussions on feminist literature. These discussions resulted in many publications: Puttanibiddaku talli uttaram (Letter to a Child Never Born), Maku Godalu Levu (We Do Not Have Walls), and Mudu Tharalu (Three Generations). 14 The word ‘Dalit’ means broken, downtrodden, or oppressed. It refers to the people who are discriminated and oppressed based on the caste. 15 Dalits have been leading the movement or struggle against untouchability and caste-based discrimination. The aim of this movement is the annihilation of the caste system. 16 Dr. B.R. Ambedkar proposed the idea of getting rid of the caste system and introduced many protections for the Dalit community in the constitution of India. He also fought for women’s empowerment and education as he believed that education is the most powerful weapon to change the lives of women. The term ‘post-Ambedkar period’ refers to the period after him when Dalit women started asserting their position inspired by his philosophy and writings.

30

Volga – agent of feminist translation

References Bageshree, S. 2013. Writing Is a Critical form of Activism. The Hindu. Available at: www.thehindu.com/ news/cities/bangalore/writing-is-a-critical-form-of-activi sm/article4325477.ece [Accessed 27 May 2008]. Beauvoir, Simone. De., 1972. The Second Sex. 1949. Translated by H. M. Parshley. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Fallaci, Oriana. 1976. Letter to a Child Never Born. New York: Simon & Schuster. Fallaci, Oriana. 1989. Puttani Biddaku Talli Uttaram. Translated by Volga. Hyderabad: Feminist Study Circle. Firestone, Shulamith. 1971. The Dialectics of Sex. New York: McGraw-Hill. Flotow, Luise von. 1997. Translation and Gender: Translating in the ‘era of feminism’ Manchester: St. Jerome Publishing. Friedan, Betty. 1963. Feminine Mystique. London: Penguin Books Ltd. Greer, German and Inglis, Andrew. 1971. The Female Eunuch. London: Paladin, 301. Hung, Eva. 2005. Translation and Cultural Change. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins Pub. Kamal, Hala. 2018. ‘Travelling Concepts’ in Translation: Feminism and Gender in the Egyptian Context. Synergy, 14(1), 131–145. Kamala, N., ed. 2009. Translating Women: Indian Interventions. New Delhi: Zubaan. Kenan, Lin. 2002. Translation as a Catalyst for Social Change in China, in Maria Tymoczko and Edwin Gentzler, eds., Translation and Power. Amherst and Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 160–183. Kirstyiane. 2008. Red Love, By Alexandra Kollontai. Vulpes libris. Available at: https://vulpeslibris.word press.com/2008/05/27/red-love-by-alexandra-kollontai/ [Accessed 27 May 2008]. Kollontai, Alexandra. 1929. The Loves of Three Generations. Translated by Lily Lore. A Great Love. New York: The Vanguard Press. Available at: https://www.marxists.org/archive/kollonta/1929/great/ch03.htm Kollontai, Alexandra. 1988. Mudu Taralu. Translated by Volga from English Translation by Lily Lore. Hyderabad: Feminist Study Circle. Kombahi River Collective Prakatana–NallajathiSthrivadhulaSwaram. 1996. Translated by Volga, Vasantha Kannabiran and Vindya. Hyderabad: StrivaadhaPrachuranalu–Vantinti Masi. Millet, Kate. 1970. Sexual Politics. New York: Doubleday & co. Pym, Anthony. 2002. Translation Studies as a Social-Problem Solving Activity. Paper presented in a conference on Translating in the 21st Century: Trends and Prospects, Thessaloniki, Greece, 27–29 Sept. Ranganayakamma. 1989. Asmantvamlonchi Asamantvamloki. Vijayawada: Sweet Home Publications. Said, Edward. 1983. Traveling Theory, in The World, the Text, and the Critic. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 226–247. Satyanarayana, Suryaprakash. 1997. Strivaada Vivaadhaalu. Hyderabad: Andhrapradesh Abyudaya Rachayathila Sangham. Simon, Sherry. 1996. Gender in Translation: Cultural Identity and the Politics of Transmission. London and New York: Routledge. Smedley, Agnes. 1984. Samanyula Sahasam. Translated by Volga. Hyderabad: Hyderabad Book Trust. Smedley, Agnes. 1985. Bhumi Putrika. Translated by Volga. Hyderabad: Hyderabad Book Trust. Spivak, G. C. 1993. Outside in the Teaching Machine. London and New York: Routledge, 179–200. Tharakeshwar, V. B. and M. Usha. 2010. Survey and Analysis of Social Science Higher Education Material Production Initiative in Kannada; Translation Strategies, Stories of Success/Failures. Mumbai: Ratan Tata Trust. Available at: http://cscs.res.in/dataarchive/textfiles/survey-and-analysis-of-social-science-higher.pdf Toury, Gideon. 1995. Descriptive Translation Studies and Beyond. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing. Volga. 1987. Swechcha. Hyderabad: Swechcha Prachuranalu. Volga. 2003. TholiVelugulu-Sthrivaada–SiddhanthaVikaasam. Hyderabad: Swechcha Prachuranalu.

31

3 Translation of women-centred literature in Iran Macro and micro analysis Sima Sharifi

Introduction/definitions The objective of this chapter is to provide insight into the translation of feminist writings before and after Iran’s 1979 revolution, and examine how the Islamic Republic of Iran (henceforth, IRI) has influenced this process. To take into account the transformation of women-centred texts in translation across two different eras – in a monarchy1 and under an Islamist g­ overnment – I attempt to answer four questions: First, which books on women-centred texts (i.e., feminist literary fiction or non-fiction) were published in Persian translation, before and during the 1970s and the reign of the Shah? Second, which women-centred texts were translated into Persian in the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s, i.e. after the Islamic Revolution, what kinds of changes can be traced in the translated texts over these decades, and why were these made? Third, how has the androcentric agenda of Ayatollah Khomeini (henceforth, Khomeini) and its Islamization of Iranian society, from his arrival on 1 February 1979, influenced Iranian women’s lives, societal culture and as a result the translation of feminist or women-centred texts? Finally, what happens to a source text (ST) which is committed to ending the subordination of women and is meant to have political impact when it is transferred into an overtly and stiflingly patriarchal target system? The definition of women-centred or feminist texts I adhere to here is the sort of writing that Eva Lennox Birch defines as “enabling an expression of the world as it is perceived by the female” (1994, 241). Such women-oriented texts may be authored by women and/or involve thematically pertinent female characters with an eye to the question of equal legal, political, social, and economic rights for women. To locate Persian translations of women-centred literature of foreign origin prior to and after 1979, I tapped into three resources: the data base of ‫ سازمان اسناد و کتابخانه ملی جمهوری اسالمی‬the online catalogue of the National Library & Archives of the Islamic Republic of Iran (henceforth, library), Iranian expatriate scholars, and an Iran-based translation studies journal. Parallel to my library-based research, and in the hope of adding to my inventory of women-oriented texts in Persian translation, I reached out, via email and/or telephone, to Iranian scholars residing in North America, Australia, and the UK, all of whom are known for their feminist work. I provided these professors with a short list of book titles by well-known authors usually referred 32

Women-centred literature in Iran

to as feminist such as George Eliot (Middle March 1871), Betty Friedan (The Feminine Mystique 1963), Virginia Woolf (A Room of One’s Own 1929), Simone de Beauvoir (Le deuxième sexe 1949), and Kate Millet (Sexual Politics 1970). I added that any writings by these or other authors interested in the status of women were welcome. As they were unable to provide any useful information in regard to the existence of Persian translation of feminist texts before 1979, they introduced me to colleagues and PhD students who they thought might be able to help and whom I immediately contacted. Most of my contacts were certain that no translations of such materials had been produced in the decades prior to and including the 1970s. As for Simone de Beauvoir’s Le deuxième sexe, however, some replied in the affirmative. One PhD graduate, Golbarg Bashi said, “I know The Second Sex was translated because my mother used to read it in the 1970s” (email).2 But when I asked her for further information, she admitted that she was unable to locate the book. A PhD candidate offered, via email, an explanation about the reasons for the lack of a coherent women-friendly translation policy in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. According to him, in those decades, there were three potential groups who had the tools, power and funds to engage in the act of translating women-centred literature but for a variety of reasons failed to do so: (1) the dominant institutions of the monarchy which had no political interest in the consciousness-raising effects of such literature; (2) the religious class of clergy that was unwilling to invest in secularism, in spite of its close connection to the masses and independent flow of income; (3) leftist groups who were among the most educated and linguistically competent, but who considered feminist literature a capitalist product with a divisive effect on the working class (email).3 Since my research focuses on the translation of women-centred literature, I did not pursue the question of whether or not the said institutions devoted their resources to translating other literary genres, such as poetry or autobiography, for example. That being said, I agree with my contact’s argument about the scarcity of feminist translations in Persian in the decades leading up to, and including, the 1970s possibly due to potential translators’ ideologies, and their disinterest in feminism.4 Further, the sparse translations of feminism may also be explained by the low rate of literacy in Iran in the decades before the 1970s. In her article, “Educational Attainment in Iran,” Mila Elmi5 (2009) writes that in 1966 only 17% of the Iranian female population, and 39% of males, were literate. Even if there were feminist translators, the low literacy in Iranian society made feminist translation in that period highly unfeasible. In 1976, however, the literacy rate had more than doubled to 35% for women and 47% for men; this stems from the Shah’s decree, strictly implemented in the 1960s and 1970s, dictating the need for girls and boys to be literate. After 1979 the literacy rate climbed to 52%, 74%, and 80% for females, in 1986, 1996, and 2006 respectively,6 a phenomenon that may explain not only the increase in the rate of translations in those decades but also the reason for the change in the kind of books translated. This will be discussed in the following sections. The other source I reached out to is an Iran-based Translation Studies Quarterly, originating in Tabatabai University in Tehran; it has published an article titled “The historiography of the translation of women in contemporary Iran” (Farahzad et al. 2015, 57–74) with the stated objective to examine the kind of material Iranian women have chosen to translate in different historical periods over 100 years, since the early 20th century. The research paper claims that between 1901 and 2011, Iranian women have translated over 1700 books of a variety of genres and topics from English, French, Russian, and Spanish. Although the article includes the number of translations, no book titles, names of writers or translators, or the countries of the source texts are mentioned. Neither does the study reveal if any feminist books are considered in the research, or to what extent Anglo-American literature may have been prevalent in Persian translation during the Shah’s reign (1941–1979), which might be expected as the USA had a strong influence on 33

Sima Sharifi

Iranian politics and culture at the time. In short, my approach to the Iran-based journal, similar to my outreach to expat scholars, failed to pinpoint any feminist translations beyond what I had already accessed through the library. Further, there seem to be no studies of Persian translations of English work with feminist perspectives. A number of studies exist that focus on cross-cultural communication and linguistically specific translation issues of certain English novels. These tend to appear in article form, in online journals, written by Iranian scholars or students based in Iran, with a focus on a linguistic theoretical framework, such as Katharina Reiss’ text types.7 While this chapter examines and compares the translations of two eras with an eye to the sociocultural contexts of the target society, the linguistically based studies are not concerned with contextual questions. This brings me to the point that there may well be no previous study dedicated to a comparison of Persian translations spanning several decades; nor is there any study of women-centred texts translated into Persian. On both counts, this chapter intends to fill the gap. Next, I will examine the search results for the translations published before the 1979 revolution.

Translations of women-centred texts before the revolution: 1930s–1970s Through library searches, I accessed Persian translations from 1936 to 1978, a year before the 1979 Iranian revolution (Table 3.3). Some of these translated authors are known for their work on social justice and women’s issues; for example, Harriet Beecher Stowe (Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 1852, trans. Keyhani 1936), Louisa May Alcott (Little Women, 1868, trans. Doostdar 1949), Pearl S. Buck (The Good Earth, 1931, trans. Lorestani 1957), Christiane Rochefort (Les petits enfants, 1961, trans. Najafi 1965), Simone de Beauvoir (Djmilah Boupacha, 1962, trans. Taraji & Pooyan 1965), and Edward Albee (Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, 1962, trans. Hariri 1977), among others. Common thematic threads connect these books expressing sentiments opposing colonialism, slavery, autocracy, and poverty. One may argue that the translators sympathize with the themes of the source texts, and deploy language to challenge the dominant despotic culture in Iran, for as Olga Castro puts it: “Language and translation inevitably are tools for legitimizing the status quo or for subverting it” (2013, 6). While 13 books were translated between the 1930s and the 1960s, five translations were published in the 1970s, and all of these 18 translations raised awareness of the poverty and social injustices plaguing Iranian society. In fact, such translations seem to underline the mood of protest that ruled the sociocultural discourse in the decades leading up to the 1979 revolution which overthrew the Shah of Iran and the Pahlavi dynasty (1924–1979). Table 3.1 shows the texts containing feminist/social justice themes found in Persian translations in the 1970s. In Table 3.1, the heading of the last column,‘Location,’ points to the labelled shelf in the library where these books are held. The importance of this location and its effect on readers will be explained later. Sparse as they are, the translated texts produced in the 1970s are inquisitive, combative, and subversive; but with the exception of Woolf ’s The Waves, they are not strictly feminist.

Persian translations of women-centred texts since the establishment of Islamist rule after the 1979 revolution 1980s As demonstrated in Table 3.2, there is an increase in translations of feminist work in the 1980s. Despite, or perhaps because of, the anti-feminist climate of the 1980s, and probably because of the already increased rate of literacy, Iranian translators seem to have enlarged the scope of 34

Rights of children, especially the physically and mentally challenged Existential questions: mortality, loss of loved ones and independence Social and self-estrangement, strict limitation of patriarchy, renewal through suffering Rejection of a number of myths: marriage institution, American dreams of happiness, success, manhood; illusion as an escape from reality Existential questions: meaning of life; self-definition; alienation of the feminine from self and other or permeating into and defining one another; male dominance

The Child Who Never Grew, 1950 Reflections on a Very Easy Death, 1964 The Bell Jar, 1963

Buck, Pearl

Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, 1962

The Waves, 1931

Albee, Edward

Woolf, Virginia

De Beauvoir, Simone Plath, Sylvia

Theme

Source Text, date

Authors

Table 3.1 Library search results of somewhat feminist translations: 1970s

Daryoosh, Parviz, 1977

Amir Kabir

Beena

CS

CS

CS & DS

Neel

Hariri, Alireza, 1977

CS

Roz

Amin Moayed, Majid, 1970 Emami, Goli, 1973

CS

Location Khorrami

Publisher

Ahi, Homa, 1970

Translator, date

Women-centred literature in Iran

35

Sima Sharifi Table 3.2 Library search results of mostly feminist translations: 1980s Authors

Source Text, date

Translator, date

Publisher

Location

De Beauvoir, Simone

The Second Sex, 1949

San’vi, Ghasem, 1981

Toos

CS

Mémoires d’une jeune fille rangée, 1958 La femme rompue, 1967 Vieillesse, 1972

San’vi, Ghasem, 1982

Toos

CS

Iran-doost, Naser, 1985 Toosi, Mohammad Ali, 1986 Forooghan, Nahid, 1989 Daryoosh, Parviz, 1983 Aghaa-Khaani, Ayoob, 1983 Khosravi, Hossein, 1984

Ordibehesht Shabaviz

CS DS

Nashr-e Markaz Ravaagh Ordibehesht

CS, DS CS CS

Golshaaii: Mazhar Kooshesh Ekbatan Kooshesh Mahtab: Erfan Negaretstan Ketab

CS

Woolf, Virginia Austen, Jane

La femme rompue, 1967 Mrs. Dalloway, 1925 Emma, 1815 Sense and Sensibility, 1811

Bronte, Charlotte Voynich, Ethel Lilian Eliot, George Buck, Pearl S.

Sense and Sensibility, 1811 Villette, 1853 Mansfield Park, 1814 Jane Eyre, 1847 Gadfly, 1897

The Mill on the Floss, 1860 Imperial Woman, 1956

Karami Far, Abbas, 1984 Teymoori, Farideh, 1986 Haghighi, Maryam, 1986 Afshar, Mehdi, 1987 Shaheen, Daryoosh & Soosan Ardekaani, 1987 Yoonesi, Ebrahim, 1989 Badre’i, Fereidoon, 1989

Negaah Chekavak

CS CS CS CS CS

CS NE

translated books by selecting women-centred texts for translation. While in the 1970s only one out of five translated books were clearly women-centred (e.g., Virginia Woolf ’s The Waves 1931/1977), the 1980s saw the production of 15 translations of 13 women-centred books (see Table 3.2). A possible additional explanation for the increased number of such translations in the 1980s, a turbulent decade when a long list of revolutionary changes, detrimentally affecting women’s lives, were put in place as laws (section 3) is that at least some of these translations had already been produced in the preceding decade(s), but revised and reprinted in the post1979 years. Some others may have been purged from the national library of the Islamic Republic of Iran. For example, according to my contact in the USA, the Persian translation of de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, existed in the 1970s, but does not show in the library’s search results. As indicated in Table 3.2, in the 1980s several of Simone de Beauvoir’s fiction and nonfiction books were translated. Similarly, while Jane Austen’s work is absent in translation in the 1970s, four of her novels were imported into Persian in the 1980s.

Persian translations of feminist texts: 1990s and 2000s There is a plethora of translations of feminist articles on unofficial websites in Iran that selfdeclare as feminist, one of which is the web page The Feminist School, founded in 2009 and managed by Noushin Ahmadi Khorasani,8 who is also an author and translator of books focused on women’s issues. The web page was initiated by a group of Iranian women activists involved in women’s rights campaigns. In ‘About Us,’ the managing director and editor in chief, Ahmadi Khorasani, describes the web page as a “platform for voicing women’s issues” and “demand for 36

Women-centred literature in Iran

equality” (original in English). The home page features a variety of women-centred articles written in Persian, or translated, by both women and men, that explore topics such as peace and women, advocate the transformation of the male-dominated face of the Iranian parliament, and run reviews of feminist magazines and books. Translated articles on the Feminist School web page include Cassandra Balchin’s “Fundamentalism and Violence Against Women” (2010; trans. Faranak Farid, 2011), an essay about Pierre Bourdieu’s Masculine Domination (1998; trans. Norman Rahimi, 2013), Michael Kaufman’s “The Guy’s Guide to Feminism” (2011; trans. Norman Rahimi, 2012), Mary F. Rogers’s Ecofeminism (1974; trans. Parastoo Ansar, 2014), and Judy Whipps’s “Pragmatist Feminism” (2004; trans. Djelveh Djavaheri, 2010), among many others. None of these articles turn up in the search results at the national library. It seems that the relatively free transnational exchange of feminist concepts and thoughts, albeit in the form of short articles, takes place only through unofficial Iranian channels such as the aforementioned Feminist School, which has become a leading platform showcasing women’s experiences of everyday life under the Islamist theocracy of Iran.9 Unofficial feminist web pages tend to focus on strictly feminist material for translation, but the same cannot be said about books translated since the 1990s, which do turn up in the official channel of the library. Here are a few examples: Pearl Buck’s Imperial Woman (1956, trans. Shahshahani, 1992) or Ethel Lilian Voynich’s Gadfly (1897, trans. Nahid Dade-Bakhsh, 1996); and in the 2000s, Phyllis Chesler’s Woman’s Inhumanity to Woman (2001, trans, Farideh Hemmati, 2008). However, the library also offers other translations for the 1990s and beyond that can be considered feminist work, such as Maya Angelou’s poem I Shall Not Be Moved (1990s, trans. Farzin Hooman Far, 1996), Kate Chopin’s The Story of an Hour (1894, trans. Rooh Anguiz Poor Naseh et al., 2006), Marilyn French’s The War Against Women (1992; trans. Toorandokht Tammadon, 1994), and Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (1963; trans. Fatemeh Sadeghi, 2013), among others. Between 2000 and 2017, the source books selected for translations become increasingly bold and more provocative in their approach to feminist consciousness-raising. A case in point is the translation of the Canadian author Rupi Kaur’s debut poetry collection Milk and Honey (2015) and Hillary Rodham Clinton’s What Happened (2017). Kaur’s poetry is described by some critics as “explor[ing] female experiences with evocative and accessible language”10 and engaging in “raising awareness of taboos on menstruation and sexual abuse.”11 This book of poetry is translated in two consecutive years, 2017 and 2018, by three different translators. Two translators, Samaneh Parhiz-kari (Tehran, Mikhak Publishing) and Niloofar Ebrahimi, worked independently and produced one translation each in 2017. A third translation was created by Fahimeh Godaz Chian in 2018. In the 2000s, books such as Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1985, trans. Soheil Sommy, 2003), Alice Walker’s The Colour Purple (1992, trans. Amir Hossein Mehdi Zadeh, 2009), and Virginia Woolf ’s A Room of Her Own (1929, trans. Masoomeh Mehr Shadi, 2012), among many others, appeared in Persian. The search results for Persian translations of English feminist fiction and non-fiction in three periods, prior to and including the 1970s, 1980s, 1990s and beyond, available through the national library, display a remarkably consistent pattern: fewer translations turn up before or during the 1970s while the number of translations steadily increases after the 1979 revolution. For the sake of space, I do not present the numerous translations produced during those periods. However, I will show the number of translations from the 1930s to 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, and beyond in Tables 3.3 through 3.5 respectively. Table 3.3 shows that in the years prior to and including the 1970s, before the revolution, the number of women-centred translations are 18 in total, and only five out of the 18 volumes are 37

Sima Sharifi Table 3.3 Number of translations concerned with social justice (1930s–1970s) Decade

Translations

1930s 1940s 1950s 1960s 1970s Total

1 2 3 7 5 18

produced in the1970s. In the 1980s, the first decade after the revolution, a total of 15 translations were produced (Table 3.4 based on the details of Table 3.2). In the 1990s, the number of translations of women-centred literature were slightly higher than those of the 1980s. The greatest increase in women-centred books in Persian translation takes place in the 2000s with a total of 148 translations (Table 3.5). It is conceivable that the proliferation of women-centred publications in Iran has created a clash of ideologies between these and the anti-feminist leaning of theocrats in power. The following discussion is one possible example of how the IRI deals with such an ideological collision. In the library search results of 2018, I observed a situation, pertinent to the translation of feminist literature, which did not exist in previous searches (2012 and 2014), and that is the marking of some feminist book titles (Table 3.1 and 3.2). In the column ‘Location,’ certain books are marked as either Closed Shelves (CS), Non-Existing (NE), Donation Shelves (DS), or the “source text may not be loaned.” To illustrate, here are some examples of marked book titles: Alice Munro’s Runaway Stories (2004; trans. Mostafa Shayan, 2016) is located in Closed Shelves, while Virginia Woolf ’s Orlando (1928; trans. Mohammad Naderi, 1991) is marked Non-Existing. Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale is placed in the Closed Shelves for one translation (Soheil Sommy, 2003) while it is Non-Existing for another (Seyyed Habib Gohari Rad, 2018). Mary Wollstonecraft’s text of Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) is an interesting case which clearly reveals the patriarchal zeal of the IRI. The Vindication is a book written in protest against Jean Jacques Rousseau’s Emile (1762) in which he opines that women’s education must be inferior to that of men, because if a woman is fully educated, she “would no longer be bound by her marital and domestic responsibilities” (qtd. in Jane Afary 1996, 197). The library search turns up no translation for the Vindication, which I therefore assume is not available in Persian, and the English source text is marked “may not be loaned.” However, Rousseau’s Emile has been translated by at least four translators. All of these translations, as well as the source texts, both in French and English, seem to be accessible to the public. To disambiguate the meaning of the terms Closed Shelves (CS), Non-Existing (NE), and Donation Shelves (DS), I asked my contact, residing in Iran, to find out from his local libraries the correct meaning of these terminologies. The librarians’ reactions and answers varied depending on whom he asked: •

“These words mean what they say: CS means not accessible to the public, NE means the library does not possess the volume, and the DS means the books were donated.”

When my contact pointed to a case marked with both CS and DS, the librarian simply said, “no clue.” 38

Women-centred literature in Iran Table 3.4 Number of translations of feminist books (1980s) Decade

Translations

1980s Total

15 15

Table 3.5 Number of translations of feminist books (1990s and beyond)

• • •

Decade

Translations

1990s 2000–2010 2011–2018 Total

18 50 80 148

“Never seen such a thing in our local library.” “These are special classification systems of the national library.” “I really don’t know.”

Yet, one librarian tested my contact’s claim by searching Jane Austen herself. She was genuinely shocked at the sight of such results as Closed Shelves appearing on her own computer. Finally, she could only say “I really don’t know.” Since my contact was eventually questioned by the security personnel of some of the local libraries about his ‘suspicious’ interest in such a matter, he quit his line of inquiry, out of fear. As a result, I cannot offer a conclusive explanation for these terminologies. Yet, the terms seem to indicate a simple purging of books from the library shelves. The library marking of certain books suggests that women-centred literature, even in posttranslation and publication, may be at risk of being obliterated by obstructing public access to them. It may be argued that some of these books do exist in the black market. However, not everybody, students and researchers in particular, can afford to purchase costly books; nor can it be expected that every reader navigates the underworld of unauthorized market. The Closed and Non-Existing shelves deprive that section of the population who are most in need of books in public libraries.

How do the sociopolitical changes influence women and translation? To unpack my third research question, I will look at the impact of the social-legal-political discourses on women and what they might mean for translations and book publishing in the IRI. The integration of sociopolitical contexts into the analysis of translation has a long history in translation studies, hence the coined term “cultural turn” by Susan Bassnett and Andre Lefevere (1998, xxi). In the aftermath of the 1979 revolution, “the government of the Islamic Republic of Iran repealed many of the legislative and social changes of the Pahlavi era that were seen to conflict with the laws of Islam” (Lewis and Yazadanfar 1996, xii). Within two months after his arrival, Khomeini undid decades of women’s achievements in the area of legal reform. He abrogated the family protection law which had allowed women to initiate divorce and have custody of their children, and subjected women’s travel and employment to their husband’s permission; 39

Sima Sharifi

these are only several of the many changes that directly impacted women’s lives (Afary 2009, 271–272). As a result of these changes, the revolutionary constitution abounds in legal codes whose main goal seems to be to relegate women to an inferior secondary status. For example, Article 630 of Iran’s Constitution allows a husband to kill his wife (i.e. honour killing) and her lover, if he catches them in flagrante (Nayyeri 2013, 12);12 Article 162 makes judgeship the exclusive right of men (56); Article 907 states that “when a father dies his son(s) are entitled to twice as much as his daughter(s)” (49); Article 198 provides that “[t]he standard of testimony in all crimes is the testimony of two men, except in cases of illicit sexual intercourse, and homosexuality which shall be proven by the testimony of four men, or two men and four women [. . .]” (15); Article 1041 prohibits marriage before the age of puberty (i.e. nine lunar years or eight years and nine months) for girls, but with the permission of the paternal guardian it is allowed (20). According to Amnesty International,13 across the country, girls even younger than ten were being married off to older men, especially in rural areas. This practice continued until 2002 when the age of marriage for girls was raised to 13, or less with paternal permission. Nayyeri, the Iranian-British lawyer and human rights activist, observes that the minimum age of marriage for girls also determines their age of maturity or criminal responsibility as approved in 2012 and stipulated in Article 147. According to Nayyeri: The IRI legal system recognizes women as dependent upon men and incomplete human beings who need to be supervised and controlled by men and the State [. . .]. As discussed above, under the Islamic Penal Code, the value of a woman’s worth is only half that of a man’s; or a woman’s testimony in court is given half the weight of a man’s testimony. (61) Feminist literature challenges such a degrading sexist view of women, hence the censorship imposed on such literature. The immediate question at this point is, given the institutionalized sexism sanctioned by the patriarchal/theocratic governing systems of the IRI, what censorial apparati are used to safeguard against women-centred translations. Censorship in the IRI is a complex and non-transparent system in which the publisher must first submit the book to the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance (henceforth, MCIG) to ensure it conforms to a myriad of written and unwritten rules and the censor’s own interpretation of those rules. Weeks, months, and sometimes years later, the MCIG may issue a prepublication permission. Hejazi (2009) details the process as follows: When the publishers decide to publish a book, they have to commission the translation (if necessary), copy-editing, typesetting, layout, cover design and proof-reading and then submit it in the final press-quality PDF format to the Book Department of the MCIG [. . .]. The publishers are responsible for paying all these origination costs even before they know whether they will receive a PPP [Pre Publication Permission] for the book. (41)14 As for the censored elements, in addition to the obvious word ‘feminism’ being considered taboo and unwritable, many other references to women seem to be offensive to the censor. Censorship is not limited to translations. Non-translations such as local literary creations that allude to a woman’s body are also subject to extensive censorial scrutiny. In his non-fiction Persian book, Ketab-e Momayyezie [Scrutinized Book] (2010), the Iranian writer Ahmad Rajab Zadeh found words, phrases, and sentences ordered deleted. For example, the line “That night my daughter had her first period” was crossed out of one manuscript by the censor. Another 40

Women-centred literature in Iran

censor found the phrase “wedding night” to be offensive to society. The sentence “She in her dress of red velvet and a white scarf was more beautiful than a red rose” was crossed out (qtd. in Mahloujian 2010).15 One may ask if there is any neat list declaring what must be censored. An Iranian translator, Abbas Ezati describes the arbitrary nature of censorship in Iran: After 20 years of translating experience and contact with the censorship system, I thought I could, in my work, reliably avoid all the words or phrases that would provoke the censor’s sensibility. But I was wrong because it is impossible to find any pattern in the kind of text the censor censors. (Ezati 2013; my translation from Persian) As a result of the non-transparency in what needs to be censored, translators, editors, and publishers experience the constant, omnipresent scrutiny and surveillance of the censor which creates “scissors in the head” (qtd. in Stark 2009, xxi) of both the writer and the translator.

A case study: micro-details of the translation In this section, I present two excerpts of Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) as a case study that illustrates what can happen to a text that is ‘translated’ across cultural boundaries into a theocratic receiving society such as the Islamic Republic of Iran. In the search results for post-1979, Margaret Atwood’s speculative novel The Handmaid’s Tale appears on the list of books translated into Persian in 2003. In Canada and the target society Iran, the book is widely known as a women-centred novel because the source text is concerned with the sociocultural status of women, and the myriad ways that women’s voices, thoughts, and experiences can be, and are, drowned out, either by socioculturally entrenched gender norms or by theocratic legal systems. Yet, this same book was translated into Persian by Soheil Sommy (2003) and circulated among Iranian readers in a clearly theocratic regime, at least until 2014 when it was marked Closed Shelves. The book tells the story of a 33-year-old woman named Offred who tapes her life story while living as a handmaid under the oppressive theocracy of Gilead, or more likely after her escape from that captivity. The narrative begins when Offred is in Gilead, a newly established Christian fundamentalist theocracy, and ends with her escape that enables her to tell her story. We learn from Offred’s story that Gilead’s ideologues are bent on purifying society from the liberalism of the pre-Gileadean era through the establishment of a hierarchical binary in which women are silenced and their basic human rights are purged. The Handmaids, a group of (still) fertile women, are assigned to the homes of the ruling classes for the purpose of procreation. The handmaids are not allowed to have their own names, an education or knowledge of any kind, own anything, choose their clothing, or have sex for pleasure. In short, handmaids in Gilead are not allowed to have power or self-awareness; yet the protagonist, Offred, strives for all that: to gain control if not directly, but vicariously through the memory of her friend, Moira. While in Gilead, and perhaps because of such oppressive treatment, Offred, who in her past never identified as a feminist but criticized her mother’s feminism, longs for the two most radical feminists in her life: her mother and her lesbian friend and radical feminist, Moira. It must be noted that the purpose of the following contrastive analysis is not to “establish what has been ‘lost’ or ‘betrayed’ in the translation process” (Bassnett 2005, 8), merely for the sake of adhering to the source text. The micro-level text analysis here is meant to expose the way patriarchy is perpetuated through language use. 41

Sima Sharifi

The following excerpt is a commentary on Offred’s mother who was a radical feminist in her day. In the source text (ST), Offred talks about the day when she returns from her daily grocery shopping in Gilead, enters the kitchen in the Commander’s house, where she smells the yeast in the freshly baked bread. This catapults her imagination back to former times. An imagery of food arouses memories of a better time when she was a mother and had a kitchen at her disposal. She also recalls her own childhood when her mother did not bake.

ST (The Handmaid’s Tale): It reminds me of other kitchens, kitchens that were mine. It smells of mothers; although my own mother did not make bread. It smells of me, in former times, when I was a mother. (45)

TT: ‫ بوی‬،‫ مادر من‬،‫ بوی مادرها را می دهد‬.‫ آشپزخانه هایی که مال من بودند‬،‫مرا به یاد آشپزخانه های دیگر می اندازد‬ .‫ در گذشته ها وقتی خودم مادر بودم‬،‫مرا می دهد‬ [It reminds me of other kitchens, the kitchens that belonged to me. It smells of mothers, my mother, it smells of me, in the past, when I was a mother myself.] (71) In the source text, we learn that unlike Offred, her mother, as a radical feminist activist, did not make bread. The TT reader is deprived of this clue and must reach a different conclusion. The matricial translation norms omit most of an important part of the sentence: “although my own mother did not make bread,” leaving only “my mother.” As a result, the segments, “It smells of mothers,” “my mother,” and “It smells of me” are seamlessly connected to one another and to the kitchen. The cumulative effect of the TT implies that Offred and her mother, like all other mothers, are nostalgic about the smell of a kitchen. Thus, Offred’s commentary on her mother, that clearly says she defied the stereotypical association of baking bread with mothers, is silenced. The new formulation creates a text in which an imbalance in the “ratio of semantic load vs. linguistic carriers” (Toury 1995, 107) creates a vacuum in meaning. The omitted lingual material is compensated for by the translation strategy of “informational intensification” (ibid.) in the translation, that is, the strategy of placing a lone phrase ‫“ مادر من‬my mother” in association with the kitchen serves an important patriarchal function: situating Offred’s mother squarely in the kitchen. Here is another example from The Handmaid’s Tale in Persian translation that demonstrates how patriarchy is maintained through language use, resulting in undermining the feminist intent of the novel. The following excerpt is from Chapter 6. On the way to their daily shopping, the two Handmaids, Offred and Ofglen, stop to gaze at The Wall patrolled by Guardians, Gilead’s Police. As she looks on, Offred narrates her observation of the six abortionists who have been hanged on The Wall, their heads covered by white bags, and their hands tied in front of them. Offred knows the executed victims are doctors from their lab coats. Offred says they must have been doctors who performed, now illegal, abortions in the past. Then she reflects on the possible informants who could be two ex-nurses because, in the new regime of Gilead, the testimony of one woman is no longer admissible, implying that unlike the regime before it, Gilead has downgraded women’s testimony due to their sex – requiring two testimonies. Employing translation strategies of omission and addition, as explained next, the TT makes the Persian texts sound like the testimony of one woman was unacceptable in both the preGilead and the Gilead regimes. In glaring opposition to the ST, the Persian translation becomes aligned with the IRI’s current Islamic laws, which give a woman’s testimony in court half the weight of a man’s testimony. 42

Women-centred literature in Iran

ST (HMT): ex-nurses perhaps, or a pair of them, since evidence from a single woman is no longer admissible (31–32).

TT: ۵۳. ‫ چون شهادت یک زن قابل قبول نیست‬،‫ الاقل دونفر از آن ها‬،‫احتماال از طریق پرستارهای سابق‬ [Probably via former nurses, at least two of them, because testimony of one woman is not accepted.] (53) Through strategies of omission and addition, the Persian translation makes two modifications, with the effect of creating a reading in which unequal gender relations are normalized in the Gilead, and by extension for the target system. The lingual changes relate to the omission of the adverb “no longer” in the English version and the addition of the quantifier “at least” in the Persian text. The omission of the adverbial phrase “no longer” has the effect of blurring the distinction between the liberal pre-Gilead and the dictatorial Gilead eras. The problematic difference appears only when the Persian text is compared to the original English text and its evocation of the pre-Gilead liberal sociopolitical institutions, where unlike the present, a single woman’s testimony was admissible. It implies that the situation is “no longer” as it was before. In fact, during the Gilead regime, the condition of women has deteriorated sharply. From the point of view of women’s rights, the two eras – before and during Gilead – represent dramatic opposites. This point is anchored in the English adverbial expression “no longer” which is deleted in the Persian text. Further, when the Persian quantifier “at least” is added to the text, it suggests a minimum number or amount, which in this case means that the evidence for the guilty partner must come from two women or more in order to be admissible by the Gileadean legal code. This sense is absent in the English original. The Persian creates a matterof-fact statement suggesting that it has always been the case that evidence from two or more women is needed, in both pre- and current Gilead times. The two modifications, the omission and the addition together, create a gendered configuration in which the sub-standard status assigned to women as a group is normalized. The textual-linguistic change in the preceding two examples from The Handmaid’s Tale creates a semantic shift with disparaging effect on the female character, an attempt to synchronize the Persian text with the realities of the target system. It is evident that even if a translation of a feminist/women-centred text exists in Persian, it may (because of censorship) completely undermine the feminist intent of the source text.

Conclusion In general, the library search results as well as the outreach for further sources showed that feminist ideas hardly travel freely between the English source and the Iranian target society. In fact, the importation of feminist texts was probably of little import to the early Islamists in Iran. While there is a visible increase in the translation of feminist texts in the 1980s, the first decade of the revolution, the 1990s, turns up a similar number of importations. The 2000s showcase a thriving growth of translations concerned with women’s issues and well-being. As was demonstrated in the preceding comparative text analysis, such translations are, however, bound to pay a heavy price for their existence by being censored and seriously altered. Since translation is not exclusively the concern of linguists but is also influenced by the broader social context in which it is produced, I presented a brief introduction to the status of 43

Sima Sharifi

women under the patriarchal realities of the Islamic Republic of Iran, as well as a glance at the censorship apparatus of the IRI. At this point, I pose the final question about the incongruent link between an authoritarian, theocratic, and patriarchal regime, such as the IRI, and the translation of feminist texts. In other words, why did the feminist texts available in translation increase in quantity after the 1979 revolution, and particularly in the 2000s, and include provocative and often radical feminist authors? A combination of two reasons may help account for such a state of affairs. First, allowing translations of feminist work to be produced under the watchful eyes of the vigilant censor may be a sign of the IRI yielding to pressure from women. Since the 1980s, if not earlier, Iranian women as readers and activists have demanded that feminist texts be made available for their enlightenment and to continue the struggle against sexism.16 Since the revolution, women, both religious and secular, have been increasingly and negatively affected by the enforcement of the legal and political discriminatory laws against gender equity. Therefore, the pressure has gained momentum, and, at the same time, translations of feminist materials have increased to a historically high number. However, this does not mean that the IRI is moving away from its patriarchal policies. On the contrary, in light of the increase in the translation of feminist literature, the IRI has found ways to contravene such a trend. For example, as a countermeasure to the proliferation of women-centred translations, the IRI seems to make such books unavailable to the public by placing them in Closed Shelves, or Non-Existing sectors of the libraries, among other strategies. The other equally plausible reason might be simply self-serving; translations appear, women readers (and the outside world) are satisfied, but the censorship system purges the text, and removes or undermines the feminist features, imposing texts that prop up the hegemonic doctrine. The comparative text analysis of excerpts from The Handmaid’s Tale illustrates how the women-centric passages are trimmed and tamed to the taste of the male-centric censor. The excerpts used in this chapter are only a miniscule sample of a large body of text analysis of two books, by two authors translated in two different times by two translators, meticulously analyzed in my doctoral dissertation where I found women-centred texts are consistently manipulated.17 Contextually speaking, translations of women-centred literature are impacted by the genderbased discriminatory laws of the target society and this inevitably results in the erasure of the content of the source text, in order to synchronize it with and conform to what is allowed to exist in the Islamic Republic of Iran.

Future research directions The fact that feminist books are translated in societies antagonistic to the very goal of f­ eminism – gender equality in social, political, legal, and economic matters – provides any translation scholar with numerous options for research topics that could enrich the discipline of translation studies. It would be enlightening to compare the translation of feminist texts in a secular society with that in a theocratic one to highlight the linguistic features that offend the sensibility of the censor. It would be equally interesting to focus on the selection and translation of texts as a function of a societal political ideological mood. Given the fact that the Iranian-based translator, Soheil Sommy, has translated four of Atwood’s eight translated novels, it would be worth investigating whether the other three novels were treated like The Handmaid’s Tale. A research project aimed at uncovering the role that publishers and editors play vis-à-vis the translators could also reveal the kinds of forces involved in translation in theocracies or in other strongly ideological governing systems possessing effective censorship apparati. 44

Women-centred literature in Iran

Further reading There are a large number of collections that tackle the translation of feminist texts, the reproduction of patriarchy through language use, and the censorship of women-oriented texts. North America is particularly well served with Kathy Mezei, Sherry Simon, and Luise von Flotow (2014), an anthology that explores the intersection of culture and translation; Flotow (2011) covers a range of topics, from women authors to women translators and characters in translation. Sara Mills and Louise Mullany (2011) and Mary Talbot (2010) explore the question of language study and its significance for feminists. To understand the role of translators and publishers in a non-Western culture, Esmaeil Haddadian-Moghaddam (2015) provides a fascinating sociological study of literary translation in Iran. On the censorship front, Michaela Wolf (2002), Denise Merkle (2002), Maria Tymoczko (2008), and Michelle Woods (2012) explore the complexity of censorship, the role of the translator, the subtle censoring of texts, and how language can be used as a totalitarian and patriarchal weapon. Sima Sharifi (2018) explores, from the perspective of two sisters, one based in Canada, the other in Iran, how a censored feminist translation is understood by Persian female readers and the memories this invokes.

Related topics Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, women-centred texts, Islamic Republic of Iran, theocratic patriarchy, translation studies, legal equality

Notes 1 The monarchy in Iran is often described as culturally paternalistic in nature as it subscribed to inequity based on sex. While the government supported women in their pursuit of education, their struggle against child marriage and men’s unilateral rights to divorce and child custody was promptly suppressed; the Shah regime also shut down feminist organizations, and the “family laws of Iran in the late 1970s still considered the man as the head of the household,” (Paidar 1995, 157). 2 Email correspondence, in English, with Golbarg Bashi, PhD, Colombia University, 27 November 2017. 3 Email correspondence, in English paraphrased, with Babak Mazloumi, translator and PhD candidate, University of California, Irvine, 16 October 2017. 4 My agreement with Mazloumi’s argument is based on personal experience: almost every novel I read in my youth was a translation of some male Russian author (e.g. Maxim Gorki’s The Mother). This implies that some translators of the pre-1979 era may have been members, or sympathizers, of Iran’s communist party, known as the Toudeh Party or the party of the masses – an ideologically close ally of the Soviet Union. These translators knew Russian and other European languages and had political interests in disseminating leftist or liberal material. Yasamin Khalighi et al. (Scholars of Ferdowsi University of Mashhad, Iran) studied the Persian translation of literature in the 1940s and 1950s and found that members of Toudeh Party translated 67 works by Russian authors such as Chekhov, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Turgenev, as well as Balzac, and Dickens, among other European authors ( Journal of Language and Translation Studies, 48(3), 19 December 2015, 1–7. 5 Zahra Mila Elmi is an assistant professor in Mazandaran University, Iran. Available at: www.mei.edu/ content/educational-attainment-iran [Accessed 6 March 2018]. 6 The increased rate of literacy is partly due to the development of education for both males and females, but also to the fact that girls in the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s found education the only way to gain some freedom in the face of the many restrictions imposed on their lives by the leaders of the Islamist government. In other words, the IRI could not stop, or reverse, the trend for literacy that had already spread across Iran before the 1979 revolution. In his study of “Islam, Education and Civil Society in Contemporary Iran,” Zep Kalb, Graduate of Oxford University, completed his MA at the University of Tehran, and PhD at UCLA, states that while the number of university students in the 1950s Iran was fewer than 9000, this number grew to 30,000 in the 1960s and over 100,000 between 1976 and 1977 (2017, 582). 45

Sima Sharifi

7 For example, Shokooh Khosravi and Mohammad Khatib (September 2012) wrote an article titled “Strategies Used in the Translation of English Idioms into Persian in Novels” in Theory and Practice in Language Studies. Vol. 2, No. 9, 1854–1859. 8 Noushin Ahmadi Khorasani is also a publisher, an essayist, journalist, author of several books on the women’s movement in Iran, and a founding member of the Women’s Cultural Center (markaz-e Farhangi-ye Zanan) in Tehran, “an NGO that focuses on women’s health as well as legal issues.” In 2007 she was sentenced to three years in prison for threatening the national security, and the NGO was shut down. Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noushin_Ahmadi_Khorasani. In order to secure permission to operate, the NGO’s founders “were required to be married, university graduates without any previous convictions for criminal (or political) activities.” Available at: https://tavaana. org/en/content/noushin-ahmadi-khorasani-two-decades-struggle-womens-rights. Ahmadi Khorsani was also “a prominent member of the One Million Signatures for the Repeal of Discriminatory Laws campaign, which used public petition to challenge the inequality of Iranian men and women before the law.” The IRI banned the Feminist School web page in 2016. Available at: www.feministschool.com/ english/spip.php?article52. As of February 2019, it is still accessible. 9 Although the IRI officially shut down the web page in 2016, for some unknown reason people can still publish articles in it. 10 Simran Singh. Available at: https://owlcation.com/humanities/Critical-Analysis-of-Rupi-Kaurs-Milkand-Honey. 11 Abigail Eardley. Available at: www.oxfordstudent.com/2017/08/21/poetry-review-milk-honeyrupi-kaur/. 12 My legal source is the British-Iranian human rights lawyer, Mohammad Hossein Nayyeri, whose report on gender inequality and discrimination in Iran’s post-1979 Constitution (http://anyflip.com/jzeo/ ghyt) is documented in Human Rights Documentation Centre, an independent non-profit organization that was founded in 2004 by international human rights scholars and lawyers: https://iranhrdc. org/gender-inequality-and-discrimination-the-case-of-iranian-women/ [Accessed 20 July 2014]. But this site http://anyflip.com/jzeo/ghyt was consulted in 20 January 2019. 13 Amnesty International. 2012. “Iran: Joint Statement on the Status of Violence Against Women in the Islamic Republic of Iran.” 29 November. Available at: www.amnesty.org/en/documents/ MDE13/074/2012/en/ [Accessed 20 July 2014]. 14 Arash Hejazi, in his MA at Oxford Brookes University, studied the multi-level procedure of censorship. According to Hejazi’s personal website (http://english.arashhejazi.com) he was the founder, publisher, and senior editor of Caravan Books Publishing in Tehran. He is the current editor of John Wiley and Sons Inc., a global publishing company that specializes in academic publications. 15 An Iranian journalist, Azar Mahloujian, fled to Sweden in 1982; she is the spokeswoman for the Writers in Prison Committee and a Member of the Board of Directors of Swedish PEN. She is the author of two books: Back to Iran (2004) and The Torn Pictures (2005). 16 Personal email, in Persian, with an Iranian-based established translator who spoke to me on anonymity, 9 July 2014. 17 Doctoral dissertation defended October 2016. Text Analysis, pp. 177–218. Available at: https://ruor. uottawa.ca/bitstream/10393/35677/1/sharifi_sima_2016_thesis.pdf.

References Afary, Janet. 1996. The Iranian Constitutional Revolution, 1906–1911. New York: Columbia University Press. Afary, Janet. 2009. Sexual Politics in Modern Iran. New York: Cambridge Universtiy Press. Ahmadi Khorasani, Noushin. 2009. About Us [online]. The Feminist School. Available at: www.feminist school.com/english/spip.php?article52 [Accessed 10 Jan. 2019]. Atwood, Margaret. 1985. The Handmaid’s Tale. Toronto: McClellan and Stewart. Bashi, Golbarg. 2017. A Request from an Iranian-Canadian Recent Graduate [email]. Bassnett, Susan and André Lefevere. 1998. Constructing Cultures: Essays on Literary Translation. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Bassnett, Susan. 2005. Translation Studies. (3rd ed.). London and New York: Routledge. Beauvoir, Simone de. 1949. Le Deuxième Sexe. Paris: Gallimard. Birch, Eva Lennox. 1994. Black American Women’s Writing: A Quilt of Many Colors. London and New York: Routledge Taylor & Francis Group. 46

Women-centred literature in Iran

Castro, Olga. 2013. Introduction: Gender, Language and Translation at the Crossroads of Disciplines. Gender and Language, 7(1), 5–12. Clinton, Hillary Rodham. 2017. What Happened. New York: Simon & Schuster. Eliot, George. 1871. Middle March. London: William Blackwood and Sons. Ezati, Abbas. 2013. ‫ مرور یک تجربه‬،‫ سانسور کور ایران‬The Blind Censorship in Iran. Overview of an Experience (my translation). Available at: www.bbc.com/persian/blogs/2013/10/131028_l44_nazeran_cen sorship_ir_book.shtml [Accessed 12 Jun. 2015]. Farahzad, Farzaneh, Afsaneh Mohammadi Shahrokh, and Samar Ehteshami. 2015. The Historiography of Women Translators in Contemporary Iran. Translation Quarterly, 13(52), 57–74. Flotow, Luise von (ed.). 2011. Translating Women. Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press. Friedan, Betty. 1963. The Feminine Mystique. New York: W. W. Norton and Co. Haddadian-Moghaddam, Esmaeil. 2015. Literary Translation in Modern Iran. A Sociological Study. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company. Hejazi, Arash. 2009. You Don’t Deserve to Be Published: The Iranian Government’s Multi-layered Censorship System for Books, and Its Implications on the Publishing Industry in Iran. Oxford: Oxford Brookes University. Kalb, Zep. 2017. Neither Dowlati nor Khosusi: Islam, Education and Civil Society in Contemporary Iran. Journal of Iranian Studies [online], 50(4), 575–600. Available at: https://ucla.app.box.com/s/rxky wn0s5lv6902svk8ohlwjjefq809u [Accessed 25 Jan. 2019]. Khalighi, Yasamin, Ali Khazaee Farid, and Ali Nazemian Fard. 2015. The Influences of the Leftist Ideology on the Selection of Literary Works for Translation. Journal of Language and Translation Studies [pdf], 48(3), 1–7. Kaur, Rupi. 2015. Milk and Honey. Kansas City, MI: Andrews McMeel Publishing. Lewis, Franklin and Farzin Yazadanfar. 1996. In a Voice of Their Own. A Collection of Stories by Iranian Women Written Since the Revolution of 1979. 1st ed. Berkeley, CA: Mazda Publisher. Mahloujian, Azar. 2010. Iran’s Controlling Interest. Ahmad Rajabzadeh’s Book ‘Censorship’ Is a Guide to Some of the Stranger Examples of Literary Repression in Iran. Available at: http://iran-womensolidarity.net/spip.php?article1497 [Accessed 15 May 2014]. Mazloumi, Babak. 2017. A Question or Request from an Iranian-Canadian Woman [email]. Merkle, Denise. 2002. Presentation. TTR: traduction, termonologie, réduction, 15(2), 9–18. Mezei, Kathy, Sherry Simon, and Luise von Flotow, eds. 2014. Translation Effects. The Shaping of Modern Canadian Culture. 1st ed. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Mila Elmi, Zahra. 2009. Educational Attainment in Iran. Middle East Institute. Available at: www.mei.edu/ publications/educational-attainment-iran [Accessed 8 Mar. 2018]. Millet, Kate. 1970. Sexual Politics. London: Rupert Hart-Davis. Mills, Sara and Louise Mullany. 2011. Language and Gender and Feminism: Theory, Methodology and Practice. London and New York: Routledge. Nayyeri, Mohammad Hossein. 2013. Gender Inequality and Discrimination. The Case of Iranian Women. Available at: http://anyflip.com/jzeo/ghyt [Accessed 10 Jan. 2019]. Paidar, Parvin. 1995. Women and the Political Process in Twentieth-century Iran. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sharifi, Sima. 2018. How Atwood’s the Handmaid’s Tale Resonates in Iran. Globe and Mail. Available at: www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-how-atwoods-the-handmaids-tale-resonates-in-iran/ [Accessed 27 Apr. 2018]. Stark, Gary D. 2009. Banned in Berlin: Literary Censorship in Imperial Germany, 1871–1918. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books. Talbot, Mary. 2010. Language and Gender. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Polity Press. Toury, Gideon. 1995. Descriptive Translation Studies and Beyond. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company. Tymoczko, Maria. 2008. Censorship and Self-Censorship in Translation: Ethics and Ideology, Resistance and Collusion, in E. N. Chuilleanáin, Cormac Ó. Cuilleanáin, and David Parris, eds., Translation and Censorship: Patterns of Communication and Interference, 1st ed. Dublin: Four Courts Press, 24–45. Wolf, Michaela. 2002. Censorship as Cultural Blockage: Banned Literature in the Late Habsburg Monarchy. TTR: traduction, termonologie, rédactions, 15(2), 45–61. Woolf, Virginia. 1929. A Room of One’s Own. Surrey: Hogarth Press. Woods, Michelle. 2012. Censoring Translation. Censorship, Theatre, and the Politics of Translation. London and New York: Continuum. 47

4 Pathways of solidarity in transit Iraqi women writers’ story-making in English translation Ruth Abou Rached

Introduction Edward Said (1990) was told “Arabic is a controversial language” by a New York publishing house when he suggested works to be translated from Arabic into English. However, since the mid1990s, a ‘market’ for Arab women’s literature in English translation has emerged. This market has been at times described as ‘constructing’ Arab women writers according to English readers’ expectations (Amireh 2000), ‘creating’ the voices of ‘Arab women’ (Hartman 2012) and even of women translators (Booth 2016) in ways that reiterate rather than dispel stereotypes about the Arabic-speaking world. With a history of refusing co-option into any hegemonic ideology (Ghazoul 2008) Iraqi women writers – along with their translators, editors, and publishers – have a tradition of negotiating the English translation of their Arabic literary works on their own terms and in various ways alongside Iraq’s fluctuating contexts of censorship, international sanctions, and political instability. This chapter has two specific objectives in the overview it provides of Iraqi women writers’ story-making in English translation. The first objective is to complement and contribute to the increasing critical attention paid to Iraqi women’s writing in both Iraqi (Ahmad 2017; Kadhim 2017; Hatto 2013; Khodeir 2013) and international Englishlanguage academic settings (Mehta and Zangana 2018; Abdel Nasser 2018; Abdullah 2018; AlUrfali 2015; Hamdar 2014; Ghazoul 2008; cooke 2007). The second objective relates to raising more awareness and critical appreciation of how Arab women writers – and their stories first written in Arabic – have navigated the multiple and charged gendered, geopolitical discourses to reach different audiences in English translation, with Iraqi women’s stories as the focus of discussion and analysis. The focus of this chapter then is to give an overview and open questions on the different pathways by which Iraqi women writers have taken their stories – and their politics of counterhegemonic solidarity – into English. These pathways of mediation into English are nuanced and varied, as are the politics of literary expression interweaving them. To do justice to these nuances of mediation and reception, this overview therefore does not present any comparative analyses of the English translations in relation to an ‘authoritative’ Arabic ‘original.’ Neither are the analyses of their pathways of mediation restricted to ‘the stories’ or ‘the texts’ themselves, particularly in view of the extensive paratextual materials – striking visuals, forewords, and afterwords – that 48

Pathways of solidarity in transit

mediate Iraqi women writers’ story-making in English translation. As this overview will show, these paratextual materials often evoke a politics of solidarity between the people/s of Iraq and the stories being told and their respective agents of mediation: editors, publishers, reviewers, cover artists, and translators. In this respect, the pathways by which expressions of solidarity are mediated reconfigure – or at least open up thinking about – definitive notions of borders between text and ‘paratext,’ translation and ‘paratranslation,’ as well as writer, translator, and ‘paratranslator’ in ways yet to be explored in depth within contexts of translation studies. To help engage with the potential complexities of such mediations of cross-border solidarity, this chapter thus draws on (intersectional) perspectives of feminist translation which frame acts of translation as gendered and geopolitically situated modes of re/writing – not as reiterative versions of an ‘original’ text (Castro and Ergun 2017; Flotow and Shread 2014), and notably ‘feminist paratranslation’ (Abou Rached 2017, 2018), an analytical framework that focuses on paratexts as key components of the meaning-making at play in any (para)translated work. From such critical perspectives, this overview thus aims to highlight the pathways of Iraqi women’s stories in English translation as negotiations of complex discourses that mediate ‘Iraq’ and ‘Iraqi people’ within often shifting spheres of solidarity and as a distinct aesthetics of ‘rewriting’ localized, gendered perspectives of such stories – thus making this a field of study that calls for further research.

Earlier Iraqi women’s stories in Arabic publication While Iraqi women have always played a crucial role in maintaining traditions of oral literature as a bedrock of Iraqi cultural memory, the first actual writings by Iraqi women were probably anonymous and unsigned (Al-Dulaimi 1999, 11, cf. Ghazoul 2008, 181) or kept in private collections by their authors and shared with people they knew personally (ibid.). The first publications by Iraqi women were in literary journals such as Layla (Efrati 2004, 158) during the 1920s, with the first short story collection by Dalal Al-Safadi titled ‫[ حوادث وعبر‬Incidents and Lessons] (self )-published in Basra in 1937. The first novella was ‫[ عقلي دليلي‬My Mind Is My Guide] by Maliha Ishaq in 1948 followed by ‫[ من الجاني‬Who Is the Culprit] by Harbiya Muhammad in 1954. Eminent Iraqi woman poet Nazik Al-Mala’ika put free-verse Arabic poetry on the wider Arab world literary map in the 1950s. In terms of story-writing, Daizy Al-Amir’s first short story collection ‫[ البلد البعيد الذي تحب‬The Distant Land That You Love] (Al-Amir 1964) was published in 1964 in Beirut, an important cultural centre of the Arab world. Samira Al-Mana’s novella ‫[ السابقون والالحقون‬The Forerunners and the Followers] (Al-Mana 1972) was published there in 1972. Iraqi women writers also publishing short stories inside Iraq included Ibtisam Abdullah, Lutfiya Al-Dulaimi, Bouthayna Al-Nasiri, Maysalun Hadi, Mai Muzaffar, and Salima Salih. Themes of these early examples of Iraqi women’s story-making (many yet to be translated) are also found in other works later published in English translation: generational and gendered family dynamics, love, patriarchal injustices, and everyday dreams of a different future. An important theme running through all stories is how experiences of power injustices pertinent to women and other vulnerable groups in Iraqi society are potentially relevant to everyone in Iraq, whatever their sociopolitical constituency. Lutfiya Al-Dulaimi’s short story collection ‫[ البشارى‬Glad Tidings] (1974), for example, shows a dystopian world dominated by psychic uncertainty. In one story, women find themselves acting in a play they thought they were going to watch. In another story, a woman feels happy to hear “‫[ ”البشارى‬the glad tidings] or ‘good news’ that she has run a red traffic light (1974, 43). Whether she is happy to be seen crossing a red line, or to have identified what the red line/light is in the first place, is left open to interpretation. Bouthayna Al-Nasiri’s short story “‫[ ”القارب‬The Boat] (1974, 2001) about traditions of honour, revenge, and sacrifice in local river communities is underpinned by the 49

Ruth Abou Rached

silent threat of violence pervading the world of each protagonist be they woman or man. While these stories are clearly a commentary on patriarchal injustices, such allegorical representations of the vulnerable also reflect a wider trend in Iraqi literature connected to censorship directives of the 1968–2003 Iraqi Ba’athist government1 (Khoury 2013; Hanoosh 2012; Rohde 2010; Ali 2008; Davis 2005) and the fear of imprisonment or exile (Wali 2007; Mushatat 1986) if the directives were not respected. In this sense, dystopic representations of localized gendered experiences of hardship in Iraqi women’s writing can be read as ‘c/overt’ political commentary on wider dynamics of power towards all constituencies in Iraq as well as ‘overt’ condemnation of localized patriarchal practices towards women, specifically. Such a reading, however, depends on the discernment of readers as well as their potential expectations, a crucial point when stories published before 2003 have been labelled (in English) as state propaganda (Zeidel 2011; Starkey 2006, 149). In relation to this point, Iraqi academic Shakir Mustafa (2008), for example, warns that overt critique of the Iraqi government cannot be easily discerned in the anthology of Iraqi writers’ stories he edited and translated into English (2008, xvi), many of which were published in Arabic before 2003. His commentary implies that these stories may disappoint (US) readers expecting overt condemnation of a pre-2003 totalitarian government in Iraq. This particular point helps frame why the first examples of Iraqi women’s stories in ArabicEnglish translation should be read in their own right and with reference to their local contexts of publication. Most of these stories first appeared in ‘state-sponsored’ literary anthologies and journals such as Ur, Iraq, Iraq Today, and Gilgamesh (Altoma 2010) funded by a then prosperous Iraqi government promoting Iraq as a cultural centre in the Pan-Arab world. Due to the generous government sponsorship of literary events and publications, any literary work not conforming to Iraqi state directives would often be blocked from circulation in other Arab countries as well as Iraq, which resulted in such works being less likely to become known, reviewed, or translated in wider Arab and international scholarly settings (cooke 2007, 241). During the 1980–1988 war between Iraq and Iran, Iraqi women’s story-making faced further barriers and challenges. As pointed out by Palestinian writer Jabra Ibrahim Jabra (Masmoudi 2015, 33), novels by Iraqi men writers proliferated in number during this war, partly because men were writing about their experiences on the battlefront as soldiers or reporters, partly because all Iraqi literary production was being framed by the Iraqi government as part of the military war effort. This meant that in Iraq, literary works by Iraqi women writers were less likely to receive critical attention or acclaim and were even less likely to become known or circulate outside of Iraq. Even though women writers did not receive the same critical attention in Iraq as men (Rohde 2010, 144), Iraqi women writers continued to publish in Iraq between 1970 and 1990. These writers included Ibtisam Abdullah (1980, 1988), Lutfiya Al-Dulaimi (1986a, 1986b, 1988), Bouthayna Al-Nasiri (1990), Maysalun Hadi (1985, 1986), Alia Mamdouh (1980), May Muzaffar (1979), and Aliya Talib (1989) – with others outside Iraq such as Daizy Al-Amir (1988), Samira Al-Mana (1985), Salima Salih (1974), and Haifa Zangana. Although many of these works have not yet been translated, noting their presence – and their publishers – is an important testimony to Iraqi women’s writing prevailing alongside (and despite) state discourses of ‘war,’ hypermasculinity, and censorship, which diminished these writers along with the literary value of their work.2 Any reading of Iraqi women’s stories in English translation needs to be informed by the knowledge that much of this innovative body of work has yet to be translated.

Early examples of Iraqi women’s stories in English translation Opportunities for Iraqi women writers to connect with publishers outside Iraq during the 1980–1988 war were few and far between due to travel restrictions imposed on Iraqis during the 50

Pathways of solidarity in transit

1980s (cooke 1996, 2007). In the wake of the 1990–1991 war in Iraq, a crumbling publishing infrastructure and ensuing international sanctions were also reasons for the relative scarcity of Iraqi women’s literature published in English translation during and beyond the 1990s, especially in comparison to translations of Arab women writers from other regions. This last point emphasizes the need to pay close attention to how and where earlier works by Iraqi women writers were actually published in English translation, that is, examine the ‘paratexts,’ that is the contexts surrounding the mediation of their works, amongst them self-translation, co-collaborative correspondence, and self-publication. The first instance of a novel (and memoir) published in English (self )-translation was Through the Vast Halls of Memory (1990) by Haifa Zangana. This novel began as individual chapters or short stories published in two Arabic diasporic journals: in ‫[ االغتراب االدبي‬Literature in Exile] between 1986 and 1989, then ‫[ الكاتبة‬The Woman Writer] (Zangana 1995, 136). These chapter were then brought together, translated, and edited by Haifa Zangana herself with the support of surrealist artist and publisher Peter Wood alongside whom she had exhibited her artwork in the 1970s and 1980s. The publication of Daizy Al-Amir’s On the Waiting List: An Iraqi Woman’s Tales of Alienation (1994) came about via a collaboration between the author, publishers, and academic scholars of Arab literature (1994, vii, xiii) who had arranged for her to come to the US in 1989 on an academic visit (McCann-Baker 1994, vii). In this respect, the cross-border solidarities of (women) academics with Daizy Al-Amir are an integral aspect or ‘paratext’ of how this particular publication came to be. Alia Mamdouh’s novel Mothballs (1995) was first published in English as part of the Garnet Arab Women Writers’ Series due to a combination of the personal, political and aesthetic politics of the book coming together for the series editor, literary writer and academic Fadia Faqir. In her introduction to Mothballs, Faqir cites her personal engagement with the political situation of Iraq during the 1990–1991 US/Iraq war (Faqir 1995, v) as one factor inspiring her decision to include Mamdouh’s story in the series along with her appreciation for the aesthetic (and political) qualities of the work. Similarly, Bouthayna Nasiri’s long-term residence in Cairo led to eminent English translator Denys Johnson-Davies taking a selection of her short stories published between 1970 and 2000 and repackaging them into one publication titled Final Night (2001) in English translation. Already blacklisted by the Iraqi government in 1979 for her story-writing, Samira Al-Mana’s ‫[ القامعون‬The Oppressors] (1997) was translated into English (2002/2008) by Paul Starkey through the grass-roots literary group Exiled Writers Ink! in London, which organises events and literary writing projects for exiled writers. In this respect, relations of trust in agents who mediated their works emerge as a key factor for Iraqi women writers who, for the most part, were also personally involved in seeing their work published in English translation. Alongside these pathways of trust, interweaving the publications are pathways of solidarity, all of which add to the fabric of each work’s meaningmaking. Solidarities with Iraqi women writers were often inspired by an appreciation for the aesthetics of a particular example of Iraqi literature less known outside Iraq as well as a wider commitment to providing a platform for Iraqi women’s writing, long overshadowed by ongoing contexts of war and sanctions. Another way of critically approaching the pathways taken by Iraqi women’s texts into English is to consider the reasons why Iraqi writers first began publishing their stories in the diaspora, taking the UK as one case study. One reason was to keep their writing in circulation – in any language – even if Iraqi state directives banned some writers’ (Arabic) works. The role played by local literary diaspora journals was crucial in this regard. As many Iraqi writers feared Iraqi surveillance operating outside of Iraq, the journals in which they published were selective and specific, operating in a spirit of literary activist collaboration and based on a sense of mutual trust between writer, translator, and publisher (Al-Mana and Abou Rached 2017). The first Iraqi 51

Ruth Abou Rached

diaspora literary journal in London ‫[ االغتراب األدبي‬Literature in Exile] (1985–2002) was founded by Samira Al-Mana and Iraqi poet Salah Niazi, with the aim of fostering literary spaces which did not reiterate “‫[ ”إ ّمعي أو ضدّي‬either with me or against me] mentalities (Al-Mana and Niazi 2002, 3) previously experienced by many Iraqi writers. Although based in London, the reach of this journal extended well outside of the UK and Europe.3 The journal ‫[ الكاتبة‬The Woman Writer] (1993–1995) was the one of the first to foreground Iraqi and Arab women’s writing within leftist literary frames. Although this journal had a limited publication run, it was deemed to be very important, which explains why back copies still circulate in some Iraqi literary diaspora circles in London4 and one example is available online. In order to get Arab literature more deeply connected with English language readerships, Iraqi writer Samuel Shimon founded Banipal Magazine of Modern Arab Literature with Margaret Obank in 1998. The aim of this journal, according to Shimon was “to encourage a wider readership of Arab writers and poets for their own sake, and for the particularity and the universality of their voices,” that is, provide a space in which to read Arab literature beyond hegemonic political oppression whatever its provenance. In Banipal, we find short stories by Iraqi women writers Lutifya Al-Dulaimi, Samira Al-Mana, Hadiya Hussein, Bouthayna Al-Nasiri, Inaam Kachachi, and Salima Salih with literary translators of their works – among them, Denys Johnson-Davies, Marilyn Booth, and Shakir Mustafa – as allies of Iraqi/Arab writers’ political integrity in English translation. Another important pathway of translation for Iraqi women writers’ stories into English is that of academic publications in the UK and the US by scholars of Arab literature, often with carefully worded introductions informed by a sense of solidarity towards the writers concerned, most of whom were living in particularly charged contexts of censorship. The presentation by miriam cooke as translator-editor of two short stories by Aliya Talib in the anthology Blood into Ink (1994) is a prime example of what could be termed a reticent approach informed by solidarity. She explains that Talib’s stories formed part of the ‘War and Culture Series,’ which was funded by the Iraqi government during the 1980–1988 Iraq-Iran war and that these stories were sent to her by the Iraqi Embassy in Washington DC. After stating that Talib might still be living in Iraq, cooke advises readers that both of Talib’s stories require “careful reading” (1994a, 80) but gives no further explanation. cooke’s reticence seems to imply a c/overt recognition of different geopolitical locations at play in this work – one being that any attempt by the (US-based) translator to interpret the stories’ political impact could endanger the life of a writer living elsewhere. Other examples of scholarly ‘reticence’ informed by solidarity can also be noted, for example in Daizy Al-Amir’s The Waiting List: An Iraqi Woman’s Tale of Alienation (1994). Despite the meticulous references to the multiple agents involved in bringing out this book between two wars taking place in Iraq, no reference is made to Iraqi state politics of war in any part of the work. Similarly, in his introduction to Bouthayna Al-Nasiri’s short story collection Final Night (2001), translator Denys Johnson-Davies (2001, 1) notes that the style of Al-Nasiri’s earlier short stories is “more direct and relaxed” but does not offer further explanations. Nor does he speculate on why her writing style has changed. Academic editor Fadia Faqir very clearly articulates why she herself included Alia Mamdouh’s iconic novel ‫حبات النفتالين‬ [Mothballs] (1986) in the ‘Arab Women Writer’s Series’ (1995–1998), a transnational literary project which published Arab women writers’ novels in English translation; her own personal anguish at seeing “the bombs falling on Baghdad” (Faqir 1995, v). She also frames the publication of this work as preserving some historical memories of Iraq, thus interpreting the words of Alia Mamdouh from her critical perspective as academic editor. The translators, editors, and publishers seem to be enacting a politics of solidarity with Iraqi woman writers by being reticent about political intention, all of them in various ways. They do not articulate any political intention on the part of the writer. Reticence in these cited examples of story publications enacts a 52

Pathways of solidarity in transit

politics of solidarity rewritten – in English – as part of the works themselves. This enacting of solidarity opens up interesting questions on how to read the politics of ‘c/overt’ solidarities in (para) translation in Iraqi women’s literature, and in other literary traditions operating in similar situations of alterity, if the intentions of the author – or (para) translator, that is editor as well as translator – can never or cannot be ‘overtly’ declared.

The politics of cross-constituency solidarity in Iraqi women’s literature In current activist postcolonial scholarship, contemporary Iraqi literature has rightly been recognized as an important marker of cross-constituencies of solidarity and mourning within and despite hegemonic dynamics of power which accord more value to some lives than to others (Atia 2019; Abdel Nasser 2018; Mehta and Zangana 2018; Al-Ali and Al-Najjar 2013). Scholars writing on the work of Iraqi women writers have been inspired by such themes, focusing on the ways in which these writers work to celebrate (as well as mourn) lived gendered experience in Iraq. Critical engagements with Iraqi women’s writing often focus on what the telling of the stories works to do, that is enact a politics of cross-constituency solidarity from diverse, distinctly gendered perspectives and also address how these stories are told. In this respect, writing is framed as gendered forbearance in the face of injustice (Ahmad 2017; Kadhim 2017; Al-Urfali 2015; Hatto 2013; Hamdar 2014; Grace 2007; Mehta 2006; Kashou 2013); an act of resistance to oppression (Abdullah 2018; Abou Rached 2017; Masmoudi 2015, 2010); transcribing localized voices on paper as an act of documentation working to preserve Iraq’s diverse cultures (Abou Rached 2017, 2018). Aesthetic expressions of cross-constituency solidarity are however not unique to women writers in Iraq and such representations of cultural-political heterogeneity and cross-constituency solidarity have marked Iraq’s literary scenes for decades (Al-Musawi 2006). Such thematic motifs have, however, run the risk of being overlooked due to the predominance of (post-)2003 war in Iraq (Al-Ali and Al-Najjar 2013, xvii). In view of the overwhelming prevalence of discourses of the 2003 war in wider contexts of Iraq, there is a danger that Iraqi women’s literature written before, during, and after 2003 will be read solely through the post-2003 lenses of war and conflict, rather than in appreciation of stylistic and thematic aspects that make this writing distinctive in Arabic and across other languages. As explained by Ferial Ghazoul (2008, 198), one critical leitmotif in Iraqi women writers’ novels has been cross-boundary “solidarity of the subaltern.” By this, Ghazoul means that Iraqi women writers see themselves as subalterns when they write about the different constituencies of women as subalterns. They face the gendered dynamics of various interlocking systems of oppressions that are common to other women, and they also face the oppressions particular to women writers. As noted by Hadil Ahmad (2017) and Majeda Hatto (2013), such oppressions include hegemonic discourses of nationalism and patriarchal mores as well as political censorship, not always limited to Iraqi state apparati. Another theme common in many novels published both before and after 2003 is that of marginalized women of Iraq telling their own local stories about life at earlier moments in Iraq’s modern (and patriarchal) history. Alia Mamdouh’s novel ‫[ حبات النفتالين‬Mothballs] (1986, 2000, 1995, 2005) represents the shifting politics of independence and revolution in urban Iraq during the 1940s. Haifa Zangana’s novel ‫مفاتيح مدينة‬ [Keys of a City] (2000) depicts the intersecting patriarchies of Arab and Kurdish Iraqi cultures in the 1950s (Al-Mozani 2000). The recourse to (pre-Ba’athist) moments in Iraq’s history was, in this case, undoubtedly a conscious choice on the part of the writer. A novel about rural or urban women in localized historical contexts might escape (Iraqi state) censors as a critique of sociopolitical injustices in contemporary Iraq. A novel about women and men of specific 53

Ruth Abou Rached

constituencies in specific times and locations however would be read as overt critique towards state apparati and their military arms, Iraqi or otherwise. This is clearly the case in Hadiya Hussein’s novel ‫[ ما بعد الحب‬Beyond Love] (2004, 2012), which tells of the Iraqi experience of US and Iraqi state military violence in Basra during the 1991 uprisings in Iraq. Another prevalent pathway of meaning-making by which a politics of cross-constituency solidarity in Iraqi women writers’ novels is mediated is that of the gendered bildungsroman, a girl-to-woman story in which a protagonist relates what she ‘sees’ and ‘hears’ through her child’s eye/I. Along with Mamdouh’s ‫[ حبات النفتالين‬Mothballs], Betool Khedairi’s two novels ‫كم بدت السماء‬ !‫[ قريبة‬A Sky So Close] (1999, 2001) and ‫[ غائب‬Absent] (2004, 2005) are two cases in point. The first novel is set in rural Iraq in the 1970s, and Baghdad and London during the 1980–1988 and 1991 Iraq wars. Her second novel ‫[ غائب‬Absent] (2004, 2005) is told by a girl living in Baghdad during the time of international sanctions. Both novels include a detailed acknowledgement by the author Khedairi in which she thanks everyone – friends, family, translators, editors, and proofreaders – involved in the production of the Arabic and English versions. The fact that her thanks are addressed towards all those involved in both language versions suggests that each version exists in tandem, rather than in derivative or authoritative relation to the other. This acknowledgement suggests that what is important to explore here is not whether the English version of each novel is an ‘authentic’ version of the Arabic text in terms of ‘literal’ translation but rather to whom each version is addressed, or for whom they are ‘rewritten.’ In this respect, the notion of ‘reader’ as part of each novel’s meaning-making and solidarity-building in (para) translation is open to further exploration. The mediation of these marginalities in Arabic writing and English translation as vectors rather than derivatives raises the issue of Iraqi women writers’ engagement with Arabic as a written and spoken language by which cross-constituency solidarities are enacted, built, and imagined through story-making. In many Iraqi women writers’ novels, Iraqi dialect is used to phonetically ‘rewrite’ (or overwrite) formal written Arabic, the language used in the public sphere which has, in the past, traditionally overwritten the presence of women and other marginalized groups in Arabic-speaking regions (Saddiqi 2006; Safouan 2007). This is why Ghazoul has described the use of dialect as one of the “distinguishing feature/s of the Iraqi novel, whether the author is man or woman” (Ghazoul 2008, 195) in that Iraqi writers consciously write Iraqi dialect as a performance and a speech-act of lived Iraqi experience which re/writes – and resists – the parameters of authority buttressing the status of formal written Arabic. This use of dialect in Arabic poses questions for those reading the English translations: how can non-readers of Arabic ‘hear’ or discern traces of the gendered resistance at play in Arabic via English translation? In Inaam Kachachi’s novel ‫[ الحفيدة األميركية‬The American Granddaughter] (2009), for example, we read the voice of the US-American translator’s Iraqi grandmother in Mosuli Iraqi dialect. In the English version (2011), translator Nariman Youssef transliterates some Mosuli Iraqi words in Latin letters to render at least something of her voice in English translation, albeit somewhat differently. In contrast, the Iraqi dialect words of Alia Mamdouh’s ‫[ حبات النفتالين‬Mothballs] (1986, 2000) are rendered for the most part in standard English, with a brief explanatory glossary of cultural terms in both the UK 1995 and the US 2005 versions of the novel. The striking cover jacket visuals and detailed para/textual explanations are noteworthy for both versions. The introduction by Fadia Faqir in the 1995 UK version, the foreword by Hélène Cixous, and Farida Abu-Haidar’s afterword in the 2005 US version explain and inform the reader about the discursive importance of Iraqi women’s voices – despite the ‘sound’ of these voice being – at least mimetically – ‘unhearable’ outside of Arabic. On the one hand, each of the novels’ (para)translation strategies – transliteration (Kachachi 2011) and copious repackaging (Mamdouh 1995, 2005) – could be read as an attempt to 54

Pathways of solidarity in transit

compensate for a ‘lack,’ namely the impossibility of rendering Iraqi dialect voices and the localized politics of each writer’s consciously gendered novel in English translation. Re/reading such strategies as part of the meaning-making of the work in new contexts (rather than as a testimony to the ‘failure’ of translation) offers another perspective which can enrich our understanding of the novels and how their pathways of translation could be read as cross-constituency solidarity ‘re/written’ differently. In her comments on feminist translation praxis, Barbara Godard (1989), for example, conceptualizes engagement with the unhearable in translation as traces of life and discourse heard and shaped by (yet resistant to) masculinist or hegemonic language – as “an echo of the self and the other, a movement into alterity” (1989, 44). By this echo, she implies that any ‘alterity’ in languages – however represented or transcribed – can only be heard as an uncanny echo since the thought processes inspiring such articulations are inevitably shaped and configured by language in the first place. Working with the echo of alterity in/of language is, according to Godard, an act of “transformance” (1989, 46) – a performance of the transformation of an inaudible echo through creative activist translation praxis. From this perspective, strategies of transliteration and para/translational repackaging used for these two novels can be read as a ‘trans-performance,’ testifying precisely to English being unable to convey Arabic voices of the novel in ‘audible’ ways – yet presenting the importance of these voices even if they can only be ‘read’ differently, if at all. Such examples of paratextual interventions reiterate the importance of appreciating – while critically exploring – the translation or ‘paratranslation’ of women’s voices in Iraqi women’s literature as a distinctive aesthetics as well as a c/overt politics of transnational mediation of solidarity.

Iraqi women’s stories in post-2003 English translation In the period following the 2003 invasion of Iraq and subsequent US allied occupation, publication contexts for Iraqi women’s literature in English translation shifted from academic or localized diasporic community settings to academic-commercial publishers with a more ‘global’ reach, based in or partially funded by agencies or funders from the US. Alongside the thousands of publications about post-2003 Iraq available on the US book market (Lynx-Qualey 2014), the translation of Iraqi women’s novels continues to be underpinned and inspired by the committed activist collaboration between Iraqi women writers and their allies, often academics who feel some connection or affinity to Iraq. All four novels by Iraqi women writers published by the New York Feminist Press, for example, have critical introductions and afterwords by academic experts – Hélène Cixous and Farida Abu-Haidar in two novels by Alia Mamdouh (2005, 2007), Hamid Dabishi and Ferial Ghazoul for Haifa Zangana’s Dreaming of Baghdad (2009), and Nadje Al-Ali for Iqbal Al-Qazwini’s novel Zubaida’s Window (2006, 2008). A common theme in the paratexts of these books is how each agent or ‘mediator’ involved sets out to contextualize the writer and her respective novel alongside local and global discourses on gender and politics in pre- and post-2003 Iraq. In Haifa Zangana’s Dreaming of Baghdad (2009), the writer of the foreword, Hamid Dabashi (2009, viii), refers to Zangana as his “Iraqi sister” who “speaks for both Iraqis and Iranians of her generation” (ix). In Alia Mamdouh’s The Loved Ones (2008), translator Marilyn Booth takes particular care to explain how the novel’s ‘multilingual’ and ‘transnational’ themes are reflected in its linguistic and cultural references (2008, 277). Booth also credits Mamdouh for assisting with the translation of this “polyphonic” work (ibid.). Similarly, the English version of Hadiya Hussein’s ‫[ ما بعد الحب‬Beyond Love] (2004, 2012) published by Syracuse Press, has two introductory chapters by miriam cooke (2012) and translator Ikram Masmoudi (2012) both of which map out Hussein’s politics of writing in Arabic about the 1991 uprising in Iraq as well as the politics of publishing the English translation in 2012. Iraqi women writers along 55

Ruth Abou Rached

with their (US-based) translators and editors thus seem to pre-empt the risks of a neo-colonial discourse on Iraq and so work against it, while they also counteract (various) censorships in Iraq’s fluctuating international political contexts. Literary awards for Arabic literature, notably the Naguib Mahfouz Medal for Literature, established and hosted by the American University Cairo (AUC), have provided other pathways by which Iraqi women writers’ novels get published in English translation. Another prestigious award is the International Prize for Arabic Fiction (IPAF) – often known as the Arab Booker – managed in London and supported by the Emirates Foundation in Abu Dhabi. These prizes accord prestigious critical recognition to writers and their literary works in Arabic, and provide the winners (and for IPAF, also the short-listed candidates) with the possibility of having their work translated, published, and distributed throughout the English-speaking world. Alia Mamdouh’s novel ‫[ المحبوبات‬The Loved Ones] won the Naguib Mahfouz Prize in 2004, and the prestige Mamdouh garnered as a result helped ‘market’ Marilyn Booth’s translation (Mamdouh 2008) and also her novel ‫[ حبات النفتالين‬Mothballs] as the 2005 US English version published by New York Feminist Press. In contrast to Mamdouh’s work, the two novels by Iraqi women writers making the short list of the International Prize for Arabic Fiction (IPAF) do not have critical introductions in their English versions. Short-listed in 2009, Inaam Kachachi’s ‫[ الحفيدة األميركية‬The American Granddaughter] (2009) clearly and overtly politicises the gendered and geopolitical status of translation in post-2003 Iraq and America by its very subject matter: it is about an Iraqi-American woman working as an interpreter for the US army during the 2003 Iraq war. Nevertheless, despite the novel’s charged subject matter, the only additional information made available in the English version, The American Granddaughter (2011) is a note about the novel being shortlisted for the 2009 IPAF and a brief bio of translator Nariman Youssef. Similarly, the blurb of The Baghdad Clock (2018), the English version of ‫( ساعة بغداد‬2016) by Shahad Al Rawi, highlights its IPAF status and states briefly that the author (not the translator) “takes readers beyond the familiar images in the news.” Readers are thus left to negotiate their own terms of engagement.

Future research: rereading Iraqi women’s stories in translation For the diverse peoples of Iraq, what is understood as Iraq and Iraqi society has undoubtedly changed and shifted in location since the country’s independence in 1932. Many Iraqis have lived in Iraq for generations. Others have had to move to other locations inside Iraq or leave the country altogether. Literary representations of Iraq thus often carry crucial emotional and political resonance for readers, Iraqi or otherwise, who feel some alliance or connection with Iraq’s diverse peoples, cultures, histories, and politics. In this respect, the study of Iraqi women’s literature in translation touches on many scholarly (and activist) disciplines and fields of research; these include Arab literature, diaspora literatures, women’s literatures, postcolonial studies, gender studies along with translation and intercultural studies, with feminist translation studies which are intersectional and transnational in focus being particular salient. Scholarship on Arab women’s literature in English translation is a vital starting point for the study of Iraqi women’s literature as a body of work in English translation (Booth 2016; Hartman 2012; Hassen 2009; Valassopoulos 2008; Kahf 2006; Hassan-Gholley 2007 Amireh 1996, 2000 Al-Majaj et al. 2002). While Iraqi women’s literature is a rich field of research, many scholarly themes, approaches, and questions have yet to be explored in depth, including which stories and works by Iraqi women writers have featured in (English) translation over time and which have not. Iraqi women’s literature has been translated into languages other than English – French, German, Italian, Serbian, Spanish, and Portuguese to name a few. The phenomena of ‘transit’ languages, such as English and French functioning as vectors into other languages – and the asymmetries of power 56

Pathways of solidarity in transit

between them (Loucif 2012) – are worthy of further exploration in this context. Exploring the many languages other than Arabic intertwining the literary histories of Iraqi women’s literature is also a field of inquiry inviting much more critical engagement. The self-reflexive choice of Riverbend (2005) the most well-known Iraqi blogger, at least to US readerships, during the 2003 war in Iraq to write her blog in English also questions boundaries between self-writing and self-translation in ways that certainly invite future research into local and broader contexts of Iraqi and Arab women’s literature. Other literary traditions of Iraq such as memoir (Al-Radi 2003), poetry, theatre, and literary critique invite further study, an invitation implicitly issued by Salih Altoma in his decision to publish his detailed catalogue of these genres already available in English translation (Altoma 2010). This point raises the question of why it is useful to (re)read Iraqi women’s literature in English translation alongside an analytical framework of feminist translation. This is a pertinent question in view of the charged discourses of ‘feminist’ and ‘feminism’ at play in post-2003 Iraq. According to Haifa Zangana (2013, 2005), for example, the presence of US state-funded ‘feminist’ NGOs in Iraq worked to serve US state interests rather than the post 2003 needs of Iraqi women, and damaged the legacy of Iraqi women’s local gender-focused political activism as well as the term ‘feminist’ in Iraqi contexts. In these charged political contexts, the ‘feminist’ power relations at play clearly go beyond categorical definitions of what ‘feminist’ agency is or isn’t. As the local and global reach of (feminist) terminologies is pertinent to many other contexts of translation besides Iraq, it is important to situate any research project within a clearly defined understanding of what ‘feminist translation theory’ means. One point of departure is to consider why feminist translation scholars view all writing, including translation, as ‘rewriting.’ In earlier instances of feminist translation praxis, such premises were based on exposing and questioning the very patriarchal premises on which all languages are based, translation being the vector by which different (gendered) discourses travel across languages (Massardier-Kenney 1997; Simon 1996; Flotow 1991; De Lotbinière-Harwood 1991; Godard 1989). In more recent scholarly contexts, feminist translation praxes have taken a more ‘intersectional’ turn (Castro and Ergun 2018; Flotow and Farahzad 2017; Flotow 2012; Shread 2011), where gender is not the only field of inquiry when analyzing – and interrogating – the power dynamics influencing how different works, discourses, and literary traditions move across languages or are ‘rewritten’ through the vector of translation. Remediations of different constituencies of race, gender and class alongside those of languages, location, and epistemes of knowledge, to name a few, are being interrogated and called into question as they move across languages. In this way, engaging analytical frameworks of feminist translation to reread (para)translated literary works does not mean that all texts or writers should be identified as having a defined feminist ideology. In fact, feminist translation analysis sets out to challenge categorical definitions of ‘feminist’ as well as the many gendered, geopolitical, and other interlocking power relations in contexts of translation (Castro and Ergun 2017; de Lima Costa 2014; Álvarez 2014). This last point is particularly relevant when we consider – and interrogate – the many (cocollaborative) agents presented as (para)translating, mediating, or ‘explaining’ an Iraqi woman writer’s story to new (perceived) target readerships as different expressions or pathways of solidarity. The importance accorded to academic expert introductions, for example, suggests that various power relations involving readers’ relations to an Iraqi woman writer are assumed to be at play when her short stories or novels are published in English translation. Similarly, the absence of introductions in earlier translations of Iraqi women writers configure ‘absence’ as well as presence as an important component of meaning-making in this literature in its earlier contexts of censorship. Questions of how to read the politics of Iraqi women writers’ story-making in English translation thus arise: Why are the politics of some agents, such as academic experts and editors, made more apparent in some Iraqi women’s novels than others? 57

Ruth Abou Rached

Why do some stories by Iraqi women writers have such extensive introductions, forewords, afterwords, and blurb reviews mediating their works, while others do not? How are Arabiclanguage representations of diverse gendered identities in Iraqi women’s literature mediated in (English) translation? Such questions are important to ask in contexts of the study of Iraqi and Arab women’s literature per se as well as in feminist translation analyses. Françoise MassardierKenney (1997, 63) states, for example, that the (feminist) translator must show or perform her political agency explicitly somewhere in the translated work, and that this often occurs in an introduction or in footnotes. If we use the tools by which hegemonic discourses invisibly shape our realities without question, we run the risk of being co-opted into reiterating them (ibid.). The more c/overt ways in which instances of solidarity are visible through the ways by which Iraqi women writers’ literature has been mediated in English suggest however that categorical notions of ‘overt’ agency in para/translated works are well worth revisiting, particularly in contexts of censorship and other (gendered) contexts of oppression. As noted by Ferial Ghazoul, much Iraqi story-writing must be read, after all, as “an aesthetic expression of a complex and disturbing reality” (Ghazoul 2004, 1). This reality includes the languages and ways in which Iraqi women writers have published. This chapter overview has worked to show how we can read the pathways that Iraqi women’s story-making have taken into English as an aesthetics of solidarity rewritten across different intersecting pathways and realities. Further research on Iraqi women’s literature will reveal how their stories continue to shed light on and work to transform such realities.

Further reading Al-Ali Nadje, S. and Deborah Al-Najjar, eds. 2013. We Are Iraqis: Aesthetics and Politics in a Time of War. New York: Syracuse University Press. This collection of essays focuses on the politics of Iraqi aesthetic production since 2003 from Iraqi perspectives. Essential reading for those wishing to gain a background on contemporary Iraqi cultural production, including the politics of its patronage, circulation, and reception. Ashour, Radwa, Ferial Ghazoul, and Hasna Reda-Mekdashi, eds. 2008. Arab Women Writers: A Critical Reference Guide, 1873–1999. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Essential reference for scholars of 20th-century Arab women’s literature published in Arabic. Each section gives a detailed overview of literature from each country. Banipal Magazine of Modern Arab Literature 61: A Journey in Iraqi Fiction, ed. Samuel Shimon. Available at: www.banipal.co.uk. A recent scholarly overview of Iraqi literature from perspectives of long-established and more recent Iraqi literary figures. There are also excerpts of Iraqi fiction in English translation. Faqir, Fadia, ed. 1998. In the House of Silence: Autobiographical Essays by Arab Women Writers. Reading: Garnet Publishing. A collection of autobiographical essays written by Arab women writers on the gendered politics of their own writing. A rich source of scholarship which brings together a wide and diverse range of literary perspectives from Arab (including Iraqi) women writers. Mehta, Brinda and Haifa Zangana, eds. 2018. War and Occupation in Iraq: Women’s Voices. Gendered Realities (Special Issue). International Journal of Contemporary Iraqi Studies, 12(1), 53–71. doi: 10.1386/ jcis.12.1.53_1. This special issue on Iraqi women under war and occupation is gives an up-to-date overview of the politics of Iraqi women’s representation from a range of different literary and critical perspectives. Useful reading for scholars working on contemporary Iraq women’s writing.

Related topics Iraqi women’s literature, Arab women’s literature, censorship, feminist translation approaches 58

Pathways of solidarity in transit

Notes 1 The 1968–2003 Ba’aathist Iraqi government came to an abrupt end after the invasion of Iraq by US, UK, and other allied military forces in 2003, with subsequent military occupation of Iraq by the US lasting until 2011. 2 This list of Arabic language publications only includes writers whose works were translated into English and cited in this chapter. Many more stories by these and other Iraqi women writers have been published. This list is the beginning of a widening index of Iraqi women writers, inspired by Salih Altoma’s (2010) catalogue. 3 A full catalogue of this journal is, for example, available in the literary journals section of Bir Zeit University. 4 I thank Dr Azhar Hammadi for kindly inviting me to attend an Iraqi literature event in London during July 2015, where back copies of the literary journal ‫[ الكاتبة‬al-kātiba] were still available to purchase.

References Abdel Nasser, Tahia. 2018. Dreaming of Solitude: Haifa Zangana and Alia Mamdouh, in Literary Autobiography and Arab National Struggles. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 110–129. Abdullah, Angham A. 2018. The Inexpressible in Iraqi Women’s Narratives of War. The Feminist Journal of the Centre for Women’s Studies (1) (May). Available at: https://cultivatefeminism.com/ protests-the-inexpressible-in-iraqi-womens-narratives-of-war/. Abou Rached, Ruth. 2017. Feminist Paratranslation as Literary Activism: Haifa Zangana in Post-2003 America, in Olga Castro and Emek Ergun, eds., Feminist Translation Studies: Local and Transnational Perspectives. London and New York: Routledge, 195–207. Abou Rached, Ruth. 2018. Many Women on Many Journeys: Haifa Zangana’s Women on a Journey: Between Baghdad and London in Arabic-English Para-translation. International Journal of Contemporary Iraqi Studies, 12(1), 53–71. Abu-Haidar, Ferial. 2005. Afterword. Translated by Peter Theroux, in Alia Mamdouh, ed., Naphtalene: A Novel of Baghdad. New York: Feminist Press, 191–213. Ahmad, Hadil A. 2017. ‫ روايات عالية ممدوح انموذجا‬:‫[ الرواية النسوية خارج فضاءات الوطن‬The Nisūwī Novel: Outside Spaces of the Homeland: The Novels of Alia Mamdouh as a Case Study]. Amman: Dār al-Ghaida’a. E-Publisher: Al-Manhal. Al-Ali, Nadje S., and Deborah Al-Najjar. 2013. Introduction, in Nadje S Al-Ali and Deborah Al-Najjar, eds., We Are Iraqis: Aesthetics and Politics in a Time of War. New York: Syracuse University Press, xxv–xl. Al-Dulaimi, Lutfiya. 2016. ‫[ هاجس الهواية في الرواية النسائية العراقية‬The Margin of Identity in the Iraqi Nisā’iyya Novel]. Al-Arab, 30 June [online]. Available at: www.alarab.co.uk/?id=84030. Al-Dulaimi, Lutfiya. 1999. ‫[ شريكات المصير األبدي‬Women Contributors to Our Eternal Destiny]. Cairo: Dār al-‘Ishtār. Ali, Salim S. 2008. Ideology, Censorship, and Literature: Iraq as a Case Study. Primerjalna Knjizevnost, 31(1), 213–220. Al-Mana, Samira and Salah Niazi. 2002. ‫[ االفتتاحية‬Foreword] in ‫[ اإلغتراب األدبي‬Literature in Exile], eds. Samira Al-Mana and Salah Niazi, 52(1), 3. Al-Mana, Samira and Ruth Abou Rached. 2017. Informal Interview in London, 17 Aug. Al-Mozani, Hussein. 2000. ”‫ في رواية “مفاتيح المدينة‬٥٨ ‫ العراق ما قبل‬:‫عرب واكراد ونساء في الرواية العراقية‬ ‫[ للكاتبة حيفا زنكا‬Arabs, Kurds and Women in An Iraqi Novel: Iraq before ’58 in “Keys of A City” by Haifa Zangana]. In Al-Sharq Al-Awsat, 27 October 2000. http://archive.aawsat.com/details. asp?issueno=8059&article=10619#.WixXlEx2vIU Al-Musawi, Muhsin. 2006. Reading Iraq: Culture and Power in Conflict. London: I.B. Tauris. Al-Radi, Nuha. 2003. Baghdad Diaries: A Woman’s Chronicle of War and Exile. New York: Vintage. Altoma, Salih J. 2010. Iraq’s Modern Arabic Literature: A Guide to English Translations Since 1950. Lanham: Scarecrow Press. Al-Urfali. Reemah. 2015. Iraqi Women’s Literature in Translation: Toward a Decolonizing Reading. MA Thesis, American University Cairo. Álvarez, Sonia E. 2014. Enacting a Translocal Feminist Politics, in Sonia E. Álvarez et al., eds. Translocalities/ Translocalides. Durham: Duke University Press, 1–18. Amireh, Amal. 1996. Publishing in the West: Problems and Prospects. Al Jadid: A Review and Record of Arab Culture and Arts, 2(10) (Aug.). Also available online via: https://solidarity-us.org/atc/67/p803/. 59

Ruth Abou Rached

Amireh, Amal. 2000. Framing Nawal El Saadawi: Arab Feminism in a Transnational World. Signs, 26(1), 215–249. Atia, Nadia. 2019. Death and Mourning in Contemporary Iraqi Texts. Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, 21(3), 1–19. Booth, Marilyn. 2016. Three’s A Crowd: The Translator-Author-Publisher and the Engineeringof “Girls of Riyadh” for an Anglophone Readership, in Farzaneh and Luise von Flotow, eds., Translating Women: Different Voices and New Horizons. London/New York: Routledge, 105–119. Castro, Olga and Emek Ergun, eds. 2017. Feminist Translation Studies: Local and Transnational Perspectives. London and New York: Routledge. Castro, Olga and Emek Ergun. 2018. Translation and Feminism, in Jonathon Evans and Fruela Fernandez, eds., The Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation and Politics. London and New York: Routledge, 125–143. cooke, miriam. 1996. Flames of Fire in Qadisiya, in Women and the War. Berkeley: University of California Press, 220–266. cooke, miriam. 2007. Baghdad Burning: Women Write War in Iraq. World Literature Today 81(6), 23–26. cooke, miriam. 2012. Preface. Translated by Ikram Masmoudi, in Hadiya Hussein, ed., Beyond Love. New York: Syracuse University Press, ix–xi. cooke, miriam and Roshni Rustomji-Kerns, eds. 1994. Blood into Ink: South Asian and Middle Eastern Women Write War. Boulder and Oxford: Westview Press. Costa, Claudia de Lima. 2014. Feminist Theories, Transnational Translations and Cultural Mediations, in Sonia E. Alvarez et al., eds., Translocalities/ Translocalidades. Durham: Duke University Press, 133–148. Dabashi, Hamid. 2009. Foreword. Translated by Haifa Zangana and Paul Hammond, in Haifa Zangana, ed., Dreaming of Baghdad. New York: Feminist Press, viii–xi. Davis, Eric. 2005. Memories of State: Politics, History, and Collective Identity in Modern Iraq. Berkley/London: University of California Press. Efrati, Noga. 2004. The Other “Awakening” in Iraq: The Women’s Movement in the First Half of the Twentieth Century. British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 31(2), 153–173. Efrati, Noga. 2012. Women in Iraq: Past Meets Present. New York: Columbia University Press. Faqir, Fadia. 1995. Preface. Translated by Peter Theroux, in Alia. Mamdouh, ed., Mothballs, Arab Women Writers Series. Reading: Garnet Press, v–ix. Flotow, Luise von. 1991. Feminist Translation: Contexts, Practices and Theories. TTR: traduction, terminologie, redaction, 4(2), 69–84. Flotow, Luise von. 2012. Translating Women: From Recent Histories and Re-translations to Queerying Translation, and Metramorphosis. Quaderns, 19, 127–139. Flotow, Luise von and Farzaneh Farahzad, eds. 2017. Translating Women: Different Voices and New Horizons. New York and London: Routledge. Flotow, Luise von and Carolyn Shread. 2014. Metramorphosis in Translation: Refiguring the Intimacy of Translation Beyond the Metaphysics of Loss. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 39(3), 592–596. Ghazoul, Ferial J. 2004. Iraqi Short Fiction: The Unhomely at Home and Abroad. Journal of Arabic Literature, 35(1), 1–24. Ghazoul, Ferial J. 2008. Iraq, in Radwa Ashour, Ferial Ghazoul, and Hasni Reda-Mekdashi, eds., Arab Women Writers: A Critical Reference Guide, 1873–1999. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 173–203. Godard, Barbara. 1989. Theorising Feminist Discourse/Translation. Tessera, 6, 42–53. Grace, Daphne. 2007. Arab Women Write the Trauma of Imprisonment and Exile, in Nawal HassanGholley, ed., Arab Women’s Lives Retold: Exploring Identity Through Writing. New York: Syracuse Press, 181–200. Hamdar, Abir. 2014. The Female Suffering Body: Illness and Disability of Modern Arabic Literature. New York: Syracuse University Press, 75–81, 106–113. Hanoosh, Yasmeen. 2012. Contempt: State Literati vs. Street Literati in Modern Iraq. Journal of Arabic Literature, 43(2–3), 372–408. Hartman, Michelle. 2012. Gender, Genre, and the (Missing) Gazelle: Arab Women Writers and the Politics of Translation. Feminist Studies, 38(1) (Spring), 17–49. Hassan-Gholley, Nawal, ed. 2007. Arab Women’s Lives Retold: Exploring Identity Through Writing. New York: Syracuse University Press. Hassen, Rim. 2009. Translating Women in Assia Djebar’s Far from Madina, Palimpsestes. ligne 22, 61–82. Available at: https://journals.openedition.org/palimpsestes/188. Hatto, Majeda. 2013. ‫[ الرواية النسوية العراقية المعاصرة والخطاب المغاير لالنهمام بالجسد وتشظي الهوية‬The Contemporary Iraqi Nisūwī Novel and the Divergent Discourse on the Pre-Occupation of The Body and the Fragmentation of 60

Pathways of solidarity in transit

Identity] (Winner of the Nazik Al-Mala’ika Prize). Baghdad, 1–24. Available at: nazikprize.crd.gov.iq/ pdf/Monetary/1/11.pdf. Johnson-Davies, Denys. 2001. Introduction. Translated by Denys Johnson-Davies, in Bouthayna Al-Nasiri, ed., Final Night. Cairo: American University of Cairo, 1–3. Kadhim, Saeed. 2017. 2003 ‫[ التجارب في الرواية النسوية العراقية بعد عام‬Experimentalism in the Post-2003 Iraqi Nisūwī Novel]. Baghdad: Dār al-Tamūz Li al-Tibā’a Wa al-Tawzī‘. Kahf, Mohja. 2006. On Being a Muslim Woman˙Writer in the West. Islamica Magazine, 17(1), 78–85. Kashou, Hanan. 2013. War and Exile in Contemporary Iraqi Women’s Novels. PhD. Thesis. University of Ohio. Supervisor: Professor Joseph Zeidan. Khodeir, Mohammed. 2013. ‫ الرواية النسوية‬:‫[ رواية التغيير في العراق‬The Novel of Change in Iraq: The Nisūwī Novel]. Al-Sabāh, 8 July. Available at: www.alsabaah.iq/ArticleShow.aspx?ID=49777. ˙ Khoury, Dina. ˙R. 2013. Iraq in Wartime: Soldiering, Martyrdom, and Remembrance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lotbinière-Harwood, Susanne De. 1991. Re-belle et infidèle: La traduction comme pratique de réécriture au féminin (The Body Bilingual: Translation as a Rewriting of the Feminine), Les éditions du remue-ménage. Quebec: The Women’s Press. Loucif, Sabine. 2012. Lectures d’aujourd’hui aux USA: les dessous du marché de la traduction [Lectures of Today About the USA: Behind the Scenes of the Translation Market], in Bruno Blanckeman et Barbara Havercroft, eds., Narrations d’un nouveau siècle. Romans et récits français 2001–2010. Paris: Presses Sorbonne Nouvelle. Lynx-Qualey, Marcia. 2014. Time-traveling – Whose Iraq Stories? Warscapes, 30 Mar. Available at: www. warscapes.com/column/marcia-lynx-qualey/time-traveling-whose-iraq-stories. Majaj, Lisa S., Paula W. Sunderman, and Therese Saliba, eds. 2002. Intersections: Gender, Nation, and Community in Arab Women’s Novels. New York: Syracuse University Press. Masmoudi, Ikram. 2010. Portraits of Iraqi Women: Between Testimony and Fiction. International Journal of Contemporary Iraqi Studies, 4(1–2), 59–77. Masmoudi, Ikram. 2012. Introduction. Translated by Ikram Masmoudi, in Hadiya Hussein, eds., Beyond Love. New York: Syracuse University Press, xv–xx. Masmoudi, Ikram. 2015. War and Occupation in Iraqi Fiction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Massardier-Kenney, Françoise. 1997. Towards a Redefinition of Feminist Translation Practice. The Translator, 3(1), 55–69. McCann-Baker, Annes. 1994. Acknowledgements. Translated by Barbara Parmenter, in Daizy Al-Amir, ed., The Waiting List: An Iraqi Woman’s Tales of Alienation. Austin: University of Texas Press in Austin, vii. Mehta, Brinda. 2006. Dissidence, Creativity, and Embargo art in Nuha Al-Radi’s Baghdad Diaries. Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism, 6(2), 220–235. Mushatat, Raad. 1986. At Home and in Exile. Index on Censorship, 15(2), 28–31. Mustafa, Shakir, ed. 2008. Contemporary Iraqi Fiction: An Anthology. New York: Syracuse University Press. Riverbend. 2005. Baghdad Burning, Girl Blog from Baghdad. London and New York: Marion Boyars Publishers. Rohde, Achim. 2010. State-Society Relations in Ba’thist Iraq: Facing Dictatorship. London: Routledge. Saddiqi, Fatima. 2006. Gender in Arabic. Brill Encyclopaedia of Linguistics, 1–21. Safouan, Moustapha. 2007. Why are the Arabs Not Free? The Politics of Writing. Oxford: Blackwell. Said, Edward. 1990. Embargoed Literature. The Nation, 17(1), 278–280. Shread, Carolyn. 2011. On Becoming in Translation, in Luise von Flotow, ed., Translating Women. Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 283–304. Simon, Sherry. 1996. Gender in Translation. New York: Routledge. Starkey, Paul. 2006. Modern Arabic Literature. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Valassopoulos, Anastasia. 2008. Contemporary Arab Women Writers: Cultural Expression in Context. London and New York: Routledge. Wali, Najem. 2007. Iraq. Translated by Lilian M. Friedberg, in Literature from the ‘Axis of Evil’: Writing from Iran, Iraq, North Korea, and Other Enemy Nations, Words Without Borders Books, New York: The New Press, 51–54. Zangana, Haifa. 2005. Colonial Feminists from Washington to Baghdad. Al-Raida Journal, 22(1), 30–40. Zangana, Haifa. 2013. ‫[ النسويات المستعمرات‬Colonialist/s Feminist/s] in Jean Makdisi, Rafif R. Sidawi and Noha Bayoumi, eds., ‫ رؤية نقدية‬:‫[ النسوية العربية‬Arab Feminisms: A Critical View]. Beirut: Markaz Dirasāt Al-Waheda Al-Arabiyya, 321–334. ˙ Zeidel, Ronan. 2011. The Shi’a in Iraqi Novels. Die Welt des Islams, 51(1), 327–357. 61

Ruth Abou Rached

Iraqi women’s literature cited in this article (primary sources) Abdullah, Ibtisam. 1980. ‫[ فجر نهار وحشي‬Dawn of A Monstrous Day: Short Stories]. Baghdad: Manshūrāt Sharikat Mat b‘at Al-Adīb Al-Baghdādīya Al-Mahdūda. Abdullah, ˙Ibtisam. 1988. ‫[ ممر الى الليل‬Passage to˙ the Night–A Novel]. Baghdad: Wizārat Al-Thaqāfa Wa Al-I‘lām, Dār Al-Shu’ūn Al-Thaqāfīya Al-‘Āmma. Al-Amir, Daizy. 1964. ‫[ البلد البعيد الذي تحب‬The Distant Country That You Love: Short Stories]. Beirut: Dār Al-‘Awda. Al-Amir, Daizy. 1988. ‫[ على الئحة االنتظار‬On the Waiting List]. Beirut: Dār Al-Adāb. Al-Amir, Daizy. 1994. The Waiting List: An Iraqi Woman’s Tales of Alienation, tr. Barbara Parmenter. Introduction by Mona Mikhail. Austin: Texas University Press in Austin. Al-Dulaimi, Lutfiya. 1974. ‫ قصص‬- ‫)البشارة‬. [The Glad Tidings–Short Stories]. Baghdad: Wizārat Al-Thaqāfa Wa Al-I‘lām. Al-Dulaimi, Lutfiya. 1986a (2013). ‫ رواية وقصص‬- ‫[ عالم النساء الوحيدات‬The World of Lone Women – A Novel and Short Stories]. Baghdad∫†Dār al-Madā Li al-Tibā‘a Wa al-Nashr Wa al-Tawzī‘. ˙ [If You Ever Loved Short Stories] Baghdad: Dār Al-Dulaimi, Lutfiya 1986b (2015). ‫ قصص‬:‫إذا كنت تحب‬. al-Madā Li Al-Tibā‘a Wa al-Nashr Wa al-Tawzī‘. ˙ 1988. ‫)بذور النار (رواية‬. [Seeds of Fire–A Novel]. Baghdad: Dār Al-Shu’ūn Al-Thaqāfīya Al-Dulaimi, Lutfiya. Al-‘Āmma. Al-Mana, Samira. 1997. ‫[ القامعون‬The Oppressors]. Damascus: Dār Al-Mada. Al-Mana, Samira. 1972. ‫[ السابقون والالحقون‬The Forerunners and the Followers] Beirut: Dār Al-‘Awda. Al-Mana, Samira. 1985. ‫النصف فقط‬/[Only a Half: A Play in Two Acts]. Translated by Farida Abu Haidar. London: Panorama Print. Al-Mana, Samira. 2002/2008. The Oppressors. Translated by Paul Starkey: London: Exiled Writers’ Ink! Al-Nasiri, Bouthayna. 1974. ‫[ حدوة حصان‬Horseshoe](Short Stories). Baghdad: Dār Al-Hurrīya. Al-Nasiri, Bouthayna. 1990. ‫[ فتى السردينة المعلب‬Boy in a Can of Sardines] (Short Stories) Baghdad: Dār Al-Kharīf. Al-Nasiri, Bouthayna. 2001. Final Night (Short Stories). Translated by Denys Johnson-Davies. Introduction by Denys Johnson-Davies. Cairo: American University of Cairo. Al-Qazwini, Iqbal. 2006. ‫[ ممرات‬Corridors of Silence]. Amman. Dār Al-Azmina Li Al-Nashr Wa Al-Tawzī‘. Al-Qazwini, Iqbal. 2008. Zubaida’s Window: A Novel of Iraqi Exile. Translated by Azza El Kholy and Amira Nowaira. Preface by Nadje Al-Ali. New York: Feminist Press. Al Rawi, Shahad. 2016. ‫[ ساعة بغداد‬The Baghdad Clock]. London: Dār Al-Hikma. Al Rawi, Shahad. 2018. The Baghdad Clock. Translated by Luke Leafgren. London: Oneworld Publications. Hadi, Maysalun. 1985. ‫ مجموعة قصصية‬،‫الشخص الثالث‬: [The Third Person–Short Stories]. Baghdad: Dār Al-Shu’ūn Al-Thaqāfīya Al-‘Āmma. Hadi, Maysalun. 1986. ‫ مجموعة قصصية‬:‫[ الفراشة‬The Butterfly – Short Stories]. Baghdad: Dār Al-Shu’ūn Al-Thaqāfīya Al-‘Āmma. Hussein, Hadiya. 2004. ‫[ ما بعد الحب‬Beyond Love] Beirut: Al-Muʾassasat Al-‘Arabīya Li Al-Dirāsāt Wa Al-Nashr. Hussein, Hadiya. 2012. Beyond Love. Translated by Ikram Masmoudi. Preface by mariam cooke. Introduction by Ikram Masmoudi. New York: Syracuse University Press. Kachachi, Inaam. 2009. ‫[ الحفيدة االمريكية‬The American Granddaughter]. Beirut: Al-Jadīd. Kachachi, Inaam. 2011. The American Granddaughter. Translated by Nariman Youssef. Doha: Bloomsbury Qatar Foundation. Khedairi, Betool. 1999. ‫[ !كم بدت السماء قريبة‬A Sky So Close!]. Amman and Beirut: Al-Muʾassasa Al-‘Arabīya Li Al Dirāsāt Wa Al-Nashr. Khedairi, Betool. 2001. A Sky So Close. Translated by Muhayman Jamil. New York: Pantheon Books. Khedairi, Betool. 2004. ‫[ غائب‬Absent]. Amman and Beirut: Al-Muʾassasat Al-‘Arabīya Li Al-Dirāsāt Wa Al-Nashr. Khedairi, Betool. 2005. Absent. Translated by Muhayman Jamil. New York: Pantheon Books. Mamdouh, Alia. 1980. ‫[ ليلى†والذئب‬Laila and the Wolf]. Baghdad: Dār Al-Hūrriyya. ˙ ūl. Mamdouh, Alia. 1986. ‫[ حبات النفتالين‬Mothballs]. Cairo: Al-Hī’a Al-Masrīyya/Fas ˙ by Fadia ˙ Faqir. Arab Women WritMamdouh, Alia. 1995. Mothballs. Translated by Peter Theroux. Preface ers’ Series, edited by Fadia Faqir. Reading: Garnet Publishing. Mamdouh, Alia. 2000. ‫[ حبات النفتالين‬Mothballs] (re-print of the 1986 publication). Beirut: Dār Al-Adāb. Mamdouh, Alia. 2005. Nephtalene: A Novel of Baghdad. Translated by Paul Theroux. Foreward by Hélène Cixous. Afterword by Farida Abu-Haidar. New York: Feminist Press. Mamdouh, Alia. 2005. ‫[ المحبوبات‬The Loved Ones]. Beirut and London: Dār Al-Sāqī. 62

Pathways of solidarity in transit

Mamdouh, Alia. 2008. The Loved Ones. Translated by Marilyn Booth. New York: Feminist Press. Muzaffar, May. 1979. ‫[ البجع‬The Swan] (A Story and A Play). Baghdad: Dār Al-Hurrīya. Salih, Salima. 1974. ‫[ التحوالت‬Metamorphoses] (Short Stories). Damascus: Manshūrāt Ittihād al-Kutāb al-‘Arab. ˙ Dār Al-Shu’ūn Talib, Aliya. 1989. ‫[ بعيدا ً داخل الحدود‬Far Away Inside the Borders] (Short Stories). Baghdad: Al-Thaqāfīya. Talib, Aliya. 1994a. A New Wait (Short Story). Translated by Mariam Cooke and Rkia Cornell, in Mariam Cooke and Roshni Rustomji-Kerns, eds., Blood into Ink: South Asian and Middle Eastern Women Write War. Boulder and Oxford: Westview Press, 80–85. Talib, Aliya. 1994b. Greening. (Short Story) Translated by Mariam Cooke and Rkia Cornell, in Mariam Cooke and Roshni Rustomji-Kerns, eds., Blood into Ink: South Asian and Middle Eastern Women Write War. Boulder and Oxford: Westview Press, 192–195. Zangana, Haifa. 1990. Through the Vast Halls of Memory. Translated by Paul Hammond and Haifa Zangana. France and Basingstoke: Hourglass Press. Zangana, Haifa. 1995. ‫[ في اروقة الذاكرة‬In the Corridors of Memory]. London: Dār Al-Hikma. Zangana, Haifa. 2000. ‫[ مفاتيح مدينة‬Keys of A City]. London: Dār Al-Hikma. Zangana, Haifa. 2009. Dreaming of Baghdad. Translated by Haifa Zangana and Paul Hammond. Foreward by Hamid Dabishi. Afterward by Ferial Ghazoul. New York: Feminist Press.

63

5 Maghrebi women’s literature in translation Sanaa Benmessaoud

Introduction The Maghreb, formerly known as Afrique du nord française, and referring to Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco, is a space of plurality and difference. Because of a long history of conquests, invasions, and human movements, from the Phoenicians and the Romans through the Arabs and Ottomans to the French and the Spanish, this region has over the centuries become a mosaic of cultures, ethnicities, and languages. Because of this genealogy, contemporary Maghrebi literature is plural, at the intersection not only of multiple languages and cultures but also of different literary influences. Indeed, while it has integrated Western forms, it remains rooted in an Arabic literary tradition that goes as far back as the 6th century (see, for instance, Omar Quinna’s (2000) overview of the classical Maqamah genre1 in 19th- and 20th-century Algeria, and Abdelkader Jebbar’s (2013) insightful study of the development of the Qasida genre, classical poem, in 20thcentury Morocco). Maghrebi contemporary literature can be considered ideologically and politically overdetermined given that it first saw the light under French colonialism, and that it reached maturity in the 1950s, when the Maghreb countries were engaged in the struggle for independence. As such, this literature raises issues of language, identity, literary realism and its political implications, relationship with the (former) colonizer and how this relationship shapes and maybe even canonizes or somehow undermines Maghrebi literary texts. It also raises questions of translation, both cultural and linguistic, for Europhone writers who move constantly between languages, mix them, and switch from one to another. When produced by women, this literature acquires additional layers of complexity. Besides the issues just referred to, these women’s texts engage significantly with gender issues, as well as with Islamic culture and scripture, and the place these accord to women. They also raise questions about their translation and circulation in a transnational context where representations of Arab-Muslim woman have become ideologically laden. For instance, how does the international circulation of these writings affect the writers’ authorial decisions as they engage in (self )-­translation? And how are the gender politics that are enacted in these writings translated? Despite the richness and complexity of Maghrebi women’s contemporary literature, critical

64

Maghrebi women’s literature in translation

interest in it both in the Arab Mashreq and in the West started relatively late. It has only gained momentum as of the 1990s because of various historical, political, and cultural reasons, and despite the growing body of research on this literature, there is still need for more critical engagement with these women’s narratives. This chapter will first give an insight into the historical conditions that shaped Maghrebi women’s literature, with a specific focus on Arabic and French texts.2 It will then engage with the critical issues marking their production, translation, and circulation in the local, regional, and transnational market. For obvious space limitations, the focus will be on three Maghrebi women writers, namely Assia Djebar, Ahlem Mosteghanemi, and Leila Abouzeid. While the first is North Africa’s most prominent francophone woman writer, the second is her ‘Arabophone’ counterpart. Mosteghanemi is the recipient of the prestigious Naguib Mahfouz Medal for Literature, and is currently one of the most popular and top selling writers in the Arab world.3 As to Abouzeid, she is Morocco’s most prominent Arabic woman novelist. The translation of her work into English earned her canonicity in the West and, as a consequence, in the Arab world, as well.

Historical perspective Maghrebi literature, including women’s literature, came into currency as a concept in the 1960s. Referring to contemporary literature produced in Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia, it was concretized by two important critics, Moroccan-French Abdelkebir Khatibi in his Le Roman maghrébin (1968) and Jean Déjeux in his La Littérature maghrébine de langue française (1973). Like all categorization, however, this one masks the complexity of the écriture/‫كتابة‬, writing in Arabic, produced in the Maghreb region. This literature was, indeed, born in a space characterized by so much cultural, linguistic, and religious diversity that Khatibi (1983) called it Maghreb pluriel, plural Maghreb. Its authors speak and express themselves in a variety of languages ranging from the vernacular languages (colloquial Arabic, and Berber or Amazigh dialects) to the vehicular ones (classical Arabic, French, Spanish, and English). The diversity characterizing this literature is, in fact, such that Moroccan literary critic R’kia Laroui (2002, 48) talks of ‘literatures’ whose themes and challenges might coincide sometimes, but which often develop in different ways. This diversity is especially seen in Maghrebi women’s literature. Women’s literature in the Maghreb region, whether in French or in Arabic, was late to emerge compared to its Mashreqi counterpart. Mohammed Berrada (2008) and Mosteghanemi (1985) attribute this delay, in part, to social conservatism. North African societies, Berrada (2008) maintains, “did not have a favorable view” of women who expressed themselves through literature (236). The most determining factor, however, not only in the delay of this literature but also in its very core remains (French) colonialism and its aftermath. In fact, French critic Charles Bonn argues that Maghrebi literature is “inseparable” from the history of colonialism and the decolonization process (2006), while Khatibi (1968, 11) holds that this literature was born to “exprimer le drame d’une société en crise,” [express the tragedy of a society in crisis] namely the crisis of colonization and the struggle for independence. In sum, it is a literature that “writes back” in Bill Ashcroft et al. (1989) words. Unlike British colonialism, which focused mostly on administrative rule, French colonialism, driven by its “mission civilisatrice,” went to extreme lengths to culturally domesticate North African societies. It fought this battle of domestication on two main fronts: language and women. Language was, indeed, a primary “ground on which political battles relating to control and resistance were fought” in North Africa (Cox 2002, 20). French colonial authorities actively

65

Sanaa Benmessaoud

promoted French at the expense of Arabic and the Berber dialects in all three countries. In retaliation, the nationalists deployed Arabic, the language of the faith, as the idiom of cultural resistance both during the fight for independence and after independence. As a consequence, Arabic, French, and Berber in the Maghreb ended up acquiring “political and social connotations as a reflection of their role in this conflict” (ibid.), connotations that have lingered well after independence.4 Likewise, policies and practices devised to ‘protect’ women were an integral part of the French colonial enterprise in North Africa. In fact, Julia Clancy-Smith maintains that from the beginning of French colonization of this part of the world, “the ‘woman question’ assumed particularly fraught and contentious dimensions whose repercussions can be detected even today” (2017, 1). Indeed, the French colonial authorities saw in the control and unveiling of indigenous women a way to “penetrate” and control societies in the Maghreb (Hélie 1995, 276). They used several strategies, including traffic in women, prostitution (See Knauss 1987; Lazreg 1994; Clancy-Smith 2017), and promotion of discourses representing and, indeed, translating North African women at once as victims in need of liberation, and as simulacra of a feminized and sexualized Orient (see Alloula 1986). During the struggle for independence, i.e. in the 1950s, the nationalists responded by promoting women’s rights and equality, and restoring to women the rights that had been denied to them (Cooke 1996, 122). Ultimately, however, they remained ‘prisoners’ of the French colonial discourses, and fought back by adopting a reactionary response and returning to traditional, conservative social practices. In other words, and as Clancy-Smith (2017) succinctly put it, women in North Africa were subjected to “a double patriarchy, colonial and indigenous” insofar as they became reified as symbols for both the power of the colonial empire and the religious and cultural identity of the indigenous societies (12). This colonial linguistic and sexual violence and its postcolonial aftermath had dramatic consequences for women in the Maghreb, and naturally left their imprint on Maghrebi women’s literature. Families boycotted French schools, which resulted in high rates of illiteracy among young girls and women. Consequently, writing by women only started gaining momentum with independence, i.e. in the 1960s (Déjeux 1992, 1994), and came to prominence in the 1980s. Moreover, the few girls who received education in French schools during the colonial period were at such an advantage that most literary exploration and production by women, whether in the form of the novel or short story, was initially in French (Cohen-Mor 2005, 7). Thus, the first women novelists in North Africa, Algerians Taos Amrouche and Djamila Debèche, were educated in French and penned their novels, Jacinthe noire (1947) and Leila, jeune fille d’Algérie (1947), respectively, in French. They were first in a long list of francophone women writers to follow in the Maghreb, including Algerians Assia Djebar, Malika Mokaddem, and Leila Sebbar, Moroccan Fatima Mernissi and Baha Trabelsi, and Tunisians Hélé Béji and Sophie El Gouli. Arabic literary production by Maghrebi women had to wait until the wave of decolonization in order to trend, thanks to the Arabization policies and the generalization of education. However, perhaps the most important consequence of the context just described, that was so marked by the imbrication of the colonial and the patriarchal, is that Maghrebi women’s writings, whether in Arabic or in French, have been ideologically and politically overdetermined from the very beginning. They were also, and regardless of language, a site of self-empowerment as women availed themselves of literature and writing to produce counter discourses about themselves, the colonial trauma and the struggle for liberation, and about their respective societies and cultures. Thus, in his preface to Algerian woman writer Yamina Mechakra’s novel La

66

Maghrebi women’s literature in translation

Grotte éclatée (1979), Algerian writer Kateb Yacine aptly observes that “Actuellement en Algérie, une femme qui écrit vaut son pesant de poudre” [In today’s Algeria, a woman that writes, is worth her weight in gunpowder].

Critical issues and topics Francophone Maghrebi women’s writings: a literature in translation Because of the conditions of its birth and development, as described previously, francophone Maghrebi women’s literature is a site of polyphony and cultural and linguistic hybridity. It is also a site of identity negotiation, one that is marred with a heavy colonial baggage and much ambivalence. The very means of self-expression for these women, French, is both their way to emancipation and self-empowerment, and the legacy of colonial oppression; at once the very tool by which they recuperate the voices of fellow Maghrebi women and restore their agency, and the rift that separates them from these women. Assia Djebar, for instance, describes French as the language of her “libération de femme” (1999, 101), yet still “la langue du sang,” the language of blood and of the colonial violence (ibid., 149). Grappling with this cultural and linguistic dissonance requires these women writers to “tanguer, pencher d’un côté à l’autre [. . .] entre deux mondes. Entre deux cultures [. . .] Écrire donc d’un versant d’une langue vers l’abri noir de l’autre” (15) [sway, lean from one side to the other . . . between two worlds. Between two cultures. . . . In other words, to write one’s way from the slopes of one language to the black harbor of the other]. This swaying between languages and cultures, a decolonizing movement, involves bringing alterity into the colonizer’s language and world, destablizing them both with “les voix non-francophones – les gutturales, les ensauvagées, les insoumises – jusqu’à un texte français qui devient mien” (1999, 29) [the non-francophone voices – the guttural, the wild, the unruly – until the French text becomes mine]. As a result, this literature, a “literature in translation” as Khatibi (1983) described it, is often palimpsestic, weaving together texts from different worlds and languages, thus bringing them to interrogate and challenge one another. In so doing, it constructs “fractured identities” that are “both” and “neither/nor,” that challenge colonial hierarchies, and “fracture” monolingual and monolithic constructs of identity (AgarMendousse 2009). Accordingly, and like all Europhone postcolonial literature, French-language literature by Maghrebi women has what Paul Bandia (2014, 12) calls a “symbiotic relationship” with translation, and raises issues of translation, not only in its metaphorical sense as cultural representation but also in its orthodox sense as interlingual transposition. (See Zabus 1991; Tymoczko 1999; Bandia 2001, for an exploration of translation as a paradigm for the study of postcolonial literature.) One of the earliest and most important authors to engage with this relationship in regard to a work by a Maghrebi woman is Samia Mehrez (1992). Approaching the subject from a postcolonial perspective, Mehrez (1992) explores translational strategies as used in several francophone Maghrebi novels, including Assia Djebar’s L’Amour, la fantasia (1985; Fantasia, An Algerian Cavalcade), where the writer superimposes oral testimonies by Algerian women and her own autobiographical notes on official French colonial archives to rewrite her nation’s history. According to Mehrez, Djebar, like her male counterparts, is engaged in a process of “perpetual” translation insofar as “the traces of both classical Arabic and the dialect are always present within the French” (135). Engaging with a passage of L’Amour, la fantasia (1985), where the narrator, Djebar’s autobiographical “je” [I] takes hold of the “qalam,” pen in Arabic, and puts it in the

67

Sanaa Benmessaoud

severed hand of an Algerian woman killed by the French army, Mehrez (1992) points out that by borrowing the word qalam from Arabic and transcribing it in French, Djebar was being doubly transgressive. The Arabic word being an allusion to the first revelation of the Koran, she transgressed Orthodox Islam by taking hold of this pen, symbolic of patriarchal knowledge, and used it to restitute voice and agency to the Algerian women silenced both by colonial and local patriarchal discourses. She also transgressed the (French) monolingual reader’s language and world by inscribing Arabic language and messages in the French text. Use of such translational strategies, characteristic both of literal translation and postcolonial literature, thus allows Djebar to create a text that is “at once a resister and liberator.” In fact, translation in francophone Maghrebi texts, according to Mehrez, is a discursive strategy that inscribes difference in the Other’s language, thereby deconstructing pre-existing linguistic and cultural hierarchies, and challenging “colonialist” and “imperialist” readings by the monolingual reader (122). Evoking Homi K. Bhabha’s in-between space as “the cutting edge of translation and negotiation” (1988/2006), Mehrez (1992) concludes that these texts “resist and ultimately exclude the monolingual and demand of their reader to be like themselves: ‘in between,’ at once capable of reading and translating, where translation becomes an integral part of the reading experience” (122). In the same vein, but drawing on Henri Meschonnic’s “politique du traduire,” Hervé Sanson’s (2015) more recent study gives insight into the translation ethics in Djebar’s works. Examining the many ways in which Djebar transposes Arabic, both classical and dialectal, oral and written, into her French texts, Sanson concludes that Djebar’s is an ethics of translation that rejects any notion of faithfulness, and destabilizes binary constructions such as author/translator and original/translation. Hailing from literary criticism, Rachida Yassine (2017) examines the different textual strategies used by Djebar in L’Amou, la fantasia (1985), mainly heavy borrowing of Arabic words, extensive use of Algerian popular expressions, and reproduction of Arabic structures and speech patterns in the French text. She concludes that in so doing, the writer “redefines Francophone history, culture and literature by translating into the colonizer’s language a different sensibility, a different vision of the world, in the process creating new paradigms for intercultural exchange” (132).

Arabic Maghrebi women’s writings: literature on the margin Arabic Maghrebi women’s literature has been growing in richness ever since independence.5 However, despite its complexity and with some rare exceptions, it is doubly marginalized. Coming from the Maghreb, i.e. west of the Mashreq, the Middle East, it is located at the margin of the Arabic literary system. As Richard Jacquemond (2017) has pointed out, Arabic literature produced in the Maghreb is hardly, if ever, designated as ‫أدب مغاربي‬, i.e. Maghrebi literature, in the Arabic literary field, even when francophone Maghrebi literature is recognized and designated by critics as ‫األدب المغاربي المكتوب بالفرنسية‬, i.e. “Maghrebi literature in French.” Political problems between Maghreb countries, particularly Algeria and Morocco, have also resulted in the absence of a Maghrebi book market. Consequently, Arabic Maghrebi literature has “relatively failed” to establish itself as a literary subfield. This situation significantly reduces the visibility of Arabic Maghrebi women writers within the Arabic literary system. Moroccan writer Abouzeid (2003, 159) revealed that when she approached an Arab publisher about her autobiography, Ruju’ Ila al-Tufulah (1993; Return to Childhood 1998), he rejected the work saying that the autobiography could have been of interest had it been Brigitte Bardot’s. But Arabic Maghrebi literary production, whether by women or men, suffers from other obstacles that hinder its translation and international circulation. Indeed, while the book industry

68

Maghrebi women’s literature in translation

in the Maghreb countries is growing, it is still underdeveloped, and marked by the prevalence of self-publishing and poor distribution networks. Piracy is yet another significant problem that faces writers, men and women, in the region, and affects their visibility locally, regionally, and, therefore, internationally. Besides, while Arabic is one of the largest languages in the world in terms of speakers, its role remains peripheral in the “cultural world system” as compared to more central languages (Heilbron 1999). As such, it proves to be an obstacle to the international promotion of Maghrebi writers, including women, even when they, too, use it as a means of liberation. Indeed, given the Maghreb’s colonial history and the fragile status of Arabic post-­independence as outlined earlier, the very act of composing in Arabic, the native language, becomes very much an act of resistance, a political statement with political and economic implications. Thus, Ahlem Mosteghanemi, Algeria’s first woman novelist in Arabic, who pursued higher education in France and defended her PhD with Jacques Berque, insists on writing her fiction in Arabic and considers this choice an act of resistance against the hegemony of francophonie in Algeria. Addressing the fact that she was the first Algerian woman writer to write in Arabic, she reveals that it filled her with “horror, not pride” (1998, 79). In the acceptance speech that she delivered when she was awarded the Naguib Mahfouz Medal, she thanked the panel of judges for supporting, through her, all those “Algerian writers writing in Arabic who confront unarmed the onslaughts of Francophonie and its diverse temptations, while they stand patriotically against the dubious and divisive tendencies to which Algeria is exposed” (1998). Shaden M. Tageldin (2009) sees in this speech a strong political positioning not only against the francophonie, but also against the discourse on Arabic as incapable of reflecting Algeria’s diverse reality, and for a promotion of Arabic as the legitimate language of Algerian literature. In Morocco, prominent post-independence woman writer Leila Abouzeid insists on writing fiction in Arabic despite her perfect command of French and English. Comparing her to many of her contemporaries who composed their works either in English or French, including her compatriot Fatima Mernissi, Pauline Homsi Vinson (2007, 94) remarks that Abouzeid’s decision to write in Arabic aligns her with “nationalist writers such as Ngugi wa Thiongo who view their choice to write in their native languages as a form of national assertion.” In fact, in her afterword to her novel The Last Chapter (2003), Abouzeid reveals an “intense aversion” towards French, the language of the people that “put my father in their jails, where he was tortured,” a language that “was forced on me” and that “threatened to strip me of my native tongue” (89). More significantly, she finds this position “fortunate, as it kept me from becoming one of the postcolonial Maghrebi writers producing a national literature in a foreign language” (89; my emphasis). Echoing Mosteghanemi, Abouzeid clearly sees in the very act of writing in Arabic a way to resist (neo)colonialist violence and assert her national and cultural identity. Because of this positioning through language, however, Maghrebi women writing in Arabic find it more difficult to pierce through the international book market than their francophone counterparts. Because the latter’s texts are penned in French and published in France,6 the Greenwich Meridian of the World Republic of Letters (Casanova 2004), they have “greater distribution possibilities and therefore potentially larger reading publics” (Mortimer 2001, 4). They also have more opportunities for translation into other languages, French being a vehicular language. As a result, Arabic-language literature coming from the Maghreb is less known outside of North Africa than its French (and English) counterparts (ibid.). A survey conducted in March 2019, in both Worldcat.org and UNESCO’s Index Translationum, of the languages into which the bestselling books by Moroccan writers Fatima Mernissi

69

Sanaa Benmessaoud

and Leila Abouzeid, and Algerian writers Assia Djebar and Ahlem Mosteghanemi, were translated, gives credence to Mortimer as shown in Figure 5.1:

30 25 20 15 10 5 0

Fatema Mernissi Assia Djebar

Ahlem Leila Abouzeid Mosteghanemi

Figure 5.1 Languages of translation

Dreams of Trespass (1994), Mernissi’s most translated work of fiction, and L’Amour, la fantasia (1985), Djebar’s iconic novel, were more successful in translation, albeit to different extents,7 precisely because they were written in vehicular languages and consecrated in the “center of the World Republic of Letters.” By contrast, ‘Am Al Fil (1983), the Arabic novel that propelled Abouzeid to international recognition, and Dhakirat al Jassad (1993), Mosteghanemi’s novel that was consecrated in the Arabic literary system through the Naguib Mahfouz Medal for Literature, are the least translated, even after their translation into English. This bleak situation harks back to Edward Said’s (1996) assertion more than 20 years ago that Arabic literature was an “embargoed literature.” Said attributes this lack of interest to ideological imperatives. Citing several examples of compellingly subversive Arabic works that remain untranslated, Said argued that this exclusion finds its explanation in the fact that these works challenge not only dominant literary values but also monolithic representations of the ‘Arabs’ and the ‘Arab world’ in the West, and particularly the US. More than a decade after Said’s diagnosis, Jacquemond (2008) investigated the translation of Arabic literary texts, including by Maghrebi women writers, in France in the period from 1979– 2000, only to find that while translation of Arabic literature had witnessed a steady increase, it was still low compared to literature in other languages, and that most of the translations are either barely visible or “over-politicized” (366). Indeed, 65% of this literature is translated and published by university presses and publishers specialized in political and Middle Eastern affairs. This foregrounds the ethnographic dimension that literature coming from Arab countries acquires when it crosses the linguistic and cultural borders. As a result, the only Arabic titles that have larger print runs are those that are “faithful to the double paradigm of realism and political engagement,” and which are thus more easily read and consumed through the ethnographic prism ( Jacquemond 2008, 366–367). After surveying the translation of Arabic literary works, including those coming from the Maghreb region, in the United Kingdom and Ireland, Alexandra Büchler and Alice Guthrie (2011) came to a similar conclusion about the main thrust for translation from Arabic: there are still not enough translations published from Arabic, and [that,] with some exceptions, interest in books coming from the Arab world is determined by socio-political factors 70

Maghrebi women’s literature in translation

rather than by the desire to explore the literary culture of the Middle East and North Africa for its own merits. (7) Interestingly, Jacquemond (2008) maintains that prestigious publishers in France show more interest in Arabic titles by women writers, including Algerian Ahlem Mosteghanemi, than by their male counterparts (365–367). This interest comes with advantages. It means visibility in France and, therefore, better chances for global circulation. At the same time, however, it contributes to a monolithic representation of the ‘Arab woman.’ Indeed, Jacquemond asserts that this interest is mainly fuelled by “voyeurism” and “politicization” in that the Arab women writers that enjoy the most visibility and circulation in France are those whose texts “most confirm representations of Arab women as ‘oppressed’ and/or with deviant or unbridled sexuality” (367). Along the same lines, Marilyn Booth (2003) doubts that Western readers read literature by Arab women to have their misconceptions challenged. She believes, instead, that “too often, the opposite seems to be true, as suggested by the popularity of the Not Without My Daughter genre, the sort that strengthens stereotypes [. . .] about living as a woman in Middle Eastern societies” (49). Indeed, the transnational context in which Arab (Maghrebi) women’s literature is consumed is one where the Arab Muslim woman is the object of a literary genre that has been enjoying strong reception by Western readers and close coverage by Western media, namely autobiographies of Arab-Muslim women or of Western women as hostages of Islamic religion. Betty Mahmoody’s Not Without My Daughter (1987) was only the first such narrative. While a 2002 Finnish documentary titled “Without My Daughter” debunked the events in the memoir, the latter achieved sales of over 12 million copies, and was translated into over 20 languages. It also earned Mahmoody a celebrity status as she was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in 1987 and was celebrated by Oakland University in Michigan as Outstanding Woman of the Year. This “hostage narrative,” in Farzaneh Milani’s (2008) words, witnessed a boom after 9/11, with the publication of such works as Reading Lolita in Tehran (Nafisi 2003) and Infidel (Hirsi Ali 2007), both of which enjoyed wide circulation with translation into close to 20 languages (Worldcat.org 2019). While this genre appears to be trying to uncover and, thus, fight gender violence in Arab-Islamic countries, some of which does indeed exist, it also translates the ArabMuslim woman into a monolithic category that is essentially oppressed, thus subjecting her to another violence. More importantly, it adds to the century-old archive of Orientalizing images and ideas about Arab Muslim women, an archive against which texts by these women, including from the Maghreb, are read, interpreted, and refracted.

Current contributions to research Research exploring translations as cultural artefacts In today’s international book market, increasingly controlled by big economic conglomerates, such ideological imperatives are entangled with economic considerations. As Heilbron and Gisèle Sapiro (2008) have shown, offer and demand are not mere economic data but social constructs promoted by dominant cultural and political institutions. This imbrication of the economic with the ideological results in the texts of Arab women writers, including those from the Maghreb region, being “commodified, as literary decisions come together with marketing strategies and assessments of audience appeal (ranging from interest in the ‘exotic’ to feminist solidarity) to foreground certain texts and repackage or silence others” (Amireh and Suhair Majaj 2000, 4). 71

Sanaa Benmessaoud

This commodification that ‘repackages’ or ‘silences’ is very visible in the translation of Ahlem Mosteghanemi’s books. Drawing on Petra Broomans and Ester Jiresch’s (2011) model of cultural transfer, and more specifically the concept of “quarantine” – the time that a book takes to be published in translation after the first phase of discovery by cultural transmitters, as well as “the grey area” where some texts fall after translation–Sanaa Benmessaoud (2015) argues that Mosteghanemi’s major works remained in the “quarantine” phase far longer than many other less popular works by contemporary Mashreqi women writers. It thus took Dhakirat al-Jassad – first published in Algeria in 1985 and republished in Lebanon in 1993 – almost a decade to be picked up for translation by Egypt-based American University of Cairo Press, in 2000, and two more years to be translated by a French publisher despite the fact that a non-fiction book by her had already been published in France by Harmattan. It also took this novel two full decades to be (re)translated and published by a major Western publisher, namely Bloomsbury (Benmessaoud 2015, 294–295). The same holds true for Mosteghanemi’s Fawda al-Hawass (1997), which entered quarantine a second time after its translation into English in 2004 (Chaos of the senses) and French in 2006 (Le chaos des sens) as it elicited little to no interest from critics and reviewers.8 As to the peritexts of Mosteghanemi’s two bestselling novels, they reposition the works within the trope of the veil and the exotic. Indeed, the dust jacket of Le chaos des sens (2006), the French translation of Fawda al-Hawass (1997), features a woman’s veiled face, thus misleading the French reader insofar as it recasts Mosteghanemi’s narrative, revolving around a female protagonist who, unapologetically and defiantly, flaunts her femininity and sexuality, in a fetishized and orientalist mold (Benmessaoud 2015, 294). Similarly, the title of the English retranslation of Mosteghanemi’s Dhakirat al-Jassad by Bloomsbury9 repositions the novel in an explicitly exotic discourse. While Dhakirat al-Jassad means “memory of the body” in Arabic, thus flagging the narrative as one that inscribes (national and personal) memory in the body (of the protagonist), the retranslation is entitled The Bridges of Constantine (2013). The English title thus emphasizes geographical location, Constantine, an Algerian city named after Constantine the Great. This exoticizing move is further enhanced through the book cover, featuring the face of a kohl-eyed woman peering seductively from behind a black transparent veil. Benmessaoud thus comments that such peritextual elements both refract the works through a prism that fetishizes the veiled Arab woman and uses the veil as a signifier of her difference (296). In fact, it is noteworthy that the iconography on the cover of The Bridges of Constantine is highly reminiscent of the sexualized and exoticized representation and, indeed, translation of Algerian women, specifically in postcards by the French during the French colonization of Algeria. It taps into the exotic interplay of the visible and invisible, or what Alloula (1986) calls “obstacle”: the exotic veil, on the one hand, that invites the male’s gaze and elicits the desire to unveil the feminine other, and “transparency,” on the other hand, which invokes the feminized Orient’s sexual promise. Drawing on Casanova, Benmessaoud (2015, 306) argues that this chequered reception of Mosteghanemi is a striking example of how subversive literature coming from the periphery is watered down or, indeed, “depoliticized,” and how those writers coming from the periphery and deploying “recognition strategies that would be both subversive and effective” find themselves “disarmed” (Casanova 2005, 88). Indeed, Mosteghanemi offers an incisive criticism of post-independence Algeria’s social and political realities in her works, all the while firmly grounding her narrative in a discourse of a unified, rather than hybrid, Algerian national identity and a wider Pan-Arab identity, as well as a feminist discourse of female agency. As such, her works are highly politicized, challenge stereotypes of Arab Muslim women as oppressed and victimized, and reduce her marketability as a third world writer whose success in translation 72

Maghrebi women’s literature in translation

is predicated on the reproduction of “the structures of the West – hybridity instead of fixed national identity” (Swaralipi Nandi 2013, 82). Such modes of consumption are all the more important that they affect the visibility and circulation of Maghrebi women writers within their own countries. Thus, Abouzeid’s ‘Am Al Fil (1983, The Year of the Elephant 1989) only gained fame in Morocco and the rest of the Arab world after it had been translated into English by an American publisher (Abouzeid 2015). In fact, Abouzeid reveals that the very first discussion of this work she had at Mohamed V University in Morocco was of the English version of the novel, not the Arabic one, and was in English not in Arabic. Many of the preceding observations about the exigencies that undergird the circulation and consumption of Arabic texts by Maghrebi women also apply to francophone Maghrebi women’s literature. Their work was similarly condemned to an “orientalist ghetto” ( Jacquemond 1992) from before its emergence. In his fine-grained bibliographical study of francophone Maghrebi women’s literature, Déjeux (1994) reveals an interest among French readers – especially those seeking an insight into the “aventures affriolentes des femmes d’Alger dans leur appartement” [alluring adventures of women of Algiers in their apartment] – for narratives penned by French women writers about or from Maghrebi societies (7). For a greater sense of authenticity and, therefore, appeal, many of these writers would take an Arabic pseudonym “pour faire croire qu’elles étaient bien du milieu et qu’elles pouvaient en parler en connaissance de cause” (8) [to make their readers believe that they belonged to that world and were therefore better placed to talk about it]. In 1935, for instance, Berthe Durand-Thiriot chose the pen name of BentaDjebel to publish her novel Simple histoire de Zineb la Nailiat: Moeurs berbères [The simple story of Zainab the Nailiat: Berber mores]. In fact, even after decolonization, as late as 1973, a French male writer took the female name of Mina Boumedine to publish a novel entitled L’Oiseau dans la main, purporting to tell the life of an Algerian woman (ibid.). After the decolonization movements, however, Déjeux (15) observes, these writers were steadily replaced by francophone Maghrebi women who “seules sont à même de rendre compte de ce qu’elles vivent” [were alone entitled to report on their life experiences]. In one sentence, the French literary critic thus reduces the complex literary production by Maghrebi women to an ethnographic and orientalist “compte-rendu,” a report. This conception of francophone Maghrebi women’s texts significantly shapes the modes of their circulation and consumption in the international book market. In her compelling investigation of Maghrebi literature in English translation, Susan Pickford (2016) starts by observing that the rates of translation of francophone Maghrebi literature, whether by women or men, are still “relatively low” (86), with periods of increase generally coinciding with political instability. She concludes that “Maghrebi French authors thus remained largely positioned within the same ethnographic frame as their counterparts writing in Arabic” (86). Turning to the specific case of Maghrebi literature by women writers, Pickford argues that the (late) enfranchisement of francophone postcolonial studies in the early 2000s, combined with the institutionalization of world literature, the growth in translation studies, and “the feminization of the post-colonial canon” have all contributed to a growing number of francophone Maghrebi women writers gaining access to an Anglo-American readership. The most accessible of these writers, however, are those writing mainly about women, and their texts are generally consumed in the metropolis as postcolonial commodities that conform to, rather than trouble, the French reader’s horizon of expectations (87). Moreover, a growing pattern of “women translators publishing books by women authors with university presses” reveals a “feminist ethnographic frame as a driving force for translation, with a particular emphasis on the place of women in Islamic society” (89–90). Pickford finds further 73

Sanaa Benmessaoud

confirmation of this “feminist ethnographic frame” in the paratext of Malika Mokeddem’s translated works. The covers of these works consistently reproduce the veil theme and resituate the books in the realm of the ethnographic (90). Pickford concludes that while texts by Maghrebi authors such as Assia Djebar and Malika Mokeddem have explored post-colonialist themes, the conditions in which their books have tended to be produced and circulated as material artefacts remain dominated by a neo-colonialist paradigm. (82) Pamela A. Pears’ (2015) study of the paratext of Djebar’s Femmes d’Alger dans leur appartement (1980) lends credence to Pickford’s conclusion. Pears maintains that Djebar’s appropriation of Eugene Delacroix’s famous painting for both the book cover and the title, and her critical engagement with the painting in her afterword are a strategic move meant to destabilize the orientalist construct of the Algerian woman and pre-empt any hijacking of her narrative. She argues, however, that Delacroix’s painting was reproduced in – and has thus framed – all versions of Djebar’s novel, including its English translation. As such, it has acquired a metonymic value for the Western reader. Accordingly, this iconography “forever ties [Djebar’s] work to colonialism, Orientalism, and the formation of the self through the European man’s gaze” (21).

Research exploring translations as texts To stay with Broomans and Jiresch’s (2011) model, the third phase in the transfer of books is the translation phase. A close study of the translations of some of the most important works by Maghrebi women reveals a flattening of their gendered and identity politics consistent with the reductive editorial practices observed in the packaging and circulation of the translations. The English translation of Assia Djebar’s Loin de Médine (1991, Far from Medina 1994) is a case in point. Categorized by Cooke (2001) as an example of Islamic feminism that attempts to construct a “countermemory,” this novel was penned in response to the then-escalating violence between the state and Islamists in Algeria and the instrumentalization of women as a symbol of Algerian identity by both sides in the conflict (Zimra 1983, 122–123). Set in 7thcentury Islamic society, it superimposes historical accounts by such Arab (male) chroniclers as Ibn Hisham and Tabari, with prophet’s sayings transmitted by rawiyat, women transmitters contemporary of the prophet. To make up for gaps surrounding the lives and actions of these rawiyat and of other female figures from Islamic history, the author relies on fiction and collective memory. Her objective is to recover these women’s voices that were muted in classical chronicles, and foreground women’s agency (Lalaoui 2004). When Rim Hassen (2009) looked closely into the translation strategies adopted by the translator, Dorothy S. Blair, she found a pattern that consistently subverted Djebar’s subversive discourse. Pointing out the critical role of the rawiyat – and of the rowat, i.e. male transmitters – in the (re)construction of early Islamic history, Hassen explains that Djebar foregrounds this role by deploying a wide variety of feminine synonyms and expressions, from “transmettrice,” i.e. woman transmitter, “diseuse,” i.e. woman teller, and “transmetteuse,” a different feminine form of the word “transmetteur,” i.e. transmitter, to “chroniqueuse,” i.e. woman chronicler, as well as by deliberately excluding the role of male transmitters, rowat, through the designation of the rawiyat as “mémoire des Musulmans” and “mémoire des croyants,” respectively memory of the Muslims and memory of the believers. The translator, however, fails to reproduce these feminine words, and even uses masculine generic plural forms, thus breaking the “chain of female transmitters” and significantly undermining the political significance of these women’s 74

Maghrebi women’s literature in translation

act. According to Hassen, the words where the feminine gender was reproduced are those that connote obedience, submissiveness, and victimhood. Some of these words, such as “Bedouin women” and “Yemenite woman,” also invoke exotic images of Muslim women. Such textual choices, according to Hassen (ibid.), confirm “the Anglo-American readers’ orientalist assumptions about Muslim women” as submissive victims. What is interesting, however, is that significant changes to the original, with similar ideological effects, occur even when the translator is the author herself. Diya Abdo’s (2009) thorough analysis of Leila Abouzeid’s translation of her own autobiography, Ruju’ ila al-Tufulah, into English provides an illuminating insight into the double bind under which this author, like all other Arab (Maghrebi) women authors, finds herself when she has to go west. For this “migration,” as Abdo puts it, to be successful, the author has to perform the not so easy feat of frustrating her Western audience’s horizon of expectations while addressing it in familiar and accessible terms. Further she has to interrogate local structures of patriarchal oppression while avoiding possible charges of treason against her own people and culture. Abdo starts by putting Abouzeid’s self-translation into perspective. It is taking place in a context that is politically overdetermined, and where the author is already consumed within a feminist ethnographic frame, as Pickford would put it. Indeed, Abouzeid’s first translated work of fiction, Year of the Elephant (1989), quickly made its way into courses on the Middle East and in women’s studies (2). Further, it is the translation of an autobiography that engages both colonial and patriarchal violence. In fact, one main thrust of the work is to expose the injustices from which Moroccan women suffered not only because of colonization but also because of political and social marginalization at the hands of the nationalists. The autobiography, however, is firmly grounded in what could easily be described as an Islamic feminist discourse that promotes women’s agency and self-empowerment and constructs an Arab-Islamic identity for them. The first notable shift in the translation could be called a generic change. Conforming to the Arabic-Islamic autobiographical tradition which prioritizes collective identity over individual identity, and undergirded by a culture of “shame,” the Arabic original makes very scarce use of the autobiographical “I” and refers very rarely to specific people and places. In contrast, the “I” is conspicuous in the English translation, and so is a focus on Leila’s individuality (14–16). The translation also involves more explicit criticism not only of men and patriarchy, in general, but also of the father, than the original, in which the Arabic reviewers saw “a loving homage” to the father (20). Abuse of women is enhanced in the translation, as well, and so is the mother’s illiteracy. This, according to Abdo, “perpetuates a certain representation of the oppressed Arab and Muslim woman” (21). Abdo, however, is quick to warn that these strategies should not be perceived as self-orientalizing. In light of Abouzeid’s assertion in her preface to the translation that her autobiography was an opportunity to challenge American misconceptions, these textual choices could rather be seen as Abouzeid’s “strategizing to win a Western audience in order that an Islam-centered critique of women’s status and colonialism can be heard” (22). Thus, numerous changes and even “mistranslations” occur in the translation with the effect of playing up women’s self-empowerment and agency (21). Abdo’s analysis of the translation’s epitext, however, reveals a flattening of the subversive ambivalence inherent in the English text and, thus, an undermining of its gender and identity politics. Indeed, the paratext imbues the text with a markedly anthropological value, mediating it as a window onto the mysterious life of the Moroccans, and a useful text “in courses on Islamic women” (17). The Arabic original, being very different from the English version, naturally garnered a different reception insofar as the critics hailed it as a work that is primarily of “political and national significance” (ibid.). 75

Sanaa Benmessaoud

Because of these contradictory pulls at work in Abouzeid’s writing, Abdo concludes that while writing for a foreign audience may be liberating for Arab women, it is also a site of “confrontation, for resistance to the Other” (22). All too often, however, and as seen from all the preceding examples, this resistance to the Other, whether it is articulated in the language of this Other or in conventions and discourses familiar to it, is significantly contained by editorial practices that muffle the subversive voices of these women writers, either through exclusion from translation or through multiple refractions during the processes of translating, packaging, and marketing.

Future directions In 1996, Amireh called out that: We need to encourage a vigorous critical discussion about Arabic literature and culture in the West [. . .]. The debate should go beyond “appreciative” criticism that condescendingly praises Arab women writers for “daring” to put pen to paper. Serious debates about fiction will remind readers that they are reading not documentaries, but “literature,” which draws on particular conventions and emerges from specific traditions. Exactly 20 years later, in 2016, Tareq Shamma wryly observes in his foreword to an issue on Arabic literature in translation that “the most persistent of the traditional paradigms seems to be what Susan Pickford calls the ‘ethnographic frame’ ” (7). The persistence of this frame indicates a need for more research on the ethics of translating texts by third world women, especially Arab (Maghrebi) women who seem to be consistently consumed in a culturally predefined space. Such research should, therefore, problematize the concept of alterity in translation and go beyond any such reductive dichotomous concepts as the foreignizing/domesticating one. For although texts by Maghrebi women, being feminist in their breadth, might invite a feminist translation that foregrounds difference and contamination (Luise von Flotow 1997, 44), a translation that “strategically downplays cultural difference in the interest of expedient political action” might be more appropriate since “what is at stake here is less the preservation of cultural or linguistic specificity than the construction of a political narrative in a universal framework of ‘justice’ ” (Hassan 2006, 759). But for Amireh’s call to be heeded, more work on the ethics of reading and teaching third world women’s literature in translation is needed. In fact, Lawrence Venuti (1998) has already explored the cultural and political ramifications of repressing translation in the teaching of translated texts, arguing that students should be made aware of the translation and, therefore, of the contingency of the interpreting and translating act. Much work is still to be done, however, to fill in a “pedagogical lack” in this area (Maier and Massardier-Kenney 2010, 2), especially when it pertains to works flowing from the periphery to the centre. On the other hand, and despite the complexity of this expanding creative corpus by Maghrebi women writers, academic engagement with it, as with Arab women’s literary production as a whole, only started gaining momentum at the turn of the 21st century, with a steady increase in the number of book-length studies and doctoral projects exploring the writings of Maghrebi women (Cooke 2001; Donadey 2001; Kelly 2005; Rice 2006; Gauch 2007; Valassopoulos 2007). Much of the research, however, gives short shrift to Arabic texts. Cooke (2001), for instance, when she engages Islamic feminism in Arab women’s writings, includes both Assia Djebar and Fatima Mernissi but excludes Leila Abouzeid, when the latter grounds her critique of patriarchal oppressive practices prevalent in Morocco in an explicitly Islamic discourse. Likewise, 76

Maghrebi women’s literature in translation

Gauch (2007) maintains that her book aims to investigate the ways in which “women writers and filmmakers from the Islamic world” resist local violence in their countries and frustrate any hijacking of their narratives by imperialist critics abroad. However, her investigation is once again limited to francophone Maghrebi women writers (xi–xii). In fact, the “minor canon of literature” that has emerged brings out, according to Lindsey Moore (2008), “the work of certain women – particularly Djebar . . . and Fatima Mernissi,” both francophone writers. In this work of selectivity, “the exigencies of translation certainly play their part” (4). There is obviously much need for more translations to enlarge this canon, which includes efforts within the Maghreb countries towards a healthier and more structured book market. There is, however, even greater need for research that looks into the degrees of complicity between publishing houses and corporate academia, including feminist academia, in the silencing of Maghrebi women writers who write in Arabic. Such canonicity-granting authorities perpetuate the colonial trope of the voiceless Maghrebi woman. By canonizing and conferring prestige on those writers who write their subjectivity through the former colonizer’s language, they also perpetuate the margin/centre dyad where the margin needs the centre to mediate its own “means of identification,” as Françoise Lionnet and Shu-mei Shih (2005, 2) would put it, thereby reproducing the same old colonial divides. There is need for scholarship that looks beyond the paradigms of hybridity and transculturation whereby linguistically transgressive francophone texts by Maghrebi women successfully subvert hierarchies, “exclude the monolingual,” and create an ‘in-between’ space for the metropolitan reader, in Mehrez’ words; what is needed is scholarship that interrogates the very concept of postcolonialism whereby (translated) postcolonial literature is a “space of resistance to the Other” as argued by Abdo. In fact, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (1996) aptly points out that given “the neo-liberal traffic in cultural identity,” postcolonial novels cannot all be seen as “post-colonial resistance” (127). In a globalized market, where cultural difference has, indeed, become a commodity, and where the postcolonial has come to function as a “sales-tag” and “a token of cultural value” (Huggan 2001, viii), translation studies has to engage more with the material conditions under which Maghrebi women’s texts are circulated, and which still allow for the containment of these women’s voices even as they ease them into the canon. Another interesting avenue of research within the sociology of postcolonial translation is the role of the postcolonial (Maghrebi) writer herself in the circulation of her texts. Addressing the effects of colonialism on postcolonial Arab writers, in general, Moroccan critic Abdelafattah Kilito (2004) suggests that these writers not only read Arabic literature through a Eurocentric prism, but also produce literature with translation in mind. Echoing Kilito, Jenine Abboushi Dallal (1998) claims that some Arab women writing in Arabic engage in self-orientalization and “write for translation” to better accommodate the Western reader. While Michelle Hartman (2012) rightly evinces wariness about any charges of complicity because, according to her, they could contribute to the reductionist view of Arab women’s literature as a mere representation of some authentic reality, the cases discussed here show that as a Maghrebi woman writer’s status grows in the centre, so does her margin for decision making. She often becomes an important agent in the translation and dissemination of her own texts. Abouzeid translated and refracted her own autobiography, one that was commissioned by University of Texas Press and which she thus wrote in Arabic but for translation and publication in the US, and with the Anglo-American reader in mind (Abouzeid 2003). Likewise, Djebar translated her novel Femmes d’Alger dans leur appartement, “intralingually” (Watts 2005) insofar as she chose the peritext that would mediate and translate her French text to her French reader, including the title, the image on the cover, the preface, and the afterword. Such agency warrants more academic attention. 77

Sanaa Benmessaoud

Further reading Abu-Haidar, Farida. 2001. Inscribing a Maghrebian Identity in French, in M.P. Mortimer, ed., Maghrebian Mosaic: A Literature in Translation. Boulder: L. Rienner, 13–26. The chapter explores several works by Maghrebi francophone writers, including Assia Djebar and Malika Mokeddem, and demonstrates that while these writers continue to pen their literature in French for the freedom and flexibility it gives them, they bend and shape this language to their mother tongue(s), including through the introduction of Arabic or Berber words and use of Arabic structures. Such discursive strategies ultimately inscribe these writers’ Maghrebi and, thus, plural identity in their francophone texts. Benmessaoud, Sanaa. 2013. The Challenges of Translating Third World Women in a Transnational Context. The Translator, 19(2), 183–205. The paper analyzes Moroccan writer Fatima Mermissi’s autobiography Dreams of Trespass (1994) from a translational perspective. It gives insight into the double bind where third world women writers, particularly Maghrebi ones, find themselves as they navigate the global market’s strictures and the pitfalls of cultural representation, and how this bind can affect the discursive strategies these writers use as they translate both their culture and their mother tongue in a text destined for international consumption. Redouane, Rabia. 2014. Femmes arabes et écritures francophones. Machrek-Maghreb. Paris: L’Harmattan. The book offers an insight into the writings of several francophone women writers from both the Maghreb and the Mashreq regions. It explores this growing “Arab and francophone literature” from a feminist perspective by shedding light on the feminist discourses on which these writers, established and emerging ones alike, draw extensively in their French texts.

Related topics Sociology of translation, postcolonial translation studies, ideology and translation, representation, gendered identity, ethics of translation

Notes 1 The maqamah is a fictional narrative genre that emerged in the 10th century. Mixing didacticism and entertainment, it is mainly characterized by a narrative frame with one narrator and one protagonist, an ornate style, and rhyming prose reminiscent of the Qur’an. Drawing on pre-Islamic Arabic narrative forms, and reproducing forms present in Islamic texts, the genre spread to new geographies, from Baghdad through Cairo to Seville, and accommodated new expectations and tastes. As a result, the maqamah lived on for over ten centuries to become a marker of Arab identity and an essential part of the Arabic literary canon. Many contemporary Arab writers have thus redeployed this genre as a “form that would anchor resistance” to any threat to national or cultural identity (Mohamed-Salah Omri 2008, 254). This was the case in Algeria with such writers as Mohamed as-Saleh Ben Atiq who used this genre to depict the suffering of the Algerian people in their fight against French colonialism (Abdel-Kader Bakader and Siboubker Ismail 2013). 2 The linguistic landscape in North Africa is very complex with many regional varieties of Berber, or Tamazight, cohabiting with Arabic – both modern standard and spoken – French, and, albeit to a much lesser extent, Spanish. As a result, literary production in this region came not only in Arabic and French, but also in Berber. Berber literature, however, has remained mainly oral due to the political marginalization of the language. Indeed, Berber (or Tamazight) only gained official language status in Morocco in 2011 and in Algeria in 2016. It has, therefore, not been fully or successfully integrated in the educational system, and suffers from the absence of a significant reading public. As a result, literature written in Tamazight is still scarce. In Morocco, for instance, it is “often self-financed and scattered across the small or ephemeral periodicals of cultural associations” (Daniela Merolla 2014, 51). Accordingly, Arabic and French remain the two main languages of literary production in the Maghreb region, including by Amazigh (women) writers such as Malika Mokaddem, Assia Djebar, and Taos Amrouche; hence the focus of this chapter. 3 By 2006, Mosteghanemi’s novels had already sold over 2,300,000 copies across Arab countries, making her the top-selling Arabic novelist and the most successful Arabic writer of her time (Maximillien de Lafayette 2013, 119). 78

Maghrebi women’s literature in translation

4 Learning French language and embracing French culture during the colonial era were synonymous with higher social standing and better access to education and, therefore, to material safety. After independence, Arabization was implemented in all three countries as part of nation building. However, the democratization of education and the presence of an economic and political elite that is still closely tied to France meant that French has not only retained much of its prestige but has also become much more widespread in society than before independence (see Farid Aitsiselmi and Dawn Marley 2008, for an overview of the linguistic landscape in the Maghreb). 5 See Berrada (2008) for a panoramic study of Arabic literary production by women in North Africa. 6 According to Nahed N. Noureddine (2015), in the period from 2006 to 2012, twice as many francophone Maghrebi titles were published in France as locally. 7 This difference could find its explanation in two factors. The first one is the language of production. Mernissi penned her book in English whereas Djebar wrote hers in French. While Casanova (2004) argues that French is the Greenwich Meridian of the World Republic of Letters, Heilbron’s (1999) statistics reveal that while French is certainly one of the central languages in the international translation system, English enjoys what he calls a “hyper-central role” in this system. Accordingly, books published in English are bound to have more visibility than those published in any of the other central languages, including French. The second and most important factor is the generic makeup of each novel. Indeed, Dreams and L’amour display different generic features and, therefore, lend themselves to different types of reading and, by extension, of circulation and consumption. Mernissi’s Dream was packaged and marketed as an autobiography, with the promise of authenticity and truth that such genre holds. It makes use of a transparent and easily accessible English language, interspersed with exotic terms and an alterity that have long been domesticated, such as harem, sharia, and shish kebab. It also displays the generic features of the realist novel, mainly linear chronology and lack of interpretative difficulty. As such, it lends itself easily to consumption by a mainstream audience versed in the realist genre, hence an appeal to publishers. By contrast, Djebar’s novel, while still semi-autobiographical and historical and, therefore, promising authenticity and truth, is experimental in nature. It eschews linearity and is more polyphonic in that it superimposes layers of narration and discursive strategies, ranging from historical documents and accounts by French officers from the colonial period to autobiographical notes and conversations with women who witnessed and took part in the war of decolonization. As such, the novel lends itself less easily to a mainstream reading public. 8 It is worth mentioning that a retranslation of the novel was published by Bloomsbury in 2015. This one did manage to garner some attention in the form of editorial reviews, including in The Independent. 9 A first translation was commissioned by the American University of Cairo Press in 2000 (Mosteghanemi, Ahlam 2000), and was carried out by Lebanese journalist and translator Baria Ahmar Sreih. The title was a literal translation of the original, “memory in the flesh,” and the book cover featured abstract art.

References Abdo, Diya. 2009. Textual Migration: Self-Translation and Translation of the Self in Leila Abouzeid’s Return to Childhood: The Memoir of a Modern Moroccan Woman and Ruju Ila Al-Tufulah. Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, 30(2), 1–42. Abouzeid, Leila. 1983. ‘Am Al Fil. Rabat: Dār al-ma’ārif al-jadida. Abouzeid, Leila. 1989. Year of the Elephant: A Moroccan Woman’s Journey Toward Independence, and Other Stories. Austin: University of Texas Press. Abouzeid, Leila. 1993. Ruju’ Ila al-Tufulah. Casablanca: Matbaèat al-Najah al-Jadidah. Abouzeid, Leila. 1998. Return to Childhood: The Memoir of a Modern Moroccan Woman. Austin: University of Texas Press. Abouzeid, Leila. 2003. The Last Chapter. Cairo: American University of Cairo Press. Abouzeid, Leila. 2015. Hiwar Ma’a Al-Katibah Leila Abouzeid Hawla Siratiha “Ruju’ Ila At-Tofulah”. Interview by Yassine Adnane. First Channel. [YouTube Video]. Available at: https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=0RcEOtIc8W8 Agar-Mendousse, Trudy. 2009. Fracturing the Self: Violence and Identity in Franco-Algerian Writing, in Simona Scarparo and Sarah J. McDonald, eds., Violent Depictions: Representing Violence Across Cultures. Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 18–31. Aitsiselmi, Farid and Dawn Marley. 2008. The Role and Status of the French Language in North Africa. Studies in French Applied Linguistics, 21, 185–222. Ali, Ayan Hirsi. 2007. Infidel. New York: Free Press. 79

Sanaa Benmessaoud

Alloula, Malek. 1986. The Colonial Harem. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Amireh, Amal. 1996. Publishing in the West: Problems and Prospects for Arab Women Writers. al-Jadid, 2(10). Available at: www.aljadid.com/content/publishing-westproblems-and-prospects-arab-women-writers. Amireh, Amal and Lisa S. Majaj. 2000. Introduction, in A. Amireh and L. S. Majaj, eds., Going Global: The Transnational Reception of Third World Women Writers. New York: Garland, 1–26. Amrouche, Taous. 1947. Jacinthe noire. Paris: Charlot. Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin. 1989. The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in PostColonial Literatures. London and New York: Routledge. Bakader, Abdel-Kader and Siboubker Ismail. 2013. Fan-ul Maqamah fil-adab al-jaza’iri ath-thawri tasweerun li-waqi’I mu’anati sha’b. International Colloquium on Algeria and Its Liberation Revolution. Archives Manifestations Scientifiques. Available at: https://manifest.univ-ouargla.dz/index.php/archives/ faculté-des-lettres-et-des-langues-fll/38-‫التحريرية‬-‫وثورتها‬-‫الجزائر‬-‫حول‬-‫الدولي‬-‫الملتقى‬.html?start=20. Bandia, Paul. 2001. Le concept bermanien de l’‘Etranger’ dans le prisme de la traduction postcoloniale. TTR: traduction, terminologie, redaction, 14(2), 123–139. Bandia, Paul. 2014. Writing and Translating Francophone Discourse: Africa, the Caribbean, Diaspora. Amsterdam: Brill. Benmessaoud, Sanaa. 2015. Arab Women in Translation: The Dynamics of Representation and the Construction of Identity. PhD. dissertation, Université de Montréal. Berrada, Mohamed. 2008. Arab North Africa, in Radwa Ashour, Ferial Ghazoul, Hasna Reda-Mekdashi, and M. McClure, eds., Arab Women Writers: A Critical Reference Guide 1873–1999. Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 235–253. Bhabha, Homi K. 1988/2006. Cultural Diversity and Cultural Differences, in Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin, eds., The Post-Colonial Studies Reader. London: Routledge, 155–157. Bonn, Charles. 2006. Bibliographie littéraire sélective: Maghreb et émigration maghrébine,” in Dominique Wolton, ed., Mondes francophones. Auteurs et livres de langue française depuis 1990. Paris: ADPF. Booth, Marilyn. 2003. On Translation and Madness. Translation Review, 65, 47–53. Broomans, Petra and Ester Jiresch. 2011. The Invasion of Books in Peripheral Literary Fields: Transmitting Preferences and Images in Media, Networks and Translation. Groningen: Barkhuis. Büchler, Alexandra and Alice Guthrie. 2011. Literary Translation from Arabic into English in the United Kingdom and Ireland, 1990–2010. Wales: Aberystwyth University. Casanova, Pascale. 2004. World Republic of Letters. Translated by M. B. DeBevoise. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Casanova, Pascale. 2005. Literature as a world. New Left Review, 31, 71–90. Clancy-Smith, Julia. 2017. North Africa and France: Imperialism, Colonialism, and Women, 1830–1962. Oxford Research Encyclopedia of African History. doi: 10.1093/acrefore/9780190277734.013.97. Cohen-Mor, Dalya. 2005. Introduction, in Dalya Cohen-Mor, ed., Arab Women Writers: An Anthology of Short Stories. Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1–28. Cooke, Miriam. 1996. Women and the War Story. Berkeley: University of California Press. Cooke, Miriam. 2001. Women Claim Islam: Creating Islamic Feminism Through Literature. New York: Routledge. Cox, Debbie. 2002. Politics, Language, and Gender in the Algerian Arabic Novel. Lewiston, N. Y.: E. Mellen Press. Dallal, Jenine A. 1998. The Perils of Occidentalism: How Arab Novelists Are Driven to Write for Western Readers. Times Literary Supplement, 24 Apr. Debèche, Djamila. 1947. Leïla, jeune fille d’Algérie. Alger: Charras. Déjeux, Jean. 1973. La littérature maghrébine de langue française. Sherbrooke: Naaman. Déjeux, Jean. 1992. La littérature maghrébine d’expression française. Paris: PUF. Déjeux, Jean. 1994. La littérature féminine de langue française au Maghreb. Paris: Khartala. De Lafayette, Maximillien. 2013. The Greatest, the Most Important and the Most Powerful Women of the Middle East. New York: Times Square Place. Djebar, Assia. 1980. Femmes d’Alger dans leur appartement. Paris: Albin Michel. Djebar, Assia. 1985. L’Amour, la fantasia. Paris: Lattès. Djebar, Assia. 1991. Loin de Médine: filles d’Ismaël. Paris: Albin Michel. Djebar, Assia. 1994. Far from Madina. Translated by Dorothy Blair. London: Quartet Books. Djebar, Assia. 1999. Ces voix qui m’assiègent. Paris: Albin Michel. Donadey, Anne. 2001. Recasting Postcolonialism: Women Writing Between Worlds. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann. Flotow, Luise von. 1997. Translation and Gender: Translating in the ‘Era of Feminism’. Manchester: St Jerome Publishing. Gauch, Suzanne. 2007. Liberating Shahrazad: Feminism, Postcolonialism, and Islam. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. 80

Maghrebi women’s literature in translation

Hartman, Michelle. 2012. Gender, Genre, and the (Missing) Gazelle: Arab Women Writers and the Politics of Translation. Feminist Studies, 38(1), 17–49. Hassan, Wael S. 2006. Agency and transnational literature: Ahdaf Soueif ’s “The Map of Love”. PMLA, 121(3), 753–768. Hassen, Rim. 2009. Translating Women in Assia Djebar’s Far from Medina. Palimpsestes, 22, 61–82. Available at: https://journals.openedition.org/palimpsestes/188?lang=fr. Heilbron, Johan. 1999. Towards a Sociology of Translation: Book Translation as a Cultural World-System. European Journal of Social Theory, 2(4), 429–444. Heilbron, Johan and Gisèle Sapiro. 2008. La traduction comme vecteur des échanges culturels internationaux, in Giselle Sapiro, ed., Translatio. Le marché de la traduction en France à l’heure de la mondialisation. Paris: CNRS Éditions, 25–44. Hélie, Anissa. 1995. Between ‘Becoming M’tourni’ and ‘Going Native’: Gender and Settler Society in Algeria, in Daiva Stasiulis and Nira Yuval-Davis, eds., Unsettling Settler Societies: Articulations of Gender, Race, Ethnicity and Class. London and Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 263–290. Huggan, Graham. 2001. The Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins. New York: Routledge. Jacquemond, Richard. 1992. Translation and Cultural Hegemony: The Case of French-Arabic Translation, in Lawrence Venuti, ed., Rethinking Translation: Discourse, Subjectivity, Ideology. London and New York: Routledge, 139–158. Jacquemond, Richard. 2008. Les flux de traduction entre le français et l’arabe depuis les années 1980: un reflet des relations culturelles, in Giselle Sapiro, ed., Translatio. Le marché de la traduction en France à l’heure de la mondialisation. Paris: CNRS Éditions, 347–369. Jacquemond, Richard. 2017. Le retour du texte. Jalons pour l’histoire de la traduction arabe de la littérature maghrébine d’expression française, in Alexis Nouss, Crystel Pinçonnat, and Fridrun Rinner, eds., Littératures migrantes et traduction. ISBN: 9791032001080. Available at: halshs-01564577. Jebbar, Abdelkader. 2013. Tahawulat al-Shi’riyah fi-l-Qasidah al-Maghribiyah fi Marhalat al-Hadathah. Majallat Jami’at Tikrit Lil-‘olum, 20(2), 39–64. Kelly, Debra. 2005. Autobiography and Independence: Selfhood and Creativity in North African Postcolonial Writing in French. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Khatibi, Abdelkebir. 1968. Le Roman maghrébin. Paris: Maspero. Khatibi, Abdelkebir. 1983. Maghreb pluriel. Paris: Denoël. Kilito, Abdelfattah. 2004. Dans le miroir. Horizons Maghrébins–Le droit à la mémoire, 51, 127–134. Knauss, Peter R. 1987. The Persistence of Patriarchy: Class, Gender, and Ideology in Twentieth Century Algeria. New York: Praeger. Lalaoui, Fatima Zohra. 2004. Ecriture de l’oralité et contre-discours féminin dans Loin de Médine d’Assia Djebar. SEMEN: Revue de semio-linguistique des textes et discours, 18. Available at: https://journals.open edition.org/semen/2289. Laroui, R’kia. 2002. Les littératures francophones du Maghreb. Québec français, 127, 48–51. Available at: http://id.erudit.org/iderudit/55807ac. Lazreg, Marnia. 1994. The Eloquence of Silence: Algerian Women in Question. New York: Routledge. Lionnet, Françoise and Shu-mei Shih. 2005. Introduction: Thinking through the Minor, Transnationally, in Françoise Lionnet and Shumei Shi, eds., Minor Transnationalism. Durham: Duke University Press, 1–23. Mahmoody, Betty. 1987. Not Without My Daughter. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Maier, Carol and Francoise Massardier-Kenney. 2010. Introduction, in Carol Maier and Francoise MassardierKenney, eds., Literature in Translation: Teaching Issues and Reading Practices. Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1–10. Mechakra, Yamina. 1979. La Grotte éclatée. Algiers: SNED. Mehrez, Samia. 1992. Translation and the Postcolonial Experience: The Francophone North African Text, in Lawrence Venuti, ed., Rethinking Translation: Discourse, Subjectivity, Ideology. London and New York: Routledge, 120–138. Merolla, Daniela. 2014. Intersections: Amazigh (Berber) Literary Space, in Kristen R. Bratt, Youness Elbousty, D. Stewart, and D. J. Steward, eds., Vitality and Dynamism. Interstitial Dialogues of Language, Politics, and Religion in Morocco’s Literary Tradition. Leiden: Leiden University Press, 47–72. Mernissi, Fatima. 1994. Dreams of Trespass: Tales of a Harem Girlhood. Cam-bridge, MA: Perseus Books. Milani, Farzaneh. 2008. On Women’s Captivity in the Islamic World. Middle East Research and Information Project, 246, 38. Available at: www.merip.org/mer/mer246/women’s-captivity-islamic-world. Moore, Lindsey. 2008. Arab, Muslim, Woman: Voice and Vision in Postcolonial Literature and Film. Milton Park, Abingdon: Routledge. 81

Sanaa Benmessaoud

Mortimer, Mildred P. 2001. Maghrebian Mosaic: A Literature in Translation. Boulder: L. Rienner. Mosteghanemi, Ahlam. 1985. Algérie: femme et écriture. Paris: L’Harmattan. Mosteghanemi, Ahlam. 1993. Dhakirat al-Jassad. Bayrūt: Dār al-Ādāb. Mosteghanemi, Ahlam. 1997. Fawda al-Hawass. Bayrūt: Dār al-Ādāb. Mosteghanemi, Ahlam. 1998. Writing Against Time and History, in Fadia Faqir, ed., In the House of Silence: Autobiographical Essays by Arab Women Writers. London: Garnet, 79–90. Mosteghanemi, Ahlam. 2000. Memory in the Flesh. Translated by B. A. Sreih. Cairo and New York: American University in Cairo Press. Mosteghanemi, Ahlam. 2004. Chaos of the Senses. Translated by B. A. Sreih. Cairo: American University in Cairo Press. Mosteghanemi, Ahlam. 2006. Le chaos des sens. Translated by F. Meyer. Paris: Albin Michel. Mosteghanemi, Ahlam. 2013. The Bridges of Constantine. Translated by R. Cohen. London: Bloomsbury. Mosteghaneni, Ahlam. 2015. Chaos of the Senses. Translated by N. Roberts. London: Bloomsbury. Nafisi, Azar. 2003. Reading Lolita in Tehran. New York: Random House. Nandi, Swaralipi. 2013. Reading the “Other” in World Literature: Towards a Discourse of Unfamiliarity, in Masood Ashraf Raja, Hillary Stringer and Zach VandeZande, eds., Critical Pedagogy and Global Literature: Worldly Teaching. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 75–96. Noureddine, Nahed N. 2015. Le Maghreb en traduction. Traduction, Diffusion et Réception en Espagne de la littérature maghrébine de langue française. Arras: Artois Presses Universitaires. Omri, Mohamed-Salah. 2008. Local Narrative form and Constructions of the Arabic Novel. Novel, 41(2–3), 244–263. Pears, Pamela A. 2015. Front Cover Iconography and Algerian Women’s Writing: Heuristic Implications of the RectoVerso Effect. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Pickford, Susan. 2016. The Factors Governing the Availability of Maghrebi Literature in English: A Case Study in the Sociology of Translation. CLINA, 2(1), 77–94. Quinna, Omar. 2000. Fann Al-maqamah fil-adab al-arabi al-jaza’iri khilala-l qarnayni at-tassi’i ‘ashar wal‘ishreen. Journal of the College of Humanities and Social Sciences. doi: http://hdl.handle.net/10576/8378. Rice, Alison. 2006. Time Signatures: Contextualizing Contemporary Francophone Autobiographical Writing from the Maghreb. Lanham, MD: Lexington. Said, Edward. 1996. Embargoed Literature, in Anuradha Dingwaney and Carol Maier, eds., Between Languages and Cultures: Translation and Cross-Cultural Texts. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 97–102. Sanson, Hervé. 2015. D’une éthique de la traduction: Assia Djebar ou les apories de l’écriture en langue française. Al Khitab, 16, 73–82. Available at: revue.ummto.dz/index.php/khitab/article/download/ 1221/1022. Shamma, Tareq. 2016. Arabic Literature in Translation: Politics and Poetics. CLINA, 2(1), 7–11. Spivak, Gayatri C. 1996. How to Read a ‘Culturally Different’ Book, in Francis Barker, Peter Hulme, and Margaret Iverson, eds., Colonial Discourse/Postcolonial Theory. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 126–150. Tageldin, Shaden M. 2009. Which Qalam for Algeria? Colonialism, Liberation, and Language in Djebar’s L’Amour, la fantasia and Musteghanemi’s Dhakirat al-Jasad. Comparative Literature Studies, 46(3), 467–497. Tymoczko, Maria. 1999. Post-colonial Writing and Literary Translation, in Susan Bassnett and Harish Trivedi, eds., Post-colonial Translation: Theory and Practice. London: Routledge, 19–40. Valassopoulos, Anastasia. 2007. Contemporary Arab Women Writers: Cultural Expression in Context. London: Routledge. Venuti, Lawrence. 1998. The Scandals of Translation: Towards an Ethics of Difference. London: Routledge. Vinson, Pauline H. 2007. A Muslim Woman Writes Back: Leila Abouzeid’s Return to Childhood, in Nawar AlHassen Golley, ed., Arab Women’s Lives Retold: Exploring Identity Through Writing. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 90–108. Watts, Richard. 2005. Packaging Post/Coloniality: The Manufacture of Literary Identity in the Francophone World. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Worldcat. 2019. Worldcat. Available at: https://www.worldcat.org/ Yassine, Rachida. 2017. Algerian Female Identity Re-construction and Colonial Language: A Postcolonial Malaise in Assia Djebar’s L’Amour, la fantasia, in Rabah Aissaoui and Claire Eldridge, eds., Algeria Revisited: History, Culture and Identity. London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 118–134. Zabus, Chantal. 1991. The African Palimpsest: Indigenization of Language in the West African Europhone Novel. Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi. Zimra, Clarisse. 1983. When the Past Answers Our Present: Assia Djebar Talks About Loin de Médine. Callaloo, 16(1), 116–131. 82

6 Translation and gender in South America The representation of South American women writers in an unequal cultural scenario Rosa Basaure, Marcela Contreras, Andrea Campaña, and Mónica Ahumada

Introduction This chapter explores literary works and representations of women within the South American literary and cultural context, focusing on how translation processes into English deal with gender in the original text, transferring not only the story, structure, and literary characteristics but the world view of the writers – in this case women writers. The works chosen for discussion by women in the Global South (Mahler 2017) reflect polarized power relations and gender inequality, and the analysis centres on gender-related markers in the categories of motherhood, female body, and violence. Selected writers are María Luisa Bombal and Silvina Ocampo and their reconstruction in the English translations, with self-translations by Bombal revised by Armand Baker, and Daniel Balderston translating Ocampo. The analysis presents examples of the cultural perspectives on gender that any translation of South American women writers may face.

Historical context of the writers Up until the last two decades of the 19th century, the role of South American women of all social strata was to meet family needs. They were subordinated to men and limited by social codes that did not allow them to decide on their lives or their bodies, let alone participate in civic life (Stuven and Fermandois 2013). Only a few women, from privileged social backgrounds and with access to European intellectual knowledge, managed to break with these codes. Most women, however, lived in a context of strong religious constraint due to the influence of the Roman Catholic Church (O’Neill 2016), lack of formal education, and generalized female illiteracy (De Ramón 2003). The situation in the region started to change in the 1880s, when the Argentinian state promoted a strong European migration policy and established a common, secular, free, and compulsory education, integrating all sectors of society regardless of their origin, gender, language, 83

Rosa Basaure et al.

identity, or religion (Sáenz Quesada 2001). This inspired other South American governments to introduce similar reforms, which changed cultural codes and rearranged societies throughout the continent. Under these changing circumstances, a pioneer generation of women writers began to question the role of women in South American literature, contrasting ideas about gender equality and a concept of masculinity still largely perceived as superior. The translation of these works is an important vindication of these women’s views on gender inequality and its reflection in their writing, assigning translators the responsibility to understand and transfer the social and cultural context of South America to a different cultural and gender reality through their work into English.

Critical issues and topics: translation, culture, and gender The question of gender in translation emerged in the 1980s, highlighting relationships between source and target discourses, where gender representations of a particular culture are relevant (Flotow 2011). This topic continues to challenge translation studies because gender difference and inequality remain urgent. The selected South American writers address cultural particularities that arise in much of the regional literature, and this chapter thus focuses on women characters who are subject to power relations based on gender inequality and the conception of ‘male superiority’ which they reflect as fictional themes and represent by particular narrative elements, namely (1) manifestations of motherhood, (2) the female body, and (3) violence caused by gender inequality.

Current contributions and research Despite the importance of this topic – the analysis of gender in South American texts and their translations – research contributions in this area are sparse. Most of the available research on translation and Latin American women writers is found in anthologies, such as the one edited by Sara Castro-Klaren et al. (1991), and present biographical and literary information on different renowned women such as Clarice Lispector, Gabriela Mistral, and Rigoberta Menchú. Some research has also focused on general aspects of the life and works of certain Latin American women writers such as María Luisa Bombal, Victoria Ocampo, and Clarice Lispector (Bassnett 1990), including women film-makers, poets, and artists. Other works have addressed the relation between Latin American women, literary culture, and political life, like the texts collected in Women, Culture, and Politics in Latin America: Seminar on Feminism and Culture in Latin America (Bergmann et al. 1992). Naomi Lindstrom (1998), however, specifically connects the literary work of women authors and feminist literary criticism as shaping factors of feminist social criticism and gender-based debate. Other studies have analyzed specific issues regarding the writers included in this chapter; for example, Bo Byrkjeland (2013) focused on Bombal’s self-translated works and Carolina Suárez (2013) approached the subversive treatment of the stereotypes of gender and age in Silvina Ocampo’s work. Regarding translation, Suzanne Jill Levine has largely written about being a woman translator translating Latin American male writers such as Jorge Luis Borges, Adolfo Bioy Casares, Guillermo Cabrera Infante, and the difficulties she has faced in regard to these authors’ oppressive views on women and their use of metaphors to suggest negative images of them (Furukawa 2010). 84

Translation and gender in South America

Texts This study analyzes María Luisa Bombal’s Spanish original La Amortajada (1938), self-translated as The Shrouded Woman in 1948 and revised by Armand Baker in 2006, and Silvina Ocampo’s Spanish original Cornelia frente al Espejo (1988), translated as Cornelia before the Mirror by Daniel Balderston, in 2015, as examples of South American women writers’ perspectives on gender, one from Chile and one from Argentina, respectively, with a focus on representations of motherhood, female body, and violence. Central to the translation of South American women writers is the understanding of cultural and semantic features that will allow an English-translated approximation of the text. In this respect, and despite experiences common to women regardless of their origin, there are cultural differences worth exploring that need to be considered when translating. This study examines some narrative elements in relation to motherhood, female body, and violence which are common to the works analyzed here that could pose challenges to translators if these semantic and cultural notions are not considered. The original texts in Spanish are compared to the English translations, with the three categories subdivided into further subcategories: on motherhood, (1) the absent mother and women caregivers and (2) child loss in South American societies; on the female body, (1) body image and physical build and (2) rebellion against patriarchal ideals of beauty; and on violence, (1) abandonment and (2) the role of women in male-chauvinist societies.

María Luisa Bombal: La amortajada (1938) – [ The Shrouded Woman 2006] María Luisa Bombal (1910–1980) is a Chilean writer, a representative of the Latin American Vanguardia literary movement of the early 20th century, who combines fantasy and social criticism, and sets her work in the upper class. Despite their subordination, her women characters reveal an inner strength that breaks with the hierarchies imposed by marriage and family (Llanos 2009). In The Shrouded Woman, published in 1938 and translated in 2006, the author presents a juxtaposition of life and death; the protagonist is dead, lying in state prior to her funeral, and reviews her conventional life as she watches relatives and friends come to say goodbye.

Silvina Ocampo: Cornelia frente al espejo (1988) – [ Cornelia before the Mirror 2015] Silvina Ocampo (1903–1993), an Argentinian artist and writer, “represents the fantastic in relationship to the psychological” (Espinoza Vera 2009). Ocampo depicts women as both objects and perpetrators of violence, whose transformations lead to emancipation and constitute a kind of rebellion against the patriarchal society. In Cornelia before the Mirror published in 1988 and translated in 2015, Ocampo tells the story of a woman who goes to her parents’ old house to take her own life. There she engages in a dialogue with the mirror in which she recalls episodes of her life.

Translation and cultural representations: motherhood, female body, and violence Regarding motherhood, the first category to be discussed, the markers considered were the absent mother and the role of women caregivers, and child loss in South American societies. 85

Rosa Basaure et al.

The absent mother and the role of other women caregivers: the social role assigned to motherhood is closely connected to that of the absent father, which makes the mother the main caregiver in the family. However, if for any reason such responsibility is not fulfilled by the mother, children are left without a socially accepted female role model. In South America, another representation of motherhood comes in the form of female caregivers called nanas or mamas, who play a strong maternal role for other people’s children, often giving up the possibility of becoming mothers themselves. This reflects the power that higher social classes wield over the economically less favoured and particularly over indigenous women, who historically have worked in domestic service under deeply precarious legal and economic conditions. The concept of nanas or mamas is not only related to domestic help in the form of cleaning and cooking but to a much more profound notion that relates to emotional support that substitutes that of the mother when she is not present. Despite being extremely relevant in the upbringing of a family, these nanas or mamas are subject to economic, ethnic, and gender inequality. Given this situation, translations of South American writers whose work considers the character of the nana, it is necessary to take into account not only the emotional component but also the gender inequality that surrounds these characters. In Bombal’s The Shrouded Woman, the author approaches the issue of the absent mother from the daughter’s perspective, delving into the distant relationship with her mother who dies early, and whose mothering role is taken on by Zoila, the nana in charge of raising the girl. In the translation, meaning is lost in regard to this particular element of motherhood, since limitations of the figurative language reduce the importance of this character and her emotional depth. The following excerpt provides an example. It describes an episode of the girl protagonist’s childhood, in which her mother is leaving on a trip and she tries to stop her by holding on to her skirt, but it is Zoila, the nana, who comforts the girl. Está Zoila, que la vio nacer y a quien la entregó su madre desde ese momento para que la criara. Zoila, que le acunaba la pena en los brazos cuando su madre lista para subir al coche, de viaje a la ciudad, desprendíasela enérgicamente de las polleras a las que ella se aferraba llorando. (Bombal 2015, 110) Then there was Zoila, who knew her since she was born, to whom her mother gave her to raise after that moment. Zoila, who rocked her in her arms after her mother, about to get into the coach and travel to the city, detached her briskly from her overskirt which she clung to, crying. (Bombal 2006, 1) In the Spanish text the emotional component is present, and makes clear the cultural importance of the caregiver as the one person who provides emotional support when the mother is absent. This example shows the importance of Zoila’s role as a surrogate mother, who is able to understand the ‘pena’ [suffering] while the biological mother seems to ignore it. The English translation, however, does not express the idea of “acunar la pena,” [to cradle an uncontrollable sadness,] limiting the action to a physical movement that is expressed by the word ‘rock,’ which does not emphasize the purpose of the action, that is to alleviate the girl’s sadness. As a consequence of this omission, and with the loss of the feeling evoked through the visual imagery of the Spanish, the English version loses the dramatic depth of the source text. Also, the idea of “la vio nacer” has changed in impact when translated as “who knew her since

86

Translation and gender in South America

she was born.” The idea in Spanish implies that Zoila, the nana, was present at the birth and probably assisted with the delivery. The English translation reduces this to Zoila knowing Ana María since she was a baby, but does not evoke the birth. Regarding the category of child loss, this is a phenomenon that occurs globally, but in South America it has been related to Catholic guilt, since the strong influence of Catholicism on South American societies has perpetuated the idea that all women’s sexual activity is taboo. This has been especially applied to viewing extramarital sex, on the one hand, and seeing the labour of giving birth to a dead child as a sinful female flaw that receives punishment from God. Women were burdened with a lifelong secret responsibility because, culturally, the responsibility for the child’s well-being lay not with the family or the parents, but with the mother. An example of this subcategory occurs in Bombal’s The Shrouded Woman when Ana María, the protagonist, describes the miscarriage of her first baby, after she falls down the stairs. Again the nana, Zoila, is the one who assists her: Zoila vino a recogerme al pie de la escalera. El resto de la noche se lo pasó enjugando, muda llorosa, el río de sangre en que se disgregaba esa carne tuya mezclada a la mía. (Bombal 2015, 127) Zoila came to pick me up at the foot of the stairs. She spent the rest of the night silent and tearful, wiping off the blood that your flesh dispersed, mixed with mine. (Bombal 2006, 10) The translation to English again changes the intensity of the image in its symbolic and emotional aspects of loss and guilt. On the one hand, the word ‘muda’ in the original Spanish is used to describe the nana’s attitude. She was not only ‘silent,’ as in the English translation, but ‘mute,’ in complete silence by the shock of seeing Ana María’s blood spread over the floor. She cannot speak, but she also chooses not to. Further, the metaphor included in the original, “el río de sangre,” that compares the quantity of blood to a river is omitted in the English translation, reducing the visual image. Finally, the clause “en que se disgregaba esa carne tuya mezclada a la mía” is difficult to understand in the English version “that your flesh dispersed, mixed with mine” because of its grammatical structure: in Spanish it describes Ana María’s dead baby as a mixture of her own flesh and blood and that of her lover. The second category analyzed in this chapter is the presentation of the female body in this literature, and it includes markers related to body image and physical build, and women’s rebellion against patriarchal ideals of beauty. In South American Catholic societies, the female body has traditionally been modelled after ideas of perfection and saintliness and associated with chastity, purity, and motherhood. Despite the fact that anyone who breaks with this tradition will inevitably have to face social judgment, departures from tradition have occurred historically, and they are reflected in the works of the women writers analyzed here. The first marker observed is body image and physical build. A symbolic element that depicts this duality is ‘hair’: sometimes it appears as a symbol of beauty and femininity, according to traditional canons; at other times, it comes to life, as an extension of women’s desires or actions, or, in a masculinizing vision, as a “tangled cobweb that holds man even against his will” (Orsanic 2015, 224). Throughout The Shrouded Woman, hair reflects the feelings and state of mind of the protagonist. In the following excerpt, the narrator describes in detail Ana María’s hair as she lies dead

87

Rosa Basaure et al.

surrounded by her loved ones. At that moment, she is concerned about the way in which they have arranged her hair: Ya no le incomoda bajo la nuca esa espesa mata de pelo que durante su enfermedad se iba volviendo, minuto por minuto, más húmeda y más pesada. Consiguieron, al fin, desenmarañarla, alisarla, dividirla sobre la frente. Han descuidado, es cierto, recogerla. Pero ella no ignora que la masa sombría de una cabellera desplegada presta a toda mujer extendida y durmiendo un ceño de misterio, un perturbador encanto. (Bombal 2015, 109–110) And she is not bothered by the thick mat of hair under her neck that during her illness, had become, minute by minute, more damp and more heavy. They were finally able to disentangle it, smooth it out, and spread it over her forehead. However, they still had neglected to arrange it carefully. But she does not forget that the dark mass of her hair spread out that way gives a woman, who is stretched out and sleeping a look of mystery, and unusual charm. (Bombal 2006, 1) Traditionally, the image of hair – when it is tidy – evokes the feminine and the aesthetic; however, it can also be transgressive, as in the preceding example: Ana María expects her hair to be drawn back and tied, in the appropriate way, but she lies with her hair loose, a symbol of liberation. Just as in the preceding examples of motherhood and miscarriage, the figurative visual image of this unit is reduced in the translation, based on the nouns, adjectives, and verbs selected in the English version. On the one hand, the word mata (‘mata de pelo’) in Spanish refers to plants or bushes. When translating it to English the word ‘mat’ is used, which is a piece of thick carpet or thick material, thus distorting the reference to wild vegetation. The same phenomenon can be observed in the translation of the verb desenmarañar, which refers to maraña, a dense thicket. On the other hand, when referring to hair, the Spanish verb recogerla means to ‘tie up,’ which the English translation “arrange it carefully” does not provide. The protagonist thinks her family was not careful in tying up her hair, but with her hair loose she feels more mysterious, more interesting and disturbing: she feels free and liberated. It is important to mention that most determinants and verbs related to ‘hair’ in this novel are evidence of the importance of hair for South American cultures given that this feature is associated with and evokes nature’s fertility and motherhood, a factor that needs to be considered for the cultural aspect of its translation. The second subcategory concerns the rebellion against patriarchal ideas of beauty. The writers analyzed in this chapter, María Luisa Bombal and Silvina Ocampo, challenge the traditional beauty canons of their times and societies, causing tension between tradition and transgression. In their works they play with language, using comparisons and metaphors, and interweaving their own standards of beauty with the voices of the characters. The translation might be expected to incorporate this tension and duality in its depiction of women characters. In Cornelia Before the Mirror, Silvina Ocampo also shows how corporeality is subjugated to established standards. The mirror makes us face this phenomenon and see how “meditation before the mirror represents a way of understanding the body and the identity in a manner radically different from the masculine manner” (Klingenberg 1994, 271). The mirror becomes a revealing agent that gives Cornelia access to an intimate reality that in the end subverts the patriarchal authority. The following example evidences this transgression in terms of aesthetic 88

Translation and gender in South America

insights. Cornelia states that the mirror could be witness to a hypothetical poverty that would make her mop the floors of the house, a circumstance in which women would, in the eyes of many, look unattractive in comparison to someone who is well-dressed and wearing makeup. Cornelia finds belleza en el desaliño, una belleza natural que no tienen las otras con sus afeites. (Ocampo 2014, 11) a kind of beauty in their unkemptness, a natural beauty that other women with their makeup don’t have. (Ocampo 2015, 314)

From the point of view of the translation, the entire meaning of the text is kept; however, the word ‘makeup’ in English does not embody the full meaning of ‘afeites’ in Spanish, since the latter implies a certain degree of criticism towards makeup, understood as an element that intends to change the natural appearance of women up to a point that it could change their essence. When translating Silvina Ocampo, the rebellion against patriarchal beauty canons present in her work is an aspect to be considered. The interaction with the mirror leads Cornelia to reflect on what is natural and what is artificial, valuing the former and rebelling against the aesthetic impositions of her time. Regarding the category of violence, the two following subcategories were observed: abandonment and the role of women in male-chauvinist societies. In South America, violence motivated by the patriarchal values that have predominated in different times and places has created a context which is reflected in literature and is presented in the two texts analyzed here as more of a psychological than physical or corporeal violence. The first subcategory is related to a passive form of violence reflected in women’s submission to the established social order, where patriarchy, embodied by a priest, the father, the husband, or some other male figure, tells women what is correct and punishes them if they attempt to escape from a ‘normal’ life, in a restrictive marriage, for example. In Cornelia Before the Mirror, psychological violence is interwoven with the concepts of patriarchy and morality. An example of this is the rape that Cornelia invents to attract her friends Pablo and Elena’s attention, since they are having an extramarital relationship Cornelia is jealous of. As rape is one of the most serious acts of violence a woman can face, Cornelia expects her parents’ support and compassion, but instead she faces their rejection. Cornelia at some point recounts how Elena reported the fabricated rape story to Cornelia’s parents and how they reacted, Enfurecida, se lo dijo a mis padres, que tenían muchos hijos y son muy religiosos; ante mi impasibilidad, me echaron de la casa. (Ocampo 2014, 47) Furious, she told my parents, who have many children and are very religious. Because of my impassivity, they threw me out of the house. (Ocampo 2015, 341) The translation captures the meaning of the original version completely, and again the question of power arises as something to be noted when focusing on translating Ocampo: Cornelia experiences rejection and abandonment by her parents, who, she reports, throw her out for her 89

Rosa Basaure et al.

‘impassivity’ at having been ‘raped.’ From a cultural perspective, the rules imposed by the Catholic religion and the established patriarchal order crush any emotional behaviour that would lead the mother to show maternal support. The moral cultural baggage behind this punishment and the religious constraints predominant at the time are aspects to be considered in translation. Finally, in regard to the second subcategory – the roles women play in male-chauvinist societies – in Cornelia Before the Mirror, Cornelia’s mother acts according to the existing strict moral order, curtailing Cornelia’s freedom in line with the patriarchal parameters of women’s proper conduct. When Cornelia talks to her friend Elena about wanting to become an actress, she points to the barriers she has encountered: Cuando le dije a Elena que yo quería ser actriz, me contestó que mamá se opondría: y fue verdad. No soporta que le hable de teatros o actrices. . . . Verás si no me odia. Para ella, en primer término, están las ideas morales, y en segundo término, yo. Además es ciega. (Ocampo 2014, 40) When I told Elena that I wanted to be an actress she answered by saying that my mother would be against it. And it was true. She can’t stand my talk of theatres and actresses. . . . She hates me, you’ll see. For her, her moral ideas come first, then me second. Besides she is blind. (Ocampo 2015, 335) The negative associations with ‘actriz/actress’ here point to other issues that arise concerning women’s activities in the cultural and historical contexts of South America. In both the original and the translation, the image of the actress represents an unacceptable activity for women, as it is related to debauchery and bohemia, a vision shared among cultures at that time.

Conclusions The intersection of translation studies and gender studies will continue to raise debates due to the changing contexts where social movements consider both women and sexual diversity as subjects of concern. These changing notions will have an impact on new visions of gender and cultural particularities that literature will reflect and translation will have to take into account. Regarding gender markers, the two works just discussed reflect South American culture in the historical period in which these two writers lived and based their works. For translation, three key factors are important in approaching this discourse: patriarchal values, the sociohistorical context, and the expression of feelings and emotions. The two writers approach the topics related to motherhood, the female body, and violence with a certain estrangement from the patriarchal order. The main female characters are caught in struggles between accepting and rebelling against imposed subordination, and they experience radical changes that lead them to lives of transmutation or thoughts of death as escape. Concerning the English translations of the three categories of markers, the original meaning in Spanish may be reflected to some extent, but a partial loss of emotional depth in the figurative language is consistently observed, mainly in terms of structural and semantic considerations. Translation has to consider women’s realities in the social context of the original writer, understanding cultural differences that will enable a more comprehensive transfer. The ideological role 90

Translation and gender in South America

of translation as a political tool to make visible gender realities from a South American perspective should be relevant and, therefore, emphasized, especially considering that most research on South American culture and translation has been conducted from American or European viewpoints. Contributions from South American scholars are urgently needed. We may conclude that the intention of translation cannot be limited to accounting for what is strictly cultural; translations of such women authors must also transmit women’s experiences and reflect both female cultural elements and the discourse markers used to evoke them. These elements not only transmit a particular regional context, but they represent the voices and conflicts of women in a global scenario.

Future directions Analyzing the transfer of text markers reflecting motherhood, the female body and violence from Spanish to English in texts written by South American women writers is only a first step in defining elements that represent the voices and the conflicts that women face. Many other questions can be explored regarding the relationships between culture, gender notions, discourse, and translation. With this in mind, future research might be directed towards defining other gender related markers in texts written by women authors in different regions of the world. Further, other South American women writers could be studied for the same gender-related markers in their literary works, analyzing how those markers have evolved, as the notion of gender has changed, and how they are translated into other cultural situations and contexts. The discussion in this chapter has opened new possibilities to develop translation theory from a South American perspective, as this region has historically taken in foreign theories to understand local processes. This translatological reflection will contribute to a regional approach to translation, becoming a communicative channel for South American women from diverse linguistic and cultural backgrounds and expressing their experiences through literature from a particular identitary perspective. At the same time, this reflection, particularly regarding gender-related topics, responds to the feminist movements’ demands that have raised gender awareness in the region over the past years, promoting and making possible intercultural encounters as egalitarian interactions.

Related topics Latin American women’s writing; gender studies in Latin America; translation of Latin American women’s writing; translation, gender, and cross-cultural communication

Further reading Bombal, María Luisa. 1995. House of Mist and The Shrouded Woman. 1st ed. Self-translated by Bombal María Luisa. Austin: University of Texas Press. The translation by Baker presented in this chapter is based on Bombal’s self translation from 1948. This may open the research to the self-translation topic for further studies. However, this new revised selftranslation also presents the ideas and conclusions proposed in this chapter. Floria, Carlos Alberto and César García Belsunce. 2009. Historia de los Argentinos. 2nd ed. Buenos Aires: El Ateneo. The authors avoid the classical ideological dichotomies of the studies of Argentinian history to approach the events and milestones of almost five centuries in an objective and balanced narration. Llanos, Bernardita. 2009. Passionate Subjects/Split Subjects in Twentieth-century Literature in Chile. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press. 91

Rosa Basaure et al.

This book analyzes the works of Chilean writers Marta Brunet, Maria Luisa Bombal, and Diamela Eltit and how they develop a counternarrative to the Chilean literary canon, showing how motherhood and womanhood inevitably conflict in the public sphere and rights of citizenship. Stuven, Ana María and Joaquín Fermandois, eds. 2013. Historia de las mujeres en Chile, vol. I. Santiago de Chile: Taurus. The editors gathered ten papers written by different historians who studied the contributions made by different groups of Chilean women between the 16th and the 19th centuries. They depict how these women renounced their traditional roles and tried to participate in society in the way men did.

References Bassnett, Susan, ed. 1990. Knives and Angels: Women Writers in Latin America. London and New Jersey: Zed Books Ltd. Bergmann, Emilie, Janet Greenberg, Gwen Kirkpatrick, Francine Masiello, Francesca Miller, Marta Morello-Frosch, Kathleen Newman, and Marie-Louise Pratt. 1992. Women, Culture, and Politics in Latin America. Seminar on Feminism and Culture in Latin America. Berkeley: University of California Press. Bombal, María Luisa. 2006. The Shrouded Woman (As she looks back at her life) (La Amortajada). Translated by Armand Baker. State University of New York-Albany. Available at: http://www.armandfbaker. com/translations/novels/la_amortajada.pdf [Accessed 27 Mar. 2019]. Bombal, María Luisa. 2015. La última niebla/La amortajada. Santiago: Planetalector. Byrkjeland, Bo. 2013. The Reinvention of the Original: The Self-translations of María Luisa Bombal and Rosario Ferré. PhD. dissertation, University of Bergen. Available at: http://bora.uib.no/bitstream/handle/ 1956/7847/dr-thesis-2013-Bo-Byrkjeland.pdf?sequence=1 [Accessed 27 Mar. 2019]. Castro-Klaren, Sara, Sylvia Molloy, and Beatriz Sarlo, eds. 1991. Women’s Writing in Latin America: An Anthology. Boulder: Westview Press. De Ramón, Armando. 2003. Historia de Chile: desde la invasión incaica hasta nuestros días. 1500–2000. Santiago de Chile: Catalonia. Espinoza-Vera, Marcia. 2009. Unsubordinated Women: Modernist Fantasies of Liberation in Silvina Ocampo’s Short Stories. Hecate [online], 35(1), 219–227, 321–322. Flotow, Luise Von, ed. 2011. Translating Women. Ottawa: Ottawa University Press. Furukawa, Hiroko. 2010. De-Feminising Translation: Making Women Visible in Japanese Translation. PhD dissertation, School of Literature and Creative Writing University of East Anglia. Available at: https:// pdfs.semanticscholar.org/c454/4a5e0f433746dba92632ffdf27067eaa5b39.pdf [Accessed 28 Aug. 2019]. Klingenberg, Patricia. 1994. Silvina Ocampo frente al espejo. Inti: Revista de literatura Hispánica [online], 1 (40), 271. Available at: https://digitalcommons.providence.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1732& context=inti [Accessed 16 Mar. 2018]. Lindstrom, Naomi. 1998. Latin American Women’s Writing and Gender Issues in Criticism. in Naomi Lindstrom, ed., The Social Conscience of Latin American Writing. Austin: University of Texas Press, 115–151. Llanos, Bernardita. 2009. Passionate Subjects/Split Subjects in Twentieth-century Literature in Chile. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press. Mahler, Anne Garland. 2017. Global South. Oxford Bibliographies in Literary and Critical Theory. Available at: https://globalsouthstudies.as.virginia.edu/what-is-global-south [Accessed 8 Aug. 2019]. Ocampo, Silvina. 2014. Cornelia frente al Espejo. Buenos Aires: Lumen. Ocampo, Silvina. 2015. Thus Were Their Faces. Translated by Daniel Balderston. New York: New York Review Books. O’Neill, Kevin Lewis. 2016. Religion and Gender in Latin America. in Virginia Garrard-Burnett, Paul Freston, and Stephen Dove, Stephen, eds., The Cambridge History of Religions in Latin America. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Orsanic, Lucía. 2015. Mujeres velludas. La imagen de la puella pilosa como signo de monstruosidad femenina en fuentes medievales y renacentistas, y su proyección en los siglos posteriores. Lemir [online], 19, 217–242. Sáenz Quesada, María. 2001. La Argentina: Historia del país y de su gente. Buenos Aires: Sudamérica. Stuven, Ana María and Joaquín Fermandois, eds. 2013. Historia de las mujeres en Chile, vol. I. Santiago de Chile: Taurus. Suárez, Carolina. 2013. El tratamiento subversivo de los estereotipos de género y edad en la obra de Silvina Ocampo. Anales de Literatura Hispanoamericana, Universidad Complutense de Madrid [online], 42, 367– 378. Available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.5209/rev_ALHI.2013.v42.43672 [Accessed 29 Mar. 2019]. 92

7 Translating metonymies that construct gender Testimonial narratives by 20th-century Latin American women Gabriela Yañez

Introduction/definitions This chapter presents a study of translations of testimonial narratives by Latin American women which constructs gender relations through metonymy. It is inspired by the many testimonial narratives written by women over the course of the 20th century, in which they narrate their experiences of dictatorial and oppressive male regimes and raise gender issues across languages and cultures. In Europe, the atrocities committed by Franco’s regime in Spain,1 the Stalinist purges in the Soviet Union,2 the Holocaust and World War II, and the Yugoslav wars in the 1990s3 gave rise to texts such as Lydia Chukovskaya’s Going Under (1972) in the Soviet Union, Ana María Matute’s Primera memoria4 (1959) in Spain, Reska Weiss’ Journey Through Hell (1961) in Germany, and Gertrude Schneider’s Journey into Terror (1981) in Austria. Testimonies of trauma were conveyed by Afghan female poets like Nadia Anjuman (Marie 2015) in the context of Taliban atrocities committed against women and by Algerian writers Assia Djebar and Aïcha Lemsine, who recounted women’s experiences in the Algerian war of independence. In African countries, the Somali and Nigerian civil wars in 1991 and 1967, respectively, and the Rwandan genocide in 19945 – to name but a few – inspired women writers’ novels,6 such as Marie Béatrice Umutesi’s Surviving the Slaughter (2004) or Never Again by Flora Nwapa (1975). Twentieth-century Latin America was no exception to terror. The FARC actions in Colombia and several coups, including the Pinochet coup in Chile and the military Junta in Argentina,7 provided the scenario for writers like Isabel Allende, Nora Strejilevich, Rigoberta Menchú, and many other women to provide testimonies of the horrors of Latin American dictatorships.8 In fact, the testimonial narrative – or testimonio – as a literary genre rose to prominence in Latin America in the 1960s as a result of turmoil, exploitation, social instability, and revolution (Nance 2006).9 Here, “testimony” refers to eyewitness accounts of historical events, usually associated with trauma and human rights violations. Considered a hybrid form between history and fiction, orality and writing, these narratives originate in a socio-historical event and articulate a version of it (Narváez 1983). In this framework, women victims assimilate and express a collective experience in literature, through which a polyphony of other voices, lives, and experiences are also evoked (Beverly 2008). 93

Gabriela Yañez

Against this backdrop, Latin American women’s narratives testifying against gender-based oppression and violence in the 20th century have proliferated and been translated and disseminated worldwide. By articulating denunciation and resistance, literary works of this kind and their translations have become an instrument for social transformation, for testimonials by women are not only documentation of events by survivors and witnesses, but they also seek to expose gendered violence and, ultimately, subvert the status quo. In this context, the translation of such texts plays a prominent role as a “tool and model of cross-border dialogue, resistance, solidarity and activism in pursuit of justice and equality for all” (Castro and Ergun 2017, 1). It is of interest to feminist translation studies to examine the discourse strategies activated in the translation of such activist women’s texts in order to shed light on how such cross-border mobility works to reposition and transform female subjectivities and world views (Alvarez et al. 2014). Discursively, women’s testimonials stage a construction of reality – rather than a copy of it – by means of which their resistant subjectivity is reconfigured (Strejilevich 1991; Zambrano and Strejilevich 2016). Therefore, texts cannot be taken as a reflection or representation of the witnesses’ experiences but rather as a refraction mediated by memory, intention, and ideology (Sklodowska 1985). The translation of these testimonials is a further refraction, where mimesis, i.e. the pursuit of real-life representation in literature, is far less important than poesis, the writer’s/translator’s artistic recreation of events in the text. Further, the fact that these literary works may be produced either in exile or in inxile (Strejilevich 1991, 2) has a bearing on the writing strategies, and subsequently perhaps on the translation strategies. Different discourse mechanisms operate in the source texts. In the first case, alienated, estranged, and exiled women create their narratives to appeal to a more international audience. They often resort to discourse clarification procedures, such as notes, glosses, and digressions on the political situation for an audience who is not placed at risk by reading this material. Texts written in exile may be more accessible and readily available for dissemination through translation as well as discursively more daring, bold, and descriptive – and, therefore, perhaps more effective and ostensibly subversive. Women who write in inxile live in isolation and turn to a more surreptitious type of writing. Allegories, metaphors, metonymies, and ambiguity abound in this literature, targeted at those readers who remain in the militarized space and are surrounded by repression. Metonymy is of special importance, evoking with one word or expression a whole history of women’s subjection to a position inferior to that of men. Given the peculiarities of such a literary corpus, articulating Latin American women’s testimonials with questions of how gender relations are constructed through the use of metonymic language and then translated for international audiences offers a rich theoretical and methodological framework of analysis. It means understanding how gender is discursively inscribed in the text by means of metonymic imagery, rather than with extra-textual – social or historical – information. In fact, this chapter relies on metonymy as a powerful evocative mechanism for reconstructing gender relations in the translation of women’s testimonials, and explores how metonymy – based on contiguity – mobilizes concrete objects such as the “washing board” to evoke women’s confinement to household chores. Here, contiguity refers to how certain expressions and terms, such as “washing board” or “apron” are used to represent experiences of a specific culture and a specific time, associations that will face a test as the text moves into English translation, into a different culture and time. This chapter provides a brief review of some prominent theoretical perspectives on metonymy in the literary field, and on metonymic aspects of translation. This is followed by an overview of the research conducted on the translation of testimonial literature – written by women – in the 20th century. In a separate section, the English translations of gender-related metonymies in three representative women’s testimonios of different Latin American conflicts are analyzed. 94

Translating metonymies

First, we examine excerpts from Elizabeth Burgos’s Me llamo Rigoberta Menchú y así me nació la conciencia10 (1983) (I, Rigoberta Menchú. An Indian Woman in Guatemala, 1984), which details the genocide of indigenous populations in Guatemala. Then, we introduce Nora Strejilevich’s Una sola muerte numerosa (1997) (A Single Numberless Death, 2002), a testimonial of the last dictatorship in Argentina. Finally, we look into Gioconda Belli’s El país bajo mi piel. Memorias de amor y guerra11 (2001) (The Country Under My Skin. A Memoir of Love and War, 2002), bearing witness to the guerrillas’ fight against the Somoza dictatorship in Nicaragua. In the last section, we suggest some directions for further research on the topic.

Historical theoretical perspectives Metonymy: an overview Metonymy has been studied in several fields, including (cognitive) linguistics,12 textual13 and literary studies,14 and – to a lesser extent – in translation studies. From a literary perspective, metonymy – Greek for “a change of name” – may be defined broadly as an expression used in place of another with which it is closely associated in experience, e.g. the “crown” can stand for a king (Abrams [1957] 1999). This entails that the metonymic relationships are established between two terms which are contiguous in time and space. In his seminal paper “Two Aspects of Language and Two Types of Aphasic Disturbances,” Roman Jakobson (1956/1995) describes metonymic relations on the basis of semantic contiguity, and distinguishes them from metaphoric relations, which he associates with semantic similarity. From this approach, “contiguity” is considered as “the neighbourly correlation of aspects and elements within a network of associations given by a joint frame of experience” (Burkhardt 2010, 249). This view of metonymy posits metonymic language as dependent on extrinsic accidental relations rather than on some predetermined natural essence. In expressions such as “the apron and the rubber gloves” (Strejilevich 2002, 27), the metonymic terms “apron” and “rubber gloves” evoke women’s position within a patriarchal society by relying on the contiguous association between the two objects and women’s role as housekeepers. This metonymic use of language reveals the arbitrariness and the conventionality of figurative meaning (Genette 1972; de Man 1979). Thus, intrinsic to metonymy are codes and cultural conventions which are bound in time and space and are, therefore, contingent (Eco 1979). The spatial and temporal contiguity that connects metonymy with experience adds a socio-historical dimension to this figure of speech which is not necessarily easy to reconstruct in translation. In testimonial literature, metonymy constitutes a prominent mechanism helping to expose culturally determined constructs with regard to women and their place in mainstream male-dominated societies.

Critical issues and topics Testimonial narratives and translation From a translation studies perspective, research on 20th-century testimonial literature is not extensive. Raquel de Pedro Ricoy (2012) finds that one focus on these texts in translation studies is the study of how the Self in the source text is portrayed as the Other in the target text, due to power relations between cultures, languages, and groups. In her work, de Pedro Ricoy (2012) looks into the translation of Cuban testimonial literature, by both men and women, with a view to analyzing how ‘otherness’ is materialized in the source text and how it is handled in the target text. She is concerned with the translation of texts originating in non-hegemonic cultures. At a 95

Gabriela Yañez

local level, she looks into culture-specific discourse elements in both texts, in order to examine how the foreignness of the source text can be maintained while ensuring comprehension in the target text. She weighs the translators’ choice of overall strategy in terms of the dichotomy between foreignization and naturalization (Venuti 1995). In regard to the translation of Holocaust testimonies, Peter Davies (2014) contributes to an understanding of how translation reveals the cultural specificities of these texts, and also how it can turn a text into a testimony. Interested in the effects of and influences on translation in theorizing the genre, Davies explores the negotiations that take place between translators and editors to determine how the genre is conceived of in both source and target texts. In his view, translators of Holocaust testimonies must make these testimonies recognizable as truth telling, i.e. they need to fulfil the truth criteria expected from the genre. Therefore, editors and translators use paratexts to explain and compensate for the extra layers of meaning that are added in the translation process and the co-creation of the text by the translator. Davies concludes that, on occasion, texts can even become testimonies as a result of translation. Another contribution to the study of the translation of testimonial narratives is by Christi Merrill in a postcolonial context. Merrill (2014) explores the emancipatory power of translation in Kausalya Baisantry’s book Dohra Abhishaap (2009) (Doubly Cursed). This life story is the first written in Hindi by a Dalit woman. A feminist and activist, Baisantry writes an account of women’s fight across generations, with traces of the Latin American testimonio genre. The novel evinces a feminist critique of gender and caste inequality in contemporary India. As the translator of the book, Merrill studies the use of the genre as a political strategy and an instrument for effecting social changes, and argues for the importance of feminist selection and dissemination strategies. She examines how the subversive power of the source text can be transmitted to the language of the former colonizer. She calls for rethinking “English’s mediating role beyond top-down colonial paradigms in such a way that takes into account transnational, translingual generic expectations” (Merrill 2016, 130). In her English translation, Merrill opts to leave certain Hindi, Marathi, and Rajasthani words untranslated. A case in point is the expression “harijan bai,”15 a mainstream discriminatory denomination for a woman deemed untouchable. By retaining the phrase, the translation draws attention to the patronizing caste politics and gendered discriminating practices in India. By adopting a feminist translation approach, the target text contributes to portraying the character as the hero of her own story – an untouchable girl riding her bicycle to college was inconceivable in 1930s colonial India – (Merrill 2019), while bridging the language and cultural gaps with an accompanying glossary.

Current contributions and research As with research on testimonial narratives, studies of the use of metonymy in the field of translation studies are not abundant. Here, it is worth acknowledging the relevance of Maria Tymoczko’s ([1999] 2014) conceptualization of metonymy as applied to the study of the translation of early Irish literature. To her, metonymy is a factor in literature that evokes certain aspects of a culture and makes them emblematic of the culture as a whole. In the same vein, she applies the concept of metonymy to the way in which translation can only partially encode attributes or aspects of the source text which then come to represent the whole. Tymoczko observes that translating the literary and culturally metonymic aspects of the source text poses difficulties when the cultural distance is too large and the source metonymies are unreadable for the intended target audience. Accepting that there is always a gain and a loss in translation, she concludes that translation is by definition metonymic since translators select certain elements of the source text to preserve, and have to drop the rest. 96

Translating metonymies

In this section, we observe how metonymic language serves to construct gender in Me llamo Rigoberta Menchú (Burgos 1983/2007), Una sola muerte numerosa (Strejilevich 1997), and El país bajo mi piel (Belli 2001). We examine excerpts from these three Latin American women’s testimonios in Spanish, and look into the challenges that metonymy poses for their English translations.

Me llamo Rigoberta Menchú (Burgos [1983] 2007) Transcribed by Venezuelan anthropologist Elizabeth Burgos, Rigoberta Menchu’s testimonial account was made into the book Me llamo Rigoberta Menchú. Published in 1983, the book immediately rose to prominence, with translations into 12 languages worldwide (Virgen 2013). In the text, Rigoberta Menchú, a Guatemalan indigenous woman of Quiché Maya descent, bears witness to the oppression faced by the indigenous populations, systematically slaughtered over centuries in the name of progress not only in Guatemala but all across the Latin American continent (Burgos [1983] 2007). While denouncing (post)colonial genocide, Menchu’s testimonial narrative immerses the reader in a minutely detailed description of the indigenous communities’ private lives, recreating birth and marriage ceremonies, male and female roles, and maternity. The narration is a multifaceted testimony, namely that of an indigenous person, a peasant, a woman, an activist, and a feminist. In the extracts that follow, we explore how metonymic language functions as an effective rhetorical procedure for evoking the gender relations entrenched in Guatemalan society. Allí, le entregaron su piedra de moler,16 su olla que tiene que estar junto a ella para lavar su nixtamal, para lavar sus trastos, para lavar el maíz. (Burgos [1983] 2007, 103) There she is given her grinding stone and her cooking pot. She must always keep her pot for washing the nixtamal, her kitchen utensils and the maize. (Burgos 1984, 77) La niñita también tiene que tener su tablita para lavar. Y esos tienen que ser sus juguetes, sus materiales que va a usar cuando sea grande. (Burgos [1983] 2007, 36) A little girl will have her washing board and all the things she will need when she grows up. (Burgos 1984, 15) “Nunca hija dejes de llevar delantal”, decía mi madre. Precisamente así se marca la etapa de la entrada en la juventud; después de los diez años. (Burgos [1983] 2007, 236) “Never forget to wear your apron, my child,” my mother used to say. Our tenth year actually marks the stage when we enter womanhood. (Burgos 1984, 211) Así es cuando yo sentí lo que mi hermana había sentido. Claro, mi hermana estuvo con otro señor. (Burgos [1983] 2007, 118) 97

Gabriela Yañez

That was when I felt what my sister had felt although, of course, my sister had been with another family. (Burgos 1984, 92) In all of the foregoing passages, the indigenous women’s role in Guatemalan patriarchal society is revealed in the source text through a network of metonymic associations. The expressions “piedra de moler” (grinding stone), “olla” (pot), “trastos” (implements), “tablita para lavar” (little washing board), and “llevar delantal” (wear an apron) all refer metonymically to the indigenous women’s responsibilities for household chores, serving as mothers or wives. Furthermore, metonymy helps to expose gender and class differences. In “mi hermana estuvo con otro señor” (my sister was with another master), in the last passage, the masculine noun “señor” (master) evokes the bourgeois house where the character’s sister was forced to work as a servant. This metonymy exhibits the contiguous association between man and power, and thus the hierarchical relations in this patriarchal societal structure. The translation, on occasion, recreates gender-loaded metonymies in more explicit terms, thereby establishing different metonymic relations. Other times, the target text erases all traces of metonymic language. For example, in the first excerpt, the noun “olla” (pot) activates associations by contiguity to women’s fixed tasks in the indigenous community. In Spanish, “olla” (pot) alludes to a container used not only for cooking but also for boiling water and other purposes.17 In the source text, the interpretation is controlled by the subsequent specification, i.e. washing the nixtamal. Rendered in English as “cooking pot,” it guides the reader in only one direction: the kitchen. Similarly, the noun “trastos” (implements) refers to the set of tools used for certain activities18 performed by the indigenous women, like washing maize. In the target text, “trastos” (implements) is translated as “kitchen utensils,” also limiting the purview of women’s actions. In this way, the target text establishes metonymic associations that reinforce gender stereotypes which, unlike the source text tropes, do not recreate solely indigenous practices and world views but may also refer to mainstream women.19 In regard to the cross-border activism that feminist translation studies calls for, such relocation of figurative meaning into more mainstream-related gendered categories homogenizes the text and, therefore, reduces the potential of translation to act as a locus of resistance “in pursuit of liberation, equality and social justice” (Castro and Ergun 2017, 4) for indigenous women. In the third fragment, “llevar delantal” (wear an apron) also refers metonymically to a girl assuming an imposed female role in society. And again, the following sentence points to what it means for a girl to wear an apron. It is a sign of maturity, of leaving her childhood behind and fulfilling the expectations of society. Even though the translation conveys the image of the apron, it downplays its metonymic significance by emphasizing the girl’s “tenth year” – her age – rather than the change in roles this “apron” imposes and which is embodied in the figure of speech, namely her entry into womanhood. On the other hand, the metonymy “señor” (master) in the last extract, which as stated here refers to the employer’s house, is rendered as “family” in English. Here the metonymy disappears altogether, with the translation leaving no trace of the trope or of the gender-based hierarchy it evokes. The target text repositions the resistant female subjectivity of the source text proposing a more gender-neutral recreation of the female subject for the readers of the translation, undermining the potential of feminist translation praxes to convey resistance and activism across borders.

Una sola muerte numerosa (Strejilevich 1997) Argentine writer Nora Strejilevich was also a victim of a male-controlled society. Kidnapped in 1977 during the last Argentine dictatorship (1976–1983), she was kept prisoner in the 98

Translating metonymies

clandestine detention and extermination centre “Club Atlético” in Buenos Aires. After her release, Strejilevich went into exile in Canada, where she decided to give testimony of her experience of the human rights violations committed during the Argentine dictatorial regime through literature. Strejilevich narrates the untold and unofficial history through her testimony Una sola muerte numerosa (1997), her most acclaimed literary work. The book was awarded the National Award Letras de Oro (Golden Letters) for Hispanic Literature in the United States, and was translated into English (A Single Numberless Death, 2002) and into German (Ein einzelner vielfacher Tod, 2014). Strejilevich underscores the place occupied by Latin American women in testimonial literature (Zambrano and Strejilevich 2016). She affirms that women’s characteristic way of writing, speaking, and thinking – typically regarded as a flaw of the “weaker sex” – is a praiseworthy virtue and a political act. For her, the testimonio genre is closely connected to women, since by writing their testimonies women make public what others might think belongs in the private sphere. Strejilevich’s own text Una sola muerte numerosa attests to this. The following fragments reveal how women’s private life is brought to the fore in the Spanish text and how significant a role metonymic language plays in this process. La veo amasar su pasado en la estrecha cocina de madera que da al patio solitario. (Strejilevich 1997, 32) I watch her kneading the past in the narrow wood kitchen that looks out onto the lonely patio. (Strejilevich 2002, 26) Ante todo, tu aspecto señorial no va con el delantal y los guantes de goma. (Strejilevich 1997, 34) You have a stately presence, an aristocratic look that doesn’t go with the apron and the rubber gloves. (Strejilevich 2002, 27) Metonymic expressions such as “el delantal” (“the apron”), “los guantes de goma” (“the rubber gloves”), and “amasar su pasado” (“kneading the past”), employed in the source text to evoke women’s status and role in Argentina’s dictatorial regime, are recreated in the translated passages. Captive in the confined space of the house and reduced to a subservient role that is performed for a patriarchal figure, women are portrayed in the duties imposed upon them as housewives. The translation of these extracts exposes how the kitchen becomes women’s cage. Past dreams and the freedom of youth vanish when the heavy burden of social dictates falls on the character. Then, all that is left for the woman is “kneading the past” in the kitchen, with the apron and the rubber gloves on, all of them metonymies of her place in society. Here the translation easily transfers the metonymic language, thus easing the cross-border transit of the disruptive mechanisms which operate in the source text to counteract mainstream hegemonic discourses about gender. In the second fragment, the source text further emphasizes gender relations by establishing a metonymic contrast between “aspecto señorial” (master-like appearance) and “el delantal y los guantes de goma” (the apron and the rubber gloves). In Spanish, “señorial” (master-like) alludes to “señorío” (mastership) – meaning the territory belonging to the master (señor) – and, consequently, expresses mastery or command.20 Here,“aspecto señorial” (master-like appearance) conveys a positive evaluation through a man-related metonymic expression, as opposed to “el delantal y los 99

Gabriela Yañez

guantes de goma” (the apron and the rubber gloves), evoking the woman as a degraded female figure. In this manner, the source text introduces a metonymic binary opposition between the male and the female figures in positive and negative terms, respectively. In the translated text, however, the expression “a stately presence, an aristocratic look” removes this shade of meaning. It conveys the notion of “dignity,” but not that of male superiority. In so doing, the translation relocates figurative meaning in a genderless terrain, presenting the reader with a less complex interpretation of the gendered relations of power evoked in the source text. From a feminist translation perspective, this lack of engagement with the rhetoricity of the source text advances a more gender-neutral version of the source culture. Metonymy in Strejilevich’s narrative also brings to light how men’s control over women is exerted through physical and sexual violence. Interminable año de observar cuerpos deslizarse por la calle con su pesada carga sexual. . . . En la hora de historia imagino ejércitos de violadores, en la de geografía continentes de carne, montañas como esa barriga. (Strejilevich 1997, 21) An endless year of observing bodies tread down the street, each with its heavy sexual cargo. . . . During history class I envision armies of rapists, in geography I imagine continents of flesh, mountains of fat like that belly. (Strejilevich 2002, 16) In this passage, the different metonymies operate together to create a female perspective on men and women. The emphasis on human bodies and their sexuality reveals the narrator’s anxiety over male sexual dominance. Indeed, the narrative exhibits women’s physical vulnerability – the “heavy sexual cargo” – and the threat of sexual assault by men. This idea is supported by the metonymical reference to male figures as rapists (violadores), flesh (carne), and a fat belly (barriga) – in allusion to the sexual assault the character suffered in a lift when returning home from school. Here the translation has reconstructed the same network of metonymic relations as in the source text. It is worth noting that the last metonymy has been adjusted to preserve the full meaning potential of the source trope. In the source text, the Spanish noun “barriga” (fat belly) conveys both the meaning of belly and that of fat, and presents a negative evaluation on the part of the enunciator. The metonymy embodies not only the reference to the assaulting man but also to the disgust the girl feels towards him. In the translation, this metonymy has been recreated through the noun phrase “fat like that belly.” Certainly, the noun “belly” alone does not express the full meaning of the source text. The translation manages to compensate for the loss of meaning with the noun phrase, thereby incorporating the notion of fatness, which is so significant in the source text. The relative ease with which issues of sexuality travel through translation in these cases suggests a narrower cultural gap between the source and target texts. This reveals how feminist translation strategies may be influenced by the type of discourse involved. It appears that the more universal the metonymic categories at play in the source text – vis-à-vis the allusion to culturally entrenched concepts and practices – the more accessible and easy to reconstruct they become for translation.

El país bajo mi piel (Belli 2001) Around the same time that Strejilevich was enduring the atrocities of the dictatorship, Gioconda Belli was involved in the Nicaraguan revolution as a guerrilla member of the Sandinist Party 100

Translating metonymies

(FSLN). In 2000, Belli, a Nicaraguan poet, writer, and political activist, wrote El país bajo mi piel as a testimony21 of the revolution she actively participated in to overthrow the Somoza dictatorship in Nicaragua (1979). The book, published in 2001, presents readers with the feminist testimony of a woman, mother, and revolutionary. As in the previous testimonial narratives, discourse is used here to subvert the forms of representation of women and the social rules imposed by the patriarchal Nicaraguan bourgeois. Within the Nicaraguan society of the time, women were expected to yield to the dictates of the mainstream male‑governed society, i.e. marriage and motherhood (Palazón Sáez 2006), as Belli evokes in the following extracts. Dos cosas que yo no decidí decidieron mi vida: el país donde nací y el sexo con que vine al mundo. Quizás porque mi madre sintió mi urgencia de nacer cuando estaba en el Estadio Somoza en Managua viendo un juego de béisbol, el calor de las multitudes fue mi destino. Quizás a eso se debió mi temor a la soledad, mi amor por los hombres, mi deseo de trascender limitaciones biológicas o domésticas y ocupar tanto espacio como ellos en el mundo. (Belli 2001, 11) Two things decided my life: my country and my sex. Perhaps because my mother went into labor when she was at a baseball game in Managua’s stadium, it was my destiny to be drawn to the warmth of crowds. My response to the multitude was an early indication I would fear solitude and be attracted to the world of men, biological functions and domestic life notwithstanding. (Belli 2002, ix) In this fragment, shifts in the translation of the metonymies of the source text efface some layers of meaning. The metonymic expressions “el país donde nací” (the country where I was born) and “el sexo con que vine al mundo” (the sex I was born with) suggest socially and culturally determined roles for women in the country. In both phrases, lack of volition becomes a prominent element of meaning, stressing the impositions Nicaraguan women suffer. In contrast, the translation erases the involuntariness and the deterministic view of women’s fate that are clearly announced in the source text by using the possessive adjective “my” (“my country” and “my sex”) to express belonging and imply a certain affinity. Furthermore, it can be observed that the translation also displaces part of the meaning of the source metonymies by the end of the passage. In “mi amor por los hombres” (my love for men), the Spanish text conveys a more forceful meaning than the translation “be attracted to the world of men.” First, the notion of “attraction” lacks the expressive strength of the source noun “amor” (love). Second, the metonymy “the world of men” can be interpreted simply as referring to her being allowed to perform the same activities as men. Certainly, the source trope “los hombres” (men) appears to be more encompassing, evoking the male figure and, by contiguity, men’s highly esteemed position and status in society and all that comes to represent, such as freedom and independence. This is opposed to women’s biological or domestic constraints (“limitaciones biológicas o domésticas”), which prevent them from taking up as much space as men in the world (“ocupar tanto espacio como ellos en el mundo”). Again, here the translation shifts part of the meaning of the metonymy by translating “limitaciones” (constraints) as “functions” and “life,” respectively, thus eliminating a relevant aspect of meaning. Displacements are made more manifest in the omission of the last metonymy “ocupar espacio” (take up space), which is left untranslated. These translated passages fail to function as North-South vectors of gender inequality, with the English translations demonstrating a more gender-neutral 101

Gabriela Yañez

re-inscription of Latin American feminist knowledge, which skews the gender-related power relations the source text evokes. Los sueños revolucionarios encontraron en mí tierra fértil. Lo mismo sucedió con otros sueños propios de mi género. Sólo que mis príncipes azules fueron guerrilleros y que mis hazañas heroicas las hice al mismo tiempo que cambiaba pañales y hervía mamaderas. (Belli 2001, 12) Revolutionary dreams found fertile ground in my young mind, as did other, more conventional kinds of dreams, although my knights in shining armor were guerrillas and my heroic exploits would be performed between changing diapers and boiling baby bottles. (Belli 2002, ix) Sin renunciar a ser mujer, creo que he logrado también ser hombre. (Belli 2001, 12) Without renouncing my femininity, I think I have also managed to live like a man. (Belli 2002, x) In both excerpts, the translation oscillates between recreating the source tropes and establishing its own metonymic connections. Like in the Spanish text, “changing diapers” and “boiling baby bottles” are metonymic for women’s tasks, which are contrasted to the “heroic exploits” the character was engaged in. On the other hand, the target text introduces a metonymy not present in the source text when translating “mí” (me) as “my young mind,” and leaves no trace of gender when rendering “género” (gender) as “conventional.” The metonymic use of “género” (“sueños propios de mi género” [the dreams that are typical of my gender]) takes on a particular significance in Belli’s feminist text, one of whose main concerns is gender. In the same vein, “ser mujer” (be a woman) and “ser hombre” (be a man) in the last passage are strong metonymic parallel structures in this context. They create culturally bound roles which the female character has managed to balance. In the target text, these metonymies are translated as “femininity” and “live like a man,” translations which lack the expressive strength and the evocative force of the Spanish, which translated literally would say “be a woman/be a man.” All of these shifts in the English passage simplify the interpretation and reading of the prototypical gender relations of power expressed in the Latin American text.

Concluding remarks The fragments analyzed in this section have shown that metonymy is a useful mechanism for gender construction in Latin American women’s testimonios and their translations. In effect, metonymy portrays certain elements as contiguous to the female figure, i.e. contingently determined by culture at a certain time and place. This figure of speech obliterates the evocation of a naturally inferior female essence. The contiguously metonymic allusions to baby bottles and diapers, cooking pots, aprons and rubber gloves contribute to creating a locus of resistance in discourse, since they act as a more or less surreptitious way of bringing gender issues to the fore. Recreating gender relations through metonymic associations makes it possible to foreground female deprecation in male-controlled, dictatorial, oppressive, and violent patriarchal regimes. The significant role played by metonymy in these testimonials requires careful 102

Translating metonymies

translation, adaptation, and/or explanation so that the subversive aspect of this discourse mechanism is allowed to function for the target reader. Awareness of this mechanism can contribute to privileging a feminist translation strategy, which, in the words of Castro and Ergun (2017), fosters transnational epistemic exchanges, inspires political growth across boundaries, and facilitates new visions of equality and social justice.

Future directions Much more work can be done not only to draw attention to the importance of metonymy in this type of writing but also in regard to the translations of these texts, which risk losing their effectiveness and their propensity to foster feminist sociopolitical awareness among readers. Other testimonials written by women – on the Japanese “comfort women” of World War II, the Lebensborn experiences of German women under Nazi rule, the narratives around Bosnian rape camps in the 1990s, or current atrocities committed in the Democratic Republic of Congo, among others – also merit study for the translations they trigger, how they process the texts and what effects they produce. The ethical considerations involved in translating historically significant testimonials written by women are also relevant, and questions regarding the role of metonymy in constructing gender relations evoked in these texts are part of this. Additionally, future research could examine how metonymy might work in target texts to raise gender issues not present in the source text. Finally, since it is not uncommon for such testimonials to be self-translated, this opens another set of complicated questions that might merit scholarly attention around the changes such translations might see when produced for the other culture, but by the same author.

Further reading Bartow, Joanna R. 2005. Subject to Change: The Lessons of Latin American Women’s Testimonio for Truth, Fiction, and Theory. Chapel Hill: North Carolina Studies in the Romance Languages and Literatures. This book introduces perspectives on the testimonio genre in Latin America. It also raises gender issues and focuses on the use of metonymic language. DeRocher, Patricia. 2018. Transnational Testimonios. The Politics of Collective Knowledge Production. Seattle: University of Washington Press. This book offers an insightful transnational feminist perspective on the Latin American testimonio which addresses questions of translation, knowledge, and power. Matzner, Sebastian. 2016. Rethinking Metonymy. Literary Theory and Poetic Practice from Pindar to Jakobson. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Matzner’s book presents a valuable and comprehensive overview of the development of the notion of metonymy, which also includes a section on metonymy and translation criticism.

Related topics Philosophical perspectives on metonymy and translation; Paul Ricoeur, Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, and Félix Guattari; metonymy and feminist retranslation; metonymy and feminist ethos

Notes 1 Cf. Cazorla Sánchez 2010; Bowen 2017. 2 Cf. Conquest 2008; Halfin 2009; Gottfried and Spencer 2015. 3 Cf. Mithander et al. 2007; Hall 2010; Tucker 2016. 4 The book was translated into English and published in 1963 under the titles School of the Sun and Awakening in the US and in the UK, respectively. 103

Gabriela Yañez

5 Cf. Nhema and Zeleza 2008; Tucker 2016; Williams 2016. 6 Cf. Smith and Ce 2015; Zulfiqar 2016; Uwakweh 2017. 7 Cf. Lewis 2006; Galván 2012; Mainwaring and Pérez-Liñán 2013. 8 Cf. Jehenson 1995; Rodríguez and Szurmuk 2016; Staniland 2016. 9 The origins of the genre are most often traced back to Cuban novelist and anthropologist Miguel Barnet and his Biografía de un cimarrón (1968) (Biography of a Runaway Slave, [1968] 2016), the story of a fugitive Cuban slave of African descent fighting in the Cuban War of Independence. 10 Henceforth Me llamo Rigoberta Menchú. 11 Henceforth El país bajo mi piel. 12 Cf. Gibbs 1994; Ruiz de Mendoza Ibáñez and Otal Campo 2002; Panther and Thornburg 2003; Díaz Vera 2015. 13 Cf. AI Sharafi 2004; Otal Campo et al. 2005. 14 Cf. Jakobson and Halle 1971; Lakoff and Turner 1989; Jäkel 1999. 15 “ ‘There’s a Harijan bai riding along! Just look at that brain, her baba is a beggar, and she’s riding a bicycle!’ ” (Excerpt from Doubly Cursed published in Words Without Borders, 2018. Available at: www.wordswith outborders.org/article/october-2018-dalit-writing-doubly-cursed-kausalya-baisantry-christi-merr). 16 Highlighting in bold type is ours in all cases. 17 Definition by the Real Academia Española. Available at: https://dle.rae.es/. 18 Definition by the Real Academia Española. Available at: https://dle.rae.es/. 19 Menchu’s indigenous testimonial explicitly distinguishes between mainstream and minority women: “I still haven’t approached the subject – and it’s perhaps a very long subject – of women in Guatemala. We have to put them into categories, anyway: working-class women, peasant women, poor ladino women, and bourgeois women, middle-class women. There is something important about women in Guatemala, especially Indian women, and that something is the relationship with the earth – between the earth and the mother” (Burgos 1984, 220). 20 Definition by the Real Academia Española. Available at: https://dle.rae.es/. 21 Belli’s testimonial narrative has challenged the traditional definition of the testimonio emerging from the literary production of Nicaraguan authors in the 1980s. This topic exceeds the scope of this chapter. For more details, see Palazón Sáez 2006, 2010.

References Abrams, Meyer H. 1957/1999. A Glossary of Literary Terms. 7th ed. Boston, MA: Heinle and Heinle. AI‑Sharafi, Abdul G. 2004. Textual Metonymy: A Semiotic Approach. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Alvarez, Sonia E., Claudia de Lima Costa, Verónica Feliu, Rebecca J. Hester, Norma Klahn, Millie Thayer, and Cruz Caridad Bueno. 2014. Translocalities/Translocalidades: Feminist Politics of Translation in the Latin/a Americas. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Baisantry, Kausalya. 2009. Dohra Abhishaap. New Delhi: Parmeshwari Prakashan. Barnet, Miguel. 1968. Biografía de un cimarrón. Barcelona: Ariel. Barnet, Miguel. 1968/2016. Biography of a Runaway Slave. Translated by Nick Hill. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Belli, Gioconda. 2001. El país bajo mi piel. Memorias de amor y guerra. Barcelona: Plaza & Janés. Belli, Gioconda. 2002. The Country Under My Skin. A Memoir of Love and War. Translated by Kristina Cordero with the author. London: Bloomsbury. Beverly, John. 2008. Testimonio, Subalternity, and Narrative Authority, in Sara S. Castro‑Klaren, ed., A Companion to Latin American Literature and Culture. Oxford: Blackwell, 571–583. Bowen, Wayne H. 2017. Truman, Franco’s Spain and the Cold War. Columbia: University of Missouri Press. Burgos, Elizabeth. 1983/2007. Me llamo Rigoberta Menchú y así me nació la conciencia. Buenos Aires, Mexico and Madrid: Siglo XXI Editores. Burgos, Elizabeth. 1984. I, Rigoberta Menchú: An Indian Woman in Guatemala. Translated by Ann Wright. London and New York: Verso. Burkhardt, Armin. 2010. Between Poetry and Economy. Metonymy as a Semantic Principle, in Armin Burkhardt and Brigitte Nerlich, eds., Tropical Truth(s). The Epistemology of Metaphor and Other Tropes. Berlin and New York: De Gruyter, 245–270. Castro, Olga and Emek Ergun. 2017. Feminist Translation Studies. Local and Transnational Perspectives. New York and London: Routledge. 104

Translating metonymies

Cazorla Sánchez, Antonio. 2010. Ordinary Lives in Franco’s Spain 1939‑1975: Fear and Progress. Oxford: Wiley‑Blackwell. Chukovskaya, Lydia. 1972. Going Under. London: Barrie & Jenkins. Conquest, Robert. 2008. The Great Terror: A Reassessment. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Davies, Peter. 2014. Testimony and Translation. Translation and Literature [online], 23(2), 170–184. Available at: www.euppublishing.com/toc/tal/23/2. De Man, Paul. 1979. Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. De Pedro Ricoy, Raquel. 2012. Translating the Revolution: Otherness in Cuban Testimonial Literature. Meta [online], 57(3), 574–591. Available at: www.erudit.org/en/journals/meta/2012-v57-n3meta0694/1017081ar/. Díaz Vera, Javier E., ed. 2015. Metaphor and Metonymy Across Time and Cultures. Berlin, Munich and Boston: De Gruyter Mouton. Eco, Umberto. 1979. The Role of the Reader. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Galván, Javier A. 2012. Latin American Dictators of the 20th Century: The Lives and Regimes of 15 Rulers. Jefferson, NC and London: McFarland and Company. Genette, Gérard. 1972. Métonymie chez Proust, in Gérard Genette, ed., Figures III. Paris: Seuil, 41–63. Gibbs, Raymond W. Jr. 1994. The Poetics of Mind: Figurative Thought, Language, and Understanding. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gottfried, Paul E. and Richard B. Spencer. 2015. The Great Purge: The Deformation of the Conservative Movement. Montana: Washington Summit Publishers. Halfin, Igal. 2009. Stalinist Confessions: Messianism and Terror at the Leningrad Communist University. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press. Hall, Richard C. 2010. Consumed by War: European Conflict in the 20th Century. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky. Jäkel, Olaf. 1999. Metonymy in Onomastics, in Klaus‑Uwe Panther and Günter Radden, eds., Metonymy in Language and Thought. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 211–229. Jakobson, Roman. 1956/1995. Two Aspects of Language and Two Types of Aphasic Disturbances, in Linda R. Waugh and Monique Monville-Burston, eds., R. Jakobson–On Language. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 115–133. Jakobson, Roman and Morris Halle. 1971. Fundamentals of Language. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Jehenson, Myriam Y. 1995. Latin‑American Women Writers: Class, Race, and Gender. Albany: State University of New York Press. Lakoff, George and Mark Turner. 1989. More Than Cool Reason: A Field Guide to Poetic Metaphor. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. Lewis, Paul H. 2006. Authoritarian Regimes in Latin America: Dictators, Despots, and Tyrants. Lanham, MD, Boulder, New York, Toronto and Oxford: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers. Mainwaring, Scott and Aníbal Pérez‑Liñán. 2013. Democracies and Dictatorships in Latin America: Emergence, Survival, and Fall. New York: Cambridge University Press. Marie, Farzana, ed. 2015. Load Poems Like Guns: Women’s Poetry from Herat, Afghanistan. Translated by Farzana Marie. Duluth, Minnesota: Holy Cow! Press. Matute, Ana M. 1959. Primera memoria. Barcelona: Destino. Merrill, Christi A. 2014. Crafting a Feminist Dalit Consciousness in Translation. World Literature Today [online], 88(3–4), 52–56. Available at: www.jstor.org/stable/10.7588/worllitetoda.88.3-4.0052#meta data_info_tab_contents. Merrill, Christi A. 2016. “The Wrath of the Goddess” and Other Acts of Doktori: Exorcising Colonial Possession in Translation. Getuigen tussen geschiedenis en herinnering, 123, 128–140. Merrill, Christi A. 2019. What “a Harijan Bai Riding . . . a Bicycle!” Has to Teach the Reader of World Lit, Conference Public Intellectuals in a Changing World: The ‘World’ in World Literature, Oberlin. Mithander, Conny, John Sundholm, and Maria Holmgren Troy, eds. 2007. Collective Traumas: Memories of Wars and Conflict in 20th-Century Europe. Brussels: P.I.E. Peter Lang. Nance, Kimberly A. 2006. Can Literature Promote Justice? Trauma Narrative and Social Action in Latin American Testimonio. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press. Narváez, Jorge. 1983. El testimonio, 1972–1982: (transformaciones en el sistema literario). Santiago, Chile: CENECA. Nhema, Alfred G. and Paul T. Zeleza, eds. 2008. The Roots of African Conflicts: The Causes & Costs. Suffolk: James Currey. 105

Gabriela Yañez

Nwapa, Flora. 1975. Never Again. Trenton: Africa World Press. Otal Campo, José L., Ignasi Navarro i Ferrando, and Begoña Bellés Fortuño, eds. 2005. Cognitive and Discourse Approaches to Metaphor and Metonymy. Castelló de la Plana: Universitat Jaume I. Palazón Sáez, Gema D. 2006. “El país bajo mi piel”: Memoria, representación y discurso femenino en la obra de Gioconda Belli. Revista de Historia de América, 137, 33–62. Palazón Sáez, Gema D. 2010. Memoria y escrituras de Nicaragua. Cultura y discurso testimonial en la Revolución Sandinista. París: Publibook. Panther, Klaus‑Uwe and Linda Thornburg. 2003. Metonymies as Natural Inference and Activation Schemas: The Case of Dependent Clauses as Independent Speech Acts, in Klaus‑Uwe Panther and Linda Thornburg, eds., Metonymy and Pragmatic Inferencing. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 127–147. Rodríguez, Ileana and Mónica Szurmuk, eds. 2016. The Cambridge History of Latin American Women’s Literature. New York: Cambridge University Press. Ruiz de Mendoza Ibáñez, Francisco J. and José L. Otal Campo. 2002. Metonymy, Grammar and Communication. Granada: Comares. Coleccion Estuduis de Lengua Inglesa 7. Schneider, Gertrude. 1981. Journey into Terror: The Story of the Riga Ghetto. New York: Irvington. Sklodowska, Elzbieta. 1985. Aproximaciones a la forma testimonial: La novelística de Miguel Baret. Hispamérica [online], 14(40), 23–33. Available at: www.jstor.org/stable/20542198 [Accessed 21 June 2018]. Smith, Charles and Chin Ce, eds. 2015. Female Subjectivities in African Literature. Nigeria: African Library of Critical Writing. Staniland, Emma. 2016. Gender and the Self in Latin American Literature. Oxon and New York: Routledge. Strejilevich, Nora. 1991. Literatura testimonial en Chile, Uruguay y Argentina 1970‑1990. PhD. dissertation, University of British Columbia. Strejilevich, Nora. 1997. Una sola muerte numerosa. Miami: North-South Center Press. Strejilevich, Nora. 2002. A Single Numberless Death. Translated by Cristina de la Torre with the collaboration of the author. Charlottesville: University of Virginia. Strejilevich, Nora. 2014. Ein einzelner vielfacher Tod. Translated by Elizabeth Schmalen. Berlin: Hentrich and Hentrich. Tucker, Spencer C. 2016. The Roots and Consequences of 20th-Century Warfare: Conflicts That Shaped the Modern World. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO. Tymoczko, Maria. 1999/2014. Translation in a Postcolonial Context: Early Irish Literature in English Translation, Kindle ed. Manchester and Abingdon, Oxon: St. Jerome and Routledge. Umutesi, Marie B. 2004. Surviving the Slaughter: The Ordeal of a Rwandan Refugee in Zaire. Translated by Julia Emerson. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Uwakweh, Pauline A., ed. 2017. African Women Under Fire: Literary Discourses in War and Conflict. Lanham, MD, Boulder, New York and London: Lexington Books. Venuti, Lawrence. 1995. The Translator’s Invisibility. London and New York: Routledge. Virgen, Lucy. 2013. 9 de enero de 1959. Nace Ribogerta Menchú [online]. Universidad de Guadalajara. Available at: www.udg.mx/es/efemerides/09-enero. Weiss, Reska. 1961. Journey Through Hell. London: Vallentine Mitchell. Williams, Paul D. 2016. War and Conflict in Africa. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Polity Press. Zambrano, Andrea and Nora Strejilevich. 2016. Nora Strejilevich: “El testimonio no es una copia de la realidad sino su construcción.” Revista Transas. Letras y artes de América Latina [online]. Available at: www.revistatransas.com/2016/08/25/nora-strejilevich-el-testimonio-no-es-una-copia-de-la-reali dad-sino-su-construccion/ [Accessed 13 Feb. 2019]. Zulfiqar, Sadia. 2016. African Women Writers and the Politics of Gender. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.

106

8 Polish women translators A herstory Ewa Rajewska

Introduction Through the centuries, the role – and later the profession – of a literary translator was regarded as one which pushes her or him into the background, into the shadows of reclusive, painstaking, and often anonymous or forgotten work. The dense shadow hovering over women translators was doubled however, cast by both the authors and male translators (cf. the classical diagnosis that in the Western culture translation is an archetypal feminine activity because it is considered secondary; Chamberlain 1988). This chapter provides a herstory of Polish women translators – that is history emphasizing the cultural role of translating women, previously overlooked, diminished, or even neglected – and studies a number of selected profiles from the earliest times to the present day. In the following sections, this ‘herstory’ will be discussed diachronically and synchronically, with emphasis on the professionalization of translation and the rising gendering of the Polish language in the 20th century.

Historical perspectives In the multicultural Poland of the past, translating was common as a part of everyday communication and personal religious practice – for example in church services conducted in Latin or Church Slavonic. However, the documented history of women translators in Poland is not long and dates back only to the late 16th century (Dębska 2016, 164). Written translation required literacy, which among women, traditionally uneducated as they were, was not prevalent even in the noblest houses. In this context, it is perhaps not surprising that the first woman translator mentioned in Polish records was a queen – Anne of Austria (1573–1598), married to King Sigismund III Vasa. Apart from her native German, Queen Anne, thoroughly educated by the Jesuits, spoke Latin, Spanish, and Italian; she soon became quite fluent in Polish. A fervent Catholic, as a young girl the future queen translated the life of Saint Ignatius from Latin into German (Dębska 2016, 166). Contrary to conditions in later centuries, the very beginnings of women’s literary translation in Poland were quite democratic – among the translators we can find not only royals and noble ladies but also townswomen. Especially printers’ widows, who were not only literate but 107

Ewa Rajewska

also well acquainted with the secrets of their late husbands’ craft, often took up translation, and had their work printed. As artisans’ widows, they enjoyed a special status, which allowed them to take over businesses after their husbands’ deaths. Jadwiga Piotrowczykowa, widow of printer Andrzej Piotrowczyk, ran his publishing house in Kraków; “having received no education in her youth, only after she had brought up her sons she commenced to learn Latin, and with such an effect that she wrote poetry in this language” (Sowiński 1821, 26). Jadwiga Piotrowczykowa’s daughter-in-law, Anna Teresa Piotrowczykowa née Pernus (c. 1600–1672), followed in her footsteps, also becoming a publisher as a widow. She authored the Polish translation of the Jesuit Philippe Hannotel’s Latin meditation Ćwiczenie, którym się wzbudzać mamy do miłości Boga dla nas ukrzyżowanego (1649; The Exercise of the Love of God Crucified for Us) (Dębska 2016, 167). Rozmyślania męki Pana Jezusa (Religious Reflections on the Passion of Jesus Christ), translated from Spanish and published anonymously in Kraków in 1594, was attributed to another printer’s widow, Anna Schreibenycher (Kapuścińska 2016). Zofia Bohowitynowa née Czartoryska (c. 1580–c. 1603), a princess, who did not inherit a publishing house, but having become a widow established her own, specializing in Church Slavonic texts; Bohowitynowa translated religious writings and excerpts from the New Testament from ancient Greek (Dębska 2016, 166). Her works, like many of that time, have been lost and are only known from hearsay (or at secondhand: a religious writer Kirill Stavrovyetski quotes her texts at length; Dębska 2016, 166). Many of these earliest translations remain in manuscript. Translations of Latin religious writings, also unpublished and only for private use, were still popular in the mid-17th century and later, but the 18th century brought a change in the translation repertoire. With French queens on the Polish throne (1645–1667; 1676–1697) and accordant shifts in foreign policy, knowledge of French became trendy, and in the 18th century, it became obligatory among the members of the noble class. Noble ladies enjoyed French romances, theatre, and opera plays, and readily translated them by way of exercise. But the hegemony of French was not absolute. Around 1730, Barbara Radziwiłłowa (1690– 1770), la grande dame, daughter of the governor of Minsk, Voivodeship Krzysztof Zawisza, translated La Dianea by Giovanni Francesco Loredan, an Italian adventure romance very popular all across Europe. Her translation remained in manuscript (Miszalska 2015, 99–105). Radziwiłłowa’s profile presented by Jadwiga Miszalska is characteristic for noble women translators of the time: “This strong and active woman, Dame of the Order of Saint Catherine and the Order of the Starry Cross, skilful manager of the ancestral estate, mother of fourteen, was able to find time for literature and politics, and often significantly influenced the course of public activity of her husband Mikołaj Faustyn. Apart from that she was a benefactress of the Convent of the Carmelites and a founder of many churches” (Miszalska 2015, 99). Barbara Radziwiłłowa’s younger sister, Maria Beata Zawiszanka-Łaniewska, also translated – from French; she prepared the Polish version of excerpts from Mademoiselle de Scudéry’s Artamène ou le Grand Cyrus (as Historia Aria-mena, c. 1717–1719; Artamène, or Cyrus the Great). French romances were translated – and published – also by the socialite Anna Narbuttowa née Grozmani (second half of the 18th century) and the novelist Anna Mostowska née Radziwiłł (1762–c. 1810). The former rendered into Polish Alain-René Lesage’s Le Diable boiteux (Diabeł kulawy, 1777; The Devil upon Two Sticks), the latter, Le Saphir Merveilleux by Stéphanie Félicité de Genlis (Szafir, czyli talizman, 1806; The Marvelous Sapphire). Duchess Franciszka Urszula Radziwiłłowa (1705–1753) was a poet and the first Polish woman playwright. Apart from writing her own plays (published posthumously in 1754 as Komedyje i tragedyje), in the late 1740s she translated or rather adapted Molière’s comedies: Les précieuses ridicules (Komedia wytwornych i śmiesznych dzieweczek; The Pretentious Young Ladies), Les amants magnifiques (Miłość wspaniała; The Magnificent Lovers) and Le médecin malgré lui (Gwałtem 108

Polish women translators

medyk; The Doctor in Spite of Himself  ). They were staged in her own court theatre in Nieśwież, which was an amateur théâtre de société, or rather family theatre – new performances were organized to add lustre and festivity to family celebrations. Komedia wytwornych i śmiesznych dzieweczek, for example, was translated and staged in 1752 for a birthday party of the duchess’s daughter. The actors were recruited from family members, friends, and servants; the plays often had a didactic undertone, as Franciszka Urszula Radziwiłłowa personally cared for the education of a number of children, her own and those entrusted to her by others. She experienced some 29 pregnancies, which for an aristocratic woman of the time was no exception. Due to numerous miscarriages and very high infant mortality, the duchess succeeded in raising only three children to full maturity ( Judkowiak 2015, 11–12). Although renowned as a poet, “she characterized her writings as ‘trivial,’ considering them merely ‘minor works of feminine simplicity,’ justifying them to readers as ‘poor poetry’ because they were ‘written by a woman’ ” ( Judkowiak 2015, 14). Unlike works by Radziwiłłowa, French comedies translated by Maria Potocka née Kątska (c. 1720–1768) were neither published nor performed. Her translations of Molière’s Les précieuses ridicules (Komedia z francuskiego na polski wytłumaczona o drożących się i wykwintnych białogłowych) and Les fourberies de Scapin (Komedia druga zdradziectwa Skapina pokazująca, z francuskiego na polski język wytłumaczona; The Impostures of Scapin) remained only in manuscript (Rudnicka 1996, 296). Such works, testifying to the literary interests of their author and prepared without any prospect of publication, are very common in private archives of that time (Miszalska 2015, 296). Duchess Barbara Urszula Sanguszkowa (1718–1791), a poet, philanthropist, moralist, and the hostess of a literary salon in Poddębice, modelled after French salons, was the translator of a prayer book written by Louise de La Vallière, former mistress of Louis XIV of France turned Carmelite nun (Uwaga duszy przez pokutę nawracającej się do Boga, 1743; Reflections on the Mercy of God) and a collection of religious-moral reflections by cardinal Giovanni Bona (Przewodnia do nieba droga, 1744; The Easy Way to God). She also translated a medical book which she commissioned from her court physician Francis Curtius (O chorobach prędkiego ratunku potrzebujących, 1783; On Diseases Requiring Quick Medical Assistance), as well as a French romance in letters by Phillipe Louis Gérard (Hrabia de Valemont, czyli obłąd rozumu, 1788; The Count of Valmont, or the Loss of Reason). Like duchess Sanguszkowa, duchess Izabela Czartoryska née Flemming (1746–1835) was a patron of artists, who were regular visitors and denizens at her court in Puławy. Her residence became the seat of the first Polish museum. It was surrounded by a magnificent English-style garden as the duchess was very keen on gardening. In 1783, she initiated the Polish translation of the descriptive poem Les Jardins, en quatre chants (The Gardens, A Poem) by Jacques Delille, completed by the poet Franciszek Karpiński and the duchess’s daughter Maria Wirtemberska as Ogrody. In 1805, she published her own book on establishing gardens, Myśli różne o sposobie zakładania ogrodów (Various Thoughts on Starting a Garden), with a motto translated from Alexander Pope. She also translated into French and published an elegy by Ludwik Kropiński, Emrod (1825). The intellectual atmosphere of the Puławy court was very favourable. Duchess Maria Wirtemberska (1768–1854), Izabela Czartoryska’s daughter and wife to Duke Louis of Württemberg, was the author of the first Polish sentimental novel Malwina czyli domyślność serca (1816; English: Malvina, or the Heart’s Intuition). But before she became a successful novelist, Maria Wirtemberska translated Le Bon Père, a one act comedy by Jean-Pierre. Claris de Florian (Ojciec dobry; 1786, in manuscript; English: The Good Father), dedicating it to her father Duke Adam Kazimierz Czartoryski. In 1794, together with her younger sister Zofia Czartoryska (1778–1837), she presented him with another literary gift: a collection of translations, including excerpts from Tacitus, William Shakespeare, John Milton, and William Robertson. Zofia translated fragments from Shakespeare (Szwach 2016, 246). 109

Ewa Rajewska

Anna Nakwaska née Krajewska (1781–1851), a novelist, author of children’s books and the hostess of a literary salon in Warsaw, translated Wirtemberska’s Malwina into French (Malvina, ou l’instinct du coeur, Warszawa 1817; 2nd edition: La Polonaise ou l’instinct du Coeur, Paris 1822). Countess Konstancja Raczyńska née Potocka (1781–1852), the wife of count Edward Raczyński – a philanthropist, founder of a first Polish public library in Poznań, and publisher of Polish historical records – helped her husband in translating numerous documents from French into Polish. In the early 1840s she was the leader of the first team including Polish women translators, who worked on Polish versions of French letters and documents by Queen Marie  Louise Gonzaga (Portofolio królowéj Maryi Ludwiki, 1841), French and Latin documents illustrating the reign of Stanislaus I (Materiały do historii Stanisława Leszczyńskiego, 1841), as well as French and German documents illustrating the reign of King Augustus II the Strong (Archiwum tajne Augusta II, 1843) (Wiesiołowski 2011, 69). Wanda Malecka née Fryz (1800–1860), a noblewoman, poet, and the editor of the first Polish women’s magazine in 1820s, Bronisława, czyli pamiętniki Polek (‘Bronisława, or Polish women’s journals’), presented in it the latest trends in fashion, but also in foreign literatures, mostly in her own translation. She translated prose from French and English, and edited the book series ‘Wybór romansów’ (‘An assortment of romances’) for the Warsaw-based publishing house of Bruno Kiciński, in which she published her translations of novels by Walter Scott, George Gordon Byron, Paul Lacroix, and François-René de Chateaubriand, among others. Her activity had all the hallmarks of professionalism. The same was true of Klementyna Hoffmanowa née Tańska (1798–1845), a children’s writer, educator, and the editor of the first Polish children’s magazine Rozrywki dla Dzieci (‘Children’s Entertainment’), published in the second half of the 1820s. For Hoffmanowa, literary translation complemented her own writing; she translated or adapted books for young readers by Pierre de Marivaux, Anna Laetitia Barbauld, and Charles de Montalembert. However, full professionalization and emancipation of the translator’s work was a process completed only in the 20th century, and as such will be discussed in the next subsection.

Critical issues and topics The Polish language is affected by gender asymmetry: masculine personal nouns are generic, which results in the linguistic invisibility of women (Karwatowska and Szpyra-Kozłowska 2010). The Polish noun ‘tłumacz’, translator, is masculine, but may also refer to a woman;‘tłumaczka’ is more specific and refers only to a woman translator. However, in the past the two names were not perceived as equally prestigious and professional – their connotations have changed in the course of 20th century. The semantic changes concerning the Polish noun ‘tłumaczka’ has paired with the emancipation of women translators in Poland, both processes starting around the beginning of the 20th century. In the second half of the 19th century, the field of literary translation in Poland, like the field of literature, was – with some exceptions, of course – a masculine realm. One of strategies adopted by women translators to join in was mimicry. Zofia Trzeszczkowska née Mańkowska (1846–1911), a poet and a literary translator of Luís Vaz de Camões’s Os Lusíadas (Luzyady 1890; The Lusiads) and Charles Baudelaire’s Les fleurs du mal (Kwiaty zła, 1894; The Flowers of Evil), among others, published her translations under her father’s name as Adam M-ski, and contacted her editors and publishers mostly by mail. In her anxious foreword to Luzyady she – as Adam M-ski – consequently used the masculine forms: Pracę podjętą zrazu z przekonania, z czasem umiłowałem. [. . .] Robiłem, com mógł; dziś jednak, w chwili rzucenia tego przekładu w świat, czuję wielką obawę, czym się dobrze wywiązał z zadania? czy niezbyt pokrzywdziłem luzyjskiego pieśniarza? Pocieszam się 110

Polish women translators

tym, że w najgorszym razie przekład mój przypomni go naszemu społeczeństwu i może lepszego tłumacza do wymierzenia mu sprawiedliwości zachęci.” (M-ski 1890, 15) With time I grew fond of that work, initially taken up out of conviction. . . . Although I did my best, today, casting this translation out into the world, I feel very anxious. Did I manage to carry out my task? Did I not treat the Lusitanian bard too wrong? I console myself with the thought that in the worst case my translation will remind our society about him and perhaps some better translator will decide to give him his due. A subtler form of passing as a man – a man of letters – was to use the professional title of ‘tłumacz,’ the generic, masculine form, instead of ‘tłumaczka,’ which reveals gender. The noun ‘tłumaczka’ did already exist; it was recorded in the first Polish dictionary published in the second decade of the 19th century by Samuel Bogumił Linde. The quoted examples of usage are rather curious – one is impersonal/abstract: “Mowa, tłumaczka myśli mówiącego” (“Speech, the translator of the speaker’s thoughts”), the other derogatory: “Pytia, prorokinia, czyli raczej czartowskich wyroków tłumaczka,” (“The Pythia, the prophetess, or rather the translator of the devil’s decrees”) (Linde 1812, 629). Among the source texts in her book on the first English translation of the Polish national epic Pan Tadeusz, Aleksandra Budrewicz quotes a very interesting piece of early modern translation criticism. It not only reveals the ideal of translation of the second half of the 19th century but is noteworthy because both parties – both women – engaged in the polemics use the generic, masculine form ‘tłumacz’ (Budrewicz 2018). In 1886 Maria Wentz’l (1859–1933), a reviewer of the magazine Biblioteka Warszawska (‘The Warsaw Library’) and the future translator of Herbert George Wells’s The War of Worlds (Wojna światów, 1899), criticizes inaccuracies in Master Thaddeus as translated by an English polonophile Maude Ashurst Biggs (1857–1933), using the forms ‘Miss Biggs’ and the masculine noun ‘tłumacz’ interchangeably. The effect is somewhat odd: Czasem panna Biggs, zatopiona w trudnościach, z jakimi łamać jej się przychodziło, zdaje się zapominać o wymaganiach angielskiego języka. [. . .] W niektórych znów razach tłumacz zdaje się nie zrozumiał autora i, polegając na słownikach, napisał zdanie, które, gdyby je drugi raz przeczytał, wydałoby mu się z pewnością nielogicznym. Here and there Miss Biggs, struggling hard with the encountered difficulties, seems to forget about the demands of the English language. [. . .] Elsewhere the translator [masc.] must have misunderstood the author, and, relying on dictionaries, has written a sentence which would surely sound illogical to him had he read it again. Countering these charges, Maude Ashurst Biggs defends herself, using also the masculine form: “Pani Maria Wentz’l zdaje się głównie zarzucać mi, iż byłam nadto wyłącznie tłumaczem liter i słów Mickiewicza ze szkodą jego poematu.” “Mrs Maria Wentz’l seems to scold me primarily for being only a translator (masc.) of Mickiewicz’s letters and words, to the detriment of his poem.” Hiding in a man’s shadow is quite characteristic of the period between the turn of the 20th century and the outbreak of World War II, when neither the noun ‘tłumaczka’ nor a woman 111

Ewa Rajewska

translator’s professional activity were held in high esteem. It was a time of non-professionals, who worked mostly on translations of children’s literature and popular novels – mostly French, English, and Russian, although English was already starting to gain influence. Tadeusz Boy-Żeleński, an indisputable luminary of literary translation of that time and the translator of the French literary canon into Polish, scornfully stated that for a woman deceived in love, translation was a tempting alternative to other typical careers: that of an actress, milliner, or a pension owner in the Polish mountain resort of Zakopane (Boy-Żeleński 1948, 13). Interestingly enough, Boy-Żeleński’s wife Zofia Żeleńska was for many years a meticulous proofreader of his translations; she never agreed to put her name on the book covers as his cotranslator, however (Winklowa 2001, 91). Julian Tuwim, a famous poet and prominent translator of Russian poetry, claimed that “a woman translator is, with few exceptions, a social and class phenomenon, but not a literary one; she takes up translating solely for money, and out of ignorance makes hilarious mistakes” (Tuwim 1950, 167–168). Julian’s sister Irena Tuwim (1899–1987), a poet and novelist, is the most recognizable Polish woman translator in history; her literary translation of Alexander Alan Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh (Kubuś Puchatek, 1938) is considered a masterpiece. Irena’s first translations were published in cooperation with her husband Stefan Napierski; one of them appeared in print as a work of Julian Tuwim. Irena Tuwim wrote ample memoirs on her famous brother and just two short and impersonal commentaries on her translation practice. She translated more than 60 books – by A.A. Milne, Pamela Lyndon Travers, Edith Nesbit, Harriet Beecher Stowe, among others – which have been loved by her readers and reissued to this day. Irena Tuwim was one of the first professional translators; in the course of her career she gave up writing poetry and concentrated on translating, indeed out of mercantile reasons – to make her living. And Aniela Zagórska was a professional translator who worked on only one author – Joseph Conrad. However, in the first decades of the 20th century translating was rarely a mainstream literary career. Many women poets of that time – Maria Konopnicka, Kazimiera Zawistowska, Bronisława Ostrowska, Zofia Rogoszówna – regarded literary translation as an activity complementary to their original writing. Post-war times brought a radical change: in a communist country relatively close to the West but isolated by the Iron Curtain, the classic works of world literature were translated within the framework of a state publishing policy. Prestigious translation series published by newly established, powerful state-owned publishing houses were very often designed, edited, and translated by women – now professional editors and literary translators. The translator’s profession was democratized. Among the most active women translators of the post-war period were Maria Skibniewska, Mira Michałowska, Zofia Kierszys, Krystyna Tarnowska, Wacława Komarnicka, and Anna Przedpełska-Trzeciakowska – all born before the war and well-educated, also in foreign languages. However, women translators, even those valued as specialists and relatively well paid, were still considered hacks, much inferior to ‘real,’ original authors. Zofia Chądzyńska (1912–2003), a writer and a translator of Julio Cortázar, Jorge Luis Borges, Gabriel García Márquez, and Jean Reverzy, among others, whose translations initiated a long-lasting literary fashion for Latin American prose in Poland, depicts women translators’ concerns in an internal monologue of the protagonist of her novel Skrzydło sowy (The Owl Wing) (1967): Aniela Raszewska, nasza najlepsza tłumaczka. Kontraktów a kontraktów. Najwyższe stawki. . . . Co z tego, że dobrze ich tłumaczy, że wynajduje prawidłowe ekwiwalenty dla ich słów, jak śpiewaczka, która ma piękny głos i czyta nuty, ale która nigdy nie zrozumie, dlaczego tak

112

Polish women translators

a nie inaczej te nuty zostały napisane. . . . Nieraz się zastanawiała, czy słusznie w stosunku do odtwórców używa się słowa talent. . . . Była tłumaczką, to znaczy nikim. (Chądzyńska 1967, 12, 21, 24) Aniela Raszewska, our best translator. Lots of contracts. The highest rates. . . . And what does it matter that she translates them well, that she finds accurate equivalents for their words, like a singer who has a beautiful voice and reads the score, but will never understand why it was written in this way and not the other. . . . She often wondered whether the word “talent” is justly used with reference to reproducers. [. . .] She was a translator [fem.], that is nobody. On the other hand, the novelist and diarist Maria Dąbrowska and the poet Kazimiera Iłłakowiczówna, both literary translators, unanimously claimed that translation is a threat to their original writing; it impoverishes the mind and steals the time needed for creative work (Dąbrowska 1954; Iłłakowiczówna 1958). Nonetheless, many poets, among them the Nobel laureate Wisława Szymborska, but also Julia Hartwig, Anna Kamieńska, Ludmiła Marjańska, Teresa Truszkowska, Łucja Danielewska, and Krystyna Rodowska, successfully managed to combine these two literary activities. Over the course of the 20th century, the connotations of the noun ‘tłumaczka’ have changed; however, some of the most acknowledged women translators still tend to refer to themselves with the generic form in interviews or paratexts. Małgorzata Łukasiewicz (b. 1948), translator of Robert Walser, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Jürgen Habermas use both forms: Można [. . .] powiedzieć, że Walser ma już swoje miejsce w świadomości polskich czytelników. I to jest ten miły moment w życiu tłumacza – może popatrzeć w lustro i powiedzieć sobie: to ja się do tego przyczyniłem. (Łukasiewicz 2007) We may say that . . . Walser has already gained some recognition from Polish readers. And this is this nice moment in a translator’s [masc.] life – he can take a look at himself in the mirror and say: I take some credit for that. Jako tłumaczka mam do czynienia przede wszystkim z różnymi idiomami albo stylami, z różnymi indywidualnościami literackimi. To może być kłopot albo przygoda, wszystko zależy od tego, czy jesteśmy pesymistami czy optymistami. (Zaleska 2015) As a translator [fem.] I deal with different idioms or styles, different literary individuals in the first place. This might be a problem or an adventure, everything depends on whether you’re a pessimist or an optimist. A new era began in 1989, with the political transformation and the abolition of censorship on 12 May 1990. The freeing up of the publishing market resulted in a flood of translations, all too often of poor quality, and the prestige of the profession temporarily dropped. Yet a new phenomenon has emerged: academic literary translators, who combine theory and practice, teaching translation studies and successfully translating literary and academic texts (Rajewska 2015, 297). To this group belong Elżbieta Tabakowska, Monika Adamczyk-Garbowska, Jolanta

113

Ewa Rajewska

Kozak, Jolanta Kozłowska, Olga Kubińska, Ewa Skwara, Ewa Kraskowska, Bogumiła Kaniewska, Agnieszka Kuciak, Julia Fiedorczuk, Agnieszka Pokojska, and Magda Heydel. The latter (b. 1969), translator of Virginia Woolf, Joseph Conrad, Seamus Heaney, and Alice Oswald among others, has no problems introducing herself as a female translator: W posłowiu do przekładu [Jądra ciemności] pisałam o tym, co wydarzyło się pomiędzy Conradem podróżującym po rzece Kongo, a potem piszącym o tej podróży, a nami – tłumaczką, która przekłada jego opowieść w kompletnie innym świecie, i jej czytelnikami. (Zaleska 2015) In my foreword to the translation [of Heart of Darkness] I wrote about what has happened between Conrad sailing up the Congo River, and later writing about this journey, for us – the translator [fem.] who translates his story in a completely different world – and its readers.

Current contributions and research In her article discussing some “founding mothers of Polish woman-made translation” Karolina Dębska states that “there are very few 17th-century women translators in Poland who are known by name,” and concludes: “just knowing the names of our foremothers is very heartening” (Dębska 2016, 170). Indeed, such important sources of general knowledge as Odpowiednie dać słowu słowo. Zarys dziejów przekładu literackiego w Polsce [Finding the exact word for a word. An outline history of literary translation in Poland] by Wacław Sadkowski (2002; 2nd edition 2013), the only Polish monograph on that topic, names no Polish women translators before the end of the 19th century; the “Polish Tradition” entry to The Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies, written by Elżbieta Tabakowska (2009), names no women translators whatsoever. New emerging projects which will certainly involve women translators’ biograms, although they are not focused on women translators alone, include a digital bio-bibliographical dictionary of Polish translators of foreign literatures and translators of Polish literature worldwide, prepared under the guidance of Ewa Kołodziejczyk from the Institute of Literary Research of The Polish Academy of Science in Warsaw. Renata Makarska of Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz and Jadwiga Kita-Huber of Jagiellonian University in Kraków manage the Polish part of the Germersheimer Übersetzerlexikon (www.uelex.de), which includes biograms of translators of Polish literature into German.

Future directions A herstory of Polish women translators – much more comprehensive than the outline presented here – should be a partial effect of the complete history of Polish translations and Polish literature written from the perspective of translation. The group of researchers under the guidance of Magda Heydel, TS scholar from the Faculty of Polish Studies at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków, is gearing up for this task. Historiography is, however, only one aspect; the other side of the coin would be developing feminist translation criticism, so far non-existent.

Further reading Przekładaniec. 2010. Myśl feministyczna a przekład, no. 24; English version: Feminism and Translation, 2012, no. 24. Available at: www.ejournals.eu/Przekladaniec/English-issues/%20Numer-24-english-version/.

114

Polish women translators

This is a collection of articles on translation studies and feminist thought in Western context, with some case studies on – mainly Polish – history of translation. Studia Filologiczne Uniwersytetu Jana Kochanowskiego. 2016. Part II: Women’s Voices in Translation, no. 29. Available at: www.ujk.edu.pl/ifp/studia_filologiczne/?page_id=32&lang=pl. This issue includes a collection of articles on feminine voices in TS studies and women translators in the global context. Urszula Radziwiłłowa, Franciszka. 2015. Selected Drama and Verse. Edited by P. J. Corness and B. Judkowiak, translated by P. J. Corness. Toronto: Iter Academic Press. This source offers a selection of works – dramas and lyric poems – by an 18th-century Polish savante, with an excellent historical-biographical introduction.

Related topics So far, in Poland we have witnessed no attempts at a comprehensive history of Polish literary translation. Case studies of particular texts in different translations into or from Polish are quite prevalent, but there are only few monographs on the output – style, strategy, translation choices – of individual translators (such as Czesław Miłosz, Stanisław Barańczak, Ludmiła Marjańska), nor are there many translators’ biographies (for example, of Maciej Słomczyński, Zofia Chądzyńska, Irena Tuwim). New research in the field of translator studies is already emerging, and the social status of translators is improving. In his article Niech nas zobaczą (Let Them See Us) from 2011, Jerzy Jarniewicz, a prominent Polish TS scholar, poet, and a translator himself, proclaimed the c­ oming-out of Polish translators (out of the insides of books onto their covers) ( Jarniewicz 2011). Five years later Jarniewicz published a text in which he compared the changing place of literary translation within culture to the changing perception of roles traditionally ascribed to women, as well as listing the names of most acknowledged contemporary Polish women translators ( Jarniewicz 2016). Apart from these publications, two recent volumes of interviews with translators are worth noting: Zofia Zaleska, Przejęzyczenie. Rozmowy o przekładzie (2015) and Adam Pluszka, Wte i wewte. Z tłumaczami o przekładach (2016).

References Boy-Żeleński, Tadeusz. 1948. Słowo od tłumacza. Translated by Tadeusz Boy-Żeleński, in Henri Murger and Tadeusz Boy-Żeleński, eds., Sceny z życia cyganerii. Warszawa: Wiedza, 5–16. Budrewicz, Aleksandra. 2018. ‘Pan Tadeusz’ po angielsku: Spory wokół wydania i przekładu. Poznań: Wydawnictwo Poznańskiego Towarzystwa Przyjaciół Nauk. Chądzyńska, Zofia. 1967. Skrzydło sowy. Warszawa: Państwowy Instytut Wydawniczy. Chamberlain, Lori. 1988. Gender and the Metaphorics of Translation. Signs, 13(3), 454–472. Dąbrowska, Maria. 1954. Parę myśli o pracy przekładowej. Twórczość (9), 169–181. Dębska, Karolina. 2016. Foremothers. First Women Translators in Poland. Studia Filologiczne Uniwersytetu Jana Kochanowskiego (29), 163–172. Iłłakowiczówna, Kazimiera. 1958. Niewczesne wynurzenia. Warszawa: Państwowy Instytut Wydawniczy. Jarniewicz, Jerzy. 2011. Niech nas zobaczą. Twórczość (4), 71–77. Jarniewicz, Jerzy. 2016. Antygony wracają. dwutygodnik (188). Available at: www.dwutygodnik.com/ artykul/6623-antygony-wracaja.html [Accessed 13 Feb. 2019]. Judkowiak, Barbara. 2015. Introduction. Translated by Patrick John Corness, in F. U. Radziwiłłowa, Patrick John Corness, and Barbara Judkowiak, eds., Selected Drama and Verse. Toronto: Iter Academic Press, 1–73. Kapuścińska, Anna. 2016. Theatrum meditationis. Ignacjanizm i jezuityzm w duchowej i literackiej kulturze Pierwszej Rzeczypospolitej – źródła, inspiracje, idee, in Anna Nowicka-Jeżowa, ed., Drogi duchowe katolicyzmu polskiego XVII wieku, vol. VII. Warszawa: Wydawnictwa Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego, 119–229.

115

Ewa Rajewska

Karwatowska, Małgorzata and Jolanta Szpyra-Kozłowska. 2010. Lingwistyka płci. Ona i on w języku polskim. Lublin: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Marii Curie-Skłodowskiej. Linde, Samuel, ed. 1812. Słownik języka polskiego, vol. 6. Warszawa: nakładem autora. Łukasiewicz, Małgorzata. 2007. Tłumacząc, staję się kimś innym. Nowe Książki (10), 4–7. Miszalska, Jadwiga. 2015. Z ziemi włoskiej do Polski. Przekłady z literatury włoskiej w Polsce do końca XVIII wieku. Kraków: Collegium Columbinum. M-ski, Adam. 1890. Kilka słów o życiu autora, in L. Camoëns, Luzyady. Epos w dziesięciu pieśniach. Warszawa: nakł. i druk S. Lewentala, 5–16. Pluszka, Adam. 2016. Wte i wewte. Z tłumaczami o przekładach. Gdańsk: Wydawnictwo Słowo/Obraz Terytoria. Rajewska, Ewa. 2015. Twórczość przekładowa kobiet, in Ewa Kraskowska and B. Kaniewska, eds., Polskie pisarstwo kobiet w wieku XX: procesy i gatunki, sytuacje i tematy. Poznań: Wydawnictwo Naukowe UAM, 270–298. Rudnicka, Jadwiga. 1996. Maria z Kątskich Potocka jako tłumaczka Moliera, in Krystyna Stasiewicz and Stanisław Achremczyk, eds., Między barokiem a oświeceniem. Nowe spojrzenie na czasy saskie. Olsztyn: Ośrodek Badań Naukowych im. Wojciecha Kętrzyńskiego, 291–293. Sadkowski, Wacław. 2013. Odpowiednie dać słowu słowo. Zarys dziejów przekładu literackiego w Polsce. 2nd ed. Toruń: Wydawnictwo Adam Marszałek. Sowiński, Jan. 1821. O uczonych Polkach. Krzemieniec–Warszawa: nakładem N. Glücksberga. Szwach, Agnieszka. 2016. Women in Europe Read and Translate Shakespeare. Studia Filologiczne Uniwersytetu Jana Kochanowskiego (29), 235–248. Tabakowska, Elżbieta. 2009. Polish Tradition, in Mona Baker and Gabriela Saldanha, eds., Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies. London and New York: Routledge, 501–509. Tuwim, Julian. 1950. Traduttore – traditore, in Pegaz dęba. Warszawa: Czytelnik, 166–190. Wiesiołowski Jacek. 2011. Najlepsza Polka o niepospolitym usposobieniu. Kronika Miasta Poznania, (1), 66–71. Winklowa, Barbara. 2001. Boyowie. Zofia i Tadeusz Żeleńscy. Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie. Zaleska, Zofia. 2015. Przejęzyczenie. Rozmowy o przekładzie. Wołowiec: Wydawnictwo Czarne.

116

9 Women translators in early modern Europe Hilary Brown

Introduction and definitions The study of women translators in history is a vibrant field, and no part of this history has received more attention than the early modern period (understood broadly here as the 16th and 17th centuries). Scholars have been intrigued by the numbers of women who emerge as translators as the Renaissance and Reformation spread through Europe: from queens (Katherine Parr, Elizabeth I) and aristocrats (Anne de Greville, Mary Sidney Herbert, Catharina Regina von Greiffenberg) to members of scholarly families (Margaret More Roper, Anne Dacier) and those with more humble or obscure roots (Anne Lock, Margaret Tyler, Aphra Behn). The state of research on women translators varies from country to country. There is a growing body of work on France, the Netherlands, and Germany, for example, but still very little on Italy or Spain. The most systematically researched tradition by far is the English one, thanks largely to the efforts of scholars in English rather than translation studies. The Renaissance, usually dated c. 1500–1640, has been particularly well studied. Scholars have done invaluable work in making primary material more readily accessible: from digital facsimiles in the Perdita Manuscripts database, to reprints in the Ashgate Early Modern Englishwoman Facsimile Library and MHRA Tudor and Stuart Translations series, to critical editions of the collected works of author-translators such as Elizabeth I, Lucy Hutchinson, Katherine Philips, and Aphra Behn. We now also have the benefit of surveys in encyclopaedias and literary histories (e.g. Sankovitch 1999; Brown 2005; Hosington and Fornier 2007; Clarke 2009; Wright 2010) and a number of edited volumes and monographs (e.g. Hannay 1985; Krontiris 1992; Belle 2012; Uman 2012; Goodrich 2014). This attention to early modern women translators has gone hand-in-hand with a surge of scholarly interest in early modern cultures of translation more generally. It is now widely acknowledged that translation was fundamental to an age defined by ‘renaissance,’ i.e. appropriations of the classical past, and ‘reformation,’ i.e. challenges to the dominance of the Latinate Roman Catholic Church, and that translation played a central role in many different contexts: in education, in negotiations of status and power, in the book trade, in religious and political upheavals. Many of the recent edited collections on early modern translation include essays on women (e.g. Hosington 2011a, Serjeantson 2013; Wilson-Lee 2015; Smith 2018). 117

Hilary Brown

Nevertheless, there is no consensus about what translation signified for women. It has often been stated that, as a second-rate, derivative activity, translation was particularly suitable for women in pre-modern times and allowed them to engage in intellectual life without trespassing into the masculine realm of authorship. However, this sits uneasily alongside the recognition that translation was a widespread, often highly valued, and high-stakes practice in this period. The study of early modern women translators thus challenges us to rethink the role of gender in translation history.

Historical perspectives Up until the late 20th century, if scholars were interested in early modern translation at all then their focus was usually on men. Francis Otto Matthiessen’s seminal Translation: An Elizabethan Art (1931, reprint 1965), for instance, is devoted to Thomas Hoby, John Florio, Thomas North, and Philemon Holland. One exception is Anne Dacier, who has earned herself a place in literary history thanks to the renown of her Iliad and Odyssey and her involvement in the Quarrel of Ancient and Moderns. Early critics who did write about women tended to pay little or no attention to gender issues but were concerned, for example, with trying to establish facts relating to publication history (e.g. Hughey 1934) or with (rather subjective) pronouncements on the success of a translator’s efforts (e.g. Greene 1941). The first influential studies of early modern women translators came in the wake of the feminist literary project of the 1970s which sought to counter male-dominated canons by reclaiming lost female voices. Theoretical impetus came from a still much-anthologized article by Lori Chamberlain (1988/2012) which identified a sexualized discourse about translation through history – inferior, reproductive, feminine translation vs. superior, productive, masculine original – and called for feminist investigations into “the role of ‘silent’ forms of writing such as translation in articulating women’s speech and subverting hegemonic forms of expression” (267). In two pioneering works on the English Renaissance (Hannay 1985; Krontiris 1992), scholars set about excavating a tradition of female translators and analyzing their lives and works based on the notion that the female sex had been marginalized and oppressed by patriarchal society. They argued that women were generally expected to adhere to the rule of silence but as translation was a “degraded activity” (Hannay 1985, 8) it was permissible for women in a way in which original discourse was not, at least if they limited themselves to religious works. Women typically opted for word-for-word translation as this was less “assertive” than a freer method (Krontiris 1992, 68) and they shied away from publication, usually only owning up to their works if they were “restricted” to manuscripts circulated among the family (Hannay 1985, 9). Nonetheless, women occasionally subverted their source texts “in order to insert personal or political statements” (Hannay 1985, 4) or chose transgressive, non-religious source material, as in the case of Margaret Tyler’s version of Diego Ortúñez de Calahorra’s chivalric romance Espejo de príncipes y cavalleros which indirectly critiques contemporary gender ideology and is prefaced by a bold attack on patriarchy (Krontiris 1992, 44–62). The conclusions drawn in the volumes by Margaret P. Hannay and Tina Krontiris have shaped the field and reverberate to some extent in more recent work on 16th- and early 17th-century England (e.g. Uman 2012).

Critical issues and topics Research has often continued to focus on women as part of a separate tradition. The questions asked are the same as those asked about male translators – who translates? in what circumstances? why? what? for whom? how? to what effect? (cf. Burke 2007, 11) – but inflected by 118

Women translators in early modern Europe

gender. Scholars are keen to tease out how the translator’s sex has affected the different aspects of her work, and have been particularly interested in women who seem to display some form of feminine or feminist consciousness. Thus studies provide ample evidence of women who used translation to assert their agency and undermine patriarchal values, which is typically demonstrated through their choice of authors, methods of presentation (dedications, prefaces, notes), or translation strategies. Douglas Robinson (1995) and Mirella Agorni (1998) were among those who extended the notion of an English female translation tradition into the 17th century and beyond. Robinson charts women’s progress towards finding a public voice, from Margaret More Roper to Aphra Behn, showing how they subvert established rhetorics in their prefaces in increasingly selfpossessed ways; while Agorni examines women’s opportunities to “voice their experience as a woman” (182) from Behn onwards (for Behn and feminine translation, see also e.g. Young 1999; Cottegnies 2004). In a similar vein, Catherine M. Müller’s work on 16th-century France (2004, 2007) suggests female translators are linked by the way they intervene in woman questions, presenting female characters in a positive light and expunging any misogynistic comment from their sources. In a rare piece on a translator from the Iberian peninsula, Rosalie Hernández-Pecoraro (2003) argues that Isabel Correa subverts the Spanish pastoral mode by producing a “feminine transformative translation” (138) of Giovanni Battista Guarini’s Il Pastor Fido: her amendments, such as where an image of male potency becomes one of female desire, demonstrate that “Correa’s conscious and unconscious gendered understanding of the world pervades in the production of her translation” (142). Recently there have also been efforts to uncover a transnational female tradition, for instance the fascinating example of the Dutch poet Anna Roemers Visscher who inserted her own handwritten translations into her editions of Georgette de Montenay’s Emblemes ou Devises Chrestiennes in an attempt to “reformulate the meaning of female authorship and imagine an international community of women writers” (Elk 2009, 184).

Current contributions and research A growing body of scholarship is casting doubt on the traditional feminist view of translation history. This is perhaps an inevitable development, as more and more research on early modern literary and translation cultures is helping scholars to see the bigger picture, at least with respect to England. Scholars are also of course becoming more wary of the essentialism of the labels ‘man’ and ‘woman,’ given poststructuralist ideas about the unstable, performative, and contingent nature of gender. Increasingly, there is an awareness that the kind of ‘woman-interrogated’ approach advocated by Carol Maier for contemporary translation practice could be productively applied to the study of women translators in history (see Brown 2018a). Early revisionist work on England includes essays by Suzanne Trill (1996) and Micheline White (1999a) who argue for a shift in focus: women’s translations may be interesting for aesthetic or religious/political reasons rather than as documents of feminine consciousness. Trill sets out a critique of earlier statements about the ‘femininity’ of translation during the Renaissance, pointing out for example that translation was not a ‘degraded activity,’ that men engaged in translation far more often than women, that women were not limited to religious texts, and that men produced literal translations too. She uses the case study of Mary Sidney’s Psalmes to illustrate how it is “inappropriate” to pursue “a desire to recover the ‘feminine voice’ ” (150), as it is problematic to read them (auto)biographically; instead, the translations embody “the search for a poetic language with which to address God” (153), a central concern for Renaissance poets, and thus Sidney is making an important contribution to the development of religious lyric. White re-examines assumptions about the ‘femininity’ of religious translation. Her case study 119

Hilary Brown

presents Anne Lock’s rendition of Jean Taffin’s Calvinist Des marques des enfans de Dieu, et des consolations en leurs afflictions in relation to the government’s efforts to repress radical Protestantism in the years around 1590, and she contends that Lock’s religious identity as a member of the Puritan community was a more relevant factor in the production of her text than her gender. The current tendency, then, is to look at early modern women translators within broader contexts. Scholars have continued the work of situating women’s activities within religious and political history. This affords new views of the significance of texts sometimes deemed innocuous or uninteresting from a feminist perspective (cf. White 2011). Brenda M. Hosington’s work is particularly notable here: in a fine series of articles (e.g. 2011a, 2011b, 2011c, 2014), she demonstrates how translations by women such as Margaret Beaufort, Anne Cooke, Margaret More Roper, and Mary Clarke Basset were produced in response to momentous contemporary religious and political events, just like those of their male counterparts. Continental examples include Barbara Becker-Cantarino’s interpretation of a translation of Guillaume Saluste Du Bartas’s didactic poem Triompfe de la Foi by Catharina Regina von Greiffenberg, the most famous German-speaking woman poet of the 17th century, against the backdrop of Austrian politics (2014). Hosington and others have stressed the need to consider how women and men worked alongside each other in kinship, political, or confessional networks (White 1999b; Hosington 2011b). New perspectives have also been opened up by re-evaluations of literary history. Scholars have a better understanding of the place of translation within literary culture and are no longer likely to lump translations together with “epitaphs, letters, and private devotional meditations” at the “margins of discourse” (Hannay 1985, 14). Acknowledging the fluidity of concepts such as authorship and genre in this period, they see translation as one of a multiplicity of literary practices which were deeply embedded within intersecting cultural landscapes (Bicks and Summit 2010). Julie Crawford’s work on 16th-century literary circles, for instance, shows how translation was one of a number of textual activities undertaken by participants, alongside others such as the writing of letters and petitions and the promotion or protection of like-minded associates, which together constituted different forms of these groupings’ religious and political activism: “If considering only the handful of translations, poems, and epitaphs these women wrote may keep them safely minoritized as women writers, looking at the full range of their related activities shows their profound influence on some of the most important events of the sixteenth century” (2010, 46). Scholars have also re-thought the role of manuscripts in this age of print, breaking down the old dichotomies between public and private, masculine and feminine, and showing that women who produced manuscript translations were unlikely to have felt “restricted” by a sense of feminine modesty (Hannay 1985, 9). Margaret J.M. Ezell’s study The Patriarch’s Wife (1987), which unpacks assumptions about the influence of patriarchy on women’s writing in 17th-century England, includes a re-assessment of manuscript culture which has been very influential (62–100): Ezell finds translations among manuscripts by both men and women and argues that for both the reluctance to print may be due to “geography, social status, or expense” (82) – the attitude left over from times gone by that it was unseemly for the nobility to print their works, for example – and cannot always be attributed in the case of women to patriarchy. Moreover, manuscript circulation was often perfectly adequate to writers’ or translators’ needs (83). Since then, critics have frequently stressed that early modern manuscript production should be understood as a form of publication; writers who opted for manuscript publication did so for strategic and positive reasons; and there were many potential gains to be had from choosing manuscript publication, from social prestige to political influence at the highest levels (see e.g. Justice 2002; Goodrich 2014, 107–143). Recent work on collaboration is further blurring the distinctions between men’s writing (or translating) and women’s writing (or translating). It is recognized that collaboration was a defining feature of literary life across early modern Europe: 120

Women translators in early modern Europe

the production of texts, whether in manuscript or print, often involved several co-writers, and critics argue that we need to conceive of more inclusive concepts of authorship and allow that even male-female partnerships could be enabling and productive for women (for England, see e.g. the essays in Pender 2017; for Germany, see Brown 2018b). In her trailblazing monograph Grossly Material Things (2012), Helen Smith extends the notion of collaboration to the material production and consumption of the early modern book, arguing that female agents were present at every stage of these processes in diverse and complex but now often unacknowledged ways. She is interested in translation as an activity “traditionally assumed to be secondary or subsequent to the act of literary creation” (52) and returns to some now-classic examples from the period c. 1557–1640 such as Elizabeth I, Margaret Roper, and Margaret Tyler to illustrate how “[b]oth women and men presented female translators as partners in a collaborative endeavour to discover the author’s meaning, a process which took place within an extended circuit of exchange, comparison, and mutual correction” (40).

Main research methods Scholars working on early modern women translators come from different disciplines and employ a range of approaches, although the majority have a background in literary studies. Most research has appeared as articles or chapters and takes the form of case studies of individuals or small clusters of translators; few scholars to date have attempted broader, synthesizing work. The construction of ‘microhistories’ has been regarded across subject areas as a fruitful means of recovering the lives and works of those who have been neglected by grand historical narratives (for renewed interest in microhistory within translation studies, see Munday 2014). As indicated previously, many studies – particularly earlier ones – are works of feminist literary historiography and adopt the method favoured by first- and second-wave feminist literary critics which came to be termed ‘gynocriticism’ (see Showalter 1977/1982). These critics placed emphasis on the social and historical conditions of women’s writing and on women’s difference: working on the assumption that a writer’s sex affected the circumstances in which she wrote and the texts she produced, they set out to uncover a separate female literary tradition. They did valuable service in making previously forgotten women visible and in establishing gender as a legitimate category of analysis. But this reading of history carries risks of lopsidedness, anachronism, and hagiography. It was often assumed that the acts of writing/translating were in themselves transgressive, and critics were keen to tease out and celebrate instances where women explicitly voice opposition, subversion, or proto-feminism. “In terms of our methodological approach,” explain the editors of The Feminist Encyclopedia of French Literature, which includes a number of translator biographies, “we asked the contributing scholars to focus on the development of a ‘feminist’ consciousness, on each writer’s awareness of the ways in which gender shaped her outlook and her opportunities, and to reflect on the way categorizations, structures, and terms used to describe literary works have been defined for women and the ways in which women writers have responded to these definitions” (Sartori et al. 1999, ix). The early 16th-century writer and translator Marguerite Briet, aka Hélisenne de Crenne, for example, whose output includes a French version of the first four books of Virgil’s Aeneid, is described as a “monument of early modern feminist consciousness and female accomplishment”; further, the “hallmark of Crenne’s literary endeavours” is “[e]quality feminism” (Nash 1999, 134). Approaches to women translators are diversifying. Gradually critics are moving away from a gynocritical approach towards a more contextualizing one. They no longer insist on difference but are alive to the possibility of sameness. This does not mean effacing gender altogether but starting out from a position which does not regard gender as the defining category of analysis. 121

Hilary Brown

Thus literary scholars will assemble a corpus which includes both men and women and aim for a balanced assessment of the relevance – or not – of gender. Gillian Wright considers translators of both sexes in her survey “Translating at Leisure” in The Oxford History of Literary Translation in English, 1550–1660, carefully noting how gentlewomen “shared some but not all of their male contemporaries’ motives, preoccupations and circumstances” (2010, 62). Deirdre Serjeantson’s article (2013) on the English translator Jane Seager is another paradigmatic example: Serjeantson compares Seager’s Divine Prophecies of the Ten Sibills, a manuscript translation presented to Elizabeth I in 1589, to translations of sibylline literature from the same period by John Napier and Richard Verstegan. At first glance, Seager’s authoritative interventions in her source material may conjure familiar arguments about female agency. But in a dazzlingly intricate exploration of the three texts, in contexts ranging from iconography to Protestant translation theory to contemporary debates about emblems and hieroglyphics, Serjeantson can show where she believes the significance of gender lies: it is not in Seager’s interventionist stance, which she shares with male peers and is motivated by political and religious beliefs, but in her choice of subject matter, as she inscribes herself and the Queen into her refashioning of the wise and powerful sibyl figures. Julie Candler Hayes made a groundbreaking attempt to bring a fresh, interdisciplinary approach to the field. Her monograph Translation, Subjectivity, and Culture in France and England, 1600–1800 (2009) analyzes early modern translation by men as well as women through the lens of post-war French philosophy. Hayes offers a reassessment of neoclassical translation theory, seeking to disprove the view that translation in this period was solely reader-oriented and thus inward-facing, hegemonizing and ethnocentric, and to demonstrate instead how translators had “multiple agendas and projects” (7). Close readings from her corpus of 450 to 500 translators’ prefaces are informed in particular by the work of Emmanuel Levinas, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Jacques Derrida. Hayes includes a chapter on Anne Dacier and her position within the Quarrel of Ancient and Moderns. She argues that although Dacier sided with the Ancients, her prefaces show an engagement with issues of translatability and meaning which prefigure Derrida’s reflections on monolingualism and show she was “more ‘modern’ than the Moderns” (121). She discusses gender explicitly in a survey of women translators in a later chapter, positing that translation offered women an opportunity to negotiate between active and passive authorship to find a Derridean “middle voice” (161). Interestingly, the findings presented in this chapter as a whole do not differ significantly from the work of earlier gynocritics. Focusing largely on the 18th century, her selection of material points again to a female tradition: translations aimed at women readers, translators commenting on female characters, women translating women’s writing and dedicating their work to women. Hayes names this last trend “gynocentric translation” (156) and commends the women for building textual connections based on gender to create – quoting the words of feminist translation critic Suzanne De Lotbinière-Harwood – “solid woman-ground” (146). The notion of femaleness underpinning her readings transcends historical periods (141) and is unshifting. Derrida leads us to see how the “explicit ‘positionality’ of translation [. . .] casts the inadequacy of the [active-passive] dichotomy into sharpest relief,” Hayes argues, and thus it is not surprising that women writers, “who must constantly confront their positionality with regard to textual production and social relations (in ways that males, naturalized as agents and producers, may not), should have found in translation a stimulating and creative environment in which to work” (162). Finally, exciting new approaches are emerging from research on the history and materiality of the book. Hosington has done much to advance the study of translation in early modern England within the context of the book trade, including the development of online resources which provide detailed quantitative data as the basis for such study: the Renaissance Cultural 122

Women translators in early modern Europe

Crossroads catalogue (www.dhi.ac.uk/rcc/) and Cultural Crosscurrents in Stuart and Commonwealth Britain: An Online Analytical Catalogue of Translations, 1641–1660 (www.translationandprint. com/catalogue). Keeping in view the wider publishing context should help us to evaluate properly the activities of women. Hosington’s method involves not treating translations in isolation but as “one of a range of works published at the same time on the same subject and in similar socio-historical circumstances” and taking into account factors such as “the ideological motivations of both translator and printer” (Hosington 2014, 248; see also Belle and Hosington 2017). Scholars are also suggesting that we need to be more attentive to texts as material objects. Materialist analyses posit that publication can be perceived as an “event” – which encompasses “an originary publication moment as well as the text’s subsequent retransmission by different hands, at different moments and in different media” (Smith 2018: 189) – and the text as ‘archive,’ and it has been argued that we need to return anew to the material elements of women’s translations, i.e. paratextual material such as dedications, woodcuts, and marginalia. Rosalind Smith, for instance, examines the woodcut of a lady at a lectern which prefaces Margaret More Roper’s Erasmus translation: where critics have always interpreted this as an image of “private reading” by a female subject cloistered by the extravagant border (192–194), Smith traces iterations of the image through four previous publications and concludes that its cropping and reframing here creates new and positive associations of female scholarship. This indicates that women’s translations “are materially positioned not as a subordinate activity, but as a kind of co-labour within publication events extending across multiple hands and textual instances” (2018, 207).

Future directions While some in English studies suggest that research on women’s writing should move into the post-recovery phase, there is surely still a place for recovering women translators, particularly in countries other than England. Indeed, scholars have begun to chart the field (e.g. Stevenson 2005 provides initial information about translators such as the Italian Tarquinia Molza and Danish woman Birgitte Thott; see also Dębska 2016 on Poland; Leturio 2018 on Spain; and Gibbels 2018 for a new bibliography of German translators). One hopes, too, that there will be efforts to compile big data on different language areas along the lines of the invaluable Renaissance Cultural Crossroads catalogue. The Women Writers database (http://neww.huygens.knaw.nl/), which seeks to chart the international reception of women writers pre-1900, is an encouraging start, but we are a long way off from a comprehensive pan-European resource – incorporating men as well as women, perhaps manuscript as well as print – which would transform research on early modern cultures of translation and provide us with new ways of asking questions about gender. In the meantime, there is a need for more conversation between subject areas. Increasingly scholars identify transcultural approaches to women’s writing as fruitful new terrain – witness Jane Stevenson’s call for investigations into “the variety of interfaces between early modern Englishwomen and the wider world” (2007, 291; cf. Suzuki 2011, 18–19) – and this research does not of course have to take an Anglocentric starting point. Is it possible to speak of a Europe-wide female translation tradition in a period increasingly understood as transnational or does the contingency of gender imply that we need to be very sensitive to national conditions? In practice scholars will need to consider how to overcome language barriers (research on Continental women translators is often published in the language of the country) and whether such work would entail individuals entering into new territory – a move which sometimes invites scepticism from single-discipline experts – or larger collaborative projects. Above all, we will need to keep interrogating gender as a useful category for our research. If Luise von Flotow defined a key question in 1997 as “How has gender affected the work of 123

Hilary Brown

translators in the past?” (90), that question is gradually becoming “Has gender affected the work of translators in the past?” We are accepting that gender is just one of the factors which has shaped translation history, alongside others such as family milieu, social class, political beliefs, and religious confession. We do not need to start out from the assumption that all women who picked up their pens were proto-feminists, using translation to assert their agency and undermine patriarchal values. We can move away from an always defensive, negative critique of patriarchy, from the privileging of oppositional voices, to a more positive and nuanced account of women’s opportunities and a readiness to acknowledge that the translator could adopt a broader range of positions. But writing a history of poets and Puritans as well as proto-feminists, of complicity as well as agency, presents us with challenges – will it still be women’s history? will it still be feminist history? – which future scholars will have to ponder.

Further reading Belle, Marie-Alice, ed. 2012. Women’s Translations in Early Modern England and France. Special issues of Renaissance and Reformation, 35(4). This special issue provides a good overview of current topics and approaches and includes a useful introductory essay by Belle entitled “Locating Early Modern Women’s Translations: Critical and Historiographical Issues.” Hosington, Brenda M. 2014. Women Translators and the Early Printed Book, in Vincent Gillespie and Susan Powell, eds., A Companion to the Early Printed Book in Britain 1476–1558. Cambridge: Brewer, 248–271. An important example of revisionist work which demonstrates how studying women’s translations within the context of book history sheds light on their role in contemporary religious and political developments. Simon, Sherry. 1996. Gender in Translation: Cultural Identity and the Politics of Transmission. London and New York: Routledge. Chapter 2 of this standard work contains a useful overview of historical research up to the mid-1990s.

References Agorni, Mirella. 1998. The Voice of the “Translatress”: From Aphra Behn to Elizabeth Carter. Yearbook of English Studies, 28, 181–195. Becker-Cantarino, Barbara. 2014. Frömmigkeit und Bekehrung: Catharina Regina von Greiffenbergs Sieges-Seule der Buße und Glaubens, oder wollte Grieffenberg wirklich Kaiser Leopold I. zum Luthertum bekehren? in Gesa Dane, ed., Scharfsinn und Frömmigkeit: Zum Werk von Catharina Regina von Greiffenberg (1633–1694). Bern: Lang, 13–38. Belle, Marie-Alice and Brenda M. Hosington. 2017. Translation History and Print: A Model for the Study of Printed Translations in Early Modern Britain. Translation Studies, 10(1), 2–21. Bicks, Caroline and Jennifer Summit. 2010. Introduction, in Caroline Bicks and Jennifer Summit, eds., The History of British Women’s Writing, Vol. 2: 1500–1610. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Brown, Hilary. 2018a. Women Translators in History: Towards a “Woman-Interrogated” Approach. fémin/ in/visible: Femmes de lettres à l’époque des Lumières, Special issue of Cahiers du Centre de traduction littéraire de Lausanne, 27–51. Brown, Hilary. 2018b. Rethinking Agency and Creativity: Translation, Collaboration and Gender in Early Modern Germany. Translation Studies, 11(1), 84–102. Published online 18 Apr. 2017. Brown, Sarah Anne. 2005. Women Translators, in Stuart Gillespie and David Hopkins, eds., The Oxford History of Literary Translation in English, Vol. 3: 1660–1790. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 111–120. Burke, Peter. 2007. Cultures of Translation in Early Modern Europe, in Peter Burke and R. Po-Chia Hsia, eds., Cultural Translation in Early Modern Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 7–38. Chamberlain, Lori. 1988/2012. Gender and the Metaphorics of Translation, in Lawrence Venuti, ed., The Translation Studies Reader, 3rd ed. London: Routledge, 245–268.

124

Women translators in early modern Europe

Clarke, Danielle. 2009. Translation, in Laura Lunger Knoppers, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Early Modern Women’s Writing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 167–180. Cottegnies, Line. 2004. Aphra Behn’s French Translations, in Derek Hughes and Janet Todd, eds., The Cambridge Companion to Aphra Behn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 221–234. Crawford, Julie. 2010. Literary Circles and Communities, in Caroline Bicks and Jennifer Summit, eds., The History of British Women’s Writing, Vol. 2: 1500–1610. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 34–59. Dębska, Karolina. 2016. Foremothers: First Women Translators in Poland. Studia Filologiczne Uniwersytetu Jana Kochanowskiego, 29, 163–172. Available at: www.ujk.edu.pl/ifp/studia_filologiczne/wp-content/ uploads/2015/03/Karolina-D%C4%99bska.pdf. Elk, Martine van. 2009. Courtliness, Piety and Politics: Emblem Books by Georgette de Montenay, Anna Roemers Visscher, and Esther Inglis, in Julie D. Campbell and Anne R. Larsen, eds., Early Modern Women and Transnational Communities of Letters. Farnham: Ashgate, 182–210. Ezell, Margaret J. M. 1987. The Patriarch’s Wife: Literary Evidence and the History of the Family. Chapel Hill and London: The U of North Carolina Press. Flotow, Luise von. 1997. Translation and Gender: Translating in the ‘Era of Feminism’. Manchester: St Jerome. Gibbels, Elisabeth. 2018. Lexikon der deutschen Übersetzerinnen 1200–1850. Berlin: Frank & Timme. Goodrich, Jaime. 2014. Faithful Translators: Authorship, Gender, and Religion in Early Modern England. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Greene, David H. 1941. Lady Lumley and Greek Tragedy. The Classical Journal, 36(9), 537–547. Hannay, Margaret P., ed. 1985. Silent but for the Word: Tudor Women as Patrons, Translators, and Writers of Religious Works. Kent, OH: The Kent State University Press. Hayes, Julie Candler. 2009. Translation, Subjectivity, and Culture in France and England, 1600–1800. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Hernández-Pecoraro, Rosalie. 2003. Isabel Correa’s Transformative Translation of Guarini’s Il Pastor Fido, in Anne J. Cruz et al., eds., Disciplines on the Line: Feminist Research on Spanish, Latin American, and US Latina Women. Newark, DE: Juan de la Cuesta, 125–144. Hosington, Brenda M. 2011a. Tudor Englishwoman’s Translations of Continental Protestant Texts: The Interplay of Ideology and Historical Context, in Fred Schurink, ed., Tudor Translation. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 121–142. Hosington, Brenda M. 2011b. Translation in the Service of Politics and Religion: A Family Tradition for Thomas More, Margaret Roper and Mary Clarke Basset, in Jeanine De Landtsheer and Henk J. M. Nellen, eds., Between Scylla and Charybdis: Learned Letter Writers Navigate the Reefs of Religious and Political Controversy in Early Modern Europe. Leiden: Brill, 93–108. Hosington, Brenda M. 2011c. Lady Margaret Beaufort’s Translations as Mirrors of Practical Piety, in Micheline White, ed., English Women, Religion and Textual Production, 1500–1625. Aldershot: Ashgate, 185–201. Hosington, Brenda M. and Hannah Fornier. 2007. Translation and Women Translators, in Diana Robin et al., eds., The Encyclopedia of Women in the Renaissance: Italy, France and England. Berkeley, CA: Clio Press, 369–375. Hughey, Ruth. 1934. A Note on Queen Elizabeth’s “Godly Meditation.” The Library, 15, 327–340. Justice, George L. 2002. Introduction, in George L. Justice and Nathan Tinker, eds., Women’s Writing and the Circulation of Ideas: Manuscript Publication in England, 1550–1800. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1–16. Krontiris, Tina. 1992. Oppositional Voices: Women as Writers and Translators of Literature in the English Renaissance. London: Routledge. Leturio, Nieves Baranda. 2018. Transnational Exchanges, in Nieves Baranda and Anne J. Cruz, eds., The Routledge Research Companion to Early Modern Spanish Women. Abington: Routledge, 347–361. Matthiessen, Francis Otto. 1931/1965. Translation: An Elizabethan Art. New York: Octagon. Munday, Jeremy. 2014. Using Primary Sources to Produce a Microhistory of Translation and Translators: Theoretical and Methodological Concerns. The Translator, 20(1), 64–80. Müller, Catherine M. 2004. Jeanne de la Font et Anne de Greville, translatrices de la Théséide de Boccace au XVIe siècle, in Jean-Philippe Beaulieu, ed., D’une écriture à l’autre: Les femmes et la traduction sous l’Ancien Régime. Ottawa: Presse de l’Université d’Ottawa, 211–227. Müller, Catherine M. 2007. Französische Übersetzerinnen in der Frühen Neuzeit, in Gesa Stedman and Margarete Zimmermann, eds., Höfe–Salons–Akademien: Kulturtransfer und Gender im Europa der Frühen Neuzeit. Hildesheim: Olms, 65–86.

125

Hilary Brown

Nash, Jerry C. 1999. Hélisenne de Crenne, in Eva Martin Sartori et al., eds., The Feminist Encyclopedia of French Literature. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 134–135. Pender, Patricia, ed. 2017. Gender, Authorship, and Early Modern Women’s Collaboration. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. Robinson, Douglas. 1995. Theorizing Translation in a Woman’s Voice: Subverting the Rhetoric of Patronage, Courtly Love and Morality. The Translator, 1(2), 153–175. Sankovitch, Tilde. 1999. Translation (Renaissance), in Eva Martin Sartori et al., eds., The Feminist Encyclopedia of French Literature. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 532–534. Sartori, Eva Martin et al., eds. 1999. The Feminist Encyclopedia of French Literature. Westport, CT: Greenwood. Serjeantson, Deirdre. 2013. Translation, Authorship, and Gender: The Case of Jane Seager’s Divine Prophecies of the Ten Sibills. in Gabriela Schmidt, ed., Elizabethan Translation and Literary Culture. Berlin: de Gruyter, 227–254. Showalter, Elaine. 1977/1982. A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Brontë to Lessing. Revised ed. London: Virago. Smith, Helen. 2012. “Grossly Material Things”: Women and Book Production in Early Modern England. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Smith, Rosalind. 2018. Paratextual Economies in Tudor Women’s Translations: Margaret More Roper, Mary Roper Basset and Mary Tudor, in Andrea Rizzi, ed., Trust and Proof: Translators in Renaissance Print Culture. Leiden: Brill, 185–208. Stevenson, Jane. 2005. Women Latin Poets: Language, Gender and Authority from Antiquity to the Eighteenth Century. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Stevenson, Jane. 2007. Still Kissing the Rod? Whither Next? Women’s Writing, 14(2), 290–305. Suzuki, Mihoko, ed. 2011. The History of British Women’s Writing, Vol. 3, 1610–1690. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Trill, Suzanne. 1996. Sixteenth-Century Women’s Writing: Mary Sidney’s Psalmes and the “Femininity” of Translation, in William Zunder and Suzanne Trill, eds., Writing and the English Renaissance. London: Longman, 140–158. Uman, Deborah. 2012. Women as Translators in Early Modern England. Newark, DE: Delaware University Press. White, Micheline. 1999a. Renaissance Englishwomen and Literary Translations: The Case of Anne Lock’s of the Markes of the Children of God (1590). English Literary Renaissance, 23, 375–400. White, Micheline. 1999b. A Biographical Sketch of Dorcas Martin: Elizabethan Translator, Stationer, and Godly Matron. Sixteenth Century Journal, 30, 775–792. White, Micheline. 2011. Introduction: Women, Religious Communities, Prose Genres, and Textual Production, in Micheline White, ed., English Women, Religion and Textual Production, 1500–1625. Farnham: Ashgate, 1–13. Wilson-Lee, Edward. 2015. Women’s Weapons: Country House Diplomacy in the Countess of Pembroke’s French Translations, in Tania Demetriou and Rowan Tomlinson, eds., The Cultures of Translation in Early Modern England and France 1500–1660. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 128–144. Wright, Gillian. 2010. Translating at Leisure: Gentlemen and Gentlewomen, in Gordon Braden et al., eds., The Oxford History of Literary Translation in English, Vol. 2: 1550–1660. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 58–67. Young, Elizabeth V. 1999. Aphra Behn’s Horace. Restoration: Studies in English Literary Culture, 1660–1700, 23, 76–90.

126

10 Women writers in translation in the UK The “Year of Publishing Women” (2018) as a platform for collective change?1 Olga Castro and Helen Vassallo

Introduction: the Year of Publishing Women (2018) as a watershed year? In May 2015, writer Kamila Shamsie sent out a provocative call to action as part of an impassioned speech at the Hay Literature Festival, in Hay-on-Wye, Wales: she called on British publishing houses to make 2018 the Year of Publishing Women (YPW), to coincide with the centenary of some women getting the right to vote. As she announced in her talk, published by The Guardian and The Bookseller a few weeks later (Shamsie 2015), the idea was simple: women are still underrepresented in publishing, as in other domains, and so for one year publishing houses should only publish books authored by women. This would then have a positive impact not only on figures for that one year but also subsequent years, as the collective action would shake up an industry that has been shown to be fairly stagnant in terms of the gender distribution of published books (see Rudd 2013). By issuing this challenge in 2015, Shamsie was, ostensibly, giving publishers plenty of time to prepare – and to take part. And yet only one publisher, the independent publishing house And Other Stories, declared their intention to participate. As the founder of And Other Stories, Stefan Tobler, explained, they realized “it provided an opportunity, instead of relying on what happens on its own, to really make a public call” (Tobler, in Yates-Badley 2018, online, n.p.). Nicky Smalley, the marketing director, reflected that Shamsie’s “incendiary solution” was “a provocation to all British publishers, big and small, she urged presses to highlight the problem, instigate discussion” (Smalley 2018, online, n.p.). Reactions elsewhere were mixed: most famously, at a panel on the Women’s International Day in 2016, writer Lionel Shriver defined Shamsie’s campaign as “rubbish and a ridiculous idea” (in Flood 2016, online, n.p.). Our contention here is that it was far from rubbish or ridiculous, but a message sent to the publishing industry about equality, and one that, while not being the outright success Shamsie may have hoped for, has had a significant effect on publishing in the UK, particularly among independent presses. Though Shamsie was campaigning for women’s writing in general, the YPW aimed to include women writers in translation too. If the situation is not promising for women writing 127

Olga Castro and Helen Vassallo

in English, it is even more challenging for translated authors, in a publishing context in which translated literature “oscillates around 3%” of the book market in Ireland and the UK on average, as confirmed by the Publishing Translated Literature in the United Kingdom and Ireland 1990–2012 Statistical Report (Büchler and Trentacosti 2015, 5).2 Given the “hyper-central position” of English (Sapiro 2008, 158), translated texts have traditionally been eschewed by the anglophone marketplace, partly because of a tendency towards being “reactive in terms of translations, wanting to see (and know) what works have done in other markets before committing to buying rights” (Mansell 2017, 53–54). Linking this to the lack of women’s visibility in their own literary cultures, this may help explain the fact that, out of that meagre 3%, less than one-third (around 28%) of books in English translation are authored by women writers.3 Translator and activist Katy Derbyshire laments: Only a tiny fraction of fiction published in English is translated, and only about a quarter of that translated fiction was originally written by women. For some reason, fiction in translation by women is an absolute rarity – black diamonds, palomino unicorns. (Derbyshire 2016, online, n.p.) Despite these figures, Alexandra Büchler and Giulia Trentacosti’s report also pointed at a consistent increase in the number of titles in translation. This was confirmed by a more recent report on Translating the Literatures of Smaller European Nations: A Picture from the UK, whose authors assert that the widespread and enduring pessimism about the prospects for translated literature in the UK is outdated, noting that “the concern has shifted from a focus on the low amount of translated literature being published, to questions about the diversity of literature translated” (Chitnis et al. 2017, 1). This diversity is mainly understood in terms of the literary genres and the variety of smaller literatures (defined as those that depend on translation to reach international audiences) that are rendered into English, most of them representing smaller European nations and thus perpetuating Eurocentrism. When looking at gender in translated literature, publication lists are still dominated by male authors (Chitnis et al. 2017, 9), a trend which was also highlighted by Daniel Hahn, writing about the longlist of the 2017 Man Booker International Prize (the most prestigious award for literary translation in English). Hahn noted that the longlist reflected “a significant gender imbalance (as we see every year), and a significant bias towards European writers and European languages (as we see every year, too)” (Hahn 2017, 48), and that these imbalances were indicative of the overall submissions pool, and thus of a more widespread imbalance in the translated literature industry. Although there is reason to be optimistic about the upward turn in the percentage of literature being translated into English, initiatives such as the YPW in 2018 are essential to hold gatekeepers to account for the continuing bias towards male-authored writing available in translation. While other stakeholders (booksellers, reviewers, literary festivals and others) also have a part to play in tackling this bias, for the purposes of this study we shall focus on publishers because of their role as primary “gatekeepers.” More precisely, we shall focus on small independent publishing houses in the UK, based on our contention that smaller presses are pioneers for activism in translation. Indeed, Tobler identifies the independent and not-for-profit status of And Other Stories as being the primary factor that gives them more freedom to embark on projects and initiatives such as the YPW, whereas larger publishers might be more hesitant, “fearing a backlash or losing money” (see Tobler, in Yates-Badley 2018, online, n.p.). We identify

128

Women writers in translation in the UK

the smaller presses as important activists for gender parity in translation for two key reasons: first, because of their contribution to the increased percentage of translated literature in the UK (as noted by Chitnis et al. 2017, 2), a trend that explicitly includes women writers – indeed, Chantal Wright, who was instrumental in setting up the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation, notes that “smaller, independent publishing houses are pioneering in their activism for gender in translation” (Wright, in Krstić 2018, online, n.p.). Second, independent presses are crucial to activism in translated literature because of their work as “cultural talent scouts” (Freely, in Flood 2019a, online, n.p.), the importance of which is reflected in the fact that eleven of the thirteen books longlisted for the Man Booker International prize in 2019 were published by independent presses, and that eight of the thirteen were women-authored. This focused approach will help us to assess the impact that the YPW has had on translation into English in the UK in 2018 and whether it might lay the groundwork for equality-driven shifts in the coming years. We shall situate our contribution within wider debates about gender, publishing and translation, and also in the context of different initiatives put in place to encourage greater translation and dissemination of women writers into English. Special attention will be paid to recent theorizations of translation as a tool for enabling transnational encounters among diverse women, as claimed by transnational feminism, particularly when translation happens in a space we shall term “from-the-Rest to-the-West.” Underlining the importance of the intersections between critical debate and literary activism, and the ways in which each enlarges and empowers the other, we set in dialogue the theory produced by academics with the immediacy of online publications and their relevance to such a time-specific debate. By so doing, we accord equal importance in this study to traditional academic research publications and contemporary methods of dissemination such as blog posts, online editorials, and podcasts, responding to the “diversity” of advocates highlighted by Rajendra Chitnis et al. (2017, 2). We shall then introduce our case study and carry out a statistical analysis of translated women’s writing published in 2018 in the 13 independent presses forming our corpus, with particular consideration of translation flows in relation to the geopolitical status of the source texts. Finally, we shall offer some conclusions about the impact of the YPW on the UK translated literature industry, highlighting areas of growth and areas that are still in progress.

Historical perspectives and critical issues on gender, publishing and translation: intersections of academic studies and literary activism The topic of women writers in the circuits of translation is one of the most researched areas in feminist translation studies (see Castro and Ergun 2018, 131–132). Thirty-five years after the publication of the first panoramic study on women writers in translation in the anglophone target culture (Resnick and de Courtivron 1984),4 the obstacles its authors noted (namely the “lack of recognition by critics and lack of influence over the publishing interests,” Resnick and de Courtivron 1984, 211) still significantly reduce the chances for foreign women writers to be noticed and selected for publication in the English-language market. These two obstacles are part of what Margaret Carson (2019) has recently categorized as the “first barrier” faced by women writers in their journey to translation (i.e. the gender gap in publishing). Those writers who succeed at overcoming it then face a “second barrier” (2019, 39–41): the lack of visibility within their own literary culture owing to their not being featured in interviews or newspapers, reviewed by well-known reviewers in well-regarded venues, or awarded literary prizes as publishers have not considered submitting their manuscripts.

129

Olga Castro and Helen Vassallo

Gender-biased attitudes towards women in translation are many and varied (for an overview, see Castro 2017), and this is something that many publishers are becoming increasingly aware of. In a 2018 interview, Smalley of And Other Stories confirms that most of what gets translated has already had a level of success in its original language, and often, in a lot of cultures, more attention is given to male writers. Men are favoured, considered more serious, considered to write better literature and so on, and so they’re the ones that get the awards, they’re the ones that get the coverage in the news that bring them to the attention of foreign publishers who might want to publish them. (in Vassallo 2018, online, n.p.) Exposing these male-centric/gender-biased trends of the publishing industry in literary circles and media has given a renewed thrust to long-standing claims in academia to use translation more consciously and strategically as a tool to help disseminate the works of silenced women writers. One of the earliest examples is Françoise Massardier-Kenney’s pioneering proposal for a “redefinition of a feminist translation practice,” in which different translator-centred and author-centred strategies would make it possible to “change literary history by bringing to light authors who were inaccessible before” (1997, 65). Indeed, if literary translation plays a major role in the internationalization of cultural markets and becomes a marker of status in the economic global system (Sapiro 2016), a feminist intervention seems vital to ensure a more balanced representation. Some of the most recent initiatives developed in the English-language literary scene include the ‘Women in Translation’ tumblr (Price and Carson 2015) and the ‘Women to Translate’ series at the online literary website LitHub, including posts listing foreign authors that should enter the English-language domain (see LitHub 2017). However, the challenges for women in translation do not end when they enter the Englishlanguage literary circuit. Carson contends that a “third barrier” is the lack of visibility of translated authors within the target book market (2019, 41–42), mainly owing to the fact that foreign publishers are more likely to promote their men writers abroad (e.g. in literary festivals) and that books in translation by women writers are less likely to be reviewed (see also Wood 2019; Radzinski 2018). To overcome that invisibility and give greater status to what is already available in English translation, different initiatives developed in the last few years have succeeded in linking the growth of translated literature to the importance of technological advances. Indeed, as Chitnis et al. conclude in their report, “[s]ocial media, book reviews sites, on-line reading groups and bloggers are transforming the notion of word-of-mouth” (2017, 2), which is “the primary means of spreading interest in a book” (2017, 6). One such initiative is the Translating Women project that forms part of the basis for our research, in which founder Helen Vassallo reviews, recommends and promotes books by women in translation, working with publishers and translators to increase the visibility of womenauthored translated literature. Equally important in making women in translation visible is the “Warwick Prize for Women in Translation” (Warwick 2017), established by the University of Warwick in 2017 to address the gender imbalance in translated literature. Coordinated by the literary translator and scholar Chantal Wright, it is awarded annually to the best work of literature by a woman published in English translation by a UK or Irish press. Besides the recognition and prestige awarded to the winner each November, by announcing the longlisted selection first and the shortlisted titles a few weeks later, this prize creates an invaluable portfolio easily accessible to the general public. A third initiative worth considering is the “WITMonth” campaign, founded by Meytal Radzinski (2014) on her blog in 2014 to encourage and challenge readers to seek out translated texts by women every August, for “as long as the huge imbalance 130

Women writers in translation in the UK

in publishing women in translation persists” (Radzinski 2016, online, n.p.). Most of the actions occur on Twitter under the hashtag #WITMonth or #womenintranslation, which gives publishers the chance to promote their existing titles and readers the opportunity to find excellent books to read. Many of the initiatives just mentioned are featured in an article in the literary magazine Words Without Borders for International Women’s Day in 2019, which highlighted 15 women and organizations working for gender parity in literature, and which shows the difference that activism can make (Words Without Borders 2019). Calling for an increased translation of (simply) women writers as a way to address the gender imbalance in translated literature may, however, risk erasing the complexity of gender identities and promoting essentialist understandings of what a woman is or may be. Needless to say, gender is not the only imbalance in translated literature,5 but a uni-dimensional understanding of it may lead to the situation Shamsie warned about at the very end of her talk at the Hay-on-Wye literary festival, showing her commitment against different “areas of exclusion” in women’s writing: If we are to truly claim that we’re pushing back against inequality, it’s essential that the YPW doesn’t end up looking like the year of publishing young, straight, white, middleclass, metropolitan women. (Shamsie 2015, online, n.p.) The only way to avoid this undesirable situation is to consider the YPW from an intersectional perspective (Crenshaw 1989) or a metramorphics approach (Flotow 2009), looking at how gender interacts with other social categories. Different categories (such as race, class, ethnicity, age, religion, geography, sexual identity, sexual orientation, etc.) are interconnected with gender to create intertwined systems of privilege or discrimination; taking on a “politics of location” as formulated by Adrienne Rich (1986, 212), identities are inexorably complex and situated. In our analysis, we shall focus on how gender is linked to geography (McDowell 1999); in particular, we shall address the power dynamics within languages and literatures in different geographical spaces or, put differently, between the hyper-centralized English-language literature field (Sapiro 2008) and other smaller literatures in less translated languages (Branchadell 2005).6 By tracing the flows of women in translation in the YPW, our aim is to assess the extent to which this initiative may be creating opportunities for women’s encounters that ultimately lead to better contextualized understandings of intersectional experiences in different geopolitical situations. As argued by theorists of transnational feminism (Lock Swarr and Nagar 2010), these women’s encounters and understandings transcending national boundaries are crucial to global social justice – and for them to happen we need translation; as Kathy Davis explains: “there can be no successful feminist politics without translation” (Davis, in Nagar et al. 2017, 111). Translation is a crucial tool for enabling transnational encounters among diverse women and alternative cross-border connectivities and solidarities (Costa and Alvarez 2014, 557).7 Yet, literary exchanges have flowed far more easily from north to south and from west to east, particularly leading to the (subtle and sometimes not so subtle) imposition of Anglo-American cultural values through translation (Venuti 1995, 14–15), whereas travel in other directions has proved almost non-existent. To challenge this trend, which reinforces neo-colonial practices so commonly incurred in previous formulations by Western feminism, some scholars have called for the need to “avoid West-to-the-Rest narratives, and develop more South-to-South oriented dialogues” (Costa 2006, 73). Alongside this, it is our contention that narratives ‘from-the-Rest to-the-West’ are crucially important too. For these feminist alliances to be truly productive, efforts must be made to incorporate narratives from other languages, literatures, and cultures in English translation. In our study of the YPW, we want to explore the extent to which women’s 131

Olga Castro and Helen Vassallo

encounters may be facilitated by translation from other languages into English, and how diverse (from a geopolitical point of view) those translated women writers are.

A gendered and geopolitical overview of the YPW in small UK independent presses We carried out extensive data analysis of the 2018 publications of 13 UK-based independent publishing houses who normally publish works in translation as a significant part (or all) of their list, discarding large or mainstream publishers and restricting our corpus to those that can be defined as small presses (see Tables 10.1 and 10.2 in Appendices for full list and breakdown of publications).8 Though we do not have scope in this piece to present all the analysis undertaken, we shall summarize our principal findings, and use these to draw tentative conclusions about the impact of the YPW for women in translation in the UK. The 13 publishers in our corpus published 39 translations of women-authored books (see Table 10.1 in Appendix I). Most of these independent publishers publish women in translation as part of their ‘generalist’ series, but some have specific series devoted to women in translation, such as Parthian’s Europa Carnivale series. Another distinctive feature is that some publishers or imprints are committed to specific geographical areas: while many focus on Europe (Istros Books publish translated literature from the Balkans, and Norvik Books publish Scandinavian literature in translation, while Parthian Books offer the aforementioned Europa Carnivale series), two concentrate on other areas: Tilted Axis Press publishes work from South Asia, and Charco Press publishes writing from Latin America. Of these 13 presses, 11 published books by men writers too – the only exceptions being And Other Stories (as a result of taking part in the YPW) and Parthian (with all prose books in translation being part of their women writers in translation series). The total number of men writers in translation by these presses is 45 (see Table 10.2 in Appendix II). Though the take-up of YPW seemed disappointingly small, with only one out of our 13 small publishers taking up the YPW challenge, these figures demonstrate that other presses have nonetheless made significant contributions (deliberate or otherwise) too. The total number of books published by the publishing houses in our corpus did not indicate total parity, but it did suggest an improvement: books by women in small presses made up 46% of the translated literature publications, compared to 54% for books by men. While this is not the 100% womenauthored total that the YPW had sought, it is certainly an improvement on the overall statistic of women’s writing accounting for less than one-third of publications. WIT (women in translation) books represent 21 languages and 25 countries, as Figures 10.1 and 10.2 show respectively. Translated literature by women writers in the UK remained determinedly Eurocentric in 2018. Only 15 of the 39 books come from non-European source literary systems, in five different languages. The existence of specific series devoted to WIT (e.g. Parthian’s Europa Carnivale) and publishers’ commitment to specific European geographical areas (such as Istros Books, Norvik Press or Parthian’s series) clearly helps; Charco’s focus on Latin America also accounts for two of the Latin American books (see Figure 10.1). Translations into English from stronger literary languages such as French, German, and Italian (the three having a colonial tradition) came in all cases from the metropolis. This trend is the direct opposite of the case with translations from Spanish, as all books come from Latin America. Our survey shows a timid openness towards writing representing ‘lesser translated languages’ or ‘smaller European nations,’ that we can only hope might grow and extend to other continents in the years following the YPW. 132

Women writers in translation in the UK 8

6

4

2

Ba

Ar ab

ic s Ca que ta C lan hi n C ese ro at ia Da n ni s Du h tc Fi h nn i Fr sh en G ch er Ic ma el n an d Ita ic Ja lia pa n ne Ko se re La an t Li vi th an u N an or ia w n eg ia Po n l Se ish rb Sp ian an Sw ish ed is h

0

Figure 10.1 WIT books by language

There are three particularly striking absences: firstly, the absence of some ‘strong’ European languages such as Portuguese (seventh most spoken language), despite the increase in translations of Latin American authors (which would have included Brazilian Portuguese); secondly, the absence of writers from Spain who write in Spanish (the three books from Spain are written in Basque and Catalan); and thirdly, the absence of languages with an official status within the UK such as Welsh – the YPW could indeed have been used to disseminate Welsh-speaking women writers in the rest of the UK, and although Parthian Books publish many titles in Welsh, and some in both Welsh and English, no Welsh women-authored books were translated into English in 2018. Equally surprising is the scarcity of literatures in languages spoken by first- or second-generation migrant communities settled in the UK, especially those with strong literary traditions and among the most spoken languages in the world, such as Arabic and Chinese. The one continent with no representation at all for either men or women writers (apart from the English-speaking territories of North America and Australia) is Africa, with nothing translated by African women authors writing either in African languages, in Arabic, or in colonial languages such as French or Portuguese; this is clearly a priority area in translated literature more generally. MIT (men in translation) books also represent 21 languages, spread across 30 countries, as shown in Figures 10.3 and 10.4. A similar Eurocentric trend in translated literature in the UK can be perceived when it comes to foreign men writers. In quantitative terms, 12 books (out of 45) are from ­non-European source literary systems; in qualitative terms, however, those 12 books span nine different languages spoken in the Americas and Asia (see Figure 10.3), adding to the non-European texts a diversity not quite as evident in the women-authored translations. As was the case for WIT, publishers’ commitment to specific European geographical areas is responsible for some of the areas of emphasis evident in the results. Although MIT has less variety in Spanish-speaking Latin American countries than WIT, it has more variety of spaces when it comes to other metropolitan/colonial languages. MIT also 133

134

Image 10.2 WIT books by country

1

4

Olga Castro and Helen Vassallo

Women writers in translation in the UK 8

6

4

2

Ar a Bo bic sn C ian hi ne s Du e Es tch to ni a Fi n nn i Fr sh en G ch er Ic ma e n In lan do d ne ic si a Ita n Ja lia pa n ne se P Po o l i rtu sh g Ro ue m se an Ru ian s Sl sia ov n ak Sl ian ov Sp ene an is h Th ai Uz be k

0

Figure 10.3 MIT books by language

had a greater geographical spread in 2018, though the linguistic spread was even between both women and men writers. However, quantitatively speaking, the number of spaces and literary traditions represented by men writers and not women, and vice versa, is very similar; as such, we can begin to distinguish between those issues that are important for translated literature more generally, and those which specifically affect women writers. The main gender-specific issues in our corpus of publishing translated adult prose into English in the UK in 2018 by small independent presses is a quantitative one: despite 2018 being the YPW, fewer books by foreign women writers were published in English translation by small presses in 2018 than books by men writers, and overall fewer literary systems were represented. Other issues encountered are true of both MIT and WIT, which suggests that they are geopolitical issues, and that this should be considered alongside the gender issue. Yet, when looked at from a gender approach some trends can still be identified. For example, there is slightly less diversity in languages and literary spaces in the case of WIT. This happens mainly in two areas: first, translations from non-European literary spaces, and second, translations from European colonial languages used in non-European spaces. These findings raise questions of the correlation between different forms of cultural and gendered dominance that the YPW brings to light. Through the analysis of which women writers entered the literary Anglosphere in the YPW, we wanted to participate in a transnational feminist practice by bringing new insights into the power relationship between languages and literary systems. We argued that flows ‘fromthe-Rest to-the-West’ (and more specifically in this case, to the Anglosphere) were crucial for two reasons: first, to add geopolitical diversity while addressing a gender gap. Translation has a particularly important role here: it is a powerful means to give voice to women who are doubly silenced – because they are women and because they do not speak a dominant world language which, as Mansell notes, symbolizes the “gatekeeping power” essential to the publication of literature in translation (2017, 50); and second, to facilitate dialogues with different women writers that have an impact on canon formation and the British literary landscape. Studying the role of translators as cultural mediators would be of paramount importance, inasmuch as the inexorable 135

Olga Castro and Helen Vassallo

ideological interventions in-between texts would determine the reception of the translated works. This is especially true at the present time, with the cautious opening up of the literary translation market, especially to small European literatures. This study has had a very specific scope. In order to assess the impact on the literary landscape, further studies beyond the stage of “creation” (Nelson and Maher 2013, 1) analyzed in this chapter would be necessary, specifically addressing the stages of circulation and reception. It would be fruitful to undertake studies that also consider the gender of the translator, and common ‘gender pairings’ in this respect, as this would shed light on how often women or men translators work with women or men writers. Another aspect worth researching would be the historical period when the source texts were published to ascertain the ratio of contemporary books being published as opposed to ‘classics’ or rediscovered/reclaimed texts from other historical periods; this would also show the type of contemporary or historical alliances made possible between women. A further possible area of inquiry is the allocation of translation grants (from the UK or from the source system) to specific areas or languages. Finally, a similar study to the one conducted here, but considering major publishers and big publishing corporations would be necessary to be able to assess whether our findings are representative of the publishing industry as a whole, or whether small presses and major publishers show distinct patterns.

Future directions and lasting effects: towards gender parity in translated literature? The extent of the legacy of the YPW will emerge over the months and years to come, and this long-lasting effect was Shamsie’s main concern when she challenged literary stakeholders to commit to a YPW. Towards the end of her 2015 talk at the Hay Literary Festival, she posed another subtler challenge: What will it look like, this changed landscape of publishing in 2018? Actually, the real question is what will happen in 2019? Will we revert to the status quo or will a year of a radically transformed publishing landscape change our expectations of what is normal and our preconceptions of what is unchangeable? (Shamsie 2015, online, n.p.) Though it might not have been “a year of a radically transformed publishing landscape,” and in the course of 2018 it might have seemed that the YPW was having little impact, we propose that there is reason to be cautiously optimistic: early in 2019, retail sales analysis adviser Nielsen Book found that sales of translated literature had risen to 5.5% (see Flood 2019b), and the proportion of WIT in our YPW corpus (46%) is significantly more encouraging than the traditional 28%. One first lasting impact is the recognition from several publishing houses that the lack of gender parity needs to be addressed: following the YPW, a number of small presses have increased the percentage of women-authored books in translation in 2019.9 For example, Peirene Press (who publish primarily translations) committed to publishing only women writers in 2019, and Oneworld Books included four WIT in their 2019 catalogue. Charco Press also included four women writers (out of a total list of six), and after a quiet year in 2018, Les Fugitives (a small press focusing on translating women writers originally published in French), announced five publications of French women’s writing in translation for their 2019 catalogue. Other publishers not included in our study have also made commitments to fostering inclusivity and diversity: most notably, the 2019 catalogue of Manchester-based UK publisher Comma Press (a press specializing in short stories, not included in our corpus because their WIT title for 136

Image 10.4 MIT books by country

1

6

Women writers in translation in the UK

137

Olga Castro and Helen Vassallo

2018 was pushed back to 2019) included two single-author collections by women in translation (one from Palestine and one from Sudan). This all bears out Carson’s claim that “[t]here is no lack of women writers in any literary culture: the question is how to find them” (Carson 2019, 39), and we have highlighted the crucial activist role of publishers in combatting this invisibility of women writers worldwide. Another very clear way in which the YPW can have a lasting impact is in terms of literary prizes. For example, if And Other Stories normally puts forward eight books for the Man Booker International Prize, of which up to half are by women, then in 2019 this figure doubled; indeed, one of the YPW books was shortlisted for the prize (Alia Trabucco Zerán’s The Remainder, translated from the Chilean Spanish by Sophie Hughes). It can be no coincidence that directly after the YPW, eight of the thirteen books on the 2019 Man Booker International longlist and four of five on the shortlist were by women authors,10 and this move towards gender parity might be connected to the already mentioned rise in the representation of independent presses on the longlist (see Mansell in Chandler 2020 for new research that upholds this hypothesis). Thus, And Other Stories’ commitment to the YPW has generated some positive transformations that will hopefully lead to a lasting change not just in our expectations of what is normal but also in the reality of a move towards gender parity in translated literature. The more publishing houses that publish WIT, the more women’s writing will be put forward for these prizes and, given the attention that the longlist and shortlist receive, this means that more women’s writing in translation will be given media coverage and publicity. The increasing importance of technological advances for the growth of translated literature is a further source of encouragement. More specifically, WIT were disseminated via blogs, crowdsourcing campaigns, podcasts, or social media such as Twitter or tumblr, and new formats are constantly emerging – for example, the first Women in Translation Edit-A-Thon workshop took place on April 18, 2019, organized by Goethe Institute New York, and June 2019 saw the launch of Project Plume, an initiative which champions women’s writing in translation from underrepresented languages with the publication of a yearly anthology focused on a particular literary tradition. As such, it is urgent to develop a new methodology which sets into dialogue the theory produced by academics with the kinds of technological ‘word-of-mouth’ highlighted by the Translating the Literatures of Smaller European Nations Report (Chitnis et al. 2017); this dialogue is exemplified by Project Plume’s inaugural interview with Vassallo (Benaissa 2019) and we hope that our study here will encourage more to adopt this approach. A fourth positive change is the perception that the awareness of this lack of equality is “going mainstream” (Danek 2018, online, n.p.) and awareness is the first step towards action. A move in this direction is the announcement in September 2018 that PEN International (the worldwide writers’ association) will team up with VIDA (a non-profit organization monitoring gender and diversity in the literary arts) to create a new PEN/VIDA count to monitor gender disparity in publishing. Chronicling disparity and inequality is the first step towards challenging and changing them, and so the YPW is not an isolated historical benchmark but a catalyst for change and the start of a potentially seismic – if slow-burning – shift in the translation industry. Another positive step revealed by our study with small independent presses pioneering translation is an increasing tendency to greater diversity, with some smaller nations and regions being represented in translation, mainly from European languages. This geopolitical diversity is especially true for MIT (and slightly less prominent for WIT). Despite this preliminary progress towards enlarged understanding of what ‘women writers’ means (not just from hegemonic, metropolitan languages), it is in this area of diversity that the most important challenges remain; for example, our study revealed some unjustifiable (and easily filled) gaps such as African, Asian, and South American authors writing in colonial languages (e.g. Portuguese or French) and authors 138

Women writers in translation in the UK

writing in widely spoken languages by migrant communities settled in the UK (e.g. Arabic or Chinese); in all cases, easily filled since plenty of qualified literary translators work with these language combinations. Challenges to diversity in translated women’s writing had already been anticipated in August 2018 by Theodora Danek (at the time, Translation Manager at English PEN) when the YPW was at its highest: while I would say that it is not exactly the Year of Publishing Women I think that there is a shift where there is more of an awareness and more of an appreciation that we do need to bring more equality into the publishing industry, not just in publishing women, but in publishing voices that might not have been heard as much as they should be until now. (Danek 2018, online, n.p.) But the geopolitics of women’s writing in translation is just one aspect of diversity. In order to embrace all those “publishing voices that might not have been heard” we must remember all the different social categories (such as race, class, ethnicity, age, religion, sexual identity, etc.) that intersect with gender to create intertwined systems of privilege or discrimination. The limited scope of our study, focused on geography, ideally should be complemented by other analyses that help strengthen debates about diversity in translation. In this way, recent efforts to discuss diversity in UK publishing industry (Akbar 2017; Saha 2019) could be extended to translation, in order to develop strategies that help to better understand the needs and challenges faced by (women) writers in translation who belong to minority groups. Despite the limited direct response to Shamsie’s challenge, the YPW led to various initiatives and forms of activism that had a demonstrable impact in translation. Although there is much more work to be done, we believe that the YPW can indeed be considered a platform for collective change and, as such, there is much to celebrate. Our study focused on specific small presses who are advocates for translation; we would like to finish with a call for action so that the ‘going mainstream’ means that major publishing houses also start behaving proactively to end the gender imbalance in translation, while ensuring diversity. For the months and years ahead, we hope that this activist agenda will expand and extend, so that more stakeholders talk about and advocate for WIT, and thus we may come closer to equality.

Further reading Resnick, Margaret and Isabelle de Courtivron, eds. 1984. Women Writers in Translation: An Annotated Bibliography 1945–1982. New York: Garland. First annotated compilation of more than 700 texts by women writers in English translation that had been published between 1945 and 1982. Each section of the book focuses on a specific geographical area and language, and includes a socioliterary context about the visibility of women authors in their source literary field and cultural system. Büchler, Alexandra and Giulia Trentacosti. 2015. Publishing Translated Literature in the United Kingdom and Ireland 1990–2012 Statistical Report, Literature Across Frontiers. Available at: www.lit-across-frontiers.org/ wp-content/uploads/2013/03/Translation-Statistics-Study_Update_May2015.pdf First report on literary translation into English published between 1990 and 2012 in Ireland and Great Britain, commissioned by the European Platform for Literary Exchange, Translation and Policy Debate ‘Literature Across Frontiers.’ The report justifies the corpus and analyzes data gathered paying attention to source languages and genres. It offers a final case study, focused on the translation of Balkan literatures into English. Chitnis, Rajendra, Jakob Stougaard-Nielsen, Rhian Atkin, and Zoran Milutinović. 2017. Report: Translating the Literatures of Smaller European Nations: A Picture from the UK, 2014–2016. Available at: www.bristol. ac.uk/media-library/sites/arts/research/translating-lits-of-small-nations/Translating%20Smaller%20 European%20Literatures%20Report(3).pdf 139

Olga Castro and Helen Vassallo

Final report of the AHRC-funded project on recent translations into English of literature from smaller European nations. The report identifies trends and challenges, and specifically highlights the need for greater focus on women in translation and understanding of how modern communication methods affect literary success.

Related topics Women in translation, translation and publishing, the politics of literary translation, UK-based small independent presses, translated women in the UK

Notes 1 This research has been funded by the Project “Bodies in Transit 2: Difference and Indifference.” Ref.: FFI2017–84555-C2–2-P, MINECO-FEDER. 2 This report was commissioned by Literature Across Frontiers, a platform for literary exchange, translation, and policy debate. This report also shows that while all translations represent 3% of the market, translations of creative writing (fiction, poetry, and children’s books) are slightly higher at 4% or 5%. Despite these low percentages, translated literature is growing significantly, proportionally to the increasing number of books published in general. 3 There are varying exact percentages from year to year and in different English-language countries, but the rough figure of one-third is standard throughout (see Radzinski (2014). 4 The compilation Women Writers in Translation: an Annotated Bibliography 1945–1982 included more than 700 women-authored texts in different genres translated into English from German, Castilian and Latin American Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese, or Russian. In their introduction, the two editors shared their intention to create “a starting point for studies in a field that is richly deserving of thoughtful, informed, and committed exploration” (Resnick and de Courtivron 1984, viii). 5 In line with this, in her Twitter account, Radzinski (2017) defines the #womenintranslation project as “international, intersectional, and built around the notion that all women* (*and transgender or nonbinary or intersex individuals) deserve to have their voices heard. This project is committed to giving voice to women from all countries, all languages, all religious, all ethnicities, all cultures, all sexualities, all marginalized gender identities, all abilities, all bodies, all classes, and all ages.” 6 The notion of “less translated languages” applies “to all those languages that are less often the source of translation in the international exchange of linguistic goods, regardless of the number of people using these languages” (Branchadell 2005, 1), including widely used languages such as Arabic or Chinese and long-neglected minority or minorized languages. 7 Having a book translated and available ‘in circulation’ is only the first step in enabling such encounters between foreign women writers and English-language readers that can only access those texts via translation. Attention should also paid to how those narratives are translated, which is beyond the scope of this chapter. 8 We considered imprints of larger presses if they had a defined separate identity and published a significant proportion of translation. To be included in the survey, the presses must have published at least three books in 2018, at least one of which must be by a woman author in translation. When selecting titles published, we focused on adult prose (including fiction, non-fiction, and single-author short story collections) published in the UK in 2018, regardless of the year of publication in the original language; but did not include academic books, multi-authored anthologies, poetry, children’s books, or Young Adult fiction. Our corpus only includes original releases, not re-editions or paperback releases if the hardback was released in a previous year. 9 The YPW has also had an impact on English-language publishers who do not publish translations; for example, Yorkshire-based Bluemoose Books will publish only women authors in 2020. 10 It is also worth noting that in four years of the Man Booker International Prize (relaunched in 2016 after merging with the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize), it has been awarded to a woman author on three occasions (South Korean Han Kang in 2016, Polish Olga Tokarczuk in 2018, and Omani Jokha Alharthi in 2019). All four winning translators were women: Deborah Smith in 2016, Jessica Cohen in 2017, Jennifer Croft in 2018, and Marilyn Booth in 2019.

140

Women writers in translation in the UK

References Akbar, Arifa. 2017. Diversity in Publishing – Still Hideously Middle-class and White? The Guardian, 9 Dec. Available at: www.theguardian.com/books/2017/dec/09/diversity-publishing-new-faces [Accessed 31 Mar. 2019]. Benaissa, Salwa. 2019. Plume Interviews: Helen Vassallo. Project Plume, 9 Aug. Available at: https://project plu.me/2019/08/09/plume-interviews-helen-vassallo/ [Accessed 13 Aug. 2019]. Branchadell, Albert. 2005. Less Translated Languages as a Field of Enquiry, in Albert Branchadell and Lovell Margaret West, eds., Less Translated Languages. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: Benjamins, 1–23. Büchler, Alexandra and Giulia Trentacosti. 2015. Publishing Translated Literature in the United Kingdom and Ireland 1990–2012 Statistical Report, Literature Across Frontiers. Available at: www.lit-across-frontiers.org/wpcontent/uploads/2013/03/Translation-Statistics-Study_Update_May2015.pdf [Accessed 31 Mar. 2019]. Carson, Margaret. 2019. Gender Parity in Translation: What Are the Barriers Facing Women Writers. In Other Words. On Literary Translation, 37–42. Castro, Olga. 2017. Women Writers’ Work Is Getting Lost in Translation. The Conversation, 21 June. Available at: https://theconversation.com/women-writers-work-is-getting-lost-in-translation-79526 [Accessed 31 Mar. 2019]. Castro, Olga and Emek Ergun. 2018. Feminism and Translation, in Jonathan Evans and Fruela Fernandez, eds., Routledge Handbook of Translation and Politics. London: Routledge, 125–143. Chandler, Mark. 2020. Indies Increasingly Dominating Translated Fiction. The Bookseller. Available at: https://www.thebookseller.com/news/indies-increasingly-dominating-translated-fiction-longliststudy-shows-1193844 [Accessed 11 Mar. 2020]. Chitnis, Rajendra, Jakob Stougaard-Nielsen, Rhian Atkin, and Zoran Milutinović. 2017. Report: Translating the Literatures of Smaller European Nations: A Picture from the UK, 2014–2016. Available at: www.bristol. ac.uk/media-library/sites/arts/research/translating-lits-of-small-nations/Translating%20Smaller%20 European%20Literatures%20Report(3).pdf [Accessed 31 Mar. 2019]. Costa, Claudia de Lima. 2006. Lost (and Found?) in Translation: Feminisms in Hemispheric Dialogue. Latino Studies, 4, 62–78. Costa, Claudia de Lima and Sonia Alvarez. 2014. Dislocating the Sign: Toward a Translocal Feminist Politics of Translation. Signs, 39(3), 557–563. Crenshaw, Kimberlé. 1989. Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex. The University of Chicago Legal Forum, 140, 139–167. Danek, Theodora. 2018. BookSHElf; Theodora Danek in Conversation with Sophie Baggott. Wales Art Review, 3 Aug. Available at: www.walesartsreview.org/podcast-bookshelf/ [Accessed 31 Mar. 2019]. Derbyshire, Katy. 2016. What’s a Quarter of Three Percent? The First in a Series on Untranslated Writing by Women. LitHub, 12 May. Available at: https://lithub.com/11-german-books-by-women-wed-loveto-see-in-english/ [Accessed 31 Mar. 2019]. Flood, Alison. 2016. Lionel Shriver Rubbishes Plans for Dedicated Year of Publishing Women. The Guardian, 10 Mar. Available at: www.theguardian.com/books/2016/mar/10/lionel-shriver-rubbishes-yearof-publishing-women-kamila-shamsie [Accessed 31 Mar. 2019]. Flood, Alison. 2019a. Man Booker International Prize 2019 Longlist Sees Small Publishers Win Big. The Guardian, 13 Mar. Available at: www.theguardian.com/books/2019/mar/13/man-booker-internationalprize-2019-longlist-sees-small-publishers-win-big [Accessed 31 Mar. 2019]. Flood, Alison. 2019b. Translated Fiction Enjoys Sales Boom as UK Readers Flock to European Authors. The Guardian, 6 Mar. Available at: www.theguardian.com/books/2019/mar/06/translated-fictionenjoys-sales-boom-as-uk-readers-flock-to-european-authors [Accessed 31 Mar. 2019]. Flotow, Luise Von. 2009. Contested Gender in Translation: Intersectionality and Metramorphics. Palimpsestes, 22, 249–256. Hahn, Daniel. 2017. Hidden Bias in the Publication of Translated Literature. In Other Words, 49, 47–51. Krstić, Višnja. 2018. Women in Translation Prize. An Interview with Chantal Wright. Knjiženstvo, Journal for Studies in Literature, Gender and Culture. Available at: www.knjizenstvo.rs/en/journals/2018/interview/ women-in-translation-prize [Accessed 31 Mar. 2019]. LitHub’s ‘Women to Translate’ Series. 2017. Women in Translation, 15 July. Available at: https://womenintrans lation.com/2017/07/15/a-look-back-at-lithubs-women-to-translate-series/ [Accessed 31 Mar. 2019]. Lock Swarr, Amanda and Richa Nagar. 2010. Critical Transnational Feminist Praxis. New York: SUNY Press. Mansell, Richard. 2017. Where do Borders Lie in Translated Literature? The Case of the Changing EnglishLanguage Market. TranscUlturAl, 9(2), 47–64.

141

Olga Castro and Helen Vassallo

Massardier-Kenney, Françoise. 1997. Towards a Redefinition of Feminist Translation Practice. The Translator, 3(1), 55–69. McDowell, Linda. 1999. Gender, Identity, and Place. Understanding Feminist Geographies. New York: SUNY Press. Nagar, Richa, Kathy Davis, Judith Butler, Anna-Louise Keating, Claudia de Lima Costa, Sonia E. Alvarez, and Ayşe Gül Altınay. 2017. A Cross-disciplinary Roundtable on the Feminist Politics of Translation, in Olga Castro and Emek Ergun, eds., Feminist Translation Studies: Local and Transnational Perspectives. New York: Routledge, 111–135. Nelson, Brian and Brigitte Maher, eds. 2013. Perspectives on Literature and Translation: Creation, Circulation and Reception. New York and London: Routledge. Price, Alta and Margaret Carson. 2015. Women in Translation. Tumblr. Available at: https://womenin translation.tumblr.com/ [Accessed 31 Mar. 2019]. Radzinski, Meytal. 2014. Women in Translation: The One with Charts. Bibliobio, 25 May. Available at: http://biblibio.blogspot.com/2014/05/women-in-translation-one-with-charts.html [Accessed 31 Mar. 2019]. Radzinski, Meytal. 2016. WIT Month: FAQ. Bibliobio, 1 Dec. Available at: http://biblibio.blogspot.com/p/ witmonth-faq-updated-august-2016.html [Accessed 31 Mar. 2019]. Radzinski, Meytal. 2017. Read_WIT. Twitter Account available at: https://twitter.com/read_wit?lang=es [Accessed 31 Mar. 2019]. Radzinski, Meytal. 2018. WIT Month Day 10. Bibliobio, 10 Aug. Available at: http://biblibio.blogspot. com/2018/08/witmonth-day-10-stats-part-2.html [Accessed 31 Mar. 2019]. Resnick, Margaret and Isabelle de Courtivron, eds. 1984. Women Writers in Translation: An Annotated Bibliography 1945–1982. New York: Garland. Rich, Adrienne. 1986. Notes Towards a Politics of Location, in Blood, Bread and Poetry: Selected Prose 1979–1985. London: Virago, 210–231. Rudd, Gillian. 2013. Women’s Prizes Inspire Some and Wind Others Up – Perfect. The Conversation, 28 Nov. Available at: https://theconversation.com/womens-prizes-inspire-some-and-wind-others-upperfect-20873 [Accessed 31 Mar. 2019]. Saha, Anamik. 2019. Rethinking Diversity in Publishing. The Bookseller, 4 Mar. Available at: www.theboo kseller.com/blogs/rethinking-diversity-965246 [Accessed 31 Mar. 2019]. Smalley, Nichola. 2018. 2018 Is Our Year of Publishing Women! And Other Stories, 11 May. Available at: www. andotherstories.org/2018/05/11/2018-is-our-year-of-publishing-women/ [Accessed 31 Mar. 2019]. Sapiro, Gisèle. 2008. Translation and the Field of Publishing. Translation Studies, 1(2), 154–166. Sapiro, Gisèle. 2016. How Do Literary Works Cross Borders (or Not)? A Sociological Approach to World Literature. Journal of World Literature, 1(1), 81–96. Shamsie, Kamila. 2015. The Year of Women. The Bookseller, 5 June. Available at: www.thebookseller.com/ insight/year-women. Also published as ‘Let’s Have a Year of Publishing Only Women – A Provocation’, The Guardian, 5 June. Available at: www.theguardian.com/books/2015/jun/05/kamila-shamsie2018-year-publishing-women-no-new-books-men [Accessed 31 Mar. 2019]. Vassallo, Helen. 2018. Reflections on the Year of Publishing Women: Interview with Nicky Smalley of And Other Stories. Translating Women, 7 Nov. Available at: http://blogs.exeter.ac.uk/translating women/2018/11/07/the-year-of-publishing-women/ [Accessed 31 Mar. 2019]. Venuti, Lawrence. 1995. The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation. London: Routledge. Warwick Prize for Women in Translation. 2017. Available at: https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/cross_fac/wom enintranslation/ [Accessed 31 Mar. 2019]. Wood, Heloise. 2019. Male Writers Favoured in Broadsheet Reviews, Research Finds. The Bookseller, 18 Mar. Available at: www.thebookseller.com/news/male-writers-get-12-more-broadsheet-reviews-973286 [Accessed 31 Mar. 2019]. Words Without Borders. 2019. International Literary Women & Organizations That Balance for Better. WWB Daily, 8 Mar. Available at: www.wordswithoutborders.org/dispatches/article/internationalliterary-women-organizations-that-balance-for-better [Accessed 31 Mar. 2019]. Yates-Badley, Emma. 2018. What Became of the Year of Publishing Women? Stefan Tobler from and Other Stories Talks to Northern Soul. Northern Soul, 1 Sept. Available at: www.northernsoul.me.uk/ the-year-of-publishing-women-writers-and-other-stories/ [Accessed 31 Mar. 2019].

142

Parthian Books (1993)

Oneworld Books (1986)

Norvik Press (1980s)

Istros Books (2011)

Fitzcarraldo Editions (2014)

Charco Press (2016)

Arabic French Finnish Basque Basque

Spanish Italian Catalan Spanish Spanish Spanish Chinese Chinese Spanish Spanish French German Polish Croatian Serbian Croatian Danish Swedish Swedish Norwegian

And Other Stories (2009)

Balestier Press (2015)

Language

Publisher

Iraq France Finland Spain Spain

Dominican Republic Italy Spain Argentina Mexico Chile Taiwan China Colombia Argentina France Germany Poland Croatia Serbia Croatia Denmark Sweden Sweden Norway

Country

Al Rawi, Shahad Julien, Maude Lindstedt, Laura Agur Meabe, Miren Jaio, Karmele

Indiana, Rita Jaeggy, Fleur Kopf, Alicia Lange, Norah Rivera Garza, Cristina Trabucco Zerán, Alia Shih, Chiung-Yu Yan, Ge García Robayo, Margarita Maliandi, Carla Ernaux, Annie Kinsky, Esther Tokarczuk, Olga Drndic´, Daša Jovanovic´, Biljana Tulic´, Tea Brøgger, Suzanne Lagerlöf, Selma Lagerlöf, Selma Skram, Amalie

Author

Table 10.1 Appendix I Women in Translation in our corpus (2018)

APPENDICES

Obejas, Achy Parks, Tim Lethem, Mara Faye Whittle, Charlotte Booker, Sarah Hughes, Sophie Sterk, Darryl Harman, Nicky Coombe, Charlotte Riddle, Frances Strayer, Alison L. Galbraith, Ian Lloyd-Jones, Antonia Hawkesworth, Celia Cox, John K. Petkovich, Coral Allemano, Marina Graves, Peter Shenck, Linda Messick, Judith and Hanson, Katherine Leafgren, Luke Hunter, Adriana Witesman, Owen Gabantxo, Amaia Addis, Kristin

Translator

The Baghdad Clock The Only Girl in the World Oneiron A Glass Eye Her Mother’s Hands (Continued )

Tentacle Sweet Days of Discipline Brother in Ice People in the Room The Iliac Crest The Remainder Wedding in Autumn The Chilli Bean Paste Clan Fish Soup The German Room The Years River Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead Doppelgänger Dogs and Others Hair Everywhere A Fighting Pig’s Too Tough to Eat The Emperor of Portugallia Banished Betrayed

Title

Women writers in translation in the UK

143

144

Lithuanian Latvian Spanish Korean Japanese Japanese French Spanish Dutch Danish Icelandic Italian

Peirene Press (2008)

German

Korean

Scribe UK (1976)

Tilted Axis Press s(2015)

Pushkin Press (1997)

Portobello Books (2005)

Language

Publisher

Table 10.1 (Continued)

S. Korea

Germany

Lithuania Latvia Argentina S. Korea Japan Japan France Argentina Netherlands Denmark Iceland Italy

Country

Jungeon, Hwang

Haratischwili, Nino

Grinkevicˇiu¯te˙ , Dalia Ikstena, Nora Enriquez, Mariana Han, Kang Murata, Sayaka Tawada, Yoko Frenkel, Françoise Gallardo, Sara Meijer, Eva Nors, Dorthe Ólafsdóttir, Auður Ava Ortese, Anna Maria

Author Valiukenas, Delija Gailitis, Margita McDowell, Megan Smith, Deborah Tapley Takemori, Ginny Mitsutani, Margaret Smee, Stephanie Sequiera, Jessica Fawcett, Antoinette Hoekstra, Misha Fitzgibbon, Brian Goldstein, Ann, and McPhee, Jenny Collins, Charlotte and Martin, Ruth Yae Won, Emily

Translator

I’ll Go On

The Eighth Life

Shadows on the Tundra Soviet Milk Things We Lost in the Fire The White Book Convenience Store Woman The Last Children of Tokyo No Place to Lay One’s Head Land of Smoke Bird Cottage Mirror, Shoulder, Signal Hotel Silence Evening Descends Upon the Hills

Title

Olga Castro and Helen Vassallo

Chinese Spanish Portuguese Spanish French Spanish Bosnian Romanian Slovene Slovakian Estonian Estonian German Portuguese French Polish Icelandic French Russian Russian Icelandic Spanish French Spanish Russian Dutch German Japanese Norwegian

Balestier Press Charco Press

Peirene Press Portobello Books Pushkin Press

Oneworld Books

Norvik Press

Fitzcarraldo Editions Istros Books

Language

Publisher

Singapore Peru Brazil Uruguay France Chile Bosnia Romania Slovenia Slovakia Estonia Estonia Switzerland Portugal Belgium Poland Iceland Canada Russia Russia Iceland Spain France Spain Russia Netherlands Germany Japan Norway

Country Yeng, Pway Ngon Cisneros, Renato Fuks, Julián Mella, Daniel Énard, Mathias Zambra, Alejandro Avdic´, Selvedin Eliade, Mircea Flisar, Evald Vilikovsý, Pavel Tammsaare, Anton Taska, Ilmar Beck, Peter Chagas Freitas, Pedro Colize, Paul Dehnel, Jacek Helgason, Hallgrímur Thériault, Denis Vodolazkin, Eugene Vodolazkin, Eugene Thorsson, Guðmundur Andri Barba, Andrés Mingarelli, Hubert Barea, Arturo Gazdanov, Gaito Hermans, Willem Frederik Herrndorf, Wolfgang Horie, Toshiyuki Houm, Nicolai

Author

Table 10.2 Appendix II Men in Translation in our corpus (2018)

Tiang, Jeremy Petch, Fionn Hahn, Daniel McDowell, Megan Mandell, Charlotte McDowell, Megan Petkovich, Coral Bartholomew, Christopher Limon, David Sherwood, Julia & Sherwood, Peter Moseley, Christopher and Shartze, Olga Moseley, Christopher Bulloch, Jamie Hahn, Daniel Rogers LaLaurie, Louise Lloyd-Jones, Antonia Fitzgibbon, Brian Hawke, Liedewy Hayden, Lisa C. Hayden, Lisa C. Cauthery, Andrew Dillman, Lisa Taylor, Sam Barea, Ilsa Karetnyk, Brian Colmer, David Mohr, Tim Howells, Geraint Paterson, Anna

Translator

145

(Continued)

Unrest The Distance Between Us Resistance Older Brother Tell Them of Battles, Kings and Elephants Not to Read Seven Terrors Gaudeamus A Swarm of Dust Fleeting Snow The Misadventures of the New Satan Pobeda, 1946 Damnation The Day I Found You Back Up LaLa The Woman at 1,000 Degrees The Boy Who Belonged to the Sea The Aviator Soloyov and Larionov And the Wind Sees All Such Small Hands Four Soldiers The Forging of a Rebel The Beggar and Other Stories An Untouched House Sand The Bear and the Paving Stone The Gradual Disappearance of Jane Ashland

Title

Women writers in translation in the UK

146

Scribe UK Tilted Axis Press

Publisher

Country

Indonesia France France France France

Turkey Japan Japan Netherlands Italy Syria Finland Poland Netherlands Uzbekistan Thailand

Language

Indonesian French French French French

Turkish Japanese Japanese Dutch Italian Arabic Finnish Polish Dutch Uzbek Thai

Table 10.2 (Continued)

Mumcu, Özgür Nosaka, Akiyuki Okada, Toshiki Reve, Gerard Righetto, Matteo Sirees, Nihad Statovci, Pajtim Wittlin, Józef van der Kwast, Ernst Ismailov, Hamid Yoon, Prabda

Kurniawan, Eka Merle, Robert Merle, Robert Merle, Robert Merle, Robert

Author

Wyers, Mark David Tapley Takemori, Ginny Malissa, Samuel Garrett, Sam Curtis, Howard Weiss, Max Hackston, David Corness, Patrick Vroomen, Laura Rayfield, Donald Poopoksakul, Mui

Tucker, Annie Kline, T. Jefferson Kline, T. Jefferson Kline, T. Jefferson Kline, T. Jefferson

Translator

Vengeance is Mine, All Others Pay Cash Fortunes of France 4 Fortunes of France 3 Fortunes of France 1: The Brethren Fortunes of France 2: City of Wisdom and Blood The Peace Machine The Cake Tree in the Ruins The End of the Moment We Had Childhood: Two novellas Soul of the Border States of Passion My Cat Yugoslavia Salt of the Earth Giovanna’s Navel The Devil’s Dance Moving Parts

Title

Olga Castro and Helen Vassallo

11 Censorship and women writers in translation Focus on Spain under Francoism1 Pilar Godayol

History, women, translation, and censorship in Europe: theoretical origins and definitions Censorship “blocks, manipulates and controls” Over the last three decades, translation scholars have provided various definitions of the concept of “censorship” differing in their nuances (e.g. Abellán 1980; Merkle 2002; Billiani 2007; Seruya and Moniz 2008; Rundle 2010; Larraz 2014). However, they all agree that in general there are two majority views which must be clearly differentiated, even though they are interconnected with regard to the production of literature. On the one hand, there is the freer version of censorship applying to what Fernando Larraz refers to as “more or less spontaneous practices of social communication, mercantile strategies, norms and canons of a specific cultural field or the legitimate laws adopted by a State to protect its individual citizens” (2014, 22). On the other hand, there is the stricter version, the political censorship by totalitarian states that consists of “an administrative and institutionalized restriction of the freedom of speech as a means of preventing the diversification of political, moral or religious discourses” (2014, 22). In this chapter, we will concentrate on this second definition, referring to a coercive power established and imposed by force by an authoritarian regime wishing to prevent the entry and diffusion of the Other, of difference and modernity, in this case of the influence of foreign feminine and feminist literature that deviates from the views of the government in power. Political censorship in totalitarian systems implies the existence of a legislative body or of norms to be applied in determining if a text can be published (or not), or if it requires modifications or cuts in order to bring it into line with the official discourse and make it tolerable from the orthodox state viewpoint. According to Denise Merkle, “[c]ensorship refers broadly to the suppression of information in the form of self-censorship, boycotting or official state censorship before the utterance occurs (preventive or prior censorship) or to punishment for having disseminated a message (post-censorship, negative or repressive censorship)” (2002, 9). That is to say, governmental censorship may be ‘preventive or prior,’ when it is applied before publication, preventing it or drastically correcting the text, or ‘negative, repressive post-censorship’ when, after publication, the distribution of the book is paralyzed or the book withdrawn and 147

Pilar Godayol

sometimes even completely destroyed. Obviously, censorship of the publication of originals and translations is one facet of the system of cultural repression put in place by authoritarian regimes. Other measures are imposed, such as the destruction or raiding of libraries, or other types of censorship applied to the theatre, music, cinema, and the press that we will not deal with here. Francesca Billiani defines censorship as “an act, often coercive and forceful, that – in various ways and under different guises – blocks, manipulates and controls the establishment of cross-cultural communication. Primarily, it aims to guide the coming into being of forms of aesthetic, ideological and cultural communication” (2007, 3). Since the 1990s, various research work has focused on censorship and translation, mainly centred on repressive political regimes of the 20th century in Europe. Of particular interest are the studies carried out on the selection, the circulation, and the publication (or not) of translations in Fascist Italy (1922–1940) (Ferme 2002; Billiani 2006; Rundle 2010; Rundle and Sturge 2010), in National Socialist Germany (1934–1945) (Sturge 2004), in the Portuguese Estado Novo of António de Oliveira Salazar (1926–1974) (Seruya and Moniz 2008; Seruya 2018), and in Spain under the dictator Francisco Franco (1939–1975), with special reference here to the work carried out by the TRACE (TRAnslations CEnsored) (Rabadán 2000; Merino 2008; Camus Camus et al. 2017). A number of monographs have also appeared presenting various types of censorship, from different periods and geographies (Billiani 2007; Seruya and Moniz 2008; Ní Chuilleanáin et al. 2009). Less has been published on periods before 1900, but an outstanding work is The Power of the Pen. Translation & Censorship in Nineteenth-century Europe (Merkle et al. 2010), which includes studies of systems of censorship in the 19th century and before in countries such as Germany, Spain, Portugal, and Russia. So as to present a case of unified criteria, strategies, and actors, this chapter concentrates on works dealing with political censorship in Europe, especially in Spain during Franco’s dictatorship.

“ ‘Lost’ in Patriarchy” Luise von Flotow’s Translation and Gender. Translating in the ‘Era of Feminism’ (1997) is one of the foundational texts of theoretical studies of gender and translation along with Gender in Translation. Cultural Identity and the Politics of Transmission (1996) by Sherry Simon. In her work, Flotow insists on the need to fight against the vertical patriarchal lines of culture and the invisibility to which women writers and translators have always been condemned stating the following: Feminists point out that the patriarchal canon has traditionally defined aesthetics and literary value in terms that privileged work by male writers to the detriment of women writers; as a result, much writing by women has been ‘lost’. [. . .] Translation has begun to play an important role in making available the knowledge, experiences and creative work of many of these [earlier] women writers. (1997, 30) Almost two decades later, Rebecca Solnit still urges us to go on building a female lineage, complex and interconnected: Eliminate your mother, then your two grandmothers, then your four great-grandmothers. Go back more generations and hundreds, then thousands disappear. Mothers vanish, and the fathers and mothers of those mothers. Ever more lives disappear as if unlived until you have narrowed a forest down to a tree, a web down to a line. This is what it takes to 148

Censorship and women writers in translation

construct a linear narrative of blood or influence or meaning. [. . .] Those excluded influences I call the grandmothers. (2014, 72) Both Flotow and Solnit support the archaeological work of retrieval of the “grandmothers” (symbolic grandmothers, mothers, sisters, etc.) to render them visible. Since cultural genealogy has always been masculine, with the incursion of some token women, legitimized by the dominant regimes, feminist scholars advocate contesting this chronic cultural lack of mothers by retrieving and revaluing feminine and feminist protagonists and texts. Therefore, translation plays a part in this restoration of women’s influence and leadership. Over recent decades, many researchers and research groups have worked in the historiographic area of feminine and feminist retrieval through translation (Delisle 2002; Bacardí and Godayol 2014, 2016; Flotow 1997, 2011; Castro 2011; Santaemilia and Flotow 2011; Castro and Ergun 2017; Flotow and Farahzah 2017). With the aim of foregrounding translation (often considered a subaltern discipline in the literary canon), and translated women writers and translators (often considered subaltern literary figures in the translating canon), these studies have vindicated the memory of women in the history of translation: firstly, by retrieving translators, translations, and their paratexts (prefaces, introductions, notes, correspondence between women, etc.), and secondly, by retrieving translations of feminist texts and authors that had been rendered invisible by the dominant context.

Towards a non-androcentric and ‘feminized’ history, or histories Thanks to new transnational and anti-essentialist approaches to translation (e.g. Bastin and Bandia 2006; Bandia 2014; Vidal Claramonte 2018), which are not based on a vertical and periodizing concept of history but are, rather, hybrid, decentred, inclusive, and open to the interrelations between histories, other forgotten histories of translation, made invisible by dominant discourses, are beginning to be studied. These include histories with “issues of gender, ethics, postcolonialism, globalization, and minority in translation, all related to what is generally referred to as the postmodern condition” (Bandia 2006, 54). Vidal Claramonte further points out that “writing new histories of translation with the voices of those who previously have been silenced may be a first step towards questioning what is established and exploring methodological paths of research. Translation as an experience of difference and opening to the Other” (2018, 120–121). In keeping with the postmodern construction and systematizing of subaltern histories of translation (non-Eurocentric and non-national histories of translation, for example), here, following in the footsteps of Lori Chamberlain (1988), we vindicate the non-androcentric and “feminized” histories of translation, which retrieve, analyze, and propagate texts written by women of yesterday and today but which are little-known owing to various political and social factors. These histories bring to light and promote women (writers, translators, publishers, mentors, etc.) and their accomplices (publishers, mentors, critics, etc.) who struggled against the established regime to bring the translations to the public eye. Lola Sánchez underlines the importance of “a greater collaboration and feedback between the History of Translation and the History of Women” (2015, 71). It is essential to go to historiographic sources to study the context in which the translation of a foreign woman author was published (or not) and to reveal the various factors involved in the production and circulation of such a translation. Historiographic excavation of the texts and paratexts of women authors must be carried out and the inherited patriarchal history rewritten with the aim of making women visible as an active social group within the history of translation. 149

Pilar Godayol

In order to achieve a history of translation that is less asymmetrical, Paul Bandia (2014) and Jeremy Munday (2014) propose applying microhistory to translation history in order to merge micro- and macro-histories. Bandia states that Translation history must account for the power inequalities inherent in global relations by shifting attention away from the dominant metropolitan cultures and canonical subjects to include those marginalised cultures that have been consigned to the periphery by forces of imperialism and colonisation. (2014, 117) Similarly, Munday (2014, 64–72) encourages us to give importance to the details, experiences and actions of the actors and institutions that influenced the process and the reception of the translation, by means of a methodological consultation of primary sources (such as archives, manuscripts, and personal papers) as well as secondary sources (such as memoirs, letters, biographies, interviews, press, and criticism in general). In the case of censorship applied to works of foreign women authors, which is our subject here, it is essential to consult the censors’ reports on the publishers, which are kept in national and personal archives. The consultation of primary and secondary sources can help us to cast light on the existing power relationships, institutionalized or not, between the various actors at the time (politicians and members of the body of state censors, publishers, writers, translators, critics, etc.), and the production of the texts. Having established the general basic concepts of our chapter, we now present a line of study that has appeared in recent years, mainly in Spain, and that reflects on the relationship between history, gender, and translation, between censorship and the reception of foreign women authors in authoritarian European states in the 20th century, and, more specifically, on how literary censorship affected the selection, production, and distribution of their works, because most of them were not in tune with the ideology of these regimes. The convergence of “woman,” “translation,” and “censorship” encourages scholars to work towards a non-androcentric and “feminized” history of translation that foregrounds “microhistory” and constantly poses questions about the circumstances, actors, and power relations involved in the circulation of knowledge: which foreign women’s texts were selected, canonized or marginalized during these dictatorships? What kind of strategies and editorial policies were adopted by the Ministries/Institutions to exert control over the importation of foreign women’s works? Is it possible to identify a network of intellectuals, publishers, and translators who were able to challenge and even elude the censors’ control of translation? If potentially ‘subversive’ concepts were involved, who proposed the foreign women’s publications? Who were the translators? Did they have political and ideological affinities with the authors?

Women writers, translation, and censorship in Spain: current contributions and research Over the last decade, in Europe, and especially in Spain, various research groups have been working on censorship and translation. Among others are the pioneering group TRACE of the University of León, the University of the Basque Country and the University of Cantabria, the GETCC of the Autonomous University of Barcelona, the GETLIHC of the University of Vic–Central University of Catalonia, and the MUTE of the University of Valencia. In this research, gender has come to be considered alongside censorship and translation with the result that scholars are beginning to study and systematize a history of translation that takes into account the history of women and gender during the period of the Francoist dictatorship. One particular research vector pays particular attention to the censorship and reception of foreign 150

Censorship and women writers in translation

women writers during this totalitarian period. Researchers have access to the dossiers on literary censorship during the Francoist regime, and work in close coordination with the General Archive of the Administration (AGA) in Alcalá de Henares, near Madrid. The first Spanish studies in this field that incorporate “gender”/“feminism”/“woman,” along with “translation” and “censorship” are relatively recent: they include “Women, Translation and Censorship in the Franco Regime” (2011) by Carmen Camus Camus (TRACE), which deals with the effect of censorship and auto-censorship in the Spanish translation of Larry McMurtry’s opera prima Horseman, Pass By (1961) and the techniques used by Ana Maria de la Fuente when translating violence against women in the discourse of this contemporary Western, and “Censure, féminisme et traduction: Le deuxième sexe de Simone de Beauvoir en Catalan” (2013) by Pilar Godayol (GETLIHC), which concentrates on the literary censorship suffered by the publishing house Edicions 62 when the translation of Simone de Beauvoir’s classic from French into Catalan was proposed in 1965. In 2015, a special issue of Quaderns de Filologia. Estudis Literaris (Zaragoza Ninet, Martínez Sierra and Ávila-Cabrera, eds.), concerned with “Translation and censorship,” included a section on “Translation, gender and censorship” consisting of three articles: “Simone de Beauvoir bajo la dictadura franquista: las traducciones al catalán” [Simone de Beauvoir under Franco’s dictatorship: the Catalan translations], by Pilar Godayol (2015); “En terreno vedado: género, traducción y censura. El caso de Brokeback Mountain” [In fenced ground: gender, translation and censorship. The Case of Brokeback Mountain], by Cristina Gómez Castro and María Pérez (2015); and “La identidad censurada: representación y manipulación de la homosexualidad en la obra Té y simpatía” [The censored identity: representation and manipulation of homosexuality in the work Tea and Sympathy], by Antonio Martínez and David González-Iglesias (2015). All three articles point to new directions in the research into gender, translation, and censorship in Spain: the first opens up the examination of the censors’ dossiers on the translations of foreign feminist writers during the Francoist regime; the second approaches the analysis of translations of literary texts into Spanish and their film adaptations, taking into account gender stereotypes; and the third studies censorship and self-censorship in literature and the theatre with regard to the treatment of homosexuality under the dictatorship. In this chapter we concentrate on the theme related to the first article and the evolution of this approach to the present. From 2015, mainly as part of the research projects of the groups GETLIHC (Vic) and MUTE (Valencia), the study of foreign women authors censored during the Francoist dictatorship has come to the fore and become the subject of monographs (Godayol 2016, 2017a), collective volumes (Godayol and Taronna 2018; Zaragoza Ninet et al. 2018) and articles and book chapters (Godayol 2017b, 2017c, 2017d, 2018a, 2018b, 2019; Gómez Castro 2017, 2018a, 2018b; Julio 2017, 2018; Somacarrera 2017; Zaragoza Ninet 2017; Riba and Sanmartí 2017, 2018; Bacardí 2018; Camus Camus 2018; Larraz 2018; Pérez 2018). These works analyze different aspects of censorship, such as 1

The censorship and the reception of foreign women authors translated into Spanish and Catalan (Simone de Beauvoir, Betty Friedan, Elinor Glyn, Radcliffe Hall, Margaret Lawrence, Harper Lee, Mary McCarthy, Mary Wollstonecraft); 2 The literary censorship applied to collections and publishing houses (“Biblioteca Breve” and “Biblioteca Formentor,” of Seix Barral; “La Educación Sentimental,” of Anagrama); 3 The task of the cultural agents during this period of dictatorship (censors, mentors, publishers, correctors, and critics) ( Josep Maria Castellet, director of Edicions 62; Carlos Barral, director of Seix Barral); 4 The profiles of the translators (the outstanding figure of the journalist Maria Luz Morales, both censor and translator). 151

Pilar Godayol

All the aforementioned cases share the experience of suffering Francoist literary censorship, one of the most organized censorship systems of the European totalitarian regimes of the 20th century. We will now describe this briefly.

Notes on the context and criteria of Francoist censorship with some examples For years, the Francoist regime (1939–1975) impeded the work of Spain’s publishing houses. From 1938 onwards, all printed texts (books, translations, newspapers, magazines, etc.) were subject to the procedure of “prior censorship.” During the first two decades of the dictatorship, all originals and translations not in tune with the regime were prohibited, as were books in Catalan, Galician, and Basque, and translations into these languages. The persecution of dissident titles was partial, whereas that of the latter group was total and destructive. From 1946, with the victory of the Allies and Franco’s estrangement from the Falange, literature in Catalan, Galician, and Basque began to be tolerated, albeit in an arbitrary fashion that privileged minority titles such as those on religious topics, poetry, or local monographs. Translations continued to be vetoed. In 1962, the new minister of Information and Tourism, Manuel Fraga Iribarne, altered the regulations controlling the publication of books in Spain and began to allow translations ‘minority.’ It was not a complete opening, but it meant a certain “liberalization” of the censorship, coinciding with the economic growth and the expansion of international tourism, and the abolition in 1966, after the II Vatican Council, of the List of Books Prohibited by the Church. Whenever a Spanish publisher submitted a request to the Ministry of Information and Tourism (MIT) to translate a book, a file was opened, numbered, and distributed to the censors (usually two or more, depending on how controversial the work was). Then, knowing several languages (especially English, French, German, and Italian), the censors read the original book and produced a report, which included answers to questions: (1) Does the book attack dogma? (2) The moral code? (3) The Church and its Ministers? (4) The regime and its institutions? (5) People who collaborate or have collaborated with the regime? (6) Are the passages to be censored typical of the whole work?, a summary of the book, an evaluation in which the passages or pages hostile to the regime were marked, and a verdict. The verdict could be to approve, approve with cuts, or reject. If the MIT’s decision was negative, the publisher could present an appeal. If the verdict was positive, the translation was carried out and sent in for review. The official administrative procedure ended with the deposit of six copies of the book in the MIT. Commissioned for academics of the Church and specialist supporters of the regime, the first censors’ reports of works by feminist writers such as Beauvoir, (Godayol 2015, 2018a), completed according to the Press Law of 1938, were negative. However, after 1966, it was no longer in the interests of the regime to hear accusations from the opposition within the country or from the foreign press, or to be seen to persecute outstanding contemporary women authors. So, the censors’ reports of these works (Beauvoir, Friedan, or McCarthy) (Godayol 2017a, 2019), evolved towards positions that were more tolerant of feminism and women’s rights. Nevertheless, for the censors there existed two insurmountable barriers right up until the last days of the dictatorship: national unity and moral freedom. The editor Carlos Barral summarized it in the following way: “There are two criteria on which prohibition is based. On the one hand are the books that differ in their treatment of political problems from the orthodox politics of the present Government. And on the other hand, there is a censorship of a moral, clerical nature, which aims to eliminate all reference to sexual intimacy or to moral freedom” (2000, 31). In relation to this, in the recent book Tres escritoras censuradas. Simone de Beauvoir, Betty Friedan y Mary McCarthy (Three censored women writers) (2017a), Pilar Godayol analyzes the censorship 152

Censorship and women writers in translation

and reception of three feminist works during the last years of the Francoist regime: Le deuxième sexe (1949), The Feminine Mystique (1963) and The Group (1963). In spite of the many obstacles imposed by the censors, the first two translations, being specialized texts for a specific readership, were finally permitted (Friedan’s text was published in Catalan and Spanish in 1965 and, Beauvoir’s in Catalan in 1968), whereas the third was not. Addressed to a wider readership, McCarthy’s The Group was a best-seller throughout the world, with frankly modern content that vindicated the economic, social, and physiological rights of women, and was, therefore, considered more dangerous because it projected an image of women that clashed with the principles of so-called National Catholicism of the period. Labelled pornographic and frivolous, The Group was considered a bête noire from which Spanish women were to be protected. To give an example, Manuel María Massa, one of the two censors, concentrated on the indecency of the work: “A very well-written novel, but of immoral and repugnant substance in numerous passages.” He added: “From contraceptions to the dirtiest methods of erotic stimulation, Miss McCarthy (who incidentally shows her Republican sympathies in Spanish matters) narrates lives that are far from being in accordance with the Catholic moral code” (Godayol 2017a, 88). After Franco’s death, these arguments could no longer be defended and the translation was authorized and published in Spanish in 1976, in a version by Carmen Rodríguez and Jaime Ferrán. This version had previously been published in Mexico in 1966, but had never circulated legally in Spain, where only the occasional clandestine copy brought from the Americas could be found. That same year, 1966, The Group had been made into a film, directed by Sidney Lumet. In the USA, the film was released on March 4, 1966; in Spain, after Franco’s death, it was released on June 11, 1976. The publication of the translation and the arrival of the film coincide with the end of the dictatorship. In 2004, the Barcelona publishing house Tusquets commissioned Pilar Vazquez to do a new peninsular translation of The Group (see Godayol 2019, 103–105).

Beyond Spain: new voices on the censorship of foreign women authors under fascism Although many of the European works on the censoring of foreign women authors refer to the situation in Spain under the Francoist dictatorship, research is beginning to focus on other contexts. In that sense, a comparative study has recently appeared: Foreign Women Authors under Fascism and Francoism: Gender, Translation and Censorship (2018), edited by Pilar Godayol and Annarita Taronna, with chapters by Italian and Spanish specialists (Valerio Ferme, Eleonora Federici, Vanessa Leonardi, Annarita Taronna, Montserrat Bacardí, Fernando Larraz, Carmen Camus Camus, Pilar Godayol, and Cristina Gómez Castro). In spite of the different timelines, parallels can be drawn between the power of the censorship exerted on Italian and Spanish publishing and translation under both the Fascist (1922–1940) and the Francoist (1939–1975) regimes. In particular, there are a number of common cultural features and processes that characterized translation practices under these two dictatorships, and that can be extended to other totalitarian situations. First of all, the only publications allowed were books and translations in Italian and Spanish of the authors in tune with the conservative ideology of the regimes. Secondly, more ideologically controversial texts began to be translated under the suspicious eye of the censors, who required all publishing houses to apply for written approval from the Italian and Spanish Ministries of Culture, or a similar body. Thirdly, there were similar ideological limitations imposed on works that discussed or invoked national identity, communism or obscenity. Fourthly, censorship was very arbitrary and publishers were on occasion able to dodge it in order to publish authors and 153

Pilar Godayol

titles that might have seemed at first sight too ideologically threatening. Last but not least, the system of censors’ reports adopted by the regimes was an effective way of exercising control over the political and ideological value of the works.

Looking to the future: “there is never a single story” Recent studies on the intersections of women writers/translation/censorship in the context of the dictatorship led by Francisco Franco have generated serious thought on how totalitarianisms affect the choice, production, and distribution of translations of foreign women writers, on how history discriminates as to who and what is translated (and studied in translation), and on the essential role of subversive publishers and intellectuals in the struggle against power imposed by force. These publications are the embryo of future research on the reception and censorship of foreign women authors under European and non-European authoritarian regimes. Sadly, the human race has suffered, and is still suffering, totalitarianisms that attack freedom of speech in all its dimensions, and these attacks include the censorship of publications when the ideology of these works deviates from that of the governments, as is the case of works by many feminists and defenders of women’s rights. Although there already exists abundant academic literature on the intersection translation/censorship, there is still a great need for studies on women writers/translation/censorship under other European totalitarian regimes of the 20th century (Germany, Austria, Greece, Hungary, Poland, Portugal, the USSR, Yugoslavia, etc.), as well as in other parts of the world. Studies of similar situations in the 19th century and before would be useful, as would comparative studies on 20th century totalitarian regimes on other continents, such as Asia, the Middle East, or South America (especially in countries such as Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Cuba, etc.). To conclude, any dictatorship, although in different historical, political, and social contexts, will attempt to impede, manipulate, and condition the entry of ‘subversive’ foreign literature written by women, especially if it contains discourses and representations on the conditions and the moral codes of those women opposing the orthodoxy of the regime. Its purpose is always to prevent the entry of the revolutionary feminine Other, with the aim stopping the female population from denouncing the system’s misogynous and androcentric controls and claiming the civil and political rights that have been usurped. During such times and despite censorship, translation, usually backed by dissident intellectuals, becomes a political act, one of the components of social change, essential for the importation of foreign “women mothers” in an attempt to (re)construct “a different memory, a different tradition” (Marçal 2004, 142).

Further reading 1 Godayol, Pilar. 2017. Tres escritoras censuradas. Simone de Beauvoir, Betty Friedan y Mary McCarthy. Granada: Comares. [Godayol, Pilar. 2016. Tres escriptores censurades. Simone de Beauvoir, Betty Friedan & Mary McCarthy. Lleida: Punctum.] This book presents the censorship and reception during the Francoist regime of three translations of 20th century feminist writers: Le deuxième sexe, by Simone de Beauvoir; The Feminine Mystique, by Betty Friedan; and The group, by Mary McCarthy. 2 Godayol, Pilar and Annarita Taronna, eds. 2018. Foreign Women Authors Under Fascism and Francoism. Gender, Translation and Censorship. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This collection of essays highlights cultural features and processes which characterized translation practice under the dictatorships of Mussolini (1922–1940) and Franco (1939–1975). The nine chapters presented here (Bacardí; Camus; Federici; Ferme; Godayol; Gómez Castro; Larraz; Leonardi; Taronna) bring to the fore the “microhistory” that existed when translating a foreign woman writer during those two totalitarian political periods. 154

Censorship and women writers in translation

3 Zaragoza Ninet, Gora, Juan José Martínez Sierra, Beatriz Cerezo Merchán, and Mabel Richart Marset, eds. 2018. Traducción, género y censura en la literatura y en los medios de comunicación. Granada: Comares. This panoramic monograph is divided into four large sections: “Translation and censorship in publishing,”“Translation, censorship and literature,”“Translation, censorship, literature and cinema” and “Translation, censorship and audiovisual media.” The 20 chapters included here (Aja Sánchez; Bosch; Calvo; Carcenac & Ugarte; Dot; Estany; Fernández Gil; Godayol; Gómez Castro; Julio; Kurasova; Meseguer; Panchón; Pérez L. de Heredia; Riba & Sanmartí; Sanz-Moreno; Santaemilia; Seruya; Williams; Zaragoza Ninet, Martínez Sierra, Cerezo Merchán & Richart Marset) present a general survey of translation studies that have concentrated their research on the field of gender, translation, and censorship over the last few years in European countries.

Related topics History of translation; feminist historiography and translation; women, translation, and censorship in Europe; women, translation, and censorship under Francoism

Note 1 This chapter is the result of work by the consolidated research group “Gender Studies Research Group: Translation, Literature, History and Communication” (GETLIHC) (2017, SGR 136) of the University of Vic–Central University of Catalonia (UVic-UCC) (C. de la Laura, 13, 08500, Vic, Spain), and the R&D project “Traducción y censura: género e ideología (1939–2000)” (ref. FFI2014–52989-C2–2-P), financed by the Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad. Author’s ORCID number: 0000–0003– 2513–5334. Email: [email protected]. Translated by Sheila Waldeck.

References Abellán, Manuel L. 1980. Censura y creación literaria en España (1939–1976). Barcelona: Península. Bacardí, Montserrat. 2018. Catalan Women Translators Under Francoism: (Self-)Censorship, Exile and Silence, in Pilar Godayol and Annarita Taronna, eds., Foreign Women Authors Under Fascism and Francoism: Gender, Translation and Censorship. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 106–125. Bacardí, Montserrat and Pilar Godayol. 2014. Catalan Women Translators: An Introductory Overview. The Translator, 20(2), 144–161. Bacardí, Montserrat and Pilar Godayol. 2016. Four-Fold Subalterns: Catalan, Women, Translators and Theorists. Journal of Iberian and Latin American Studies, 22(3), 215–227. Bandia, Paul F. 2006. The Impact of Postmodern Discourse on the History of Translation, in Georges L. Bastin and Paul F. Bandia, eds., Charting the Future of Translation History. Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 45–58. Bandia, Paul F. 2014. Response. The Translator, 20(1), 112–118. Barral, Carlos. 2000. Almanaque. Madrid: Cuatro. Bastin, Georges L. and Paul F. Bandia, eds. 2006. Charting the Future of Translation History. Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press. Beauvoir, Simone de. 1949. Le deuxième sexe. Paris: Gallimard. Billiani, Francesca. 2006. Identity and Otherness: Translation Policies in Fascist Italy. CTIS Occasional Papers, 3, 59–77. Billiani, Francesca, ed. 2007. Modes of Censorship and Translation. National Contexts and Diverse Media. Manchester: St. Jerome Publishing. Camus Camus, Carmen. 2011. Women, Translation and Censorship in the Franco Regime, in José Santaemilia and Luise von Flotow, eds., Special issue “Woman and Translation: Geographies, Voices and Identities,” MonTI, 3, 447–470. Camus Camus, Carmen. 2018. A Vindication of the Rights of Women: The Awaited Right to be Published in Spain, in Pilar Godayol and Annarita Taronna, eds., Foreign Women Authors Under Fascism and Francoism: Gender, Translation and Censorship. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 146–168. Camus Camus, Carmen, Cristina Gómez Castro, and Julia T. Williams Camus, eds. 2017. Translation, Ideology and Gender. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. 155

Pilar Godayol

Castro, Olga. 2011. Traductoras gallegas del siglo XX: Reescribiendo la historia de la traducción desde el género y la nación, in José Santaemilia and Luise von Flotow, eds., Special issue “Women and Translation: Geographies, Voices and Identities,” MonTI, 3, 107–130. Castro, Olga and Emek Ergun, eds. 2017. Feminist Translation Studies: Local and Transnational Perspectives. London: Routledge. Chamberlain, Lori. 1988. Gender and the Metaphorics of Translation. Signs, 13, 450–472. Delisle, Jean, ed. 2002. Portraits de traductrices. Ottawa: Les Presses de l’Université d’Ottawa. Ferme, Valerio. 2002. Tradurre è tradire. La traduzione come sovversione culturale sotto il fascismo. Ravenna: Longo editore. Flotow, Luise von. 1997. Translation and Gender: Translating in the ‘Era of Feminism.’ Manchester and Ottawa: St. Jerome, University of Ottawa Press. Flotow, Luise von, ed. 2011. Translating Women. Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press. Flotow, Luise von and Farzaneh Farahzah, eds. 2017. Translating Women: Different Voices and New Horizons. New York and London: Routledge. Friedan, Betty. 1963. The Femenine Mystique. New York: Norton & Company. Godayol, Pilar. 2013. Censure, féminisme et traduction: Le deuxième sexe de Simone de Beauvoir en catalan. Nouvelles Questions Féministes, 32(2), 74–89. Godayol, Pilar. 2015. Simone de Beauvoir bajo la censura franquista: las traducciones al catalán. Quaderns de Filologia. Estudis Literaris, 20, 17–34. Godayol, Pilar. 2016. Tres escriptores censurades. Simone de Beauvoir, Betty Friedan & Mary McCarthy. Lleida: Punctum. Godayol, Pilar. 2017a. Tres escritoras censuradas. Simone de Beauvoir, Betty Friedan y Mary McCarthy. Granada: Comares. Godayol, Pilar. 2017b. Simone de Beauvoir: Censorship and Reception Under Francoism, in Carmen Camus Camus, Cristina Gómez Castro, and Julia Williams, eds., Translation, Ideology and Gender. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 64–82. Godayol, Pilar. 2017c. Género, traducción catalana y censura franquista, in Annette Keilhauer and Andrea Pagni, eds., Refracciones/Réfractions. Traducción y género en las literaturas románicas/Traduction et genre dans les littératures romanes. Graz: LIT VERLAG, 73–92. Godayol, Pilar. 2017d. Hacia un canon literario igualitario postfranquista: laSal, primera editorial feminista, in José Santaemilia, ed., Traducir para la igualdad sexual. Granada: Comares, 49–62. Godayol, Pilar. 2018a. Translating Simone de Beauvoir Before the “Voluntary Consultation”, in Pilar Godayol and Annarita Taronna, eds., Foreign Women Authors Under Fascism and Francoism. Gender, Translation and Censorship. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 169–193. Godayol, Pilar. 2018b. Feminismo, traducción y censura en el posfranquismo: “La Educación Sentimental” de Anagrama, in Gora Zaragoza Ninet, Juan José Martínez Sierra, Beatriz Cerezo Merchán, and Mabel Richart Marset, eds., Traducción, género y censura en la literatura y en los medios de comunicación. Granada: Comares, 13–26. Godayol, Pilar. 2019. Mary McCarthy: Censorship and Reception Under Francoism, in Alicia Castillo and Lucía Pintado, eds., Translation and Conflict: Narratives of the Spanish Civil War and the Dictatorship. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 91–111. Godayol, Pilar and Annarita Taronna, eds. 2018. Foreign Women Authors Under Fascism and Francoism. Gender, Translation and Censorship. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Gómez Castro, Cristina. 2017. Hombre Rico, Mujer Pobre: género y moral sexual en traducción bajo censura, in José Santaemilia, ed., Traducir para la igualdad sexual. Granada: Comares, 95–108. Gómez Castro, Cristina. 2018a. To Kill a Classic: Harper Lee’s Mockingbird and the Spanish Censorship Under Franco, in Pilar Godayol and Annarita Taronna, eds., Foreign Women Authors Under Fascism and Francoism. Gender, Translation and Censorship. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 194–213. Gómez Castro, Cristina. 2018b. Translated Overseas, Manipulated in Spain: Two Argentinian Translations Facing Censorship in the Last Franco’s Years, in Gora Zaragoza Ninet, Juan José Martínez Sierra, Beatriz Cerezo Merchán, and Mabel Richart Marset, eds., Traducción, género y censura en la literatura y en los medios de comunicación. Granada: Comares, 161–176. Gómez Castro, Cristina and María Pérez L. de Heredia. 2015. En terreno vedado: género, traducción y censura. El caso de Brokeback Mountain. Quaderns de Filologia. Estudis Literaris, 20, 35–52. Julio, Teresa. 2017. María Luz Morales, traductora: estado de la cuestión y perspectivas de investigación. Confluenze. Rivista di Studi Iberoamericani, 9(2), 55–68.

156

Censorship and women writers in translation

Julio, Teresa. 2018. Censura política y otros avatares: María Luz Morales y las Lettres portugaises de Mariana Alcoforado, in Gora Zaragoza Ninet, Juan José Martínez Sierra, Beatriz Cerezo Merchán, and Mabel Richart Marset, eds., Traducción, género y censura en la literatura y en los medios de comunicación. Granada: Comares, 27–38. Larraz, Fernando E. 2014. Letricidio español. Censura y novela durante el franquismo. Gijón: Trea. Larraz, Fernando E. 2018. Gender, Translation and Censorship in Seix Barral’s “Biblioteca Breve” and “Biblioteca Formentor” (1955–1975), in Pilar Godayol and Annarita Taronna, eds., Foreign Women Authors Under Fascism and Francoism. Gender, Translation and Censorship. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 126–145. Marçal, Maria-Mercè. 2004. Sota el signe del drac. Proses 1985–1997. Barcelona: Proa. Martínez, Antonio and David González-Iglesias. 2015. La identidad censurada: representación y manipulación de la homosexualidad en la obra Té y simpatia. Quaderns de Filologia. Estudis Literaris, 20, 53–67. McCarthy, Mary. 1963. The Group. New York: Harcourt, Brace. Merkle, Denise. 2002. Presentation. Special issue: Censure et traduction dans le monde occidental/Censorship and Translation in the Western World. TTR: traduction, terminologie, redaction, 15(2), 9–18. Merino, Raquel. 2008. Traducción y censura en España (1939–1985). Estudios sobre corpus TRACE: cine, narrativa, teatro. Bilbao: Universidad del País Vasco/Universidad de León. Merkle, Denise, Carol O’Sullivan, Luc van Doorslaer, and Michaela Wolf, eds. 2010. The Power of the Pen. Translation & Censorship in Nineteenth-century Europe. Wien and Münster: LIT VERLAG. Munday, Jeremy. 2014. Using Sources to Produce a Microhistory of Translation and Translators: Theoretical and Methodological Concerns. The Translator, 20(1), 64–80. Ní Chuilleanáin, Eiléan, Cormac Ó Cuilleanáin, and David Parris. 2009. Translation and Censorship. Patterns of Communication and Interference. Dublin: Four Courts Press. Pérez L. de Heredia, María. 2018. Traducción, adaptación, tradaptación, proximidad cultural y diálogos intertextuales de la literatura y los medios audiovisuales, in Gora Zaragoza Ninet, Juan José Martínez Sierra, Beatriz Cerezo Merchán, and Mabel Richart Marset, eds., Traducción, género y censura en la literatura y en los medios de comunicación. Granada: Comares, 177–190. Rabadán, Rosa, ed. 2000. Traducción y censura inglés-español, 1939–1985. Estudio preliminar. León: Universidad de León. Riba, Caterina and Carme Sanmartí. 2017. Censura moral en la novela rosa. El caso de Elinor Glyn. Represura, 2, 40–55. Riba, Caterina and Carme Sanmartí. 2018. La traducción de literatura sentimental entre 1920 y 1960. El rosario de Florence Barclay: versiones, adaptaciones y censura, in Gora Zaragoza Ninet, Juan José Martínez Sierra, Beatriz Cerezo Merchán, and Mabel Richart Marset, eds., Traducción, género y censura en la literatura y en los medios de comunicación. Granada: Comares, 99–110. Rundle, Christopher. 2010. Publishing Translations in Fascist Italy. Berlin: Peter Lang. Rundle, Christopher and Kate Sturge. 2010. Translation Under Fascism. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Sánchez, Lola. 2015. La traducción: un espacio de negociación, resistencia o ruptura de significados sociales de género, in Lorena Saletti-Cuesta, ed., Translaciones en los estudios feministas. Málaga: Perséfone, 55–80. Santaemilia, José and Luise von Flotow, eds. 2011. Women and Translation: Geographies, Voices and Identities. Special issue of MonTI (Monografías de Traducción e Interpretación) 3. Seruya, Teresa. 2018. Women and the Spanish Civil War in the Portuguese Censorship Commission 1936–1939, in Gora Zaragoza Ninet, Juan José Martínez Sierra, Beatriz Cerezo Merchán, and Mabel Richart Marset, eds., Traducción, género y censura en la literatura y en los medios de comunicación. Granada: Comares, 39–48. Seruya, Teresa and Maria Lin Moniz, eds. 2008. Translation and Censorship in Different Times and Landscapes. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Simon, Sherry. 1996. Gender in Translation: Cultural Identity and the Politics of Transmission. London and New York: Routledge. Solnit, Rebecca. 2014. Men Explain Things to Me: And Other Essays. Londres: Granta. Somacarrera, Pilar. 2017. Rewriting and Sexual (self )-censorship on the Translation of a Canadian Novel, in Carmen Camus Camus, Cristina Gómez Castro, and Julia T. Williams Camus, eds., Translation, Ideology and Gender. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 83–101. Sturge, Kate. 2004. “The Alien Within”: Translation into German During the Nazi Regime. Munich: Iudicium. Vidal Claramonte, María Carmen África. 2018. La traducción y la(s) historia(s). Nuevas vías para la investigación. Granada: Comares.

157

Pilar Godayol

Zaragoza Ninet, Gora. 2017. Gender, Translation, and Censorship: The Well of Loneliness (1928) in Spain as an Example of Translation in Cultural Evolution, in Olaf Immanuel Seel, ed., Redefining Translation and Interpretation in Cultural Evolution. Hershey, PA: IGI Global, 42–66. Zaragoza Ninet, Gora, Juan José Martínez Sierra, and José Javier Ávila-Cabrera, eds. 2015. Special issue Traducción y censura: nuevas perspectivas. Quaderns de Filologia. Estudis Literaris, 20, 1–257. Zaragoza Ninet, Gora, Juan José Martínez Sierra, Beatriz Cerezo Merchán, and Mabel Richart Marset, eds. 2018. Traducción, género y censura en la literatura y en los medios de comunicación. Granada: Comares.

158

12 Gender and interpreting An overview and case study of a woman interpreter’s media representation Biyu (Jade) Du

Introduction The past three decades have seen rapid processes of globalization and an expanding scale of migration, during which frequent interlingual, intercultural contacts, and communication take place at various local, national, and transnational levels. There is a growing demand for languagerelated jobs, such as language teachers, translators and interpreters. Interpreters are often used to mediate communication between speakers of different languages on occasions ranging from meetings of international organizations and conferences to local social service settings; they provide linguistic support to people from all walks of life, including government officials, professionals, businessmen, as well as migrants who cannot speak the dominant languages of host countries. However, it has been observed that there is a gender imbalance in the interpreting profession, which reflects similar conclusions drawn in other studies in other industries. It is generally observed in many universities, including Ingrid Kurz’s (1989) and mine, that far more female than male students are enrolled in translation and interpreting programmes. Take my university as an example: of all the students enrolled in the MA Chinese Translation and Interpreting Programme in 2019, male students accounted for less than 10%; in the previous year, there were only two males out of 67 students in total. Though the number of females who remain in the profession may decrease after graduation, statistics show a preponderance of women interpreters. According to the survey conducted by Franz Pöchhacker and Cornelia Zwischenberger (2010), of 704 conference interpreters, 74% were female. In the Annual Review of Public Service Interpreting in the UK, a total of 1807 interpreters were on register in 2017 and 65% were women (NRPSI 2018, 8). Noticing female preponderance in both conference and community interpreting, some may have the impression that interpreting is a feminised profession. Kurz even claims that “[t]he study of interpreting is clearly a ‘female study’ ” (1989, 73). Rachael Ryan (2015) thus raises the question: why are there so few men? Interestingly, despite the noticeable gender imbalance, gender-related issues in interpreting do not receive much scholarly attention. Compared with the amount of work on gender in translation studies, research on gender in interpreting is relatively scant. This chapter is devoted to surveying and discussing gender issues in interpreting studies in an attempt to draw more 159

Biyu (Jade) Du

scholarly attention to this area. After tracing the historical development of interpreting as a gendered profession and reviewing main research topics in the intersection of gender and interpreting, I will proceed to present a case study from China to investigate how gender and the professional role of a woman interpreter are represented in the media. Finally, I conclude by suggesting directions for future research.

Historical background A historical approach is needed to understand the underlying relationships between gender and interpreting (Flotow 1997). One approach to understanding the cause of gender imbalance in the interpreting profession is to return to early language education and the traditional view of gender-related subject choices. Joanna Carr and Anne Pauwels (2006) base their research on data collected from secondary schools in major anglophone countries including the US, the UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, and find that boys generally show less interest in foreign language learning across all these countries. Analyzing the factors contributing to boys’ lower rates of participation in foreign language education through interviews with boys, girls, and their teachers in those schools, they discover that in addition to the gendered curriculum and pedagogy that work better for girls, boys, surrounded by the discourse of masculinity, perceive foreign language learning as something not ‘masculine’ and choose not to do language as a way of gender performativity. Influenced by the “traditional narratives of innate predispositions and brain differentiation” (2006, 169), many boys and teachers subscribe to beliefs about what boys/girls excel at – foreign language learning is considered a difficult choice for boys and suitable only for smart girls (2006, 172). Though Carr and Pauwels’ study centres on boys’ resistance to foreign language learning, their findings shed light on ways to understand how gender stereotypes and ideologies shape individuals’ choices, desires and actions with regard to whether or not they learn foreign languages. While the ideology that links gender and language demotivates boys and men, it inspires girls and women to get involved in foreign language education, take up language-related jobs, and outperform boys and men in this area. In terms of the interpreting profession, similar perceptions of gender, aptitude and career trajectories are shared by male conference interpreters in Ryan’s study (2015). When asked why there is such a preponderance of women in interpreters, many of them state that women generally have better aptitude for language, with better working memories and multitasking capabilities, and therefore are more inclined to enter the profession. In the broader context of globalization, the symbolic capital associated with language has the potential to be transformed into economic and social capital (Bourdieu 1991). With language acquiring value as a commodity in a new globalized economy (Heller 2003, 2007), bilingual or multilingual skills have become more commodified in language work, such as call-centre operators, child-rearing workers, and interpreters (Piller and Pavlenko 2007, 2009). Within these ­language-related service industries, “the workforce is heavily feminised” (Piller and Pavlenko 2009, 15), so Ingrid Piller and Aneta Pavlenko contend that multilingualism “is a gendered practice” (2009, 22). However, there is a clear distinction of social status ascribed to these language workers: while jobs in call-centres, often outsourced to developing countries, are relatively poorly paid, interpreters, especially conference interpreters, are financially rewarded and enjoy high recognition, which is one of the main motivations for women to enter this profession (Cho 2017). Such is the case in countries like China and South Korea where there has been a great demand for conference interpreters in the course of globalization and expanded international exchanges (Choi and Lim 2002). In addition, the flexible and casual nature of interpreting work 160

Gender and interpreting

fits in well with women’s unpaid work of reproduction and child-care (Piller and Pavlenko 2009) and the perception of interpreting as service occupations is said to deter men from choosing this career (Ryan 2015). These factors combined result in gender imbalance in the interpreting professions. In sum, the acquisition of second language skills enables women to gain access to labour markets and make economic advancements in the globalized new economy.

Critical issues and topics As mentioned in the introduction, very little research explores the intersection of gender and interpreting. A survey of the literature shows that these studies primarily address gender differences in conference interpreting performance, and they mainly draw on previous work on gender in language use which shows linguistic differences between men and women in regard to speech style (e.g. Lakoff 1975; Holmes 1990; Tannen 1990). Robin Lakoff ’s seminal study (1975) indicates that women hedge more than men do in spoken discourse. Use of hedges, she claims, is associated with speakers’ uncertainty. Based on these findings, it is natural to hypothesise that gender difference exists in the interpreting of hedges as well. To find out whether the hypothesis is true, Cédric Magnifico and Bart Defrancq (2017) use corpora to investigate whether men and women interpret the same source speeches differently, and why that might be the case. They examine the performance of professional simultaneous interpreters at the European Parliament, analyzing their interpretation of hedges in two language pairs of French to English and French to Dutch. Their findings show that even though interpreters produce more hedges than their speakers overall, gender differences are not as significant as they have hypothesised. The only significant difference is found in the language pair of French to Dutch: in places where source texts contain none, women interpreters add more hedges than their men counterparts, which might be a result of the linguistic difference that Dutch contains more hedges than English. They believe that addition of hedges is a strategy by interpreters to tone down face-threatening acts in the source texts and deal with cognitive overload. In a similar study on hedges using a corpus approach, Feng Pan and Binghan Zheng (2017) compare the interpretation produced by men and women interpreters at the press conferences of the Chinese government. They find that men interpreters generally use more hedges than women interpreters, especially in the accuracy-oriented and speaker-oriented categories, while the latter use more audience-oriented hedges (Pan and Zheng 2017). Using hedges is said to be part of women’s politeness strategies (Lakoff 1975), which, according to Janet Holmes (1993), is attributed to the different social status of men and women. Holmes (1993) argues that women are generally seen to be inferior to men, so they use more polite language that features discourse markers, such as hedges, which William O’Barr and Bowman Atkins (1980) term a “powerless” language style. But this gender difference in linguistic behaviour is not confirmed in a study conducted by Magnifico and Defrancq (2016), who, drawing on the same corpora of simultaneous interpreting at the European Parliament, attempt to investigate the relationship between gender and politeness strategies in interpreting. Surprisingly, their findings show that men interpreters tone down more face-threatening acts than women interpreters. Gender differences in interpretation have also been observed at the Chinese government’s press conferences. Analysing a corpus of 28 recordings from 1989 to 2014, Kaibao Hu and Lingzi Meng (2018) discover that men and women interpreters differ in their use of English forms and interpreting strategies. Men interpreters are found to adopt English low-value modal verbs, intensifiers, verbs of cognitive attitude, and the pronoun we more frequently than their women colleagues; in terms of interpreting methods, women interpreters tend to remain closer 161

Biyu (Jade) Du

to the source texts and use fewer strategies of strengthening, weakening and addition. Explaining such gender differences in linguistic behaviour, Hu and Meng (2018) argue that they are linked to the traditional gender norms in Chinese society, where women are expected to be passive and obedient, so women interpreters pay more attention to being faithful to the source texts, while men interpreters tend to intervene and be creative in their interpreting because of men’s social roles as initiators and creators. Apart from conference settings, a few studies have been devoted to gender impact on public service interpreting. Public service interpreting, also known as community interpreting in some countries, takes place in “face-to-face encounters between officials and laypeople, meeting for a particular purpose at a public institution” (Wadensjö 1998, 49). It is mobilised in the provision of public services, such as social services or medical care. Typical public service settings include courtrooms, police offices, healthcare centres, hospitals, immigration and asylum tribunals, and prisons. Researchers on gender-related issues in public service settings have varied foci. Some address cognitive aspects in interpreting: Marianne Mason (2008) observes that when handling cognitive overload in court interpreting, men tend to omit more discourse markers than women; some are interested in the participatory role of interpreters and their stance: Ester Leung and John Gibbons (2008) observe that in interpreting rape trials in Hong Kong courts, certain men interpreters take a hostile stance towards the victim of sexual assault and seem to blame the victim rather than the perpetrator; other researchers are more concerned with gender-sensitivity issues in cases of sexual assault and violence: Yukiko Nakajima (2005) calls for the provision of medical interpreters with gender sensitivity when doing medical examinations of victims, and Carolina Norma and Olga Garcia-Caro (2016) believe that there is an urgent need to include feminist education in the training of community interpreters. In addition, certain researchers also examine the gendered aspect of the profession itself. In Jinhyun Cho’s study of women interpreters in South Korea (2017), she finds that in a language market where clients are predominantly men and interpreters are predominantly women, there is a market demand for physical attractiveness. To be more competitive, women interpreters have to do self-styling and use beautification as a strategy to gain more aesthetic capital in addition to the linguistic capital associated with their English language skills. Cho (2017) argues that women interpreters’ self-commodification represents gendered power exerted by employers in a patriarchal society. With regard to the media portrayal of interpreters, Ebru Diriker (2003, 2005, 2009) conducts research on the discourse about simultaneous interpreters in the Turkish media in the period from 1998 to 2003, but these studies regard interpreters as a homogeneous group and do not address gender difference in representation.

Current contributions and research The preceding overview shows that the area of gender and interpreting has hardly been subject to research. In order to appeal for more scholarly attention and to show possible directions for future research, this section presents a case study, which is part of a larger project on the representation of interpreters in public discourse. It explores how a Chinese woman interpreter is portrayed in the media. The data consist of Chinese media reports produced in both Chinese and English between 2010 and 2018; national and local media, such as People’s Daily and Southern Metropolis Daily, major news websites of big Internet Technology companies including Sina, NetEase, Tencent, English websites of Chinese media and institutes, such as China Daily, All-China Women’s Federation, as well as English media such as South China Morning Post are included.

162

Gender and interpreting

This case study does not present a comprehensive analysis of all media discourse on this woman interpreter. Rather, it highlights some prominent recurrent themes and shows how these are articulated into representing the woman interpreter as a role model. The themes are not exhaustive but they give some idea of the general attitude and prevailing perceptions. Adopting a critical discourse analysis (CDA) approach that views discourse as socioculturally shaped and not neutral (Fairclough 1989, 1995; Wodak and Meyer 2015), I do a close reading of the dominant men’s narrative on women and unpack the gender stereotypes and ideology underlying the representation of women interpreters in Chinese media. CDA sees discourse as a social construct, so it is important to understand the status of interpreters in the Chinese context before we embark on the analysis of media discourse. Since the adoption of the reform and opening-up policy in the late 1970s, China has undergone rapid economic growth and dramatic social changes. The increase in foreign investment, international trade and intercultural exchanges has created many job opportunities that require multilingual skills and a huge demand for translators and interpreters. As a result, Chinese foreign language learning, especially the learning of English, as well as translation and interpreting programmes, have developed at a rapid pace. It is reported that the number of universities offering Master of Translation and Interpreting (MTI) programmes exceeded 200 in 2017, only ten years after the MTI degree first started (China Daily 2017), not to mention hundreds of English degree programmes offered by many universities in the country. The huge market demand has brought about a rise in the translation and interpreting professions as a popular choice for young people. Conference interpreters, in particular, enjoy a high social status and are often labelled ‘gold-collar’ professionals because of their high remuneration, flexible working time, good working conditions, and the opportunities they have to work with celebrities and high-level officials. This positive perception of conference interpreters is also noted in many studies on the occupational status of the interpreting profession (e.g. Jones 2002; Pöchhacker 2011; Setton and Guo 2009; Diriker 2003, 2005, 2009). Despite this status and reputation, however, individual conference interpreters are normally not known or visible to the general public (Dam and Zethsen 2013). Zhang Lu, the subject of this case study, however, enjoys an extraordinary visibility in China. She became famous overnight for her excellent interpreting performance at Premier Wen Jiabao’s press conferences at the annual sessions of the National People’s Congress and Chinese Peoples’ Political Consultative Conference in 2010. She has been providing consecutive interpreting on the same occasion for many years and has become a well-known figure. The Chinese government’s practice of holding Premier’s press conferences started in the 1980s and these have become important events since the 1990s, events that are seen widely by the outside world as a gesture with which China demonstrates its determination to build an open, transparent, democratic government and its willingness to have dialogues with Western countries. The press conferences are also used as windows for the Chinese government to publicise its national policy and promote China’s discourse, which is part of a nation-branding strategy. It is on these occasions that foreign journalists, alongside Chinese domestic reporters, are permitted to be present and sometimes given opportunities to pose questions to the Premier. As the press conferences are broadcast live to the whole world, their success is closely linked to the quality of interpreting provided on site. Interpreters’ renditions are often quoted verbatim by foreign media. In other words, the voice of the interpreter becomes the voice of the Chinese government (Gu 2018). Zhang Lu, the interpreter in question here, also points out that, “when you speak, when you interpret, people will not only take your words as the individual’s voice, but also as the voice of authority” (Wong 2016).

163

Biyu (Jade) Du

Sitting next to the second highest-ranking officials of the government, Zhang Lu is thus at the centre of global attention. She, more than any other interpreter, enjoys an extremely high publicity and popularity in media coverage. Her interpreting performances, especially her translations of ancient Chinese poems, are studied, analysed, commented upon by numerous students and teachers in translation and interpreting studies. She is a celebrity in the country, a star of the profession and an icon to many people. My textual analysis of media reports in the following sections centres on what the media foregrounds about her.

Appearance Noticeably, in the media headlines and contents, ‘nvshen’ is often used to describe Zhang Lu. Literally meaning ‘goddess’, ‘nvshen’ is the term people use to refer to a beautiful woman they highly respect and deeply admire. Following is how the media describe the audience response to Zhang when she gave a public lecture in Hong Kong: Excerpt (1) She was greeted with cries of ‘You are a goddess to me!’ by women – and even a few men – during her trip to Hong Kong. (Wong 2016) With the ‘goddess’ label, Zhang’s charming appearance is often highlighted in the media. Since her first appearance at the Premier’s press conference, she has been constantly praised for her attractive looks and demure temperament. When commenting on her appearance, the media also stress that she is neither too eye-catching nor too flashy, appropriate to the official occasion. Here is an excerpt from the media to depict her appearance, covering the hairstyle, dress, and manner: Excerpt (2) Sitting beside Li, Zhang sported a short haircut and wore a dark tailored suit. “Elegant,” “calm,” “clear,” “coherent” and “capable” were some of the adjectives used to describe her. (All-China Women’s Federation 2017) The media’s interest in the appearance of women professionals is also common in the case of women politicians. Elizabeth van Acker notes that media reporters are more likely to “comment on women’s personal appearance, discussing their hairstyles, weight, clothes, shoes or glasses” whereas they are “generally less [likely to] comment on men’s beer bellies, suits, size and family roles,” which “perpetuates gender norms” (2003, 117).

Poetry translation Apart from appearance, what is foregrounded in the media discourse on Zhang Lu in relation to her professional role is her skilful interpreting of Chinese poetry. This is another reason why she became well-known. Praising her eloquent renditions of ancient Chinese poems quoted by the Premier, the media often refer to comments by scholars in translation studies:

164

Gender and interpreting

Excerpt (3) “I think that her interpretation is excellent and indeed meets the national level,” Luo Lisheng, dean of the Foreign Language Department of Tsinghua University, told reporters. He added that from a professional standpoint, the interpretation during the entire press conference was fluent and much of the political vocabulary was translated properly. (People’s Daily Online 2010) In this excerpt, Zhang Lu’s interpreting performance is given credit as “excellent,” “the national level,”“fluent,”“proper,” which are very generic rather than specific comments. Dissimilarly, in Turkish media reports on simultaneous interpreters and interpreting, the discourse not only addresses positive aspects, such as “big event,” “big name,” but also a “big mistake” (Diriker 2003, 2005).

Hard working Working for high-ranking officials is regarded as a privilege and an honour. Only the most talented and outstanding people can win the opportunity in the fierce competition through which interpreters are recruited by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Zhang’s rise to fame is often attributed to her diligence. In Excerpt (4), she is described as extremely hard working and devoted to her work: Excerpt (4) According to one of Zhang’s classmates, Zhang is very smart and diligent. She often works until 1 or 2 a.m., and listens to radio programs from the BBC, VOA and CNN. She likes to take notes while reading the Reference News and Global Times. (All-China Women’s Federation 2010) In summary, while in most cases interpreters are invisible and remain backstage, in this case study, Zhang Lu is highly visible and influential. She has come to the front of the stage (Goffman 1978). This is owing to the status of her professional role, and especially the link her job provides to high-level officials in the country. The textual analysis of the media reports shows that in the process of iconization, she is portrayed as a role model for Chinese women: beautiful, talented, and hard-working. Francis Lee (2004) observes a similar discourse in the Hong Kong media that aims to construct women politicians as perfect women who can balance both work and family. Though Zhang Lu’s fame is mainly a result of her professional role as a government interpreter, what is foregrounded alongside her expertise is her appearance. Her beautiful looks, her feminine manner, and her style of dress are often given a detailed description. Other studies have also shown that in the media coverage of women professionals, such as American Congress women members (Carroll and Schreiber 1997), women politicians in Australia and New Zealand (van Acker 2003), the media are keen on their appearances. Even though women professionals stand out because of their professional identity, their gender and gender-related features also come into the spotlight, which is a gendered practice. This is particularly the case in the so-called service industries where women are predominantly employed. In the case of South Korean women interpreters, in addition to language services, they also need to perform aesthetic labour to cater to the demand for good-looking interpreters in the language market. They often

165

Biyu (Jade) Du

use beautification to increase their competitiveness, which, according to Cho, is a new mode of “objectification and commodification” (2017, 502). Further, the fact that interpreters are predominantly women and government officials are predominantly men reflects another gendered aspect of this profession. What is more, in the case of Zhang Lu whose professional role is highly politicised, her good looks provide added value to promote the national image. As mentioned previously, the Premier’s press conferences are part of China’s nation-branding strategies to present the country positively to the outside world, and the image of the interpreter is part of this portrayal and positive construction. In a sense, interpreters’ beautification serves the “display” function on the front stage (Goffman 1978).

Future directions As is evident from the preceding discussion, gender and interpreting is an area that has not been fully explored. Further research can be done on how men interpreters are portrayed and whether this is different from the portrayal of women interpreters, given that media representation of women politicians is different from that of men (van Acker 2003). Comparative studies can also be conducted across different countries and regions to see whether and how cultural and social factors impact perceptions of men and women interpreters. Though women are dominant in overall numbers, men interviewees in Ryan’s study (2015) say they have a privileged status in the profession. For instance, in international organisations that have their own language services sections, men are often seen to take up important posts. So, it is worth exploring the occupational status of women interpreters in the job market in comparison with that of their men counterparts, to investigate whether there exists gender inequality in employment and career development, such as recruitment, income, promotion, and position. Following this, research on employers’ and audience’s reception and perception of women and men interpreters in relation to their role performance could also be carried out. Quantitative methods such as surveys (Pöchhacker and Zwischenberger 2010) can be used to gain insights into general trends in the workplace of the interpreting profession. With regard to professional role performance, more empirical data are needed to probe into gender differences in other linguistic behaviours – as in the studies conducted by Leung and Gibbon (2008) and Nakajima (2005) in legal and medical settings, for instance, that examine how men and women interpreters differ in interpreting gender-related source texts/speeches. Methodologically, corpus studies using large data (Magnifico and Defrancq 2014, 2016, 2017; Pan and Zheng 2017; Hu and Meng 2018) provide a useful tool to investigate whether and how gender impacts interpreting. Going beyond linguistic analysis, a critical discourse perspective could be used to explore how gendered linguistic behaviour is shaped by sociocultural factors. Adopting the qualitative approach of interviews (e.g. Cho 2017) for an in-depth understanding of individual’s perception and personal view towards certain issues, we can inquire how these differences relate to interpreters’ personal stances, positioning, and ideology.

Further reading Magnifico, Cédric and Bart Defrancq. 2017. Hedges in Conference Interpreting. Interpreting, 19(1), 21–46. This paper examines gender differences in simultaneous interpreting of hedges of French speeches into English and into Dutch at the European Parliament. Findings show that women interpreters make more hedges in both target languages and use more additions as interpreting strategies to cope with hedges in the source speeches. 166

Gender and interpreting

Cho, Jinhyun. 2017. Why Do Interpreters Need to Be Beautiful? Aesthetic Labour of Language Workers. Gender and Language, 11(4), 482–506. Drawing upon theories of language commodification and the concept of ‘aesthetic labour’, this paper uses interview as the research method and shows that beautification is used by women interpreters in South Korea as a strategy to gain aesthetic capital in addition to language capital in a patriarchal language market. Diriker, Ebru. 2003. Simultaneous Conference Interpreting in the Turkish Printed and Electronic Media 1988–2003. The Interpreters’ Newsletter, 12, 231–243. Analysing the discourse of Turkish media over a span of 15 years, the author discovers that media representations of simultaneous interpreters are mainly positive and typically centre on Big Events, Big Money, Big Mistakes, Personal Fame, and Big Career.

Related topics Critical discourse analysis, gender and identity, language and gender, media discourse, gender and interpreting

References All-China Women’s Federation. 2010. Female Interpreter Gains Fame for Poem Translations at Premier’s Press Conference [online]. Available at: www.womenofchina.cn/womenofchina/html1/news/news makers/10/3807-1.htm [Accessed 27 May 2018]. All-China Women’s Federation. 2017. Zhang Lu: China’s Top Interpreter Shines in National Spotlight [online]. Available at: www.womenofchina.cn/womenofchina/html1/people/others/1703/3795-1.htm [Accessed 27 May 2018]. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1991. Language and Symbolic Power. Translated by Gino Raymond Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Carr, Joanna and Anne Pauwels. 2006. Boys and Foreign Language Learning: Real Boys Don’t Do Languages. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Carroll, Susan J. and Ronnee Schreiber. 1997. Media Coverage of Women in the 103rd Congress, in Pippa Norris, ed., Women, Media and Politics. New York: Oxford University Press, 131–148. China Daily. 2017. Language Service China 40 Forum [online]. Available at: www.chinadaily.com.cn/ edu/2017-09/16/content_32075192.htm [Accessed 26 Jun. 2018]. Cho, Jinhyun. 2017. Why Do Interpreters Need to Be Beautiful? Aesthetic Labour of Language Workers. Gender and Language, 11(4), 482–506. Choi, Jungwha and Hyang-Ok Lim. 2002. The Status of Translators and Interpreters in Korea. Meta, 47(4), 627–635. Dam, Helle Vrønning and Karen Korning Zethsen. 2013. Conference Interpreters – the Stars of the Translation Profession? A Study of the Occupational Status of Danish EU Interpreters as Compared to Danish EU Translators. Interpreting, 15(2), 229–259. Diriker, Ebru. 2003. Simultaneous Conference Interpreting in the Turkish Printed and Electronic Media 1988–2003. The Interpreters’ Newsletter, 12, 231–243. Diriker, Ebru. 2005. Presenting Simultaneous Interpreting: Discourse of the Turkish Media, 1988–2003 [online]. Available at: http://aiic.net/p/1742 [Accessed 2 July 2018]. Diriker, Ebru. 2009. Meta-discourse as a Source for Exploring the Professional Image (s) of Conference Interpreters. HERMES-Journal of Language and Communication in Business, 22(42), 71–91. Fairclough, Norman. 1989. Language and Power. London: Longman. Fairclough, Norman. 1995. Critical Discourse Analysis. Boston: Addison Wesley. Flotow, Luise Von. 1997. Translation and Gender: Translating in the ‘Era of Feminism’. Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press. Goffman, Erving. 1978. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. London: Harmondsworth. Gu, James Chonglong. 2018. Towards a Re-definition of Government Interpreters’ Agency Against a Backdrop of Sociopolitical Evolution: A Case of Premier’s PRESS Conferences in China, in Olaf Immanuel Seel, ed., Redefining Translation and Interpretation in Cultural Revolution. Hershey, PA: IGI Global, 238–257. 167

Biyu (Jade) Du

Heller, Monica. 2003. Globalization, the New Economy, and the Commodification of Language and Identity. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 7(4), 473–492. Heller, Monica. 2007. Gender and Bilingualism in the New Economy, in Bonnie McElhinny, ed., Words, Worlds, and Material Girls. Berlin: Mouton De Gruyter, 287–304. Holmes, Janet. 1990. Women, Men and Politeness. London: Longman. Holmes, Janet. 1993. New Zealand Women Are Good to Talk to: An Analysis of Politeness Strategies in Interaction. Journal of Pragmatics, 20(2), 91–116. Hu, Kaibao and Lingzi Meng. 2018. Gender Differences in Chinese-English Press Conference Interpreting. Perspectives: Studies in Translatology, 26(1), 117–134. Jones, Roderick. 2002. Conference Interpreting Explained. Manchester: St. Jerome. Kurz, Ingrid. 1989. Causes and Effects of the Feminization of the Profession of Translating and Interpreting. Thesis by Christa Maria Zeller. The Interpreters’ Newsletter, 2, 73–74. Lakoff, Robin. 1975. Language and Woman’s Place. New York: Harper Colophon. Lee, Francis. 2004. Constructing Perfect Women: The Portrayal of Female Officials in Hong Kong Newspapers. Media, Culture & Society, 26(2), 207–225. Leung, Ester S. and John Gibbons. 2008. Who Is Responsible? Participant Roles in Legal Interpreting Cases. Multilingua–Journal of Cross-Cultural and Interlanguage Communication, 27(3), 177–191. Magnifico, Cédric and Bart Defrancq. 2014. Gender Differences and Pragmatic Markers in Conference Interpreting, in Richard Xiao, ed., Using Corpora in Contrastive and Translation Studies. Lancaster: Lancaster University, 42–43. Magnifico, Cédric and Bart Defrancq. 2016. Impoliteness in Interpreting: A Question of Gender? Translation & Interpreting, 8(2), 26–45. Magnifico, Cédric and Bart Defrancq. 2017. Hedges in Conference Interpreting. Interpreting, 19(1), 21–46. Mason, Marianne. 2008. Courtroom Interpreting. Lanham, MD: University of America. Nakajima, Yukiko. 2005. The Need for Gender-sensitive Medical Interpreters for Victims with Limited English Proficiency in Sexual Assault Examinations. Journal of Immigrant & Refugee Services, 3(3–4), 57–72. Norma, Caroline and Olga Garcia-Caro. 2016. Gender Problems in the Practice of Professional Interpreters Assisting Migrant Women in Australia: A Theoretical Case for Feminist Education. Violence Against Women, 22(11), 1305–1325. NRPSI. 2018. NRPSI Annual Review of Public Service Interpreting in the UK: 2017. Available at: www.nrpsi. org.uk/downloads/NRPSIAnnualReview2017.pdf [Accessed 4 Mar. 2019]. O’Barr, William and Bowman Atkins. 1980. “Women’s Language” or “Powerless Language”? In Sally McConnell-Ginet, Ruth Borker, and Nelly Furman, eds., Women and Language in Literature and Society. New York: Praeger, 93–110. Pan, Feng and Binghan Zheng. 2017. Gender Difference of Hedging in Interpreting for Chinese Government Press Conferences: A Corpus-based Study. Across Languages and Cultures, 18(2), 171–193. People’s Daily Online. 2010. Female Interpreter Gains Fame for Poem Translations at Premier’s Press Conference. Available at: http://en.people.cn/90001/90782/90872/6922324.html. [Accessed 28 Jun. 2018]. Piller, Ingrid and Aneta Pavlenko. 2007. Globalization, Gender, and Multilingualism, in Helene DeckeCornill and Laurenz Volkmann, eds., Gender Studies and Foreign Language Teaching. Tübingen: Gunter Narr Verlag, 15–30. Piller, Ingrid and Aneta Pavlenko. 2009. Globalization, Multilingualism, and Gender: Looking into the Future. Contemporary Applied Linguistics, 2, 10–27. Pöchhacker, Franz. 2011. Conference Interpreting, in Kirsten Malmkjær and Kevin Windle, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Translation Studies. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 307–324. Pöchhacker, Franz and Cornelia Zwischenberger. 2010. Survey on Quality and Role: Conference Interpreters’ Expectations and Self-perceptions. Available at: http://aiic.net/p/3405 [Accessed 20 Jun. 2018]. Ryan, Rachael. 2015. Why So Few Men? Gender Imbalance in Conference Interpreting. Available at: https://aiic.net/page/7347/why-so-few-men-gender-imbalance-in-conference-interp/lang/1 [Accessed 26 Jun. 2018]. Setton, Robin and Alice Guo. 2009. Attitudes to Role, Status and Professional Identity Interrupters and sTranslators with Chinese in Shanghai and Taipei. Translation and Interpreting Studies, 4(2), 210–238. Tannen, Deborah. 1990. You Just Don’t Understand: Women and Men in Conversation. New York: Morrow.

168

Gender and interpreting

Van Acker, Elizabeth. 2003. Media Representations of Women Politicians in Australia and New Zealand: High Expectations, Hostility or Stardom. Policy and Society, 22(1), 116–136. Wadensjö, Cecilia. 1998. Interpreting as Interaction. London: Longman. Wodak, Ruth and Michael Meyer, eds. 2015. Methods of Critical Discourse Studies. London: Sage Publications. Wong, Catherine. 2016. In Her Own Words: Translator to China’s Top Leaders Takes Centre Stage in Hong Kong. South China Morning Post. Available at: www.scmp.com/news/china/policies-politics/ article/1934922/her-own-words-translator-chinas-top-leaders-takes 1 [Accessed 26 Jun. 2018].

169

Part II

Translating feminist writers

13 The Wollstonecraft meme Translations, appropriations, and receptions of Mary Wollstonecraft’s feminism Elisabeth Gibbels

Introduction and definitions The existence of translations has often been celebrated as evidence of the successful transmission of ideas. Indeed, translation is considered a key indicator of international cultural transfer (Even-Zohar 1997), and, when discussing how Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) (Rights of Woman) became the founding text of international feminism, publications rarely omit the fact of its immediate translation (Botting 2013). Versions in French (1792) and in German (1793) were produced immediately; Dutch and Danish translations followed soon. However, these translations differ significantly. Whereas in France, Wollstonecraft was presented as a political thinker, in Denmark, she was positioned within conventional literature on women’s education. In Brazil again, for almost 200 years, a different text circulated as Rights of Woman. Wollstonecraft’s legacy, the posthumous Maria, or the Wrongs of Woman (1798) (Wrongs of Woman) with its startling parallelism in title was immediately translated as well but met with a starkly different reception. In view of these disparate framings, it seems evident that the fact of translation alone may not suffice to guarantee the transfer of content or the impact of a book in translation. This chapter analyzes Rights of Woman and Wrongs of Woman and traces the transfer of feminism. It argues that, besides the translations as such, it was their appropriation and reception through the texts surrounding them, their presentation in the other culture, and the dissociation of Wollstonecraft’s fame from her actual texts that constructed her as a feminist meme and established her as the founding author of feminist discourse. The discussion thus revolves around three key issues: feminism, paratexts, and memes. It follows Karen Offen’s definition of feminism as (1) recognizing women’s lived lives as valid for interpreting their experience and needs, (2) raising consciousness of institutionalized injustice, and (3) advocating the elimination of that injustice by challenging coercive power and authority (2010, 16). Both Rights of Woman and Wrongs of Woman meet this definition. The content of these works is surrounded by titles, prefaces, and footnotes, and evaluated in reviews. As paratexts, such interventions by publishers and reviewers form “a consciously crafted threshold for a text which has the potential to influence the way(s) in which the text is received” (Batchelor 2018, 142). Further, metatexts, such as private correspondence, also comment upon the text, 173

Elisabeth Gibbels

though they do not establish a threshold (149). With the reception thus dissociated from the actual text, the name of the author may assume a signal function and become a meme. Memes as units of cultural transmission substitute an icon for the actual content (Dawkins 1976) and may operate without access to the original texts or translations. Feminist discourse was produced in the name of Wollstonecraft even where her texts were not available anymore or were misattributed. Wollstonecraft thus dissolved into the genre of her field and became a discourse founder for feminist discourse in Michel Foucault’s sense (1977).

Historical perspectives Wollstonecraft (1759–1797) lived during the Age of the Enlightenment, when “western and central Europe first became, in the sphere of ideas, broadly a single arena integrated by mostly newly invented channels of communication” (Israel 2001, vi). Bluestocking aristocrats established large cross-national collections of books by and on women ( Johns 2014, 61–62) and enlightened journals like The Spectator made liberal philosophy accessible for women. Such ideas reached Germany, for example, when Luise Gottsched translated complete volumes (Der Zuschauer, 1739–1742). A pan-European phenomenon, with main impulses coming from France, Britain, Germany, Italy, and the Netherlands, the Enlightenment “effectively demolished all legitimation of monarchy, aristocracy, woman’s subordination to man, ecclesiastical authority, and slavery, replacing these with the principles of universality, equality and democracy” (Israel 2001, vi). Wollstonecraft was well integrated in enlightened circles and published widely. Her oeuvre includes, besides her own fiction and non-fiction, numerous reviews (women’s fiction, historical and scientific books) and some translations (from French and German).

Critical issues and topics There is extensive research on Wollstonecraft’s life, work, and position within feminism. Apart from numerous editions of Rights of Woman and of her complete works (Todd and Butler 1989), several biographies and bibliographies exist. In addition, each wave of feminism has produced its own body of Wollstonecraft literature: re-discovery for first-wave feminism (RauschenbuschClough 1898), reception ( Janes 1978), writing style (Poovey 1988), pedagogy (Myers 1988), feminism versus misogyny (Gubar 1994), philosophy (Falco 1996), and translations (Bour 2004, Gibbels 2004; Kirkley 2009a, 2009b). Recent research has acknowledged the second volume, Wrongs of Woman, as a philosophical book in its own right (Mackenzie 2014), analyzed the feminism in her literary translations (Kirkley 2015a) and reclaimed her as a religious writer (Taylor 2016) and educationist (Hanley 2013). Most importantly, work on paratexts has emphasized how the agents around a translation affect cultural transfer (Batchelor 2018), and Wollstonecraft research has begun to assess the role of publishers, reviewers, and biographers (Bour 2013, Botting 2013). Work analyzing the role of Wollstonecraft as a meme has recently begun (Botting and Hammond Matthews 2014).

Main research methods This chapter traces the role played by translation in Wollstonecraft’s rise as a feminist meme and discourse founder. Starting from key feminist concepts in Rights of Woman and Wrongs of Woman, French and German translations will be analyzed as to their treatment of feminist content. Next, prefaces, reviews and other paratexts will be examined for the effect they had on how Wollstonecraft was presented and received. The discussion of misappropriations and 174

The Wollstonecraft meme

misattributions as well as the absence or presence of a translation in a culture will help assess Wollstonecraft’s function as a meme. Finally, current manifestations of Wollstonecraft’s status as a discourse founder for international feminism will be listed.

Feminist concepts in Rights of Woman and Wrongs of Woman Rights of Woman (1792) challenges power and authority, addresses injustices and inequality and accepts women’s lived experience as valid indicators of their needs. Throughout the text, Wollstonecraft emphasizes the importance of independence (“it is vain to expect virtue from women till they are, in some degree, independent of men” (230)) and shows how domination and social oppression hinder women from achieving independence. To achieve autonomy, women need to become independent thinkers (“then you ought to think, and only rely on God” (88)) because “enlarging the mind” will “enable the individual to attain such habits of virtue as will render it independent” (89). In their intellectual endeavours, Wollstonecraft insists that “not only the virtue, but the knowledge” should be the same for “the two sexes” and should be acquired “by the same means” (110). Furthermore, she argues against “docile blind obedience” (87), contests “the divine right of husbands” (112), and flatly refuses male domination (“I love man as my fellow; but his sceptre, real, or usurped, extends not to me” (107)). Wollstonecraft even demands participation in civic life (“When, therefore, I call women slaves, I mean in a political and civil sense,” (262)) and professional life (“enable them to earn their own subsistence, the true definition of independence [so] that we may know how far the natural superiority of man extends” (165)). Wrongs of Woman widens the feminist scope of Rights of Woman and investigates “different classes of women” (74). Here, Wollstonecraft attacks patriarchal marriage and drastically exposes physical and emotional abuse of women, but also addresses issues of legal and political equality, economic independence, sexual self-determination, and custody of children. Wollstonecraft’s criticism of legal injustice is assertive and outspoken (“I wish my country to approve of my conduct; but, if laws exist, made by the strong to oppress the weak, I appeal to my own sense of justice” (197)). Exhibiting “the misery and oppression, peculiar to women, that arise out of the partial laws and customs of society” (73), Wrongs of Woman shows how the private is political. Her pairing the story of a lower-class woman ( Jemima) with that of a middle-class woman (Maria) allows Wollstonecraft to discuss women’s oppression as a group and across classes (“Thinking of Jemima’s fate and her own, she was led to consider the oppressed state of women, and to lament that she had given birth to a daughter” (120), and to show female solidarity as the way to overcome this oppression (Maria, sympathizing with Jemima’s sufferings, promises her “a better fate,” which she “will procure” for her (121). This female solidarity, which has made the book a “founding text for modern organized feminism” (Botting 2016, 219), may also be detected in Wollstonecraft’s choice of genre as the novel format increases accessibility for a female readership.

The German and French translations of Rights of Woman and Wrongs of Woman The 1793/94 German translation of Rights of Woman is by Georg Friedrich Christian Weissenborn, a teacher at the school run by Christian Gotthilf Salzmann, the German educationist and publisher. Although supportive, the translation often softens Wollstonecraft’s claims, mostly through modal particles that qualify her statements. For example, in the passage where Wollstonecraft addresses potential weakness in women, writing “should experience prove that they cannot attain the same degree of strength of mind, perseverance, and fortitude, let their virtues 175

Elisabeth Gibbels

be the same in kind, though they may vainly struggle for the same degree” (106), the translation adds a “wirklich” [really] and reads “cannot really attain.” The next part of the phrase: “let their virtues be the same in kind” is drowned in hedging “verstatte man ihnen doch wenigstens [one should at least grant them], so that the power of the English statement is considerably reduced: “Sollte indessen die Erfahrung ausweisen, dass die Weiber wirklich nicht so viel Seelenstärke, Beharrlichkeit und Muth als die Männer erreichen könnten, so verstatte man ihnen doch wenigstens eine der Art nach gleiche Tugend, wenn sie gleich umsonst nach demselben Grad ringen würden” (Wollstonecraft 1793, 120). In contrast, the French translation of 1792 radicalizes the text. For instance, “Femme” [woman] is continuously capitalized. When Wollstonecraft writes of kings as “men whose very station” sinks them necessarily below the meanest of their subjects, the (anonymous) translator chooses “méchants” [villains] whose “vices” always sink them. Wollstonecraft’s hope that the rights of women might be respected one day becomes an assertive “they will be respected as they should be.” All over the text, the translator intensifies the passionate tone through imperatives and exclamation marks (Kirkley 2009a). When Wrongs of Woman appeared, it was immediately translated into French (1798), just like Rights of Woman. Here, however, the translator Basile-Joseph Ducos softens or eliminates passages, in particular, references to sexual and physical abuse, pleas for women’s freedom or attacks on marriage as an institution (Bour 2004, Kirkley 2015b). Such omissions and changes are present in the German version (1800) as well. For example, the passage beginning “Marriage, as at present constituted, she considered as leading to immorality” and ending with “as it roused bitter reflections on the situation of women in society” (193–194) has been deleted. Wollstonecraft’s drastic “a wife being as much a man’s property as his horse, or his ass” (158) is neutralized in the French version (“à la vérité, une femme est la propriété de son mari” [to be honest, a wife is the property of her husband]) and further watered down in the German by the hedging modal particle “gleichsam” [quasi, so to speak] “eine Frau ist wahrhaftig gleichsam das Eigenthum des Mannes” [a wife is truly almost like the property of her husband] (161). A passage that reminds readers of the abuse she suffered in her marriage (“Various are the cases, in which a woman ought to separate herself from her husband; and mine, I may be allowed emphatically to insist, comes under the description of the most aggravated” (195–196) is distorted to a cheerful “Es giebt verschiedne Umstände, die einer Frau erlauben, sich von ihrem Manne trennen zu dürfen. Ich ergriff dieses Mittel, und fühlte mich dadurch weit glücklicher, als vorher” (237–238) [There are various circumstances that justify a woman’s separation from her husband. I made use of this means and became far happier for it (my translation)]. While these translations exist, and were completed almost immediately upon the publication of the original English texts, it seems that the paratexts had a greater influence on the reception of Wollstonecraft’s work.

The paratexts Dedication, prefaces, footnotes and titles The second edition of Rights of Woman includes a Dedication as well as the preface and footnotes that were part of the first edition. The translations added further footnotes and editor’s prefaces. The Dedication was only translated in the French edition, however, and was reflected upon in Spain and Italy (see “Rights of Woman and Wrongs of Woman in Other Countries” section). It is missing in the German translation (which translated the first edition) and, consequently, also in the Dutch and Danish versions (which used the German text). 176

The Wollstonecraft meme

The Dedication addresses the French education minister Talleyrand and received much coverage in reviews. It not only positions Wollstonecraft on an equal footing with other thinkers in political debates but also reiterates two of her main tenets: women’s independence and the validity of their life experience. Wollstonecraft’s preface survives in both translations. The German editor Salzmann, however, placed it after his own 18-page foreword. In addition, Salzmann included 37 footnotes of his own that comment upon and often undermine the text. When Wollstonecraft refuses submission to male authority (“I love man as my fellow; but his sceptre, real, or usurped, extends not to me, unless the reason of an individual demands my homage; and even then the submission is to reason, and not to man.” (107); or “The divine right of husbands, like the divine right of kings, may, it is to be hoped, in this enlightened age, be contested without danger” (112)), Salzmann contradicts her (Wollstonecraft 1793, 121) or states flatly that the author does not mean what she says. For the passage “but attacking the boasted prerogative of man – the prerogative that may emphatically be called the iron sceptre of tyranny, the original sin of tyrants, I declare against all power built on prejudices” (225), the footnote thus begins reassuringly: “Man stoße sich nicht an diese starken Ausdrücke! Wenn man weiter lieset: so wird man finden, daß es die Verfasserin nicht so böse meynt, als es das Ansehn hat. [One should not mind these harsh expressions. If you continue reading, you will find that the author does not mean it as drastically as it sounds.] (Wollstonecraft 1794, 31). In contrast to the editor Salzmann, the translator Weissenborn seeks to accentuate the text’s political agenda, and he adds a footnote to explain that “the abominable traffick” (329) refers to the slave trade (Wollstonecraft 1794, 203). The French translation also contains footnotes. These, however, support or even radicalize Wollstonecraft’s views, especially when referring to the church. Moreover, there are 14 long notes in the chapter on national education (five in all of the other 11 chapters), which underline how seriously Wollstonecraft is taken as a partner in this debate (Bour 2004). Wrongs of Woman contains two paratexts that suggest that Wollstonecraft intended this book to be seen in connection with Rights of Woman. Firstly, the parallelism of the title establishes an immediate link to Rights of Woman and, second, the “Author’s Preface” establishes her wish to use women’s individual suffering and oppression to show social ills. This strategy suffers, however, as Wollstonecraft’s husband, the radical philosopher William Godwin, who published the book posthumously together with Memoirs of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1798), places his own preface before hers. In France, the “Author’s preface” was not translated, and the title became Le Malheur d’être femme [the misfortune of being a woman], which does not resemble the French title used for Rights of Woman, Défense des droits des femmes, and thus elides the parallelism. The German title follows the French but burdens it with two further novel titles: the popular story of a virtuous young woman, Elisa, and the translator’s own novel about a “black-brown girl” (Maria oder das Unglück Weib zu seyn: ein Gegenstück zur Elisa u.s.w./ Nach dem Englischen der Miß Wollstonecraft aus dem Französischen übersetzt vom Verfasser des schwarzbraunen Mädchen von Schreckhorn [Maria or the misfortune of being a woman: a counterpart to the novel Elisa and others/translated from the French after the English of Miss Wollstonecraft by the author of the Black Brown girl of Schreckhorn]).

Reviews of Rights of Woman and Wrongs of Woman First, let us look at the reviews for Rights of Woman in England, France, and Germany. The reviews present a diverse picture. In England, the Analytical Review listed Rights of Woman under ‘political economy,’ while the Monthly Review praised its intellectual force but voiced vehement 177

Elisabeth Gibbels

opposition to women’s participation in civil government. The Critical Review ridiculed women embracing “the severity of reason” altogether (Bour 2013). German reviews reacted favourably to Salzmann’s interventions. The Göttingsche Gelehrte Anzeigen, for example, attested Wollstonecraft “deep thoughts on [the] important issue [of education]” and praised Salzmann for correcting “the author’s exaggerated principles” (Gibbels 2004). The reviews in France were substantial and fair. The Almanach littéraire ou Etrennes d’Apollon and the Chronique de Paris provided extensive summaries. The Journal Encyclopédique’s review spans two successive issues and discusses the book in detail; the reviewer even quotes from the Dedication and includes Wollstonecraft’s criticism of de Genlis. Where German reviews seemed relieved by Salzmann’s mitigations, French reviews did Wollstonecraft justice as a political thinker (Bour 2013). In contrast, Wrongs of Woman was received as a scandalous book in England. The Anti-Jacobin Review attacked Wollstonecraft viciously, calling her a prostitute and a whore, and Hannah More referred to it as a “vindication of adultery” (Taylor 2003, 246). This reception contrasts with that in France, where the reviewer for the Journal de Paris, the prominent political author Pierre-Louis Roederer, disregarding the misleading French title, discussed it in terms of political economy, philosophy, and natural sciences. Isabelle Bour (2013) characterizes this reception as “much more favourable . . . and much more insightful” and “much less moralistic [than in England].” The German reviews are divided. Whereas one reviewer doubted that the book can have been written by “witty, lively and intelligent Wollstonecraft” (Neue allgemeine deutsche Bibliothek), another recommended it as a Christmas present for daughters (Intelligenzblatt der Allgemeinen Literaturzeitung). One assessment that resembles the careful review in France came from Weissenborn, the translator of Rights of Woman. Although only in a metatext and buried in the translator’s footnotes to Godwin’s Memoirs, he points out the parallelism in the titles of the two books and the political intention of Wrongs of Woman (see Wollstonecraft’s life story as a paratext and its influence on the reception). In sum, the decisions on the part of the French and German editors of Wrongs of Woman to delete the “Author’s preface” and to tone down the title destroyed the connection to Rights of Woman; Wrongs of Woman thus failed to have the same impact as a political book. A more recent indicator of this is that only in 1993 did a German retranslation refer back to the original English text and even then the edition chose to obliterate the reference in the title (Erinnerungen an Mary Wollstonecraft [memories of Mary Wollstonecraft]).

Rights of Woman and Wrongs of Woman in other countries The German and French translations informed the reception in other countries. In the Netherlands, Ysbrand van Hamelsveld’s Dutch version appeared in 1796, containing Salzmann’s preface according to a 1797 review (Kirkley 2009a). The Danish edition of 1801/1802 by Jørgen Borch also followed the German text. The book appeared in octavo with ribbons attached, addressing a conventional female audience, which undermined Wollstonecraft’s political agenda. The translator’s preface, too, suggested a conventional treatise on education and urged women “to defend the respectable place which has been determined for them by the Creator, to be their husbands’ girlfriends, advisors, clever hostesses in their homes, their children’s teacher and model” (Wollstonecraft 1801, vii, cited in Gold 1996, 45). In Spain, the reception was informed by the French translation. The Diario de Madrid published a four-part review which included partial translations into Spanish and chapter summaries (1792). The reviewer, Julián de Velasco, translated the first and last paragraphs of each chapter, however omitting those that attacked aristocracy, army, and church or advocate co-education. Velasco carefully placed religious markers by mentioning Talleyrand as Bishop of Autun in the title and adding “despues de estarlo en la religion” 178

The Wollstonecraft meme

[enshrined in religion] to a translated quote at the end of the review. Moreover, Wollstonecraft is referred to with only male or neutral appellations (“nuestro autor” [our author], “el autor” [the author], “Wollstonecraft,” “M.W.,” “nuestro filósofo” [our philosopher] (Kitt 1994). In Italy, the French version circulated among progressive women and led to enthusiastic reviews with partial translation by Elisabetta Caminer Turra in 1792 and 1793 (in D’Ezio 2013, 115–116) as well as a pamphlet Breve difesa dei diritti delle donne [short defence of the rights of women], which references the English title, by Rosa Califronia in 1794 (112, 118–119). For Eastern Europe, there is only a translation into Czech (Anna Holmová 1906, in Botting 2013, 523–524). The only other Scandinavian translation is a Swedish one of Wrongs of Woman (Maria, eller Missödet at vara qvinna, 1799).

Wollstonecraft’s life story as a paratext and its influence on the reception Besides the translations and reviews, Godwin’s Memoirs, his account of her unconventional life, shaped the reception of Wollstonecraft’s work. This text, too, was immediately translated into French and German. The French version included Wollstonecraft’s full name and listed other works (Vie et mémoires de Marie Wollstonecraft Godwin: auteur de La défense des droits de la femme, d’une résponse à Edmond Burck, des Pensées sur l’éducation des filles [life and memoirs of Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin: author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, a response to Edmund Burke, thoughts on the education of girls]. The preface gave a detailed overview of Wollstonecraft’s oeuvre and philosophical standing. The German translation (1799) by Weissenborn included a translator’s preface in which he voiced his expectation that readers would be open-minded, fair, and neutral in their assessment [ein unbefangenes, parteyloses und gerechtes Urtheil] of Wollstonecraft’s capability, legacy, and character [die Talente, das Verdienst und den Charakter], and he added translator’s footnotes that supported Wollstonecraft’s cause. The effect of these Memoirs was disastrous in England and affected the reception of Wrongs of Woman as an autobiographical novel. Mary Hays, a close friend and disciple, for example, wrote a glowing obituary for Wollstonecraft in 1797, but omitted her from her Female Biography of 1803. Everywhere, Wollstonecraft’s writing faded from public discourse, while the scandal around her person persisted. It was “Mary’s personality that has kept her memory alive” and more readers “thrilled to her history” or were “fired by her example” than read their way through the Rights of Woman, says a biography (Wardle 1951, 341). French feminist Flora Tristan in 1840 struggled to find a copy of the book and recalled how even progressive women reacted negatively (Tristan 1982, 320). George Eliot entreated people to read the book: “There is [. . .] a vague prejudice against the Rights of Woman as [. . .] a reprehensible book, but readers [. . .] will be surprised to find it eminently serious, severely moral, and withal rather heavy” ([1855] 1963, 201). At the same time, Wollstonecraft’s name did not, however, lose its evocative power. In 1858, Bessie Parkes, editor of the English Women’s Journal, referred to Mary Shelley Wollstonecraft, wife of poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, simply as “Mary’s daughter, his wife” (Caine 1997, 261). English 19th-century Wollstonecraft reception was characterized by this contrast between the omnipresence of her name and the absence of her texts. In France and Germany, both her name and her work disappeared. This was less due to moral outrage than to the backlash against the French Revolution which turned Wollstonecraft into a pariah in public discourse. Indeed, she was absent to such an extent that a book on French feminism in the 19th century does not even mention her name (Moses Goldberg 1984) and a German treatise on women’s rights by Amalia Holst (1802) reads like a direct translation of her work but contains no reference to Wollstonecraft. The only new translation in that period was published in the USA in 1852 by 179

Elisabeth Gibbels

a German exile: Mathilde Anneke translated excerpts for her Deutsche Frauen-Zeitung [German women’s paper] (Gibbels 2018).

Phantom translations and misattributions: indicators of Wollstonecraft’s rise to a meme Misattributions are indicators of Wollstonecraft’s nonetheless growing iconic status. Sources, for example, persistently mention German writer Henriette Herz as the author of an 1832 translation of Rights of Woman (van Dijk, database Women Writers), but scholars declare it a phantom (Gibbels 2018). A supposed Portuguese translation of 1800 is ascribed to Henrique Xavier Baeta (van Dijk, database Women Writers), but the only documented translation by him consists of excerpts from Wollstonecraft’s Letters from Sweden. In France, Wrongs of Woman was attributed to Madame de Staël (Bour 2013, 582). The most telling instance of misattribution is the story of Rights of Woman in Latin America. It started with a translation and culminated in the circulation of another text for nearly two hundred years (Botting and Hammond Matthews 2014). The starting point was the English text Woman not Inferior to Man: or A Short and Modest Vindication of the Natural Right of the Fair-Sex to a Perfect Equality of Power, Dignity and Esteem, with the Men (1739). This anonymous text, signed “Sophia, a person of quality,” was translated into French in 1750. In 1826, a Paris publisher issued it as Les Droits des Femmes, et l’Injustice des Hommes; par Mistriss Godwin, traduit librement de l’Anglais [the rights of woman and the injustice of men, by Mistress Godwin, freely translated from English]. In 1832, this title was mistaken for Rights of Woman and translated into Brazilian Portuguese as Direitos das Mulheres e Injustiça dos Homens, por Mistriss Godwin. Tradusido livremente do Francez para Portuguez, e offerecido às Brasileiras e Academicos Brasileiros por Nisia Floresta Brasileira Augusta [rights of women and injustice of men by Mistress Godwin, translated freely from French into Portuguese, and offered to the women and academics of Brazil by Nisia Floresta Brasileira Augusta]. This translation made Floresta famous as a feminist in her own right. The mistake remained unnoticed until the 1990s, when a copy of Floresta’s translation was found and finally compared with Wollstonecraft’s English text. It took another 20 years to establish the identity of the English original and accept the fact that Wollstonecraft had nothing to do with Floresta’s version at all. Such misattributions and phantom translations testify to the symbolic currency of Wollstonecraft as a meme and her status as a discourse founder: it did not matter “who is speaking” (Foucault 1977) as her name had replaced the content, and feminist discourse was produced without reference to her actual text.

Transmitting Wollstonecraft’s feminism by proxy: current instances Even where audiences may not read her texts, her name is being referenced. Whether a church in Newington Green, England, frequented by Wollstonecraft, mounted a plaque in 2009 to commemorate it as the “birthplace of feminism” or Muslim cross-national activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali invoked her as an inspiration in her 2006 autobiography, her name creates a bond and evokes a body of shared feminist knowledge. She is present in feminist publications in South Africa (Thorpe 2018), at conferences on her contribution to contemporary philosophy in Turkey (2017) and in investigations on working conditions in South Korea ( Joohee Lee 2017). Such metatexts are not bound to translation anymore to transmit feminism in Wollstonecraft’s name.

180

The Wollstonecraft meme

Conclusion This chapter has investigated phenomena in the appropriation and transfer of Wollstonecraft’s feminism through translation. Even though Wollstonecraft designed Rights of Woman and Wrongs of Woman as volume one and volume two, only Rights of Woman became the founding text of international feminism, while Wrongs of Woman was largely ignored. This was caused mainly by paratextual decisions in the English-speaking world but also in the translations. Both texts were immediately translated into French and German, but the paratextual settings in the French and German translations more than the translations themselves set the tone for the reception. In addition, the publication of biographical details in the Memoirs proved detrimental to 19thcentury reception and raised insurmountable obstacles for Wrongs of Woman to be perceived as a book of feminist political philosophy. Secondly, even though Wollstonecraft was ignored for most of the 19th century, and the reception of Rights of Woman was marked by misattributions and mistranslations, Wollstonecraft became the universal symbol of international feminism. This was due to her construction as a feminist meme in the reception of her work, which occurred independently of actual access to her writings. Thirdly, Wollstonecraft’s name is present in international feminist discourse irrespective of the availability and number of translations of her work. This testifies to the power of her name as a discourse founder.

Further directions Future research could explore the use that feminist movements have made and now make of Wollstonecraft in African, Asian, and Eastern European contexts, especially in languages that did not translate her work. How does Wollstonecraft’s status survive and how can it serve feminist causes? Another line of investigation could address paratextual framings of authors. How do the life stories of women authors affect the reception of their works? How does an author’s reputation and biographical circumstance distort, overwrite, or dilute their words? What paratextual mechanisms effect this, what strategies could prevent or counteract this? Finally, retranslations of authors of iconic status need to be assessed. What impact can such retranslations have? What paratextual strategies should accompany them? This may also include further study of how memes work for and against feminist agendas and how paratextual settings and mechanisms operate in the case of translation projects.

Related topics Transfer of ideas, evolution of feminism, production of cultural memory, women’s discourse founders, public and private sphere

Suggested readings Craciun, Adriana. 2002. Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman: A Sourcebook. London: Routledge. This is a concise collection of major paratexts around Rights of Woman and its reception. It serves as a good introduction to the debates and includes a wide variety of English sources. Botting, Eileen H., Christine C. Wilkerson, and Elizabeth Kozlow. 2014. Wollstonecraft as an International Feminist Meme. Journal of Women’s History, 26(2), 13–38.

181

Elisabeth Gibbels

This article analyzes how Wollstonecraft was employed as a meme by four leaders of women’s movements at the turn of the 20th century to build their own movements and create authority. Bergès, Sandrine and Alan Coffee. 2016. The Social and Political Philosophy of Mary Wollstonecraft. Oxford: Oxford University Press. This collection delivers in-depth analyses of Wollstonecraft as a theorist and explores the range and depth of Wollstonecraft’s philosophy beyond feminist core themes.

References Batchelor, Kathryn. 2018. Translation and Paratexts. London: Routledge. Botting, Eileen H. 2013. Wollstonecraft in Europe, 1792–1904: A Revisionist Reception History. History of European Ideas, 39(4), 503–527. Botting, Eileen H. 2016. Wollstonecraft, Mill, and Women’s Human Rights. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Botting, Eileen H. and Charlotte Hammond Matthews. 2014. Overthrowing the Floresta-Wollstonecraft Myth for Latin American Feminism. Gender & History, 26(1), 64–83. Bour, Isabelle. 2004. The Boundaries of Sensibility: French Translations of Mary Wollstonecraft. Women’s Writing, 11(3), 493–506. Bour, Isabelle. 2013. A New Wollstonecraft: The Reception of the Vindication of the Rights of Woman and of The Wrongs of Woman in Revolutionary France. Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies, 36(4), 575–587. Caine, Barbara. 1997. Victorian Feminism and the Ghost of Mary Wollstonecraft. Women’s Writing, 4(2), 261–275. Dawkins, Richard. 1976. The Selfish Gene. Oxford: Oxford University Press. D’Ezio, Marianna. 2013. Italian Women Intellectuals and Their Cultural Networks: The Making of a European ‘Life of the Mind’, in Lisa Curtis-Wendlandt, Paul Gibbard, and Karen Green, eds., Political Ideas of Enlightenment Women: Virtue and Citizenship. London: Routledge, 109–122. Dijk, Suzan van. 2018. Women Writers [online]. Available at: www.databasewomenwriters.nl [Accessed 28 June 2018]. Eliot, George. 1855/1963. Margaret Fuller and Mary Wollstonecraft, in Thomas Pinney, ed., Essays of George Eliot. London: Routledge, 199–206. Even-Zohar, Itamar. 1997. The Making of Culture Repertoire and the Role of Transfer. Target, 9(2), 355–363. Falco, Maria J., ed. 1996. Feminist Interpretations of Mary Wollstonecraft. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press. Foucault, Michel. 1977. What Is an Author. Translated by Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon, in Donald F. Bouchard, ed., Language, Counter-memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 113–138. Gibbels, Elisabeth. 2004. Mary Wollstonecraft zwischen Feminismus und Opportunismus. Tübingen: Narr. Gibbels, Elisabeth. 2018. Lexikon der deutschen Übersetzerinnen 1200–1850. Berlin: Frank & Timme. Godwin, William. 1798. Memoirs of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. A facsimile reprint of the first edition of 1798. Oxford: Woodstock. Godwin, William. 1799. Denkschrift auf Maria Wollstonecraft Godwin, die Vertheidigerin der Rechte des Weibes. Aus dem Englischen übersetzt und mit einigen Anmerkungen begleitet. Translated by Georg Friedrich Christian Weissenborn. Schnepfenthal: Verlag der Erziehungsanstalt. Gold, Carol. 1996. Educating Middle-class Daughters. Copenhagen: Royal Library. Gubar, Susan. 1994. Feminist Misogyny: Mary Wollstonecraft and the Paradox of ‘It Takes One to Know One.’ Feminist Studies, 20(3), 453–473. Hanley, Kirsten. 2013. Mary Wollstonecraft, Pedagogy, and the Practice of Feminism. London: Routledge. Holst, Amalia. 1802. Über die Bestimmung des Weibes zur höhern Geistesbildung. Berlin: Frölich. Israel, Jonathan. 2001. Radical Enlightenment. Philosophy and the Making of Modernity, 1650–1750. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Janes, Regina. 1978. On the Reception of Mary Wollstonecraft’s a Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Journal of the History of Ideas, 39, 293–302. Johns, Alessa. 2014. Bluestocking Feminism and British-German Cultural Transfer, 1750–1837. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. 182

The Wollstonecraft meme

Kirkley, Laura. 2009a. Feminism in Translation: Re-writing the Rights of Woman, in Tom Toremans and Walter Verschueren, eds., Crossing Cultures. Nineteenth-century Anglophone Literature in the Low Countries. Leuven: Leuven University Press, 189–200. Kirkley, Laura. 2009b. Rescuing the Rights of Woman: Mary Wollstonecraft in Translation, in Agnese Fidecaro, Henriette Partzsch, Suzan van Dijk, and Valérie Cossy, eds., Women Writers at the Crossroads of Languages, 1700–2000. Geneva: Métis Press, 159–171. Kirkley, Laura. 2015a. Original Spirit. Literary Translation and Translational Literature in the Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, in Robin Goodman, ed., Literature and the Development of Feminist Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 13–26. Kirkley, Laura. 2015b. Marie, or Le Malheur d’être femme: Translating Mary Wollstonecraft in Revolutionary France. Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies, 38(2), 239–255. Kitt, Sally-Ann. 1994. Mary Wollstonecraft’s a Vindication of the Rights of Woman: A Judicious Response from Eighteenth-century Spain. Modern Language Review, 89(2), 351–359. Lee, Joohee. 2017. South Korea: Work, Care and the Wollstonecraft Dilemma, in Marian Baird, Michele Ford, and Elizabeth Hill, eds., Women, Work and Care in the Asia-Pacific. London: Routledge, 214–229. Mackenzie, Catriona. 2014. An Early Relational Autonomy theorist? In Sandrine Bergès and Alan Coffee, eds., The Social and Political Philosophy of Mary Wollstonecraft. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 61–91. Moses Goldberg, Claire. 1984. French Feminism in the Nineteenth Century. Albany: SUNY Press. Myers, Mitzi. 1988. Pedagogy as Self-expression in Mary Wollstonecraft: Exorcising the Past, Finding a Voice, in Shari Banstock, ed., The Private Self: Theory and Practice of Women’s Autobiographical Writings. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 192–210. Offen, Karen. 2010. Was Mary Wollstonecraft a Feminist? A Comparative Re-reading of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, 1792–1992, in Karen Offen, ed., Globalizing Feminisms 1789–1945. London: Routledge, 5–17. Poovey, Mary. 1988. A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, in Carol H. Poston, ed., Mary Wollstonecraft, 1759–1797. A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. New York and London: Norton, 343–355. Rauschenbusch-Clough, Emma. 1898. A Study of Mary Wollstonecraft and the Rights of Woman. London: Longmans. Taylor, Barbara. 2003. Mary Wollstonecraft and the Feminist Imagination. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Taylor, Barbara. 2016. Mary Wollstonecraft and Modern Philosophy, in Sandrine Bergès and Alan Coffee, eds., The Social and Political Philosophy of Mary Wollstonecraft. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 218–225. Thorpe, J., ed. 2018. Feminism Is: South Africans Speak Their Truth. Cape Town: Kwela Books. Todd, Janet M. and Marilyn Butler, eds. 1989. The Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, 7 vols. London: Pickering & Chatto Publishers. Tristan, Flora. 1982. The London Journal of Flora Tristan, 1842. Translated by Jean Hawkes. London: Virago. Wardle, Ralph M. 1951. Mary Wollstonecraft. A Critical Biography. Kansas: Kansas University Press. Wollstonecraft, Mary. 1792a. A Vindication of the Rights of Woman with Strictures on Political and Moral Subjects. London: J. Johnson. Wollstonecraft, Mary. 1792b. Défense des droits des femmes, suivie de quelques considérations sur des sujets politiques et moraux. Ouvrage traduit de l’anglais. Paris et Lyon: Chez Buisson et Bruyset. Wollstonecraft, Mary. 1793. Rettung der Rechte des Weibes mit Bemerkungen über politische und moralische Gegenstände, vol. 1. Translated by Georg Friedrich Christian Weissenborn. Schnepfenthal: Verlag der Erziehungsanstalt. Wollstonecraft, Mary. 1794. Rettung der Rechte des Weibes mit Bemerkungen über politische und moralische Gegenstände, vol. 2. Translated by Georg Friedrich Christian Weissenborn. Schnepfenthal: Verlag der Erziehungsanstalt. Wollstonecraft, Mary. 1798. Maria, ou Le Malheur d’être femme. Translated by Basile-Joseph Ducos. Paris: Maradan. Wollstonecraft, Mary. 1801. Qvindekjønnets Rettigheder forsvarede: Med tilføjede Anmærkninger over politiske og moralske Gjenstande. Translated by J. Borch. Copenhagen: Simon Poulsen.

183

14 An Indian woman’s room of one’s own A reflection on Hindi translations of Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own Garima Sharma

Introduction I wish to open this chapter with Virginia Woolf ’s statement in A Room of One’s Own, in which she says: “Intellectual freedom depends upon material things. Poetry depends upon intellectual freedom. And women have always been poor, not for two hundred years merely, but from the beginning of time” (Woolf [1929] 2011, 102). In 1928, when she was invited to speak on the topic Women and Fiction at the only two women’s colleges in England at the time, Newnham and Girton College at Cambridge University, she started her lectures with her famous assertion: “a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction” (2). The lack of a room of one’s own and financial freedom is deeply connected with women’s (in) ability to produce literature. In the course of her lectures, Woolf uncovers various other lacks that women have lived with, fought with, made peace with, and conquered throughout history and the effect of those lacks on their mental freedom and capacities: from the lack of an actual room where women possess a physical space of their own to the lack of financial independence that can provide them with greater access to personal and professional freedom; from the lack of a place in the history of literature to the lack of a language, a writing tradition, “a common sentence” that could make them literary geniuses, like their male counterparts. The question of women’s language-less-ness and their history-less-ness forms the deepest core of Woolf ’s essay A Room of One’s Own, which grew out of those two lectures and was published in 1929 by Woolf ’s own publishing house, The Hogarth Press. The essay, which is one of the most admired and influential feminist texts of the 20th century (Lee 2001, vii), is written in a unique and unconventional style, in which Woolf uses her signature stream of consciousness writing technique. Recent years have not only witnessed a large number of translations of Woolf ’s seminal essay into numerous languages but also an engagement with the politics and poetics of translation that steer the traveling process of this important contribution to feminist literature across nations and cultures. The recent engagements with the translations of Woolf ’s essay can be placed within an interdisciplinary discourse emerging out of a network of theoretical and practical exchanges between the fields of translation studies, cultural studies, and gender and feminist studies. In 184

Hindi translations of A Room of One’s Own

times of prevailing interdisciplinary approaches in universities throughout the world, translation has emerged as a field of inquiry that is positioned at the crossroads of various disciplines intertwined by the common objective of exploring the trajectories of transformation that sociopolitical experiences undergo as they move “into a variety of artistic and cultural forms” (Bose 2002, x). The interaction between Translation Studies and Feminist Studies strives towards an engagement with the translations of literary works within a framework of ever-dynamic feminist aspirations and methodologies, and the development of feminist theories of translation and feminist translation studies. Most of the scholarship on the translations of Woolf ’s essay into different languages is based on research that examines the role played by the translator’s political ideology and approach towards gender constructs and feminist ideas present in Woolf ’s essay. This area of research, which goes beyond a mere analysis of the ‘innocent’ process of linguistic transformation of a literary work from one language into another, deals with the way the political ideas of a translator and the society within which the translator is located intervene in the strategies chosen for the translation. This chapter studies the two translations of Woolf ’s A Room of One’s Own into an Indian language, Hindi, and demonstrates how both (male) translators neglect to take into account Woolf ’s feminist intention and objective present in the essay, and translate the essay by not only consciously choosing “masculine” forms for neutral nouns, but also distorting the meaning and writing style present in the original essay. The chapter addresses the following questions: what insights into the nature of language and into the processes of translation can be acquired from the interaction of Translation Studies with various gender and feminist theories? How can the Hindi translations of Woolf ’s essay be located within the traditions of translation studies, feminist literary studies, and their interactions in India? In an attempt to find answers to these questions, the chapter places and examines the translation strategies adopted by the two Hindi translators of Woolf ’s work within a new dynamism that the “happy merger of two academic disciplines – feminism and translation studies” (Kamala 2009, xv) has attained in the last few decades.

Historical perspectives The Hindi translation of the term ‘translation’ ‘anuvad’ अनुवाद which “stands for the “subsequent” or “following” discourse (anu=following, vad=discourse)” (Singh 2017, 101) rightly points to a subsequent discourse that the translation of a work initiates within the milieu of an existing discourse brought about by an “original” literary work – a continued life, an “afterlife”/“Nachleben” in Benjamin’s terms, that a work of art participates in through its translation (Benjamin [1923] 2000, 17). Recent work in translation studies has called into question the so-called transparent role of literary translators and has fostered new insights into the way translations take part in or renounce long-standing schools of knowledge. Translation is recognized as “a mode of engagement with literature, as a kind of literary activism” (Simon 1996, ix), “the most intimate act of reading” (Spivak 1992, 398), especially after the onset of the “cultural turn” in Translation Studies in the late 1970s and the early 1980s. After the emergence of the cultural turn, the category gender, with both biological and sociopolitical implications, has been placed at the heart of the translation process by feminist theories of translation. Feminist translators not only strove towards carrying across implicit and explicit feminist connotations and experimentations present in the “feminist” source text but aimed at making themselves visible in the translations through strategies like supplementing, prefacing and footnoting (Flotow 1991, 74), which they called womanhandling the texts (Godard 1989, 50). 185

Garima Sharma

Feminist translation in India In the Indian context, Tejaswini Niranjana and Gayatri Spivak have examined translation theories within the postcolonial context, and discussed how translation has been used to reproduce hegemonic versions of the colonized, of the “non-Western other” through ethnographic projects (Niranjana 1992), (Spivak 1992). In the introduction to Translating Women. Indian Interventions (2009), her volume of collected essays on translations of Indian women’s works, N. Kamala points to the specificities of caste, class, gender, and religion that play an important role when works by Indian women writers are translated into other Indian and Western languages (xiv). Kamala briefly summarizes the way various anthologies like Susie Tharu and K. Lalita’s Women Writing in India – Vol 1 (1991) and 2 (1993) have brought to light women’s writings from over 2000 years ago to the present for English-language readers in India and around the world, and have initiated a discourse on the translation of works by women writers in India. The two volumes contain English translations of women’s works from a variety of Indian languages. In an essay in Kamala’s volume, Meena Pillai discusses the great reluctance among Malayalam translators in Kerala, India to translate ‘Western’ feminist theories and highlights the way the Malayalam translations of Simone de Beauvoir’s Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter and Mahasweta Devi’s Draupadi completely hijack the feminist voices present in original texts. Other essays in the volume also explore the way certain genres/themes/authors are chosen for translation and look at the politics that govern the theoretical and practical underpinnings of translating works by women writers written in Indian languages. While most of the discussions on literary translation (and feminist translation) in India revolve around the representation of postcolonial and subaltern subjects and cultures, recent years have witnessed an engagement with questions of gender and sexual identity within the translation discourse and as Niranjana points out, one can learn from recent scenes of translation in India, “how the (feminist) subject of politics is being shaped by the process of moving between languages” (Niranjana 1998, 143). Publishing houses like Stree and Kali for Women have played a major role in making translations of works by women writers in Indian regional languages accessible to a large readership (Kothari 2003, 43). One example of feminist translations in India is the English translation (2000) of Geetanjali Shree’s Mai (1993), in which the translator, Nita Kumar, explicitly identifies her translation as “feminist” in the afterword. Spivak’s English translations of works of Bengali writer Mahasweta Devi have also caused quite a debate regarding the way the translator “re-wrote” Devi’s works in order to enhance the already present emancipatory gender and marxist politics in the original works through the translation. Pillai describes Spivak’s translations as having a “feminist” punch, as being carried out in a way that the translator’s own critique of colonialism and masculinism (that is central to the story) becomes apparent in the way words are chosen, thereby intensifying the author’s intentions (Pillai 2009, 12).

Translation analysis This section deals with a specific case of translation of Virginia Woolf ’s famous feminist essay A Room of One’s Own into an Indian language, Hindi. Drawing upon feminist theory and practices of translation, this section analyzes the two Hindi translations of Woolf ’s text, firstly, within the framework of specific strategies acknowledged as “feminist” translation strategies within translation theory, and secondly, along the lines of the translation methodology used to render Woolf ’s stylistic experimentation and feminist ideas in Hindi. Given that this particular work by Woolf

186

Hindi translations of A Room of One’s Own

has witnessed a series of distorted translations in the past, Borges’ Spanish translation of the work being one (Bengoechea 2011), it becomes interesting as well as important to examine the way the work reaches Hindi-language readers in India. Since both Hindi versions of Woolf ’s A Room of One’s Own were translated by male translators, speculations exist around the way the explicit “female” voice present in Woolf ’s text is carried across in Hindi. Lori Chamberlain argues that it is important to move beyond the questions of the sex of the author and the translator when it comes to measuring the sincerity of the translator towards the writing project (Chamberlain [1988] 2002, 327), but when one looks at the large number of cases where male translators of women-centric or feminist texts have undermined and hijacked the feminist project through their male-centric translation strategies, it becomes important to observe the translations through the lens of conflictual effects caused by gender difference. The first Hindi translation of Woolf ’s essay, Apna Kamra (अपना कमरा), appeared in 2002 and was published by Samvad Publication, Mumbai. The translator, Gopalji Pradhan, an associate professor of Hindi at Ambedkar University Delhi, has not only translated a number of theoretical books on history and sociology, On History by Eric Hobsbawm being one of them, but has written and published extensively on Hindi literature. The second Hindi translation of Woolf ’s essay was published in 2011 as Apna Ek Kamra (अपना एक कमरा) by the academic publishing house Vani Prakashan, which has published Hindi translations of important works from nonIndian languages like English, French, German, Russian, and also Latin American and African languages (Singh 2017, 118). The translator of this second translation, Mozez Michel, has translated over 100 works from English into Hindi and vice versa and has also authored several stories and poems in Hindi.

Title and cover page While both translators use the gender-neutral reflexive possessive “Apna” “अपना” to denote the gender-free “One’s” in Woolf ’s title, this term “अपना” fails to carry across the accentuated idea of one’s “own” room present in the original title. The expression “खुद का” “one’s own” perhaps could highlight the notion of a specific room of “one’s own” in the Hindi title. Moreover, a reflection on the Hindi word “कमरा” “room” raises questions about the implications that come with Woolf ’s idea of a “room.” Apart from the “room” as a personal physical space, there is a scope within Woolf ’s title to grasp this “room” as a place in the literary history, a “place,” a “voice” in the society that, according to Woolf, women have lacked throughout history. This “place” does not get reproduced with the Hindi word “कमरा,” which only stands for a physical room. The word “जगह,” which means “space” as well as “room,” however, would allow the other connotations present in Woolf ’s idea of a room to be present in the Hindi title as well. Additionally, the cover pages of both the Hindi translations do not necessarily depict a “room of one’s own” an Indian woman could relate to. While the cover page of the first translation has a full-page portrait of Virginia Woolf, the second translation has Vincent Van Gogh’s painting The Bedroom at Arles (1888) on its cover. Van Gogh’s painting of the bedroom does depict a personal space that according to Woolf women must possess in order to be able to produce literature, but this painting of a clearly “European” room with its sturdy wooden furniture and Van Gogh’s self-portrait on the wall fails to come across as an Indian woman’s room, as a room found in Indian households, as a room that Indian women, especially in the rural areas or/and in large and joint families may dream of having. This takes us to the very important point pertaining to the complexities involved in the process of transformation of experiences and perspectives

187

Garima Sharma

from Western cultural spaces to diverse, multifaceted, and multicultural spaces in India, with its regional, religious, caste, and class specificities, wherein the Western philosophies have been thought to ‘enrich’ the non-Western schools of thought. Nevertheless, in spite of the asymmetrical relations of power brought about by the colonial enterprise, which the postcolonial translation theorists like Niranjana and Spivak draw attention to in their works and translation practice, the translation of Woolf ’s seminal text on feminism into Hindi does not cease to give birth to possibilities of enriching existing dialogues and initiating new ones within the feminist discourse in India.

Prefacing In the preface to the first Hindi translation (2002), translator Pradhan refers to the details of Woolf ’s life derived from the biography written by her nephew, Quentin Bell, a biography that has been criticized by Roger Poole for its consistent usage of the term ‘mad’ to describe Woolf and for other distortions (Poole 1995, 1). The translator’s choice of biography reflects how he chooses to carry forward the myths created about Woolf ’s life in various biographies, for as Hermione Lee points out in her biography of Woolf: “there is no such thing as an objective biography, particularly not in this case. Positions have been taken, myths have been made” (Lee 1997, 3). Indeed, biographies play an important role in creating certain images of authors that often reflect the interpretations and judgments of the biographers. For instance, there is no information on Woolf ’s homosexual relationships in the little biographical sketch that is provided in the preface. The second translation (2011) is accompanied by a preface written by the BangladeshiIndian feminist writer Taslima Nasrin, who was exiled from Bangladesh and India a decade ago because of her powerful writings on women’s oppression and her criticism of religion. Nasrin’s preface adds a woman’s voice to the Hindi translation, as along with outlining Woolf ’s main feminist ideas, Nasrin shares her own experience of how difficult it was for her to rent a room in 1990 as a single woman because of the patriarchal mindset of the society that just cannot accept an independent single woman living alone, without a “man” or family. Regardless of the fact, that Woolf ’s feminism is highlighted by the translator in the preface to the first translation and by Nasrin in her preface to the second translation, neither translator includes a discussion on the challenges and choices made in translating Woolf ’s text into Hindi nor is any effort made to provide extra information in the translation itself using footnotes or supplementing. The fact that neither translator mentions two of the most important themes in Woolf ’s work – androgyny and homosexuality – in their discussions of her writing (for instance, in the translator’s note on the flap covers in the second translation) – underlines their reluctance to admit how important these issues are for contemporary debates on sexuality and gender.

Translation of gender constructs One of the most important aims of feminist approaches to translation studies is to examine the way translators consciously or unconsciously let their own ideological positions take over the ‘women’s’ voice that is present in the original. In the Hindi translations, this can be observed in the way the translators deal with the gender constructs and assign gender to nouns and pronouns that are neutral in the original. Despite the fact that the Hindi translators acknowledge Woolf ’s work as a seminal feminist work, they often choose ‘masculine’ nouns for neutral words. Cf. Example 1:

188

Hindi translations of A Room of One’s Own

Example 1: I thought of the queer old gentlemen I had seen and I remembered how if one whistled one of them ran . . . thinking of the safety and prosperity of the one sex and of the poverty and insecurity of the other and of the effect of tradition and of the lack of tradition upon the mind of a writer. (1929, 2011, 22) In the preceding lines, Woolf thinks about the consequences of poverty and the lack of tradition on the mind of a writer; this is connected to Woolf ’s main argument that a woman needs financial freedom in order to produce literature. The gender-neutral term “writer” in English has been translated in both Hindi translations as “लेखक,” which stands for a male writer in Hindi. Hindi, being a gendered language, has both masculine and feminine nouns and the Hindi word for a female writer is “लेखिका.” The use of the masculine noun in Hindi for the neutral word “writer” only highlights how the translators silence and devalue the “feminine” present in the original text. Moreover, by using the Hindi noun for male writer, both translators have taken the life out of Woolf ’s central idea, and that is how ‘female’ writers have been deprived of experience and tradition. Here is what happens: Example 2: What poets, I cried aloud, as one does in the dusk, what poets they were! (Ibid., 12) Similarly, in both Hindi translations of the preceding lines, the masculine word “कवि” is used for “poet” while the word “कवयित्री” would denote a female poet. In the example, Woolf is talking about poets like Alfred Lord Tennyson und Christina Rossetti; in both the translations the reference to a female poet is completely lost. In fact, the second translator translates the sentence literally into Hindi as “कैसे कवि, मैं ज़ोर से चिल्लाई,” which is a word for word translation of Woolf ’s sentence and could have been translated using a figure of speech in Hindi. The phrase “what poets” in English expresses admiration, while “कैसे कवि” in Hindi makes it a question “what kind of poets?” Further, there are many neutral words in the English text like “novelist,” “playwright,” “reformer,” “author” etc. that are explicitly used in the context of women and have all been translated into Hindi as masculine nouns.

Thematic translations On women’s lives Another example: Example 3: There would have been that assertion – you cannot do this, you are incapable of doing that – to protest against, to overcome. (Ibid., 52)

189

Garima Sharma

In this example, Woolf writes about the way women in a patriarchal society have always been discouraged from becoming artists and writers. In the first translation (2002), the translator changes the meaning of Woolf ’s sentence as follows: “उस पर विजय हासिल करने के लिए कहा जाता रहा होगा,” which means women are “asked” to protest against such demotivating assertions, while Woolf clearly states here that a woman writer must face assertions like “you cannot do this, you are incapable of doing that,” which she constantly has to protest against and overcome. Women are not “asked or motivated” in a patriarchal society to overcome them; they have to do so themselves. The patriarchal society in fact establishes these assertions in the first place. The Hindi translation, however, states that women are asked to protest against such assertions, which changes the meaning of what Woolf writes. The second translator translates this phrase as “they have been under pressure to protest against these assertions,” which is quite close to the meaning in Woolf ’s text but because the translator translates it quite literally, the meaning is not only distorted but is not clear at all in the translation. Further example: Example 4: [I was still considering those early nineteenth-century novelists] when they came to set their thoughts on paper – that is that they had no tradition behind them, or one so short and partial that it was of little help. For we think back through our mothers if we are women. (Ibid., 72) In these lines, Woolf reflects on how the lack of a writing tradition, the lack of access to experiences of life, the lack of a language, which has not been tainted by patriarchal connotations and structures, impact women’s writing. These lacks are reflected in the works of women when they attempt to write, in spite of heavy criticism and discouragement. This is one of the most important concerns that Woolf raises when she tries to find writings by women in the history of literature. In the first Hindi translation (2002), the meaning behind the phrase “had no tradition behind them” disappears completely as the translator translates it literally as “they had no tradition behind their back (body part)” (पीठ पर परं परा). The line “we think back through our mothers if we are women,” points to the fact that just like the mothers of the women writers, who had little access to reading and writing and who did not develop a command over a language that would be suitable for women to express themselves, women writers themselves also lack that tradition when they begin writing. “Thinking back through mothers” is an important phrase that Woolf uses to not only highlight how the situation of women has not changed from generation to generation, but to also show the relationship that women share with their mothers due to a common lineage of suppression. In the first translation, this line is literally translated as “we look at the past through our mothers” (पीछे की तरफ हम अपनी माताओं के ज़रिये दे खते हैं ), which does not carry across Woolf ’s intended meaning and the word “दे खते” denotes a group of people which are not necessarily all women, while Woolf is clearly talking about women. In the second translation (2011), this line is translated as “we think through our mothers,” which carries across the meaning to some extent but does not reproduce in Hindi the effect Woolf creates in her text. Moreover, in the second translation,“novelists” is translated again as male novelists in Hindi, whereas Woolf is clearly referring to 19th-century female writers.

Homosexuality Let us look at the following example: 190

Hindi translations of A Room of One’s Own

Example 5: Chloe liked Olivia. . . . Do not start. Do not blush. Let us admit in the privacy of our own society that these things sometimes happen. Sometimes women do like women. . . . Chloe liked Olivia perhaps for the first time in literature. (Ibid., 77) Woolf writes about how the story of a lesbian love described in a novel by a fictional twentieth century writer completely startles her, as it appears unthinkable that women, who could not even consider writing for many centuries, have now not only started writing but are able to write about their sexual desires and their homosexual tendencies. According to Woolf, it is a breakthrough for women to write on homosexuality as throughout centuries, they have only been “shown in their relation to men” (78) in literature. In the first translation (2002), the phrase “Chloe liked Olivia” is translated as “क्लो ओलिविआ को चाहती थी,” while in the second translation (2002), it is translated as “क्लो को ओलिविआ पसं द थी.” While the use of the word “चाहती” in the first translation conveys the idea that Chloe liked Olivia in a homosexual way, in the second translation, the meaning is completely lost due to the use of the word “पसं द,” which just means “to like someone as a person.” For “sometimes women do like women,” even in the first translation, the Hindi word for “like” “पसं द” is used, which changes the meaning to represent a general liking between women, but not explicitly in a homosexual way. The translators here have chosen words that not only provide a reductive reading of Woolf ’s exploration of the theme of homosexuality but also fail to create that “same-sex love” space that Woolf reads in a literary work by a woman writer and recreates for her readers. In this context, the translators could draw inspiration from many women writers writing in Hindi who have explored the theme of lesbian love and relationships in their works, have unabashedly spoken about women’s sexuality, and desire and have unsettled the reigning heteronormative narratives in Hindi literature. Set in a semi-rural setting in India, Geetanjali Shree’s novel Tirohit (2001) is one such work, which revolves around a relationship between a married woman and her maid and uncovers “the complicated layers of patriarchal oppression regarding lesbian invisibility, compulsive heterosexuality, lesbian motherhood, sexual oppression within marriage and class dynamics in homoerotic passion” (Chanana 2010, 192).

Translation of Woolf’s stylistic devices Another example: Example 6: what a gift that untaught and solitary girl had for the framing of a sentence, for the fashioning of a scene. Listen to her running on: “After dinner wee sitt and talk till Mr B. com’s in question and then I am gon . . . I walke out into a Common that lyes hard by the house where a great many young wenches keep Sheep and Cow’s and sitt in the shades singing of Ballads; I goe to them and compare their voyces and Beauty’s to some Ancient Shepherdesses that I have read of and finde a vaste difference there . . . most commonly when we are in the middest of our discourse one looks aboute” (60). 191

Garima Sharma

In these lines, Woolf writes about a woman, Dorothy, who wrote letters in the 17th century, but did not have a proper education and was restricted to household work, but still had the makings of a writer in her. Woolf gives an example from these letters. In spite of the grammatical errors and the misspellings, this writer, according to Woolf, had a flair for writing. In both the Hindi translations, the complete part in quotes appears as normal, well-structured Hindi sentences, which changes Woolf ’s intention of showing how women write because of the lack of proper training in language. Woolf ’s engagement with various writings by women over the centuries forms the core of the essay and therefore, it becomes important to carry across the exact way Woolf cites these cases in order to re-create her original impressions in Hindi. The translation of Woolf ’s original stylistic experimentation requires experimentation in Hindi, which could carry across the same message that Woolf is trying to convey in the original. In yet another example (Example 7), Woolf creates a poem in the essay which was written by a certain (fictional) Lady Winchilsea in the 17th century, in which she is “bursting out in indignation against the position of women” (55): Example 7: How we are fallen! fallen by mistaken rules, And Education’s more than Nature’s fools; Debarred from all improvements of the mind, And to be dull, expected and designed; And if someone would soar above the rest, With warmer fancy, and ambition pressed, So strong the opposing faction still appears, The hopes to thrive can ne’er outweigh the fears. In the second translation (2011), the poem is translated quite literally, where “fallen” becomes “गिरना,” which means “we have come down to this” “कितनी गिर गई हैं हम!” and changes the original meaning of how we are fallen or broken because of the several rules put on us. The literal translation erases the poetic effect created in the original as the poem in translation looks just like a paragraph, that literally translates the poem. While in the first translation (2002), the translator has tried to recreate the poem in Hindi, the meaning of the poem gets distorted as the “we,” which refers to women who wish to write, is changed to a neutral “हम” (we) in Hindi, which refers to a general group of men and women or to a society in general. The line “and to be dull, expected and designed” completely loses its meaning as it is translated as “आलस, आशा और अपेक्षा यही रहा वरदान नियति से,” which means “we have been granted dullness and hope by destiny.”

Conclusion It can be observed that the two Hindi translations of Woolf ’s A Room of One’s Own fail to reproduce the intention and effect of Woolf ’s original ideas as presented in the essay. Both translations leave out important stylistic features, feminist experimentation with language, meandering writing style, poetic devices, etc. present in the original text. In many places, the second translator (2011) translates Woolf ’s metaphors quite literally, whereby not only the beauty of Woolf ’s expressions is lost, but a confusion crops up in the Hindi text. For example, the rendering of “a thousand stars were flashing across the blue wastes of the sky” as “आसमान के नीले कबाड़ों में,” which means “in the blue junk or dumps of the sky,” the bird in “dined alone off a bird and a 192

Hindi translations of A Room of One’s Own

bottle of wine” becomes “sparrow”; “it was a thousand pities” becomes “यह हज़ार दये का विषय था” (“it was a matter that needed thousand pities”). All these examples demonstrate how instead of choosing equivalent metaphors and figures of speech in Hindi, the translator opts for literal translations. The first translator (2002), on the other hand, chooses to translate Woolf ’s expressions into equivalent Hindi expressions, but fails to reproduce Woolf ’s writing style. Moreover, both translators consistently opt to use masculine noun and pronoun forms for the neutral nouns present in English, thereby imposing their own assumptions about masculine nouns as a ‘standard.’ Woolf ’s essay is clearly written in a feminist voice. In the essay, she herself critiques the way the language is structured through a patriarchal perspective. Throughout the text, she emphasizes the lack of a specific language for women, and women’s lack of access to the existing language. To reproduce Woolf ’s arguments in a language that clearly gives prominence to masculine noun forms does a serious injustice to Woolf ’s feminist project. While feminist translators explicitly subvert hegemonic forms of language in their translations to make the “feminine” visible, the Hindi translators of Woolf ’s A Room of One’s Own once again impose the masculine, sexist language as the universal code. In the Hindi translation of works by women writers, especially if the intentions are clearly feminist, there appears then an imperative need to highlight a “woman’s voice” throughout the text, to implement experimentation within the boundaries of the Hindi language, to make the Hindi language articulate women’s agency, the way many women writers writing in Hindi such as Krishna Sobti, Manu Bhandari, Mridula Garg, Manjul Bhagat, and Mahadevi Varma have done. While there has been a certain absence of a feminist reading strategy and approach in Hindi literary criticism (Chandra Nisha Singh 2007, 6), since only a small number of critical works on women writers writing in Hindi have been published to date, it is true that over the past few decades of the 20th century an increased number of women have begun writing in an unmasked and uninhibited language about issues that lie at the heart of the feminist movement. Challenging the traditional understanding of gender roles in society and norms of writing, many women writers have carved out a separate space for themselves within Hindi literature, thereby introducing new, heretofore unimaginable experimentations with the language and sociopolitical themes. Hindi has been equipped by a number of women writers to translate women’s agency and experiences, desire and sexuality, suppression and revolution into words. A translation of a feminist text into Hindi should therefore be able to contribute to or even enhance the existing attempts to shake up the base of hegemonic patriarchal language and social structures. It should not need to re-impose traditions or sociocultural as well as linguistic conventions. According to Meena T. Pillai, “a translation becomes feminist only when the translator consciously seeks to transform dominant modes of gender representations by choosing what to translate and how to translate” (Pillai 2009, 9). She asserts that when the text is not reduced to the dominant ruling patriarchies in the target culture and the spirit and tone of the woman’s voice is not hijacked in the translation, the source text can initiate a destabilizing discourse, a radical change in the target culture.

Future directions This analysis of the Hindi translations of Virginia Woolf ’s A Room of One’s Own has revealed not only a lack of engagement with the feminist practice of reading and translating on the part of the Hindi translators of her work but also a general lack of engagement with feminism within Hindi literary and translation theory. Feminist translation, as Kamala points out, still remains an “unexplored ground” in India (Kamala 2009, xii). There appears then a need to translate more feminist and/or women-centric works from and into Indian languages, a need to bring about 193

Garima Sharma

more discussions on how feminist works are translated and finally, on how feminist ways of translation could be conceived within the Indian literary context. There are abundant literary works in many of the Indian languages that inspire feminist thought within the Indian context, but there definitely exists a lack of engagement with the translation of such works. Moreover, in reflecting on the question of how feminist approaches to translation could be applied while translating works into and from Indian languages, inspirations could be drawn from such existing texts.

Related topics Feminism, feminist translation, Indian feminism, Indian feminist literature, Hindi literature, women’s writing, Virginia Woolf

Further reading Bose, Brinda, ed. 2002. Translating Desire: The Politics of Gender and Culture in India. New Delhi: Katha. Published right at the beginning of the 21st century, the essays in this book shed light on various questions about gender and sexuality in both academic and popular discourses in contemporary India. The essays are divided into six categories placed within the Indian context: “Myths, Archetypes, Stereotypes,” “Masculinities/Femininities,” “The Female Body,” “Same Sex love,” “Rape and Violence,” and “Translation.” Flotow, Luise von and Farzaneh Farahzad. 2017. Translating Women. Different Voices and New Horizons. New York and London: Routledge. For the purpose of internationalizing feminist translation studies, editors Luise von Flotow and Farzaneh Farahzad bring together essays in this volume that take the discussion on the politics of feminist translation beyond the European and Anglo-American world. The essays provide detailed discussions on not only how feminism gets translated into and from many diverse ‘non-Western’ cultures but also on the role played by women translators and feminist projects in countries like Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Mexico, Sri Lanka, China, Japan, Colombia, etc. Kamala, N., ed. 2009. Translating Women: Indian Interventions. New Delhi: Zubaan. This volume brings together essays on political underpinnings of the process of translation of literary works by women writers from Indian languages into Western languages. Niranjana, Tejaswini. 1992. Siting Translation: History, Post-Structuralism, and the Colonial Context. Berkeley: University of California Press. Considered one of the most important interventions in the field of postcolonial translation studies, this work by Niranjana deals with how “translation” becomes a practice that shapes the process of how the “colonized subject” is created and represented for the perpetuation of the colonial enterprise. Tharu, Susie and K. Lalita, eds. 1991. Women Writing in India: 600 B.C to the Present. Volume 1: 600 B.C to the Early Twentieth Century. New York: The Feminist Press. Tharu, Susie and K. Lalita, eds. 1993. Women Writing in India: The Twentieth Century, vol. 2. New York: The Feminist Press. This pioneering work brings together an anthology of translated works by Indian women writers from various Indian languages into English in two volumes – Women Writing in India: 600 B.C. to the Early Twentieth Century and Women Writing in India: The Twentieth Century. The work contains not only a detailed introduction on women’s writing in India from 600 BC to contemporary times but also an introduction to every work in the anthology by the editors.

References Bengoechea, Mercedes. 2011. Who Are You, Who Are We in a Room of One’s Own? The Difference That Sexual Difference Makes in Borges’ and Rivera-Garretas’s Translations of Virginia Woolf ’s Essay. European Journal of Women’s Studies, 18(4), 409–423. Benjamin, Walter. 1923/2000. The Task of the Translator, in Lawrence Venuti, ed., The Translation Studies Reader. London and New York: Routledge, 15–25. 194

Hindi translations of A Room of One’s Own

Chamberlain, Lori. 1988/2004. Gender and The Metaphorics of Translation, in Lawrence Venuti, ed., The Translation Studies Reader. London and New York: Routledge, 314–329. Chanana, Kuhu. 2010. Plurality of Lesbian Existence in Modern Indian Writers: Manju Kapur, Rajkamal Chaudhary and Geetanjali Shree. Indian Literature, 54(3) (May–June), 257, 190–219. Flotow, Luise von. 1991. Feminist Translation: Context, Practices and Theories. TTR: traduction, terminologie, redaction, 4(2), 69–84. Godard, Barbara. 1989. Theorizing Feminist Discourse/Translation. Tessera, 6 (Spring–Printemps), 42–53. Kothari, Rita. 2003. Translating India. The Cultural Politics of English. London and New York: Routledge. Lee, Hermione. 1997. Part: 1882–1904: 1. Biography, in Hermione Lee, ed., Virginia Woolf. London: Vintage Books, 3–20. Lee, Hermione. 2001. Introduction, in Virginia Woolf, ed., A Room of One’s Own: Three Guineas. London: Vintage, vi–xiii. Niranjana, Tejaswini. 1998. Feminism and Translation in India: Contexts, Politics, Futures. Cultural Dynamics, 10(2), 133–146. Pillai, Meena T. 2009. Gendering Translation, Translating Gender: A Case Study of Kerala, in N. Kamala, ed., Translating Women: Indian Interventions. New Delhi: Zubaan, 1–15. Poole, Roger. 1995. The Unknown Virginia Woolf. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Shree, Geetanjali. 1993. Mai. New Delhi: Rajkamal Prakashan. Shree, Geetanjali. 2000. Mai. Translated by Nita Kumar. New Delhi: Zubaan. Simon, Sherry. 1996. Gender in Translation: Cultural Identity and the Politics of Transmission. London and New York: Routledge. Singh, Chandra Nisha. 2007. Radical Feminism and Women’s Writing: Only So Far and No Further. New Delhi: Atlantic Publishers and Distributors (P) Ltd. Singh, Avadhesh Kumar. 2017. Translation in/and Hindi Literature, in Tariq Khan, ed., History of Translation in India. Mysuru: National Translation Mission Central Institute of Indian Languages, 101–121. Spivak, Gayatri. 1992/2000. The Politics of Translation, in Lawrence Venuti, ed., The Translation Studies Reader. London and New York: Routledge, 397–416. Woolf, Virginia. 1929/2011. A Room of One’s Own. New Delhi: UBS Publishers Distributors (UBSPD). Woolf, Virginia. 2002. अपना कमरा. Translated by Gopalji Pradhan. Mumbai: Samvad Publication. Woolf, Virginia. 2011. अपना एक कमरा. Translated by Mozez Michel. Patna: Vani Prakashan.

195

15 A tale of two translations (Re)interpreting Beauvoir in Japan, 1953–1997 Julia Bullock

Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex [Le Deuxième Sexe, 1949] is a monumental work of 20th century philosophy that profoundly influenced subsequent generations of feminist scholars and activists. Her unique fusion of existentialist philosophy with methods derived from phenomenology, psychoanalysis, anthropology, biology, literary studies, and many other disciplines is understood today to have forged a compelling argument for women’s freedom and a stunning indictment of women’s second-class status as man’s “Other” in a patriarchal system that devalues femininity.1 However, because of the complexity of this text, its full significance for feminism was not widely understood in the early years after its appearance in French. Furthermore, many of its initial translations – particularly the English version by Howard Madison Parshley, the source text for translations into many other languages – have been criticized for abridging and misrepresenting Beauvoir’s arguments, creating further confusion as to what precisely she meant to say.2 While both Japanese versions of The Second Sex were translated from the original French text, rather than Parshley’s problematic English version, understanding of the significance of Beauvoir’s work has followed a similarly confused trajectory in Japan. The essay made its debut in Japanese as Daini no sei in April 1953, just four years after its French-language publication (de Beauvoir 1953/1955). While it proved phenomenally popular with readers at the time, it was later criticized for taking liberties with the original text and distorting Beauvoir’s feminist message. This translation was eventually found to be so problematic that by the late 1980s, a collective of Japanese feminist scholars formed to re-read The Second Sex in the original French, eventually producing what they called a “definitive” translation of Beauvoir’s famous tome. This chapter will explore the differences between the 1953 and 1997 Japanese versions noting the way changes in historical context in between shaped understanding of Beauvoir’s conceptual apparatus, as well as the role a new generation of feminist academics played in reinterpreting Beauvoir at the turn of the last century. As we will see, gender, language, and historical context all played a role in shaping both Japanese translations of The Second Sex. The first translator, Ikushima Ryōichi, was a male academic with training in French language and literature but with little understanding of Beauvoir’s philosophical vocabulary or conceptual traditions. He was also working at a time when the significance of Beauvoir’s contribution to feminist philosophy was not widely understood either in 196

A tale of two translations

Japan or in her home country. By contrast, the 1997 translation team was composed of a dozen women from varying academic backgrounds, ranging from teachers of French language to professional scholars of philosophy and gender theory. They benefitted both from a significant body of scholarship on Beauvoir’s work that was published in French and other languages subsequent to the Ikushima translation, and also from the emergence of academic disciplines such as women’s studies that supported this scholarship. So while their retranslation of Beauvoir was framed as an effort to reclaim her work from the misunderstandings that Ikushima’s first version invited, it should also be noted that the deficiencies with this first translation were not solely the product of the biases “of a contemporary Japanese male,”3 but may also be attributed to the state of scholarship on women and philosophy that framed this first translation. Furthermore, as we will see later, the complexities of the Japanese language posed an additional set of challenges, for Ikushima and for the 1997 translation team, in rendering Beauvoir’s essay into Japanese.

Problems with the Ikushima translation While Beauvoir’s intellectual work had garnered some attention from Japanese scholars prior to 1953 due to her connections with Jean-Paul Sartre, whose work was all the rage in Japan during the early post-war years, the appearance of The Second Sex in Japanese made her philosophy available to a much wider audience. Daini no sei was published in five installments from 1953 to 1955, and many of these volumes made the top ten bestsellers’ list for the years in which they were published.4 The timing of publication was likely responsible for much of its appeal. In 1952, Japan had finally regained its sovereignty after defeat in World War II and a seven-year occupation by Allied forces that rewrote its constitution and legal system so as to ‘democratize’5 and pacify the country. Elevation of women’s status through equality of opportunity in education was an important component of this program of reform, and though this allowed more women to achieve higher levels of education over the following decades, it also created controversy over the purpose of such education.6 Should women compete with men for prestigious university placements and professional positions? Or should they continue to support men through more conventional roles as “good wives and wise mothers,” as they were exhorted to do prior to defeat in 1945?7 Beauvoir’s feminist treatise appeared just as the first post-war generation of young Japanese women was struggling with this dilemma. Her arguments for women’s freedom through greater roles in society found a ready audience among such readers, in spite of the considerable problems with the first Japanese translation. Daini no sei was initially marketed to a general readership, and in order to make Beauvoir’s vast and complex tome accessible to those without a strong background in French philosophy, Ikushima made a number of changes to the text that unfortunately distorted its message. These included restructuring of the source text, misattribution of material quoted by Beauvoir as Beauvoir’s own thoughts, and mistranslations of philosophical terms that bred confusion as to what Beauvoir actually said and obscured her contributions to feminist philosophy.8 As we will see in the following paragraphs, these misunderstandings gave many Japanese readers the impression that Beauvoir believed women could only be ‘free’ by denying female corporeality and refusing motherhood entirely. Part of the confusion regarding Beauvoir’s arguments stemmed from the fact that Ikushima rearranged the sequence of chapters to place the sections of the text dealing with women’s lived experience first, on the understanding that these would be most relatable for the general reader.9 Volumes I through III of the Ikushima translation correspond to Part II of Beauvoir’s original text, and include those chapters dealing with women’s maturation from girlhood to old age, concluding with the chapter on women’s freedom at the end of Volume III. Volumes IV and V 197

Julia Bullock

of the Ikushima translation correspond to Part I of Beauvoir’s original. These volumes contain the chapters devoted to discussion of the “facts and myths” that historically framed women’s roles and position in society. This means that the portions of the text where Beauvoir explained her theoretical framework were buried in the middle of the Ikushima translation, rather than at the beginning as in the source text, where they were meant to clarify these concepts in advance of her specific arguments about contemporary women’s lives. As a result, the philosophical nuances of much of her existentialist phenomenological terminology were effectively “lost in translation.” But the problems with Ikushima’s translation were not limited to his restructuring of the source material. He has also been taken to task by Japanese feminist scholars for misleading or inconsistent translations that have given Japanese readers the impression that Beauvoir denigrates femininity and motherhood. To some degree these linguistic choices were shaped by the target language itself; Japanese feminists have long struggled with the fact that much of their language’s terminology for female sexual and reproductive functions carries a strongly negative connotation.10 But in this case, Ikushima’s tendency to use derogatory expressions for women’s bodies at crucial points in the text, even when these linguistic choices were avoidable, unfortunately heightened the pervasive impression of Beauvoir as “male-identified.” For example, Japanese readers of The Second Sex opened the first volume to find the following discussion of children’s psycho-sexual development on the very first page: The drama of birth and weaning takes place in the same way for infants of both sexes; they have the same interests and pleasures; sucking is the first source of their most pleasurable sensations; they then go through an anal phase in which they get their greatest satisfactions from excretory functions common to both; their genital development is similar; they explore their bodies with the same curiosity and the same indifference; they derive the same uncertain pleasure from the clitoris and the penis. (Beauvoir 2011, 283) With this explanation, Beauvoir wants to demonstrate that boys and girls start off with the same relationship to their own bodies, which are experienced without shame or taboo until society intervenes to code masculine anatomy, particularly the penis, as ‘superior’ to its feminine counterpart. Yet in Ikushima’s translation, this final phrase is rendered as: クリト リス（陰核）とペニス（男性器）とからおなじ漠然とした快感をひきだす (Beauvoir 1953 I:9). Here he presents the anatomical terms “clitoris” (クリトリス) and “penis” (ペニス) first in direct transliteration from the French, and then parenthetically defines these terms for his readers. However, whereas his equivalent for “penis” is the rather neutral phrase “male organ” [danseiki], for “clitoris” he chooses a term with a decidedly negative connotation: 陰核 [inkaku]. The first character of this word means yin, as in the female pole of the opposition between the male and female principles in Chinese philosophy (yin/yang), and it carries all of the negative connotations traditionally associated with this term: darkness, secretiveness, passivity, shame, etc. There is an analogous term for the male anatomy, 陰茎 [inkei], that Ikushima might have used to establish a parallel between the two body parts. Or he might simply have used the term “female organ” as a counterpart to “male organ.” But instead he chose a term for the female body part that has a negative and shameful connotation, while rendering the male organ in more neutral terms. In the process, he wound up thoroughly undermining Beauvoir’s basic point that children’s bodies signify neutrally for them until society intervenes to valorize the male organ while coding female genitals as “taboo” and shameful (Beauvoir 2011, 287–289). So Japanese 198

A tale of two translations

readers of the Ikushima translation might be forgiven for assuming that Beauvoir denigrated femininity.

Early Japanese feminist responses to The Second Sex Many of Beauvoir’s earliest readers in Japanese were young women who encountered her work as they were attempting to decide whether or to what extent to “liberate” themselves from traditionally feminine roles. In addition to The Second Sex, Japanese translation of the first volume of Beauvoir’s memoirs as Musume Jidai (1961) provided these young women with an inspirational, if perhaps also impractical, example of such female liberation. In a sense, this generation of young Japanese women – the first to benefit from post-war educational reforms that granted them access to elite universities – formed an ideal readership for Beauvoir’s call to liberation. References to Beauvoir’s famous line that one is not born, but becomes, a woman stud these women’s recollections of their youth like precious jewels. Clearly, contemporary readers of the Ikushima translation understood this much of her argument, even if they understood nothing else. Thus, in its first two decades of publication, Daini no sei managed to inspire many Japanese women in spite of the problems with the Ikushima translation noted earlier. We see this for example in the case of writer Okabe Itsuko (1923–2008). Okabe recalls being an obedient housewife who followed the Confucian dictum to submit to her husband’s will in everything – that is, until she read The Second Sex in 1953 and had something of a conversion experience. She credits Beauvoir with “opening the eyes of her heart” to all the ways she had suppressed her own feelings throughout her marriage, and realized for the first time that she had a right to express her own opinion, whether or not her husband agreed with it (Okabe 1966). She immediately divorced him and embarked on a career as a successful essayist, producing 134 books over a literary career that spanned half a century. But Japanese feminists also grappled seriously with the theoretical claims made by Beauvoir in The Second Sex. To cite just one important example, Kurahashi Yumiko (1935–2005), a cerebral novelist who made her literary debut in 1960, wrote philosophy in fictional form that was heavily influenced by Beauvoir’s brand of existentialist feminism. For example, the theoretical framework that she devised to explain her own literary methodology, the notion of literature as an “anti-world,” is in fact a term that appears in the Ikushima translation of The Second Sex.11 Her groundbreaking essay “Watashi no ‘Daisan no sei’ ” (“My ‘Third Sex,’ ” 1960) may be read as an attempt to leverage Beauvoir’s notion of women as the “second sex” towards constructing a subject position for women within male-dominated society that subverts the very structure of patriarchy from within.12 Her controversial first novel, Kurai Tabi (Blue Journey), can also be read in part as an homage to (or parody of ) the open relationship between Sartre and Beauvoir. Kurahashi is just one example of Japanese female intellectuals in the early post-war decades who were inspired by Ikushima’s version of The Second Sex – however problematic that translation might have been – and interpreted it in ways that enhanced their own creative work.

Rejection of Beauvoir in the 1970s In the late 1960s, Japan, like many other advanced industrialized countries, experienced a surge of ‘second-wave’ radical feminism. Many of the Japanese women at the forefront of this movement had gained leadership experience in the left-wing student protests of the 1960s, but were alienated from the movement by the violent turn these protests took. They also resented the fact that women members were typically treated as second-class citizens within the movement, subject not just to less inspiring tasks such as kitchen duty or mimeographing pamphlets written 199

Julia Bullock

by male members, but also often to the violence (including sexual assault) of male members of their own and other groups. The ‘women’s lib’ thought that evolved in Japan from the late 1960s to the early 1970s was founded on a rejection of masculinist logic that denigrated or subordinated women to the interests of men.13 It promoted a thorough critique of the societal ‘common sense’ that assumed a straightforward connection between women’s biology and norms of femininity that had historically justified women’s subordination to men. This goal would seem to suggest common cause with Beauvoir, who had implicitly argued for the notion of femininity as a social construct with her famous declaration that one is not born, but becomes, a woman. However, after reading the Ikushima translation of The Second Sex, many of these activists erroneously assumed that Beauvoir’s philosophy was “male-identified” and out of step with the current age, even as they worked towards a theoretical basis for the same notion of ‘gender’ as a social construct that she posited in her famous essay. As a result, Beauvoir’s work was increasingly pigeonholed as an example of masculinist philosophy that advocated that women should live as men do, by renouncing female experiences such as motherhood in order to pursue “projects” in a society still dominated by masculine logic (Kanai 2002). Unfortunately, this meant that although translation of feminist discourse from abroad was an important source of inspiration for the Japanese ‘women’s lib’ movement in the 1970s, Beauvoir’s influence on Japanese feminism at this stage of its development was relatively muted, in comparison with that of other theorists such as Betty Friedan, Shulamith Firestone, Kate Millett, and Juliette Mitchell (Ehara 2009, 30). A 1969 essay by Takai Kuniko provides a quintessential example of this turn away from Beauvoir. In the section of her essay devoted to The Second Sex, Takai characterizes Beauvoir’s thought as follows: [For Beauvoir] corporeal conditions are not [a matter of] immovable fate, but simply one [kind of] situation [jōkyō], and humans exist by continually creating themselves through choosing freely. According to existentialist philosophy, it is impossible for anything to surpass human beings. Even nature is beneath them. (Takai 1969, 133) According to this understanding of Beauvoir, then, failure to transcend one’s biological limitations through denial of motherhood or other feminine experiences meant one’s choices were in “bad faith.” Takai also claims that Beauvoir “not only does not value the maintenance of human life (childbirth) but says that this is a humiliation [kutsujoku] and reduces people to animals.” This seems to form the basis for her conclusion that Beauvoir “denies” motherhood and argues that women resign themselves to immanence and Otherness when they become mothers (Takai 1969, 134). While Takai’s footnotes list only the French-language versions of Beauvoir’s published works, her discussion of Beauvoir’s philosophy hints that she also consulted Ikushima’s translation, and that his linguistic choices may have colored her reading of Beauvoir’s attitude towards motherhood. One indication of this is her assertion that the philosopher considers motherhood as a ‘humiliation,’ a word that appears frequently in the Ikushima translation in contexts where he conveys Beauvoir’s attitude towards female corporeality. Where Beauvoir speaks of women’s ‘servitude’ to biological conditions such as menstruation and childbirth, Ikushima translates this term as ‘humiliation’ [kutsujoku], thus giving the reader the impression that she is contemptuous of such experiences. Unfortunately, this perception of Beauvoir as “male-identified” persisted into the mid-1990s (Saegusa 1995; Shimada 1996), even after much scholarly work by Japanese feminists had been devoted to debunking this interpretation of Beauvoir. 200

A tale of two translations

Reassessment of Beauvoir in the late 20th century Beauvoir’s death in 1986 prompted a re-examination of her legacy for feminism worldwide. In Japan, this also resulted in the discovery of serious problems with the Ikushima translation of The Second Sex. By 1997, a dozen female scholars14 had collectively produced a second, “definitive” Japanese translation of this massive tome. This version of The Second Sex preserved the sequencing of material in the source text, adopted more neutral terminology for female biological processes, and employed clearer and more consistent translations for philosophical terms, thus clarifying Beauvoir’s claims about femininity and motherhood. This retranslation of Beauvoir was imbricated with, and motivated by, shifts in Japanese feminist theoretical discourse such as the rise of women’s studies as an academic discipline in the 1980s and the introduction of queer theory in the 1990s. With the publication of this second translation, a new generation of Japanese feminists (re-)discovered Beauvoir’s thought, finding renewed relevance in her insights even for 21st-century readers. Members of the retranslation committee fostered this new appreciation of Beauvoir’s arguments not merely through their translation work, but also through the publication of scholarly and popular articles written to debunk prevalent misunderstandings of Beauvoir by Japanese readers of Ikushima’s Daini no sei. For example, in an essay published the same year as the retranslation in the intellectual journal Risō, lead translator Inoue Takako went to some trouble to clarify that Beauvoir does not deny the “importance of women’s biological condition, but she firmly refuses the idea that this determines women’s destiny” (Inoue 1997, 45). These efforts to reclaim The Second Sex for 21st-century readers seem to have borne fruit, given that more recent scholarship on Beauvoir reflects the influence of both the ‘definitive’ translation and the success of its translators’ efforts to promote the text. Kanai, who wrote disparagingly of Beauvoir’s ‘male-identified’ strand of philosophy in her book Postmodern Feminism (Kanai 1989), later retracted these claims in a 2002 article that profiled The Second Sex as one of 50 ‘feminist classics’ (Kanai 2002). Likewise, in a 2005 essay on Beauvoir’s stance towards motherhood published in the proceedings of a women’s university journal, Satō Hiroko notes Beauvoir’s understanding of the difficulties of balancing motherhood with projects outside the home: Beauvoir did not become a mother. However, she understood the situation [jōkyō] in which mothers are placed and the difficulties [they experience], and thought about ways they could extract themselves [from these difficulties]. . . . From that point, becoming a mother was no longer women’s destiny, and it became possible for the first time for them to choose a number of lifestyles at various stages of their lives. (Satō 2005, 44) Significantly, Satō’s Works Cited section lists many articles penned by members of the retranslation committee in order to reclaim Beauvoir’s significance for contemporary feminism, indicating the impact of the translators’ efforts in shaping Japanese readers’ impression of her work. On the other hand, the translators’ activist zeal in ‘reclaiming’ Beauvoir’s thought for Japanese feminism raises important questions about how this goal may have shaped their own interpretation of The Second Sex in ways that Beauvoir might not have envisioned or intended. For example, in their Afterword to the 1997 translation, Inoue Takako and Kimura Nobuko note that the Ikushima translation frequently creates the false impression that Beauvoir is criticizing women in a categorical sense by failing to distinguish between Beauvoir’s use of the term ‘femininity’ to describe actual women and her use of this term to reference the stereotype of the ‘eternal feminine.’ They argue that her intention is to criticize such stereotypes, not actual women; thus, they 201

Julia Bullock

chose to differentiate between these two cases in their translation of The Second Sex, referring to the feminine stereotype with the term onnarashisa (being like a woman) and to actual feminine experience as onna de aru koto (the fact of being a woman). However, as the translators themselves note, Beauvoir’s text itself fails to distinguish between these two concepts (Inoue and Kimura 1997, 372). While linguistic distinctions between biological sex and cultural constructions of gender had become de rigueur by the turn of the millennium, they were not widely understood or denoted linguistically at the time Beauvoir wrote her foundational feminist treatise. Furthermore, in some cases – such as the first few pages of her Introduction to Volume I of The Second Sex – Beauvoir seems to want to highlight the societal conflation between the stereotype and the reality of ‘femininity.’ In fact, she begins her lengthy dissertation on femininity by asking seriously “What is a woman?” so as to underscore the very instability of the category itself. So while perhaps well-intended, the translators’ attempts to make distinctions between these two meanings of ‘femininity’ in some cases may actually cut against the intention of Beauvoir’s phenomenological inquiry. Furthermore, the way they denote these distinctions in their translation may further obfuscate, rather than clarify, the degree to which Beauvoir articulated conceptual distinctions between sex and gender in her own writing. It is certainly true that The Second Sex helped to lay the theoretical groundwork for later linguistic distinctions between these two notions, a legacy that the translators highlight as follows: “[Beauvoir’s notion of] sex [sei] as societally and culturally constructed is to be distinguished from biological sex [seibutsugakuteki na sei (sekkusu)], and today is expressed with the term ‘gender’ [jendaa]” (Inoue and Kimura 1997, 371). This remark seems to explain the translators’ tendency to gloss the character 性 (sei) – which in Japanese may connote either ‘sex’ as a biological fact or ‘gender’ as a cultural construction – with the term sekkusu (セックス, or “sex”) when they understand it as signifying biological sex. But as noted previously, this ‘clarification’ may actually have created artificial distinctions where Beauvoir might have intended to preserve a kind of productive ambiguity between ‘sex’ as a biological fact and a cultural construct. This also highlights inherent aspects of the Japanese language that pose challenges for the translator in rendering terms related to sex and gender. The term sekkusu, which the translators have chosen as a gloss meaning biological sex, exists in Japanese only as a counterpart to jendaa [ジェンダー, or ‘gender’]. Both of these terms are very recent loanwords derived from English, rather than the French language in which Beauvoir wrote her original text. Not only is this distinction anachronistic, but it also has the unfortunate and no doubt unintended consequence of reasserting the linguistic supremacy of English over French (among other languages) – a historical legacy of the post-World War II Allied Occupation that has more to do with the politics of language in Japan than it does with feminism generally speaking, or with Beauvoir’s specific contributions to feminist theory.

Conclusion Although the first Japanese translation of The Second Sex by Ikushima Ryōichi inspired many young women with its suggestion of femininity as a social construct rather than a biological given, problems with this translation also gave readers the erroneous impression that Beauvoir denigrated femininity and motherhood. While in some ways the deficiencies of this translation mirrored those of translations into other languages such as English – namely, structural changes and mistranslations that created confusion as to the significance of Beauvoir’s arguments – these problems were also exacerbated by linguistic features of the Japanese language and writing system. In particular, the negative associations inherent in many Chinese compounds used by Ikushima to represent words for women’s sexual and reproductive functions compounded the 202

A tale of two translations

prevalent assumption of Beauvoir’s thought as “male-identified.” But while the 1997 retranslation improved on the Ikushima version in many respects, the translators’ activist impulse to “clarify” Beauvoir’s thought may have had unintended consequences, creating artificial distinctions where Beauvoir may have preferred to remain ambiguous and thus flattening out some of the philosophical complexity of the original text.

Notes 1 For a brief overview of Beauvoir’s importance to feminism, see Andrew 2003. 2 For an overview of these criticisms of the Parshley translation, see Simons 1999 (1983), 62–69. 3 This is how the 1997 translation team describes the Ikushima translation in their Afterword to Volume I. See Inoue and Kimura 1997, 371. 4 For details of the work’s initial reception and publication in Japanese, see Bullock 2018. 5 I place this term in scare quotes because while this is how the Occupiers understood their mission in Japan after the country’s defeat in World War II, the phrasing implies that Japan had no prior experience with democracy. In fact, Japan had a parliamentary system that was created in the late 1880s and remained in power until the rise of military dictatorship in the 1930s. 6 On the controversy over the post-war educational reforms as seen through a discussion of debates over coeducation, see Bullock 2019. 7 On “good wife, wise mother” discourse, see for example Koyama 2013 and Uno 2005. 8 For a fuller discussion of these points, see Inoue and Kimura 1997. 9 Ikushima explains the rationale behind these changes in the explanatory commentary (kaisetsu) appended to the first volume of his translation. See Ikushima 1953. 10 This was a particularly thorny problem for ‘women’s lib’ activists in the 1970s who attempted to translate the iconic feminist text Our Bodies, Ourselves into Japanese. For discussion of this point, see for example Buckley 1997. 11 Scholars differ on the question of whether Kurahashi also read Beauvoir in the original French, in addition to the Ikushima translation with which she was obviously familiar. But given that she was a French literature major who wrote her graduation thesis on Jean-Paul Sartre’s Being and Nothingness, it is certain that she at least had a thorough grasp of the existentialist philosophical terminology employed by Beauvoir throughout The Second Sex. 12 For an analysis of this essay as an adaptation of Beauvoir’s thought to the Japanese feminist context, see Bullock 2018. 13 For more on the ‘women’s lib’ movement in Japan, see Shigematsu 2012. 14 This group formed exclusively for the purpose of re-reading Beauvoir in the original French, as suggested by their adoption of the name Daini no Sei Genbun de Yominaosu Kai [Committee to Re-read The Second Sex in the Original]. Ten members of this committee collaborated to translate volume one of the original text; 11 of its members produced volume two. This resulted in publication of Daini no sei: Ketteiban (The Second Sex: Definitive Edition), referenced earlier.

References Andrew, Barbara S. 2003. Beauvoir’s Place in Philosophical Thought, in Claudia Card, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Simone de Beauvoir. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 24–44. de Beauvoir, Simone. 1953. The Second Sex. Translated and edited by H. M. Parshley. New York: Knopf. de Beauvoir, Simone. 1953/1955. Daini no sei (5v.). Translated by Ikushima Ryōichi. Tokyo: Shinchōsha. de Beauvoir, Simone. 1961. Musume jidai. Translated by Asabuki Tomiko. Tokyo: Kinokuniya shoten. de Beauvoir, Simone. 2011. The Second Sex. Translated by Constance Borde and Sheila ­Malovany-Chevallier. New York: Vintage Books. Buckley, Sandra. 1997. Interview with Nakanishi Toyoko, in Broken Silence: Voices of Japanese Feminism. Berkeley: University of California Press, 185–225. Bullock, Julia C. 2018. From ‘Dutiful Daughters’ to ‘Coeds Ruining the Nation’: Reception of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex in Early Postwar Japan. Gender and History, 30(1), 271–285. Bullock, Julia C. 2019. Coeds Ruining the Nation: Women, Education, and Social Change in Postwar Japanese Media. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. 203

Julia Bullock

Ehara, Yumiko. 2009. Gendai Nihon ni okeru joseigaku, jendā kenkyū no rironteki tenkai – 1970 nendai kara kyō made. Josei kūkan, 29–37. Ikushima, Ryōichi. 1953. Kaisetsu, in Simone de Beauvoir, ed., Daini no sei v. 1: Onna wa kō shite tsukurareru. Tokyo: Shinchōsha, 235–238. Inoue, Takako. 1997. Daini no sei: Jiko no tankyū to shite no feminizumu. Risō, 659, 43–52. Inoue, Takako and Kimura Nobuko. 1997. Yakusha atogaki, in Ketteiban Daini no sei I: Jijitsu to shinwa. Tokyo: Shinchōsha, 371–374. Kanai, Yoshiko. 1989. Posutomodan Feminizumu. Tokyo: Keisō shobō. Kanai, Yoshiko. 2002. Simone de Beauvoir: Daini no sei, in Ehara Yumiko and Kanai Yoshiko, eds., Feminizumu no meicho 50. Tokyo: Heibonsha, 60–69. Koyama, Shizuko. 2013. Ryōsai Kenbo and the Educational Ideal of ‘Good Wife, Wise Mother’ in Modern Japan. Translated by Stephen Filler. Boston: Brill. Okabe, Itsuko. 1966. Beauvoir kaikenki. Fujin Kōron, 51(12), 53–54. Saegusa, Kazuko. 1995. Ika ni shite josei no tetsugaku wa kanō ka 4: Bōvowāru dansei shikō no wana. Yuriika, 27(9), 17–25. Satō, Hiroko. 2005. Bōvowāru Daini no sei to . Kawamura Gakuen Joshi Daigaku joseigaku nenpō, 3, 43–50. Shigematsu, Setsu. 2012. Scream from the Shadows: The Women’s Liberation Movement in Japan. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Shimada, Akiko. 1996. Nihon no feminizumu: Genryū to shite no Akiko, Raichō, Kikue, Kanoko. Tokyo: Hokuju shuppan. Simons, Margaret A. 1983/1999. The Silencing of Simone de Beauvoir: Guess What’s Missing from The Second Sex, in Beauvoir and The Second Sex: Feminism, Race, and the Origins of Existentialism. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 61–71. Takai, Kuniko. 1969. Beauvoir ni okeru tashasei no mondai. Meiji Gakuin Ronsō, 146, 127–156. Uno, Kathleen. 2005. Womanhood, War, and Empire: Transmutations of ‘Good Wife, Wise Mother’ Before 1931, in Barbara Molony and Kathleen Uno, eds., Gendering Modern Japanese History. Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 493–519.

204

16 Bridging the cultural gap The translation of Simone de Beauvoir into Arabic Hala G. Sami

Introduction Simone de Beauvoir comes to mind whenever research in women’s studies, gender studies, or feminism is mentioned. A prominent figure for second-wave feminism, she introduced groundbreaking views regarding women’s status, whether in her autobiographical works, her novels or her essays. She is particularly known for her magnum opus Le deuxième sexe (originally published in 1949), which has been translated and critically examined in many languages of the world. Influenced by her existentialist philosophical stance, the book was considered controversial when it first appeared, and caused a row as it particularly outraged the Vatican. It is interesting, however, that despite the fact that the Arab world is principally conservative, and a large part of its population is very much observant of religious teachings, particularly Islam, many of Beauvoir’s major works have been rendered in Arabic. Her seminal essay was translated into Arabic for the first time in 1969, a fact that has escaped general notice in academic circles. Egypt and Lebanon, in particular, have proven to be pioneers in the field of translation in the Arab world (Consulting and Meiering 2004, 16). In Lebanon, there emerged, for example, such publishers as Dar al-Ādāb, which initiated a translation project to transfer the Western literary and cultural canon to the Arab world. The project began in 1956 in Beirut, initiated by Suhayl Idrīs, a Lebanese writer and translator, who is also famous for the 1953 launch of his literary magazine al-Ādāb (Belles lettres). Both Idrīs and his wife, ‘Ā’ida Matarjī Idrīs, “undertook to summarize, translate, and critique works by such existentialists as Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus [. . .] and above all Sartre” (Spanos 2017, 110). Although the publisher translated the French existentialists, including Beauvoir, it did not translate her most famous book, Le deuxième sexe (see Table 16.1). It was roughly during this same period, the golden age of translation, that Egypt also translated the works of Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus, whereas, Beauvoir, their existentialist peer, was predominantly translated in Lebanon. Indeed, almost all of Beauvoir’s works were translated in Beirut. Occasionally, one can find one or two translations adopted by other Arab countries, notably Syria and Jordan. Only two of her less well-known books were translated in Cairo (see Table 16.1). None of the translators of Beauvoir’s work state whether they translated directly from French or used the mediation of another language, possibly English, but since most 205

Hala G. Sami

of them were from the Levant, where French language proficiency is probable, we can assume they worked from the original French. Translation entails a cultural encounter, which accounts for the fact that “in the collective memory of the Arab world,” it “is associated with cultural openness, social advancement and political strength” (Consulting and Meiering 2004, 16). Nevertheless, it involves various challenges, which researchers in translation studies meet, when engaging in this field. Among the challenges, which translations into Arabic particularly manifest are inaccuracy and inadequacy of the translation, in addition to absence of required bibliographical data. However, there has recently been more awareness of the importance of translated works, and the role they play “in creating a different discourse in Arabic about translation as a means for negotiating ‘cultural otherness’ ” (Hanna 2011, 27). The present study examines the translation of Simone de Beauvoir into Arabic, while shedding light on the cultural background against which French culture has generally been translated into Arabic, as well as touching upon the reception of and resistance to feminist thought. It will focus on translation from Egypt and the Levant, as they particularly dominate the field of translation in the Arab world. This approach derives from the cultural turn of translation studies where translation, as Lawrence Venuti notes, “forms particular cultural identities and maintains them with a relative degree of coherence and homogeneity, but also [. . .] creates possibilities for cultural resistance, innovation, and change at any historical moment” (1998, 68).

Critical issues and topics Translation projects are often challenged by state institutions, which can insist on censorship and instill the state’s right-wing ideology. Such challenges have been studied in regard to Spain (see Godayol, in this volume) and China, where a similar official stance, seriously challenging the translation of Beauvoir’s Le deuxième sexe, for instance, existed in the 1980s. It was feared the book would trigger and inspire women’s activism (Haiping 2016, 234–236). This draws attention to the fact that feminist theory, initially, and perhaps right up to the present, confronts the rigidity of a patriarchal system, and that all manner of censorship is deployed to challenge the communication of new ways of thinking about diverse sociocultural environments and contexts. Early Arabic translations of Beauvoir suffered extensive abridgement, which was only partially remedied in the most recent translations. Extensive adaptation has been very common in the Arab world, starting in the mid-19th century with the initial transposition of European works in modern Egypt ( Jacquemond 1992, 140–141). This, perhaps, accounts for the fact that the translation of Beauvoir’s writings were mainly effected in the less conservative Lebanon. Beauvoir, in fact, experienced considerable translational silence, if one may call it so, and Le deuxieme sexe only saw the light in Arabic 20 years after its original publication in France. However, in the last decade, the translation movement from the West to the Arab world has resumed its momentum, with various state and private projects contributing to the translation of Western intellectuals.1 Nevertheless it is true that many of the key works of major feminist figures have not been translated into Arabic, which points to a substantial gap in the acknowledgement of feminist thought in the Arab world. This brings us to the Arab world’s interest in Beauvoir’s writings, the dynamics involved in the translation process, and the transfer of Western feminism to the Arab world. The research available, so far, on Beauvoir’s work in Arabic translation has shown that early translations of many of her texts were extensively abridged, while most recent translations are more adequate, valid and comprehensive. In this respect, one has to bear in mind the cultural differences that determine how feminist ideology and theory materialize in Arabic. Luise von Flotow observes: 206

Bridging the cultural gap

“all translation is faced with negotiating cultural difference. And since feminism means something different in every culture, the issue is heightened in texts where gender is foregrounded” (Flotow 1997, 92). This view also reflects Hans Robert Jauss’s notion of “horizon of expectations,” according to which he proposes that the reception of a work of art is determined by the readers’ presuppositions: “for each work a pre-constituted horizon of expectations must be ready at hand [. . .] to orient the reader’s (public’s) understanding and to enable a qualifying reception” (1982, 79). In an analysis of and comment on Gérard Genette’s notion of paratexts, that is, the various extra-textual elements, which make up a book, Kathryn Batchelor notes that “the book, . . ., circulates in a context which also affects its reception” (2018, 8). Such views bring to the fore the question of Simone de Beauvoir’s reception in the Arab world, as well as the sociocultural environment which might engage with Beauvoirian existentialist and feminist thought. This is illustrated by one of the very few translations into Arabic produced and published in Egypt and daringly attributed to Simone de Beauvoir. The book is entitled kayfā tufakkir almar’ah [How Women Think], also referred to as gharāa’iz al-mar’ah [Women’s Instincts.] Beauvoir’s French original title is not given and remains unknown, and the book is basically a patriarchal interpolation on feminist discourse. In it, the publisher purports to present and discuss some of Beauvoir’s views but does so in the light of “Muslim values,” quoting from the Koran on several occasions. In an initial prefatory note, the publisher apologizes for the proposed ideas, pointing out how they are at odds with the predominantly Muslim culture in Egypt, and not necessarily suitable for Arab society, yet, given the author’s value and fame, he has made Beauvoir’s text available to Arab readers. His initial note is worth quoting at length: The standards of Western society, by which they measure a woman’s worth are different from those to which we conform in our Muslim society. Undoubtedly, according to Western standards, a woman’s position in the society and the adequacy of her financial means are prioritized. According to such Western standards, women, such as Marilyn Monroe, the wellknown American actress, and Dalida, the French singer, reached great fame. However, they also reached the highest level of misery, which led them to commit suicide. We, therefore, reject Western values, which totally venerate two suicidal women.2 This leads us to further hold on to our beliefs and our valuable religion. However, since it is imperative to open up to and interact with the world, we have opened a window that would show us the Western perspective on women. Such an outlook is presented in this book written by the most famous European woman writer in the modern age (kayfā tufakkir al-mar’ah). (my translation) (n.d.) Such intervention reveals a conservative culture’s resistance to progressive ideas vis-à-vis gender, whereby a sharply defined discourse pits “us” (“our Muslim society”) against “them” (“Western society”). The main problem confronting the feminist movement in Egypt and in the Arab world, for that matter, is that it is accused of subscribing to a Western ideology, which conflicts with the sociocultural values of the Arab-Muslim norm. It is noteworthy that other early Arabic translations of Beauvoir’s works, such as Le Deuxième Sexe and Mémoires d’une jeune fille rangée, also make major changes to the text. The translations are fragmented, which caused quite inaccurate versions of the target text to reach the Arab reader, thus miscommunicating Beauvoir’s ideas. For example, Beauvoir’s Le Deuxième Sexe has undergone frequent adaptations and abridgements to the extent of being published, 207

Hala G. Sami

in one particular instance, as a 100-page booklet. This particular version (Al-Sahly 1967) consists of excerpts from selected chapters supplemented with cartoon images of half-naked women. Beauvoir’s most renowned essay is thereby misrepresented and reduced to a mere manual on women’s sexuality. Such an outcome discloses a superficial, reductive and mistaken understanding of Beauvoir’s work. In the case of Mémoires d’une jeune fille rangée, her renowned autobiography was translated into Arabic in 1959 with several subsequent reprints (see Table 16.1). With each reprint, the title of the work was modified. An examination of the title’s nuances provides a cogent commentary on one of the Arab paratexts regarding Beauvoir (see case study). Another important issue is the lack of homogeneity among Arab countries, which causes the reception of feminism to vary from one country to another. Alanoud Alsharekh, who is specialized in researching women’s rights in the Arab Gulf region, highlights this diversity of the Arab countries, which complicates the process of translating new modes of thinking: “the twenty-one countries of the Arab world” boast “many Arab identities,” whose lack of homogeneity became more accentuated “after the post-liberation statehood projects” (2016, 2). This has meant “that the legal and social position of women progressed at widely differing rates in the various Arab countries, and thus produced a varying range of engagements with feminist thought, texts and translations” (2016, 2). The differences in women’s status in Arab countries have implications vis-à-vis the translation and reception of feminist texts, making certain translations possible and prohibiting others. For instance, one can speculate that radical feminist thought might be translated in Lebanon and Tunisia, which are more liberal and progressive sociocultural contexts, but not necessarily in Egypt, which is characterized by a more conservative vein.

Current contributions and research A more general issue underlying Beauvoir translations into Arabic is the question of whether the translation of feminist theory is even possible. Recently, Hala Kamal (2015) engaged in such a process of translation, and presented readers with a substantial volume containing a wide range of important articles (2016, 66–67), in order to fill a considerable gap in the feminist critical arena in the Arab world (66). She also attempted a feminist translation of the critical writings in question. The very fact of translating such significant material, while incorporating a deliberately feminist aspect, is a political act, as Kamal observes: it is “an assertion of the activist dimension in feminist translation, viewing it as an expression of feminist agency and a political act” (60). Alsharekh corroborates the fact that translating feminism in the Arab world is a social activist stance (2): “the feminist translator is not only instigating social change but uncovering the traditional reasons behind the status quo” (3). Currently, in the Arab world, there is a renewed interest in translating Beauvoir’s works, as two of her major works, Les mandarins, and Le Deuxième Sexe now exist in more comprehensive translations, while Mémoires d’une jeune fille rangée was reprinted twice. It is also noteworthy that a large number of Beauvoir’s recent translators into Arabic are women,3 (e.g. Lina Badr, Daniel [sic] Saleh, Sahar Said, and Marie Tawq) and mainly from the Levant region. To take the translation of Beauvoir into Arabic a step further is to require a feminist and more professional translation of her works. The following analyses study several different moments of Beauvoir translation, which put the translators to the test as they seek to remain coherent with the source text and its gendered feminist framework. The passages were selected from three different genres, namely a treatise about women (Le Deuxième sexe), two novels (Les mandarins and Les belles images) and a memoir (Mémoires d’une jeune fille rangée). 208

Bridging the cultural gap

Case study I: the clash of grammatical gender in two 2015 Arabic translations of Le Deuxième Sexe This case study focuses on the translation of Volume I, Part III of Le Deuxième Sexe, entitled Mythes [Myths], which Borde and Malovany-Chevalier, the book’s most recent English translators, accurately describe as a study of “myths about women” (2009b, 438). Beauvoir here demonstrates how myths corroborate woman’s ambiguous status, and present her as both saviour and destroyer. She proposes that woman, just like a myth, is contradictory, ambivalent, and resists definition (Le Deuxième Sexe, Tome I, 242). Early translations of the book into Arabic were mere adaptations, where the translators almost entirely omitted the third part of the original French text. There is no literature to account for these cuts,4 but one can propose two reasons: first, this section is replete with the names of Western mythological figures and supplemented with Beauvoir’s generous footnotes elaborating on the mostly Greco-Roman references. These are not necessarily familiar to the Arab reader. Further, these mythological references require a large number of footnotes in Arabic to explain, for instance, the Eve–Virgin Mary/Delilah–Judith dichotomy (Beauvoir 1976, 242), which, otherwise, would be lost upon the reader. Second, this section also closely examines literary works abounding in cultural references, which are equally foreign to the Arab reader. The two most recent translations of Beauvoir’s Le Deuxième Sexe into Arabic were published in 2015, by Sahar Said, an independent Syrian woman translator and localization professional, and by Rehab Akkawy and Joseph Kaloustian, two Lebanese translators, both men, who have translated many works of world literature. Unlike previous translators, both Said and AkkawyKaloustian are aware of potential cultural discrepancies and attempt to bridge the gap by further clarifying language nuances. A comparison of the two translations5 sheds some light on their rendition of mythological figures, as well as masculine and feminine nouns, which differ sharply between French and Arabic. The translations reveal how the dialectic relationship that Beauvoir observes between man’s “transcendence” and woman’s “immanence” is confused, and even deconstructed. For example, [L]e Soleil est l’époux de la Mer; Soleil, feu sont des divinités mâles; et la Mer est un des symboles maternels qu’on retrouve le plus universellement. Inerte, l’eau subit l’action des rayons flamboyants, qui la fertilisent. (Beauvoir 1976, 244) ‫ الماء‬.‫الشمس زوجة البحر؛ الشمس والنار آلهةٌ مذكرة ٌ؛ والبحر هو أحد أكثر رموز األمومة شيوعا ً فى العالم‬ .‫ التى تخصبه‬،‫ يخضع لتأثير األشعة الملتهبة‬،‫ساكن‬ ٌ . (Said 2015b, 190) Back-translation: [The sun is the wife of the sea; sun and fire are masculine divinities; and the sea is one of the most prevalent maternity symbols in the world. The calm water submits to the scorching effect of the sun’s rays, which fertilise him.] (my emphasis) Said provides a footnote, though inadequate, to account for the French-Arabic discordance in masculine and feminine nouns. She notes: “In French, the sun is masculine and the sea is feminine (the translator)” (Said, 190) (my translation). In Arabic, both “water” and “sea” are masculine nouns, hence, the pronoun “him,” which defeats the purpose of Beauvoir’s intention to demonstrate the 209

Hala G. Sami

male’s power over the female. In Arabic, the translation backfires as the feminine sun overcomes the masculine sea. Akkawy-Kaloustian render the same passage as follows: ‫ الشمس والنار إلهان ذكران فى حين أن البحر‬،)‫والشمس (مذكر فى اللغة الفرنسية) زوج البحر (مؤنث فى اللغة ذاتها‬ ۰‫ يتأثر الماء الهامد بفعل األشعة المتوهجة التى تخصبه‬.ً ‫هو أحد رموز األمومة التى نجدها أكثر شيوعا‬. (Akkawy-Kaloustian 2015a, 99–100) Back-translation: [and the sun (masculine in the French language) the husband of the sea (feminine in the same language). Sun and fire are two masculine divinities, while the sea is one of the most prevalent maternity symbols. The still water is affected by the blazing rays which fertilise him.] (my emphasis) Whereas Said provides a footnote to account for the gender discrepancy, Akkawy-Kaloustian use explicitation, and interpolate the flow of the text in order to explain such a language/culture gap. However, the translators overlook the fact that in French, the noun ‘water’ is feminine, while it is masculine in Arabic, which should be explained. Without an explanation, the final personal pronoun (‘him’) makes the sentence very awkward. The Arabic translation, thus produces a reverse effect, whereby the natural element (the sun), which is feminine in Arabic, overrides the masculine elements (the sea and the water). This problem of grammatical gender not coinciding between French and Arabic continues. Further on in the passage, Beauvoir observes: De même la glèbe entaillée par le travail du laboureur reçoit, immobile, les grains dans les sillons. Cependant son rôle est nécessaire: c’est elle qui nourrit le germe, qui l’abrite et lui fournit sa substance. (Beauvoir, 244) l’homme a continué à rendre un culte aux déesses de la fécondité; il doit à Cybèle ses récoltes, ses troupeaux, sa prospérité. (Beauvoir, 244) ،‫ هو الذى يغذى البذرة‬:‫ مع ذلك فدوره ضرورى‬.ً ‫وكذلك الحقل الذى ينبشه الحارث يتلقى البذور فى أخاديده ساكنا‬ ‫ يدين بمحاصيله وقطعانه وازدهاره لـ سيبل‬.‫ استمرالرجل فى عبادة آلهة الخصب‬. . . ‫ويحميها ويعطيها مادتها‬ Cybèle. (Said, 190) Back-translation: [The field, which is unearthed by the ploughman, receives, motionless, the seeds in its furrows. Nevertheless, his role is necessary: he is the one who feeds, protects and gives substance to the seed. As such, . . ., man continued to worship the goddess of fertility. He is indebted for his crops, herds and prosperity to Cybele] (my emphasis) Said translates the French feminine noun “la glèbe” into the masculine Arabic noun “al-haql” ˙ (the field), which defeats the purpose of highlighting the masculine-feminine binary opposition. In addition, the passage becomes ambiguous, as it is not clear, in this context, whether the masculine pronoun “huwa” (he) refers to al-haql (the field) or al-harith (the ploughman). The rest of the reference ˙ ˙ 210

Bridging the cultural gap

to the field in the passage proves to be odd because it is associated with a masculine entity: “The field (masculine) is unearthed and receives the seeds of the ploughman (masculine)” (my addition). Said includes the mythological name Cybele in Latin letters, as well as highlights the Arabic word in bold font. She, then, supplements the proper noun with a footnote to inform the reader who Cybèle is: .(‘‫اإللهة األم لدى اإلغريق و الرومان (المترجمة‬ (Said, 190) Back-translation: [The mother goddess, according to Greek and Roman mythology. (The translator)] In comparison, Akkawi-Kaloustian translate the passage as follows: ‫ فهى‬،‫ مع ذلك فإن دورها ضرورى‬.‫كذلك تتقبل التلعة المحزوزة بجهد الحارث حبات القمح فى أثالمها بال حراك‬ ‫ فهو مدين لـ‬:‫ على تقديم العبادة آللهات الخصب‬. . . ،‫ لهذا السبب ثابر الرجل‬.‫ تؤويه وتوفر له مادته‬،‫التى تغذى البذر‬ ‫سيبال بمحاصيله وقطعانه وازدهاره‬. (Akkawi-Kaloustian, 100) Akkawi-Kaloustian manage to maintain the feminine noun to preserve the feminine-masculine structure by using a rather archaic Arabic word al-tal’ā (a furrowed hill or mound), which, some Arab readers might not understand. The mythological name Cybèle is only included between quotation marks, without further explanation. In another passage, Beauvoir notes: Pour le marin, la mer est une femme dangereuse, perfide, difficile à conquérir, mais qu’il chérit à travers son effort pour la dompter. Orgueilleuse, rebelle, virginale et méchante, la montagne est femme pour l’alpiniste qui veut, au péril de sa vie, la violer. (Beauvoir, 262) ،‫ و الجبل‬.‫ لكنه يحبها من خالل الجهد الذى يبذله لقمعها‬،‫ صعبة المنال‬،‫ خبيثة‬،‫البحر بالنسبة للبحار إمرأة خطيرة‬ . . . ، ‫ هو إمرأة بالنسبة للمتسلق الذى يريد أن يغتصبه‬،ً ‫ بريئا ً و شريرا‬،ً ‫ متمردا‬،ً ‫فخورا‬ (Said, 203) Back-translation: [To the sailor, the sea is a dangerous woman . . . and the mountain, proud, rebellious, innocent and wicked, is a woman for the mountain climber, who, risking his life, wants to rape ‘him’.] (my emphasis) ،‫ والجبل المتكبر‬.‫ لكنه يحبها عبر جهده إلخضاعها‬،‫ صعبة القياد‬،‫ غادرة‬،‫ إمرأة خطرة‬،‫ بالنسبة إلى البحار‬،‫والمرأة‬ . ‫ أن ينتهك حرمتها‬،‫ معرضا ً حياته للخطر‬،‫ هو امرأة فى نظر متسلق الجبال الذى يريد‬،‫ المشاكس‬،‫ النقى‬،‫المتمرد‬ (Akkawy-Kaloustian, 115) Back-translation: [The woman [sic], to the sailor, is a dangerous woman. She is deceptive and difficult to control, but he loves her through his effort to submit her to his will. And the proud, rebellious, pure and quarrelsome mountain is a woman to the mountain climber, who, risking his life, seeks to rape her.] (my emphasis) 211

Hala G. Sami

In the Arabic language, both the sea and the mountain are masculine nouns. The translation, which again does nothing to adjust the problem of grammatical gender, appears awkward and requires further explanation, which neither translator attempts to do. In French, the language nuance highlights Beauvoir’s view of man’s supposed transcendence and woman’s supposed immanence, but this is not echoed in Arabic. Ironically, the transcendence-immanence binarism that Beauvoir takes pains to point out and discuss, where woman’s alterity becomes the embodiment of man’s “contradictory projections” (Lecarme-Tabone 2008, 91), is completely dismantled here. In a detailed footnote, the translators could have addressed this paradox by further elaborating on the French-Arabic discrepancy with reference to masculine and feminine nouns so as to underline Beauvoir’s intended meaning of masculine supremacy over the feminine in a patriarchal context.

Case study II: the translation of a woman’s consciousness in Les mandarins Simone de Beauvoir’s Les mandarins (1954) is a roman-à-clef, for which she was awarded the prestigious French Goncourt prize. It addresses and discusses the political inclinations of French intellectuals during the post-World War II period, as they are torn between the two emerging political ideologies, capitalism, and particularly, communism, to which they question their allegiance. It also engages with the dynamics of marital and extra-marital relationships, with the two main characters, Anne Dubreuilh, a psychiatrist (Simone de Beauvoir) and Henri Perron, a newspaper editor (Albert Camus), acting as alternate narrators. The novel was translated twice into Arabic, in 1962 by Georges Tarabichi and in 2009a by Marie Tawq. Both translate the novel as Al-mothaqqafūun (The Intellectuals). Georges Tarabichi was a Syrian writer, critic, and translator (1939–2016), who translated over two hundred books into Arabic, among them works of the French Existentialists, including Beauvoir. He is also known for a critique of Nawal al-Saadawi’s work, entitled Woman Against Her Sex (2001). Marie Tawq (1963–) is a Lebanese university professor of French language and literature, who has translated several works of world literature. In an interview addressing her translation activities, she points out that she tries, as much as possible, to observe fidelity to the source text (Al-hajiri 2013). Tarabichi’s version, translated at the age of 23, consists of one volume, divided into two parts and is devoid of any introduction or preface. Tawq’s two-volume version has two introductory sections in the first volume: one presents the novel as a roman-à-clef and sets the historical background, the literary aspects and technique of the novel. It is followed by a brief biographical note on Simone de Beauvoir. Within the translated text, the translator provides consistent footnotes to explain words that carry cultural markers and which are most probably foreign to the Arab reader. However, she does not provide a “Translator’s Note” to elaborate on possible challenges or potential discrepancies she met in the course of translating the work, or the strategies she adopted to translate this hefty roman-à-clef. The present case study will shed light on the main character, Anne Dubreuilh, and her introspection about her life. The discrepancies between both translators will indicate how successfully they render the heroine’s predicament vis-à-vis her love affair. The heroine is torn between her physical need and her awareness that she needs to tame her desire. When the two translations are compared, Marie Tawq’s translation renders a woman’s consciousness much more vividly, as she highlights what she reads between the lines. Conversely, Tarabichi’s translation tends to be more literal:

212

Bridging the cultural gap

mon tort, c’était de prendre mon corps tellement au sérieux: j’avais besoin d’une analyse qui m’enseignerait la désinvolture. (Les mandarins Tome II, 117) ‫ كنت بحاجة إلى تحليل يعلمنى السيرة الطليقة‬:‫لقد كانت غلطتى هى أننى ابالغ فى الجدية التى أنظر بها إلى جسدى‬ (Tarabichi 1962, 347–348) Back-translation: [My fault had lain in the seriousness with which I perceived my body: I needed an analysis to teach me a free narrative]. .‫ أنا بحاجة إلى تحليل نفسى يعلمنى أن أكون أكثر جسارة مع جسدى‬:‫خطئى يكمن فى أنى بالغت كثيرا ً فى الرهان على جسدى‬ (Tawq 2009a, 473) Back-translation: [My fault lies in the fact that I was at the disposal of my body: I needed psychotherapy to teach me to be more courageous with my body]. In the preceding passage, Tarabichi’s translation misses the whole message. The final phrase “a free narrative” (al-sīra al-t alīqa) is incomprehensible, and does not describe Anne Dubreuilh’s ˙ reflection that she needs to ignore her physical desire, or be more casual about it. Tawq’s rendition of the protagonist’s thoughts is closer to the meaning and unravels the woman’s dilemma. Non; je refusai la prudente réflexion, la fausse solitude et ses consolations sordides. Et j’ai compris que ce refus était encore une feinte: en vérité je ne disposais pas de mon coeur; . . . mes sages discours ne combleraient pas ce vide au-dedans de moi. J’étais sans recours. (117) ‫ فأنا فى‬:ً ‫ وفهمت أن هذا الرفض لهو مداجاة أيضا‬.‫ الوحدة الكاذبة وتعازيها الشحيحة‬،‫ إننى أرفض التفكير الحذر‬.‫كال‬ ۰‫ كنت بدون ملجأ‬.‫ وما كانت خطاباتى الحكيمة لتردم هذا الفراغ فى داخلى‬. . . .‫الحقيقة ال أسيطر على قلبى‬. (Tarabichi 1962, 348) Back-translation: [No. I refuse the cautious reflection, the false loneliness and its scarce consolations. I also understood that this refusal is equally hypocritical: I, in fact, cannot control my heart. . . . My wise speeches could not bury this void within me. I was without resort]. ‫ ال يسعنى‬،‫ ففى الحقيقة‬:‫ وأعرف أن هذا الرفض هو أيضا كذبة‬.‫ أرفض الحذر والوحدة الزائفة وتعزياتها البغيضة‬،‫ال‬ .‫ لقد وصلت إلى حائط مسدود‬.‫ وأفكارى المتعقلة ال تمأل هذا الفراغ داخلى‬. . . ‫التصرف بقلبى‬ (Tawq 2009a, 473) Back-translation: [No, I refuse caution and fake loneliness, as well as its repulsive consolations. I also know that this refusal is a lie: in reality, I am unable to cope with my heart . . . and my rational thoughts do not fill this void within me. I have reached a cul-de-sac]. Once again, the heroine’s pretense that she can live without her lover, Lewis Brogan, is vividly translated by Tawq as “a lie,” as she renders the gist of Dubreuilh’s introspection; Tarabichi on the other hand, uses an archaic word (mudājāa), which might not be grasped by the Arab reader. He also literally translates the word “discours” as “khit ābāt” (speeches or letters), which does not ˙ 213

Hala G. Sami

exactly reflect the female protagonist’s inner dialogue, while, conversely, it is translated by Tawq as “afkāri al-muta’aqqila” (“my rational thoughts”). This process of literal translation also appears in the final words “kuntū dūnā malja’ ” (“I was without resort”), which is more accurately rendered by Tawq’s translation as “laqad wassaltu ilā hā’it sad” (“I have reached a cul-de-sac”), thus, ˙ underlining her predicament.

Case study III: the rendition of female subjectivity in Les belles images Beauvoir’s novel, Les belles images, was published in 1966. The main character, Laurence, is married and a mother of two daughters. She is torn between the “beautiful pictures” of a happily married woman with a stable conjugal household, in which she is expected to fit, and her resistant inner self, which rebels against false social values of hypocrisy, deceit, and the veneration of mere appearance. She is concerned about her daughter Catherine, whom she attempts to protect from such a society. Accordingly, the narrative manifests the tension between what the heroine is expected to be, on one hand, and her stream-of-consciousness, on the other, which reveals a woman in torment. The following lines, quoted from the novel, shed light on the tension between the heroine’s two states of mind, as she is on the verge of a nervous breakdown. The novel was translated into Arabic in 1967 by ‘Ā’ida Mat arjī Idrīs in Beirut. Idrīs was a ˙ well-known translator, who translated several of Beauvoir’s works (see Table 16.1) among a number of other books. As is the case with almost all of the translations of Beauvoir into Arabic, Idrīs’s rendition of the novel has no prefatory note to account for the translation process; her remarks are limited to a very few footnotes to explain to the Arab readers some unfamiliar proper nouns. The following lines are drawn from chapter four and the last chapter in the novel which portrays Laurence’s vigorous resistance and final break-out from the “beautiful pictures,” or false values, to which a hypocritical French bourgeois society insists on clinging. Maintenant qu’elle a vomi, elle se sent bien. Il fait nuit en elle; elle s’abandonne à la nuit. Elle pense á une histoire qu’elle a lue: une taupe tâtonne à travers des galleries souterraines, elle en sort et sent la fraîcheur de l’air; mais elle ne sait pas inventer d’ouvrir les yeux. Elle se la raconte autrement: la taupe dans son souterrain invente d’ouvrir les yeux, et elle voit que tout est noir. Ça n’a aucun sens. (Les belles images 1966, 131) (my emphasis) ‫ قصة ُخ ْلد‬:‫ وفكرت بقصة قرأتها‬.[sic.]‫ فاستسلمت لليل‬،‫ وهبط الظالم فى نفسها‬.‫ فإنها تشعر بالراحة‬،‫أما وقد قاءت اآلن‬ .‫ حتى يخرج منها ويحس رطوبة الهواء؛ و لكنه ال يحسن أن يخترع فتح عينيه‬،‫يتلمس طريقه عبر الممرات األرضية‬ ‫ ولكنه يرى أن كل شىء مظلم‬،‫ إن ال ُخ ْلد فى جحره األرضى يخترع فتح عينيه‬:‫وروت لنفسها الحكاية على نح ٍو آخر‬ .‫ ليس لهذا أى معنى‬.‫أسود‬ (Idrīs 1967, 173) Back-translation: [Now, that she has vomited, she feels good. It is dark within her; so, she surrenders to the night. And she thought of a story she read: the story of a mole that gropes its way through earthly paths, to get out of the earth so as to feel the humidity of the air. But, he’s not good at inventing opening his eyes. She tells herself the story differently: the mole, in his earth hole, invents opening his eyes, but he sees that everything is stark black. This doesn’t mean anything]. Idrīs’s translation lacks a certain accuracy, providing an inadequate depiction of Laurence’s inner mind. The heroine’s act of vomiting enacts her rejection of the fake social values in which 214

Bridging the cultural gap

she finds herself entangled. Instead, she conjures up an alternative image of a mole, which functions as an objective correlative of her psychological condition. Laurence feels that “Il fait nuit en elle; elle s’abandonne à la nuit.” Her inner sadness is emphasized by the overwhelming effect of her “inner darkness,” which is rendered by the repetition of the word “nuit” (night or darkness). Idrīss’s translation overlooks this matter as she does not maintain the reification of the word “night.” She translates it in the following manner: “It is dark within her; so, she surrenders to the night.” Laurence’s predicament and sense of oppression is further supported by the image of the mole, which Idriss translates into Arabic as “al-khuld,” a word that is hardly familiar to the reader of Arabic. The choice of lexis would have required a footnote to explain the type of animal in question, so as to elaborate on its natural underground habitat and its option to emerge above the surface of the earth for a different life. Such a note would have highlighted Laurence’s projection of her inner self on the analogous plight of the mole. Further, Idrīss depicts the creature as living in an “earthly hole” instead of “subterranean”/ “underground” tunnels. The mole attempts to rise to the surface of the earth and “feel a breath of fresh air” or “the freshness of the air,” which Idrīss clumsily translates as “to feel the humidity of the air.” Her rendition, therefore, falls short of delineating the principal female character’s struggle to resist the stifling social oppression she endures at the hands of her immediate family circle and her endeavour to break free from her imprisonment.

Case study IV: Arabic title variations of Beauvoir’s Mémoires d’une jeune fille rangée This text is the first in a series of autobiographical works by Beauvoir, and one of her most famous. It covers the early stage of her life, from her childhood until the early phases of her maturity. She vividly delineates her impressions and feelings during adolescence as she rebelled against the conventions of the bourgeoisie. She also evokes family relationships, friendships, and her aspirations for learning as well as early engagements with her lifelong companion Jean-Paul Sartre. In the present context, I am interested in examining the autobiography’s translated title, a paratextual element worth studying, given the nuances of the translations, which lend themselves to sociocultural interpretations. According to Gérard Genette, the function of the paratext is “to present” a text (1997, 1), to foreground its existence (1). He distinguishes between two categories of paratextual elements, the first of which, the peritext (5), is relevant here, as it includes the title, the preface, as well as various other details found in the text itself (5). The title of the book yields three possible translations. The first Arabic translation of Beauvoir’s memoir appeared in 1959, as Mudhakkarāt fatāh rasina (Memoirs of a Composed Young Girl) ˙ by an anonymous translator. This version describes the book as a novel, and it was the basis for subsequent reprints (in 2012 and 20156), accompanied by some revisions and editing. Many of the Arabic translations of Beauvoir, the Mémoirs among them, are increasingly superficial and inaccurate. The translation omits large segments of the French original, and such omissions are surprisingly maintained in the subsequent versions. However, one of the aspects, which changed throughout the revisions, is the title of the book. The title’s last word “rangée” proves to be problematic yielding several translations in Arabic: “rasina” (composed), “’āqela” (sensible) and ˙ “multazima” (conforming) (see Table 16.1). According to the Petit Robert, the adjective “rangée” means someone “who leads a regular and regulated type of life, without excess” (1978, 1603); a person who adopts “good conduct”; a person who is “serious” (1603). Initially, one wonders at Beauvoir’s choice of adjective for her title and ventures to suggest that she used it in a tongue-in-cheek manner to evoke the young woman who manifests early 215

Hala G. Sami

signs of rebellion and digression from the mores of the Catholic bourgeoisie. In his book on paratexts, Genette observes that an author may deliberately use an “antiphrastic” effect in the title to produce irony (1997, 83). The ambiguity of the adjective, thus, accounts for the Arabic variations of the translated title. According to the preceding lexical definitions, I see “serious” as the adjective closest to the young woman delineated by Beauvoir in her memoir. The Arabic translation of the title using the term “multazima” (conforming), adopted by Akkawy in his 2012 revision of the translation, by no means reflects Beauvoir’s demeanor. It would make the book appear as a primer for young women. “Rasina” (composed), on the other hand, refers to ˙ “good conduct” (used in the first translation and the 2015 reprint). Therefore, I suggest that “’āqela” (sensible), though not exactly the equivalent of “rangée,” might be more compatible with the overall character of the young Beauvoir. Currently, Arab translators of Beauvoir produce much more accurate translations. Yet, the translations still illustrate some archaic, and hence, non-transparent language, as well as occasional inaccurate renditions of the source texts. The major aspect, which such translations lack, is a prefatory note as well as footnotes that an Arab translator might provide to elaborate on and account for the challenges and language discrepancies s/he meets during the translation process. This lack, in itself, points to one of the hurdles which the translation studies researcher faces. Given the fact that Beauvoir is a major feminist figure, and a major contributor to the modern intellectual arena, a fresh look at and more professional translations of her works are in order.

Future directions A large amount of material has been produced, published in Europe and the USA,7 about Arab women’s achievements, that is, the extent to which they mobilize, the amount of activism in which they are involved, the challenges they meet in their confrontation with the patriarchal state, and the awareness that exists about the urgency of women’s empowerment. On the other hand, in the field of feminism, gender and translation, the amount of translated material from the West to the Arab world is inadequate. Major works, by such thinkers, theorists, and critics as Luce Irigaray, Toril Moi, Hélène Cixous, Julia Kristeva, Monique Wittig and Judith Butler, have not been translated into Arabic. It is important to note, however, that Virginia Woolf, for instance, was initially translated in Egypt in the 1960s. On the other hand, Mary Eagleton’s Feminist Literary Theory: A Reader (1996) and Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique were both translated into Arabic in Syria in 2016 and 2018, respectively.8 What is, mainly, available in Arabic, for example, are books of literary criticism addressing women and gender, such as Pam Morris’ Literature and Feminism: An Introduction (1993), Sarah Gamble’s The Routledge Companion of Feminism and Postfeminism (2001), and Alanoud Alsharekh’s Angry Words Softly Spoken: A Comparative Study of English and Arabic Women Writers (2006). The publisher of these translations is the Egyptian National Centre for Translation, and the translations were undertaken as part of the project funded by the state institution to introduce the reader to Western feminism and women’s literature. It is, therefore, suggested that Arab feminist circles need to address the threefold gap that exists in the field of translation, gender and feminism. On the one hand, major contemporary feminist thinkers have not been taken into account, and so the compilation and translation of additional feminist readers into Arabic would be a substantial contribution. Furthermore, a large amount of translation literature, related to the intersection of feminism, gender and translation requires translation into Arabic. Last, but not least, an awareness of and engagement with a feminist approach to translation into Arabic is equally required.

216

Bridging the cultural gap

Related topics Translation of feminist theory and criticism into Arabic, feminism in the Arab world, feminist translation, translation and postcolonialism

Further reading Kamal, Hala. 2008. Translating Women and Gender: The Experience of Translating the Encyclopedia of Women and Islamic Cultures into Arabic. Women’s Studies Quarterly, 36(3–4) (Fall–Winter), 254–268. The Encyclopedia of Women and Islamic Cultures originally came to light in 2003 in English. The article investigates the implications of translating this seminal work, a project that sheds light on the translation of women and gender studies, as well as Islamic cultures into Arabic. Mehrez, Samia. 2007. Translating Gender. Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies, 3(1), 106–127. This article is concerned with the intersection of translation and gender studies. It discusses the problematics of translating terms related to gender studies, particularly the term ‘gender’ itself, into Arabic. It sheds light on the contestations, which confront translators of gender studies within the conservative Arab context. It also emphasizes the activist dimension of translating gender in the Arab world. Palmary, Ingrid. 2014. A Politics of Feminist Translation: Using Translation to Understand Gendered Meaning-Making in Research. Signs, 39(3) (Spring), 576–580. The article primarily focuses on the power relations and the politics of research involved in the translation process. It highlights the fact that translation entails research across languages, and not the domination of one language, such as English. This requires paying attention to “the politics of translation” without which “the non-English speaking world” will appear “as an infantilized other.”

217

APPENDIX I

SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR’S WORKS TRANSLATED INTO ARABIC

Table 16.1 illustrates the titles of Beauvoir’s works translated into Arabic. One can notice that the translations started as far back as 1955 with a rendition of the author’s sole play Les bouches inutiles. In addition, most of the translations were first initiated in the 1950s and 1960s, which reflects the apogee of an Arab intellectual and translation momentum in newly emerging independent Arab nation-states. In the 1950s and 1960s, apart from Aida Matarji Idrīs, and one translation by Fatma Abdallah Mahmoud, Beauvoir was mainly translated by men; whereas women take over the translation of her books starting from the new millennium. Many of Beauvoir’s major works were translated several times, as well as followed by several reprints. It is also noteworthy that most of her work was translated in Beirut. Her works, translated in Cairo, are mainly in a more political vein.

218

Suhayl Idrı¯s Abdel Moneim El Hefny Georges Tara¯bı¯chı¯ ˙ Translated by a group of university professors – anonymous Mohammad Ali Sharafeddin

1955 1976 1965

1969ii

Al-afwwa¯h al-lamujdiah (The Useless Mouths) ¯ diyah (Towards Nahwa akhla¯aq wudju Existentialist Ethics)

Al-djins al-a¯khari (The Other Sex)

Al-djins al-tha¯nı¯ (The Second Sex)

Al-djins al-a¯khar (The Other Sex)

Al-djins al-a¯khar (The Other Sex)

Al-djins al-a¯khar (The Other Sex)

Al-djins al-a¯khar (The Other Sex)

al-mothaqqafu ¯ un Vols. I & II (The Intellectuals)

Wa¯qi’ al-fikr al-yamı¯ni (The Status of Right Wing Ideology Today) Mudhakkara¯t fata¯h rasina (Memoirs ˙ of a Composed Young Girl) Mudhakkara¯t fata¯ h ‘a¯ qelah (Memoirs of a Sensible Young Girl)

Le Deuxième Sexe

Le Deuxième Sexe

Le Deuxième Sexe

Le Deuxième Sexe

Le Deuxième Sexe

Les mandarins (1954) (The Mandarins)

La Pensée de droite aujourd’hui (1955) Mémoires d’une jeune fille rangée (1958) (Mémoirs of a Dutiful Daughter)

Georges Tara¯bı¯chı¯ ˙ Translator unknown Ibrahim al-maghrabi

1959 1959

Georges Tara¯bı¯chı¯ ˙ Marie Tawq

1963

1962 2009

2015

2015

2008

1997

A reprint of the 1969 translation Nada Haddadiii (a reprint of the 1969 translation) Rehab Akkawy and Joseph Kaloustian Sahar Said

Daniel Saleh

1999

¯ wah (The Female Invitee) al-mad’uu

L’Invitée (1943) (She Came To Stay) Les Bouches Inutiles (1945) (The Useless Mouths) Pour une morale de l’ambiguité (1947) (The Ethics of Ambiguity) Le Deuxième Sexe (1949)

1979

Translator

Title of Arabic translation

Title and year of publication

Date of publication of translated work

Table 16.1 Simone de Beauvoir’s works translated into Arabic

Dar ghawth-Beirut (Continued )

al-maktabah al-hadı¯thah lil-tiba¯’a ˙ wal-nashr-Beirut Dar usa¯ma¯ lil-nashr wal-tawzı¯’Damascus and Beirut Al-ahleya lil-nashr wal-tawzı¯’Amman, Jordan Dar al-harf al-’arabi lil-teba¯’a wal˙ nashr wal-tawzı¯’-Beirut Dar al-rahbah lil-nashr wal-tawzı¯’˙ Damascus Manshura¯t dar al-A¯ da¯b-Beirut Dar Al-A¯ da¯b-Beirut, and KalimaAbu Dhabi, U. A. E. Dar al-talı¯’ah lil-teba¯’ah wal-nashrBeirut Dar al-’ilm lil-malayyı¯n-Beirut

al-maktabah al-ahlı¯yah-Beirut

Dar al-’ilm lil-malayyı¯n-Beirut Matba’et al-dar al-misriya-Cairo Dar Al-A¯ da¯b-Beirut

Al-intisha¯r al ‘arabı¯-Beirut

Publisher and place of publication

Bridging the cultural gap

219

220

ana wa sartr wal-haya¯ h (Life: Sartre and I) Ma’sa¯t ta’dhı¯ b Djamı¯ la Bu ¯ bacha (The Tragedy of Torturing Djamila Boupacha) Qu ¯ wat al-ashia¯a’ (The Force of Things) Al-Suwar al-djamı¯la (The Beautiful ˙ Pictures ) Su ¯ ’ tafa¯ hom fi mosko (Misunderstanding in Moscow)

2012

Mudhakkara¯t fata¯h multazima (Memoirs of a Conforming Young Girl) Mudhakkara¯t fata¯h rasina (Memoirs ˙ Girl) of a Composed Young

Lina Badr

Dar al-huwwar lil-nashr wal-tawziLatakia, Syria.

Dar Al-adab-Beirut

‘A¯ ’ida Matarj¯ı Idrı¯s ˙

1967 2015

Dar Al-adab-Beirut

Aida Matarji Idris

1964

Al-dar al-qawmiyah lil-tiba’a¯h walnashr-Cairo

Dar Al-a¯da¯b-Beirut

Al-ahleya lil-nashr wal-tawzı¯’Amman, Jordan

Dar al-harf al-arabi lil-nashr waltawzi’-Beirut

Publisher and place of publication

Fatma Abdallah Mahmoud

A reprint of the 1959 translation, introduced by Rehab Akkawy A reprint of the 1959 translation, revised by Iman Zakareya Aida Matarji Idris ˙

Translator

1962

1964

2015

Date of publication of translated work

Title of Arabic translation

i Almost all translations of Le deuxième sex into Arabic translate the title as “The Other Sex,” an issue that deserves further investigation, but is not the focus of the present research.   ii The year of publication does not appear in the book itself. The bibliographical data is provided by Neel wa furat, the largest Arabic online bookstore. iii The title page states that Nada Haddad is the translator of the book. However, her version of Le deuxième sexe is a mere copy of the first translation published in 1969, translated by a group of university professors.

Malentendu à Moscou from La femme rompue (1968) (Misunderstanding in Moscow from The Woman Destroyed)

La Force de l’âge (1960) (The Prime of Life) Simone de Beauvoir and Gisèle Halimi, Djamila Boupacha (1962) La Force des choses (1963) (Force of Circumstance) Les Belles Images (1966)

Title and year of publication

Table 16.1 (Continued)

Hala G. Sami

Bridging the cultural gap

Notes 1 The Egyptian National Centre for Translation, the Women and Memory Forum (Egypt) and the Kalima Project for Translation (UAE) are among such institutions. 2 Islam strongly condemns suicide. 3 Aida Matarji Idris, wife of Suhail Idris, the founder of al-ādāb magazine, is also a writer and translator. She translated several of Beauvoir’s works in the 1960s (see Table 16.1). 4 The cultural discrepancies between French and Arabic are not reflected in earlier translations of Beauvoir’s works, which are devoid of additional notes or a glossary to account for the meaning of foreign words. This is, for instance, also illustrated in the Arabic translation of such works as La force des choses (Qūwat al-ashiāa’) and L’invitée (al-mad’uūwah) 5 It would have been worthwhile to examine the selected passages in the three main Arabic translations of Le deuxième sexe. However, the 1979 translation (see Table 16.1) is out of print and unavailable in major public libraries in Egypt, such as the Bibliotheca Alexandrina, Dar al-kutub wal-watha’iq al misriya (The Egyptian National Library and Archives), Cairo University Central Library and the AUC (American University in Cairo) library. This translation is also unavailable at neel wa furat, which is the biggest Arabic online bookstore. For more information, visit their website at: www.neelwafurat.com/ 6 There are two translations of Mémoires d’une jeune fille rangée published in 1959. An anonymous translator produced the title as Mudhakkarāt fatāh rasina (Memoirs of a Composed Young Girl). Ibrahim al-maghrabi ˙ translates the book as Mudhakkarāt fatāh`āqelah (Memoirs of a Sensible Young Girl). This last version is available at the Iraqi National Library and is out of print. 7 See, for example, Kandiyoti (1996), Al-Ali (2000) and El Said et al. (2015). 8 Al-rahba Publishing House in Damascus, Syria, has recently translated a number of key texts related to feminism. Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch (al-mar’ah al-makhşiyah) (2014) and Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (al-loghz al-onthawi) (2018) are among their translations, by Abdallah Badie Fadel. For more information about their publications, visit their website at the non-profit Women’s Studies organization musāwā (Equality): http://musawasyr.org/?p=15943

References Al-Ali, Nadje. 2000. Secularism, Gender and the State in the Middle East: The Egyptian Women’s Movement. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Al-hajiri, Mohammad. 2013. Al-mutarjima Marie Tawq: Atawwarrat ma’ā nussūssī ‘ātefīān. (“Translator Marie Tawq: I Get Emotionally Involved with My Texts”) Interview with Marie Tawq. Aljarida. Available at: www.aljarida.com/articles/1462281557633878600/. Alsharekh, Alanoud. 2006. Angry Words Softly Spoken: A Comparative Study of English and Arabic Women Writers. London: Saffron Books. Alsharekh, Alanoud. 2016. Instigating Social Change: Translating Feminism in the Arab World and India. QScience Connect, Special issue on Translating the Gulf: Beyond Fault Lines [online], 2(2), 1–8. Available at: www.qscience.com/doi/pdf/10.5339/connect.2016.tii.2 [Accessed 31 May 2018]. Batchelor, Kathryn. 2018. Translation and Paratexts. Abingdon, Oxon and New York: Routledge. Beauvoir, Simone de. 1958. Mémoires d’une jeune fille rangée. Paris: Gallimard. Beauvoir, Simone de. 1959. Mudhakkarāt fatāh rasina. (Memoirs of a Composed Young Girl). Beirut: Dar al-`ilm ˙ lil-malyīn. .‫ دار العلم للماليين‬:‫ بيروت‬،‫مذكرات فتاة رصينة‬ Beauvoir, Simone de. 1962. Les mandarins. Translated by Georges Tarabichi. Al-muthaqqāfūn (The Intellectuals). Beirut: Dar al-ādāb. .‫ دار اآلداب‬:‫ بيروت‬، ،١۹٦۲ ،‫ نقلها إلى العربية جورج طرابيشى‬،‫ المثقفون‬،‫سيمون دى بوفوار‬ Beauvoir, Simone de. 1963. La force des choses. Paris: Gallimard. Beauvoir, Simone de. 1964. qūwat al-āshiyāa’ (The Force of Things, Vol. II). `Aida Matarji Idrīs. Trans. Beirut: Dar al-ādāb. .1964 ،‫ دار اآلداب‬:‫ بيروت‬،‫ ترجمة عايدة مطرجى إدريس‬، )‫قوة األشياء (الجزء الثانى‬ Beauvoir, Simone de. 1966. Les belles images. Paris: Gallimard. Beauvoir, Simone de. 1967a. Al-suwar al-djameela. Trans. `Aida Matarji Idrīs. Beirut: Dar al-ādāb. .1967 ،‫ دار اآلداب‬:‫ بيروت‬،‫ ترجمة عايدة مطرجى إدريس‬،‫الصور الجميلة‬ Beauvoir, Simone de. 1967b. Le deuxième sexe. ‫ دار الثقافة الحديثة‬،‫ القاهرة‬،‫ ترجمة واختصار سمير السهلى‬،‫الجنس اآلخر‬ 221

Hala G. Sami

(Al-djins al-ākhar) Trans. and summarised by Samir Al-Sahly. Cairo: Dar al-thaqāfa al-hadīthā. Beauvoir, Simone de. 1976. Le deuxième sexe. Tome I. Paris: Gallimard. Beauvoir, Simone. 2009a. Les mandarins. Translated by Marie Tawq. Al-muthaqqāfūn (The Intellectuals). Beirut: Dar al-ādāb and Abu Dhabi: Kalima. .‫ كلمة‬،‫ دار اآلداب و أبو ظبى‬،‫ بيروت‬، ۲۰۰۹ ،‫ ترجمة مارى طوق‬،‫ المثقفون‬،،‫سيمون دى بوفوار‬. Beauvoir, Simone de. 2009b. The Second Sex. Trans. Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier. New York: Vintage Books. Beauvoir, Simone de. 2012. Mudhakkarāt fatāh multazima. Revised and edited by Rehab Akkawy. Beirut: Dar al-harf al-arabi lil-nashr wal-tawzi’. (Memoirs of a Conforming Young Girl) .‫ دار الحرف العربى للنشر والتوزيع‬:‫ بيروت‬،‫ مراجعة وتدقيق رحاب عكاوى‬،‫مذكرات فتاة ملتزمة‬ Beauvoir, Simone de. 2015a. (Al-djins al-ākhar) Trans. Rehab Akkawy. and Joseph Kaloustian. Beirut: Dar al-harf al-`arabi. ˙ .‫ بيروت‬،‫ دار الحرف العربى للنشر والتوزيع‬،‫الجنس اآلخر‬ Beauvoir, Simone de. 2015b. Le deuxième sexe. Translated by Sahar Said. Damascus: al-rahba lil-nashr ˙ wal-tawzī. .‫( الجنس اآلخر‬Al-djins al-ākhar). ، ‫ الرحبة للنشر و التوزيع‬:‫دمشق‬ Beauvoir, Simone de. n.d. kayfā tufakkir al-mar’ah (How Women Think). Cairo and Alexandria: al-markaz al-`arabi lil-nashr wal tawzi’ .‫ المركز العربى للنشر والتوزيع‬:‫ القاهرة واإلسكندرية‬،‫كيف تفكر المرأة‬ Borde, Constance and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier. 2010. Translating ‘The Second Sex’. Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, 29(2) (Fall), 437–445. Jstor [Accessed 7 May 2018]. Consulting, Thalassa and Gregor Meiering. 2004. Lost or Found in Translation: Translations’ Support Policies in the Arab World. Next Page Foundation. Eagleton, Mary. 1996. Feminist Literary Theory: A Reader. Oxford and Malden, MA: Blackwell. El Said, Maha, Lena Meari, and Nicola Pratt, eds. 2015. Rethinking Gender in Revolutions and Resistance: Lessons from the Arab World. London: Zed Books. Flotow, Luise von. 1997. Translation and Gender: Translating in the ‘Era of Feminism’. Manchester, UK and Ottawa: St Jerome Publishing and University of Ottawa Press. Friedan. Betty. 1963. The Feminine Mystique. Translated by Abdallah Badie Fadel. 2018. al-loghz al-onthawi. Damascus: Al-rahba. .‫ دار الرحبة‬،‫ دمشق‬،۲۰١٨ ،‫ ترجمة عبد هللا بديع فاضل‬،‫ اللغز األنثوى‬،‫بتى فريدان‬ Gamble, Sarah. 2001. The Routledge Companion of Feminism and Postfeminism. London and New York: Routledge. Genette, Gérard. 1997. Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation. Translated by Jane E. Lewin. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Greer, Germaine. 1970. The Female Eunuch. Translated by Abdallah Badie Fadel. 2014. al-mar’ah al-makhşiyah. Damascus: Al-rahba. ‫ دار الرحبة‬،‫ دمشق‬،۲۰١٤ ،‫ ترجمة عبد هللا بديع فاضل‬،‫ االمرأة المخصية‬،‫جرمين غرير‬ Haiping, Liu. 2016. Manipulating Simone de Beauvoir: A Study of Chinese Translations of The Second Sex, in Luise von Flotow and Farzaneh Farahzad, eds., Translating Women: Different Voices and New Horizons. Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 232–248. Hanna, Sameh Fekry. 2011. Flows of English-Arabic Translation in Egypt in the Areas of Literature, Literary/Cultural and Theatre Studies: Two Cases of the Genesis and Development of the Translation Market in Modern Egypt. Alexandria: Transeuropéennes, Paris and Anna Lindh Foundation, 1–112. Jacquemond, Richard. 1992. Translation and Cultural Hegemony: The Case of French-Arabic Translation, in L. Venuti, ed., Rethinking Translation: Discourse Subjectivity, Ideology. London: Routledge, 139–158. Available at: http://ls-tlss.ucl.ac.uk/course-materials/CLITG002_49775.pdf [Accessed 20 Apr. 2018]. Jauss, Hans Robert. 1982. Toward an Aesthetic of Reception. Translated from German by Timothy Bahti. Introduction by Paul de Man. Theory and History of Literature, vol. 2. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Kamal, Hala, ed. and trans. 2015. al-naqd al-adabi al-niswi (Feminist Literary Criticism). Cairo: Al-mar’a walzakira (Women and Memory Forum). .2015 ،‫ مؤسسة المرأة والذاكرة‬:‫ القاهرة‬،‫ النقد األدبى النسوى‬،‫هالة كمال‬ Kamal, Hala. 2016. “Translating Feminist Literary Theory into Arabic.” Studia Filologiczne [online], 57–73. Available at: www.academia.edu/ [Accessed 23 May 2018]. Kandiyoti, Deniz, ed. 1996. Gendering the Middle East: Emerging Perspectives. London and New York: I. B. Tauris & Co. Ltd. 222

Bridging the cultural gap

Lecarme-Tabone, Éliane. 2008. Le Deuxième Sexe de Simone de Beauvoir. Paris: Gallimard. Morris, Pam. 1993. Literature and Feminism: An Introduction. Oxford and Cambridge: Blackwell. Robert, Paul. 1978. Le Petit Robert. Paris: Société du Nouveau Littré. Spanos, Adam. 2017. Mediating Iltizām: The Discourse on Translation in The Early Years of al-Ādāb. Alif, 37, 111–140. Tarabishi, Georges. 2001. Woman Against Her Sex. London: Saqi Books. Venuti, Lawrence. 1998. The Scandals of Translation: Towards an Ethics of Difference. 1st ed. [ebook]. London: Routledge. Available at: www.questia.com/read/103014138/the-scandals-of-translation-towards-anethics-of [Accessed 27 Jan. 2018].

223

17 Translating French feminist philosophers into English The case of Simone de Beauvoir Marlène Bichet

Introduction This chapter explores how feminist philosophy is dealt with in translation, with particular reference to Simone de Beauvoir’s Le Deuxième Sexe and its latest English translation (2009). Philosophy is a genre that challenges translation due to its abstraction, which makes it prone to misunderstanding, and due to its particular use of language. Philosophical language often develops its own terminology by coining new phrases or resorting to semantic shifts, and it can even be said that “one of the indispensable conditions for philosophy is a capacity for linguistic insecurity – for taking a certain distance from one’s customary everyday words” (Rée 2001, 246). Jonathan Rée explains how philosophy and language are entwined, arguing that one cannot “do philosophy” without creating distance from the usual, and without analyzing what is customary in order to question it. Acts of linguistic subversion can therefore be closely linked to the philosophical theory developed by their authors, and this is part of the evolution of the theory. If subverting language may indeed lead to philosophy, the term also brings to mind feminist translation, which often relies on subverted language and innovative writing practices (Flotow 1991, 74). Sherry Simon, for instance, encourages translators to modify texts in order to fulfil their feminist agenda, because “they can use language as cultural intervention, as part of an effort to alter expressions of domination” (Simon 2005 [1996], 8). This prompts us to wonder what kinds of translation strategies are the most relevant to render philosophy, and in particular, feminist philosophy. Although Simone de Beauvoir’s work is central to this chapter as her contribution to the field cannot be underestimated, English translations of work by Hélène Cixous and Monique Wittig, two other feminist philosophers, are referred to as well. This chapter presents a brief discussion of feminist philosophy, and in regard to Beauvoir, how existentialism and phenomenology have been reclaimed for feminist philosophy. The second section analyzes how feminist philosophy is translated, examining translation strategies as they are used to render English versions of Vivre l’orange (1979) by Hélène Cixous as well as L’Opoponax (1964) and Les Guérillères (1969) by Monique Wittig. The final section focuses on Le Deuxième Sexe and its most recent English translation, and illustrates the relevance of using the interpretive theory of translation to translate feminist philosophy. 224

Translating French feminist philosophers

Context and historical perspectives An introduction to feminist philosophy Just as there are many different branches of feminism, there are differences in perspective in feminist philosophy. According to some scholars, such as Nancy Bauer, feminist philosophy should be a way to revolutionize philosophy itself, whose history largely shows a neglect of the question of what it means to be a woman, which would help redefine what it means to be a sexed and thinking human being (Bauer 2001, 21), thus going beyond feminist activism and contributing to the whole of philosophy. Beauvoir’s work illustrates that point and is pioneering in many ways, because of the methodology she uses, but also the theories she develops on women and on existentialism. The fact that Beauvoir opted for existentialism as a framework to draw on (and to elaborate her own thoughts) is groundbreaking, because existentialist theory is not the most encouraging for women. Indeed, it has been described as dismissive of women, for, as Michèle Le Dœuff puts it, “there is no place for a woman in such a system, and even less for a woman who produces philosophy” (Le Dœuff 2007, 165). This point is reinforced by Jeffner Allen who coined the phrase “patriarchal existentialism” and explained that, as this theory does not speak to women, they cannot identify with it (Allen in Allen and Young 1989, 72). Yet, Beauvoir’s Le Deuxième Sexe challenged this situation, incorporating women’s experience in existentialism. The methodology she deployed was phenomenology, which refers to the study of phenomena, and relates precisely to our experience and perception of the world. By following such logic throughout her book, Beauvoir opened the way for feminist philosophers to use phenomenology in their analyses, as did Iris Marion Young in her influential essay Throwing Like A Girl, which examines the way young girls are said to throw balls differently than boys of the same age, and explores other “feminine” behaviours to then discuss girls and boys’ socialization (Young 2005, 32). Young draws substantially on Beauvoir and on her notion of feminine and masculine behaviours being socially constructed; she also references existential phenomenology, thus reaffirming Beauvoir’s feminist philosophical impact. Indeed, it needs to be stated that Beauvoir’s magnum opus has been acknowledged as a model of feminist philosophy which widely influenced the field (Bauer 2001; Young 2005), so that a reliable English translation of her work is critical. This point compels us to explore the issues around the translation of feminist philosophy.

Translating feminist philosophy Beyond foreignization and domestication My contention is that foreignization, often presented in the literature as a more ethical approach to translation (see Venuti 1995, for instance), is not necessarily the most adequate translation strategy to render texts of philosophy. Foreignization is a strategy which breaches the target language’s linguistic rules, and this can be prejudicial to philosophical texts, precisely because philosophy itself often disrupts linguistic rules. The foreignization of an already foreignizing strategy in the source language can thus become even more challenging to read in a target language. Foreignizing philosophical translations adds a further layer of foreignness. In Venuti’s view, a foreignizing translation can help establish a foreign text in the target literature and tackle the use of domesticated English, thereby working to curb anglophone hegemony. His analysis of the general trends in English translation shows that most foreign texts currently translated into English are domesticated, thus maintaining the impression that they are 225

Marlène Bichet

written in English. The Second Sex, however, a French text rendered into ‘foreignized’ English in its latest version, can hardly be seen to undermine this aspect of English hegemony. Instead, it has been criticized for misrepresenting Beauvoir’s magnum opus. I suggest that the interpretive theory of translation (ITT) might be an apt translation strategy for philosophical discourse, which is often seen as cryptic by non-specialists and relies on the reader understanding theoretical insights, which require interpretation. The ITT originated in interpreter training and states that translating is an act of communication; it asserts that there cannot be effective translation without interpretation. This strategy focuses on sense, which, according to Marianne Lederer, arises as a matter of course, especially in consecutive interpretation where sense is not only what interpreters understand and express but also the only thing to mark memory as the words themselves vanish. Sense is also the central issue in translation even though the circumstances of production and reception differ (Lederer 2014, 12). Interpretation according to Lederer proceeds as follows: interpreters understand the sense of a foreign language (FL) utterance and deverbalize it before reformulating it in their own native words and phrases (2010, 174–177). The ITT can serve to curtail polysemy and ambiguity in translation, as it insists on the context of the source text as well as the necessity of having extralinguistic knowledge to render sense. It seems particularly suited for the translation of philosophy since despite using technical and specific vocabulary, philosophy requires interpretation. Focusing on the “sense” or meaning of a text is a position which is supported by philosophy too, as the following quotation by Jean-Paul Sartre illustrates: “sense is not contained by the words (of a text) since it is sense itself which allows each word’s meaning to be understood [. . .] sense is not the sum of the words, it is their organic whole” (Sartre 1985, 50–51, in Lederer 2014, 13–14). That definition of sense relates to the main tenet of existentialism, namely the rejection of “essence.” It implies that the words themselves do not have an essence which encloses meaning, but only the interconnection between words creates sense. Philosophy often subverts language and creates coinages, which presents translators with particular problems and requires a thorough specialized knowledge of the field. Since philosophy is a plurilingual discipline, this can add further translation issues when phrases are borrowed and used from one language to another. Barbara Cassin, editor of the Vocabulaire européen des philosophies: Dictionnaire des intraduisibles (2004), even refers to “philosophizing in languages” (quoted in Apter 2012, 173) because languages (and therefore translation) and philosophy have always been closely related. In her Vocabulaire, Cassin’s aim is to explore the “Untranslatables,” those philosophical concepts that need constant retranslation because they are equivocal. This idea is reminiscent of Marcel Govaert’s contention that “bien souvent l’intraduisible est ce qui n’a pas encore été traduit correctement” (what is untranslatable is often enough what has not yet been correctly translated.) (Govaert 1971, 39–62, my translation, emphasis in original), which implies that untranslatability is not absolute; the translator simply needs to tenaciously seek ever better renderings. Ronald Landheer is even more severe when he states that: les traducteurs [. . .] ne sont que trop portés en général à [. . .] invoquer le postulat de l’‘intraduisibilité’, toutes les fois qu’ils n’ont pas pris le temps ou la peine de chercher un énoncé équivalent dans le texte cible. (translators are just too keen to invoke the ‘untranslatability’ hypothesis every time they have not taken the time, nor made the effort, to look for an equivalent in the target text.) (Landheer 2000, 216, my translation) I contend that the preceding comments can apply to the translation of philosophy, although they should not preclude the fact that the neologisms often found in philosophical discourse 226

Translating French feminist philosophers

cannot always have equivalents in another language. As Cassin explains, the Untranslatable is “that which one never ceases (not) to translate. But it highlights the fact that its translation, into one language or another, causes a problem to the point of sometimes producing a neologism” (Cassin, Introduction to Vocabulaire européen des philosophies 2004, my translation, XVII–XVIII).

Philosophy translation strategies And so, what translation strategies can be used to render philosophy? One of those strategies is “non-translation,” when a translator simply borrows foreign terms (as illustrated with the German word Dasein, central to Martin Heidegger’s philosophy). However, that strategy would seem to confirm the notion that philosophy is untranslatable and perhaps to lead to the avoidance of translation, an approach that is not always desirable or possible. Translation thus sometimes has to depart from the source-text, which is when shifts occur. Because there are often no formal correspondents available in the target-language, translators of philosophy resort to shifts and other strategies, such as inventing new words, altering the syntax, or using different tenses than those used in the source texts. For example, the French conditional tense is often used to convey doubt, which needs to be rendered differently in English, with such phrases as “supposedly,” or “according to” (Rée 2001, 228; Moi 2010). That seemingly trivial example shows how crucial it is to shift from the source text’s linguistic norms, but this requires a thorough knowledge of both linguistic norms of the target language and the philosopher’s theory. The translator needs to recognize when style and content are linked in order to then find the most adequate way to render the same meaning in the target text, as advocated by the interpretive theory of translation. Such an approach seems most appropriate for translating philosophy, because, as Jonathan Rée puts it, “[philosophy’s] special ways of thinking, reading, writing, and translating cannot be foreignized, for the simple reason that they were never “naturalized” in the first place” (Rée 2001, 252–253). Bearing this in mind, I argue that shifts can be seen as part of a translation strategy to translate feminist philosophy and ultimately help convey the author’s feminist and philosophical message.

The translation of feminist philosophy When it comes to translating feminist philosophy, it seems that translators face two difficulties in one: namely translating philosophical ideas and terminology, while at the same time conveying the feminist stance. Translating feminism and philosophy is a case of highly specialized translation that faces serious challenges, among these the ongoing debates about what feminist philosophy actually entails. Further, and more crucially, the combination of feminism and philosophy has not yet been widely studied in translation studies. One notable exception is, however, feminist existentialism, a field of study triggered by Beauvoir’s treatment of existentialism and phenomenology, approaches that underpin Beauvoir’s ideas, making Le Deuxième Sexe a cornerstone of the developing links between feminism and philosophy. Due to its significance and influence, Le Deuxième Sexe has been analyzed from various points of view, and yet, despite this fame and authority, the book was not (re)translated into English by translators specialized in philosophy. We can ask, as Sherry Simon does, who translates French feminist philosophers? Simon points out that “there have been few translations by the theorists who have acted as cultural intermediaries: Alice Jardine, Toril Moi, Jane Gallop, Elizabeth Grosz, etc.” (Simon 2005 [1996], 86). If that is the case, then the gap between feminist and philosophy theorists and translation studies has yet to be bridged. Nevertheless, English translations of certain feminist philosophical texts do exist, and the following discusses aspects of the work of Hélène Cixous and Monique Wittig 227

Marlène Bichet

in English, to then move on to Beauvoir. The purpose is to compare the translation techniques used to translate their work into English, and more crucially, to assess what the outcome has been. How did the translations promote, or perhaps impede, the reception of their theories? Strongly associated with the theory of écriture féminine, Hélène Cixous is the award-winning author of novels and plays, but also works of philosophy, feminism, and literary criticism. Out of the three “French feminists” recognized as such in Anglo-American feminist circles–Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva, and Hélène Cixous–I chose to analyze Cixous because, as Nicole Ward Jouve puts it, “she is the most misrepresented of the ‘Trinity’ ” (Ward-Jouve 1991, 49). The translation issues which have been recorded by scholars and critics will provide some understanding of how Cixous’s work may have been misrepresented. Monique Wittig, for her part, was a radical feminist philosopher, a lesbian theorist, and the acclaimed author of avant-garde fiction. Even though both writers have different views on feminism, notably on political commitment, essentialism, and materialism, they have had a significant impact on feminist philosophy and literary theory. Hélène Cixous, whose style presents her translators with many traps and difficulties as she ties images, languages, and concepts together, challenges her translators with unconventional stylistic choices that entwine philosophy and poetry. In The Hélène Cixous Reader (1994), which presents translations of Cixous’s work by different translators, Susan Sellers contends that the difficulties of translating a writer like Hélène Cixous are immense as she “actively incorporates the possibilities generated by language into her text” (Sellers 1994, 3). She illustrates this problem with the French words délire, délier, and déliter, which produce an alliterative effect difficult to convey through a literal English translation. In this example, the translator had to give up on the poetic alliteration of the French, staying close to the meaning instead: “Delirium or unbind or split the ash” (Sellers, 8). In regard to Vivre l’orange (1979), a bilingual text, which Cixous edited in both French and English (based on an English version by Ann Liddle and Sarah Cornell), Simon asserts that “Cixous’ translation strategy is consistent and coherent: she provides in English a very close echo of the French text” (Simon 2005 [1996], 91). Indeed, the translation techniques used for philosophical texts are either a domesticated approach, which tends to produce a fluent text, albeit less poetic, or a foreignized view, which “creates estrangement effects” (ibid.). The problem I have noted in regard to the multilingual nature of philosophy, which leads to translators’ borrowing foreign concepts and coinages, particularly relates to Cixous’s Vivre l’orange, which not only comprises a French and an English version in the actual text, but includes other languages, such as German, Portuguese, Italian, or Spanish. Sharon Willis rightfully wonders how those foreign elements can be rendered in translation (Willis 1992). She says the text “seems to be at work on relations of foreignness,” inviting the reader into this foreignness (ibid., 115). In addition to intertwining different languages, the text also incorporates different texts, in particular La Passion selon G. H., by Brazilian author Clarice Lispector, which seems to have been translated by Cixous herself for her own text, as Lynn Kettler Penrod has argued (Penrod 1993, 48). Sharon Willis further invites us to reflect on the enmeshing of languages and intertextuality in translation, as she reminds us that Lispector, “an Eastern European refugee, [. . .] writes in her adopted Portuguese, which Cixous reads in a French translation” (Willis 1992, 107). These issues would require a lengthy analysis as the issues of multilingualism and intertextuality in feminist philosophy are a wide and fascinating subject. A second instance of a French feminist philosopher is Monique Wittig, whose own bilingualism and experience of translation provides insights into the translation of feminist theory. According to Hélène Vivienne Wenzel, Wittig was so disappointed by the translations of some of her books that she decided to translate her Brouillon pour un dictionnaire des amantes (1976) into English herself, with the help of her partner, Sande Zeig (Wenzel 1981, 265). Why were the translations so disappointing? Let us see some examples from L’Opoponax (1964, translated into 228

Translating French feminist philosophers

English in 1966 by Helen Weaver) and Les Guérillères (1969, translated into English in 1971 by David Le Vay), in which Wittig experiments with pronouns in her native French. In L’Opoponax the author extensively uses the genderless pronoun “on.” As Hélène Vivienne Wenzel points out, this pronoun can become “they” or “we” in English, so that characters are referred to indiscriminately, “any sense of rigid gender or number is thus eliminated, creating a quasi-utopic “free zone” in which these young children1 may grow up outside the confines of socialized, rigidified sexual difference” (Wenzel 1981, 276). The English translation, however, does not render the ideology behind the use of the French “on,” and translates “on” as “you,” thus losing the effect created in French. Indeed “you” gives a general sense, as does “one,” whereas the pronoun “we” might be closer to the French “on” here, thus reinforcing the bond of the characters, regardless of their gender. Likewise, the plural French “elles” (feminine plural “they”) has been seen as mistranslated in the English version of Les Guérillères. It is used throughout to refer to the collective female protagonist in order to describe women as a historical and social class, and not woman as a feminine essence.2 Linda Marie-Gelsomina Zerilli, in fact, claims that “the pronoun elles lies at the heart of Wittig’s radical project to transform the social contract” (Zerilli 2005, 87). And Monique Wittig explains that she tries to universalize the point of view of elles. The goal of this approach is not to feminize the world but to make the categories of sex obsolete in language. [She], therefore, set up elles in the text as the absolute subject of the world. (Wittig 1986, 70) Both the singular French noun “la femme” and its plural “les femmes” are thus almost entirely absent from the French text. As Wittig points out, in English the translator, lacking the lexical equivalent for elles, found himself compelled to make a change, which for me destroys the effect of the attempt. When elles is turned into the women the process of universalization is destroyed. All of a sudden, elles stopped being mankind. (Wittig 1986, 70) Interestingly, the author herself offers a solution for the translation of the French “elles,” indicating that “the question is a grammatical one, therefore a textual one” (1986, 71): The solution for the English translation then is to reappropriate the collective pronoun they which rightfully belongs to the feminine as well as to the masculine gender. They is not only a collective pronoun but it also immediately develops a degree of universality which is not immediate with elles. [. . .] They helps to go beyond the categories of sex. [. . .] Only with the use of they will the text regain its strength and strangeness. (Ibid.) “Elles” refers to the feminine plural in French, so that the feminine aspect cannot be erased, whereas the English “they” has the advantage of being used to refer to the feminine plural, the masculine plural, or both, thus providing the universality Monique Wittig was looking for. These examples taken from both Hélène Cixous’s and Monique Wittig’s English translations warn us of the misrepresentation that translation can cause. For such specific and subtle feminist philosophical work, in which language plays a subversive role, collaboration with the author, or at least a very specialized knowledge of the author’s ideology, is essential. 229

Marlène Bichet

Studies of the translation of feminist philosophy still need to be developed as argued in an insightful chapter on the subject by Carolyn Shread in the Routledge Handbook of Translation and Philosophy (2018). Shread makes this point when she states that “[her] chapter sits like a bomb in a book all of whose named philosophers are men” (Shread 2018, 324). She further observes that “in this Handbook, quite typically, only one of the fourteen men is a feminist and the rest can be said to be in the service of, and subject to, patriarchy” (ibid.). Despite those limitations, however, the Handbook is a compelling and up-to-date work bringing together the disciplines of philosophy and translation studies, while also being the first handbook to include reference to the specific field of feminist philosophy within translation studies. As Shread points out such publication in the field of translation studies “can help philosophy do its job better by allowing it to learn from and engage with places beyond its borders” (ibid., 326) as well as consider who actually produces such translations. Shread, for instance, mentions the fact that “questions [. . .] have been raised about [. . .] the philosophical competency of Constance Borde and Sheila ­Malovany-Chevallier for the 2009 re-translation” of Simone de Beauvoir’s Le Deuxième Sexe (ibid., 333). These and other issues in regard to Beauvoir translations are addressed in the next segment.

Translating Simone de Beauvoir Simone de Beauvoir in English translation Critiques of English translations of Beauvoir’s work started in the 1980s (Simons 1983), and those translations are still much studied (Daigle 2013; Ruonakoski 2017). It seems that translating Beauvoir into English is a challenging task, whether it is her fiction, her autobiographies, or her philosophical essays, as the following discussions reveal. According to Ursula Tidd, Beauvoir’s “dense, lucid prose is the hallmark of an intellectual trained in philosophy” (Tidd 2000, vol. 1, 120), and her literary precision, mingled with her philosophical input, is complex to translate. Tidd writes that Yvonne Moyse and Roger Senhouse’s translation of L’Invitée (She Came to Stay 1949) is one of the finest English translations of Beauvoir’s fiction, despite some issues with the translation of philosophy, where the overtranslation and mistranslation of phenomenological lexis curtail the text’s philosophical considerations (Tidd 2000, vol. 1, 120). She praises the same translators for their rendering of Le Sang des autres (The Blood of Others, 1948), but remarks on similar difficulties in translating Beauvoir’s philosophy. While Bernard Frechtman’s translation, The Ethics of Ambiguity, which also came out in 1948, offers a “largely faithful rendition,” again, philosophical notions pertaining to both existentialism and Heidegger are obscured or mistranslated (Tidd 2000, 121). Tidd notes similar problems of over-translation and lexical errors (especially for existentialist terms) in regard to the English translations of Beauvoir’s memoirs, such as Kirkup’s 1959 translation of Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter (Tidd 2000, 121). However, she considers the sophisticated novel, Les Belles Images (1968) “a valiant rendition” (ibid.). The Mandarins (1956), translated by Leonard Friedman, has been critiqued for its censoring of the book’s sexual content. Barbara Klaw extensively studied how sexuality is portrayed in Beauvoir’s novel and found that the English translation softens and censors sexual passages (Klaw 1995). It is interesting to note that Klaw has gone on to also translate works by Beauvoir, as did Margaret Simons, whose study of the first English translation of Le Deuxième Sexe drew considerable attention to the numerous cuts in the English rendition (Flotow 2009, 36). Finally, we can conclude with a quote by Melanie Hawthorne who introduced her book Contingent Loves. Simone de Beauvoir and Sexuality by stating that “all quotations from Beauvoir’s work in this book are given in both the original French and in English” (Hawthorne 2000, 8), as she deems most 230

Translating French feminist philosophers

translations of Beauvoir’s work unreliable. In the following section, I compare extracts from the latest English translation of Le Deuxième Sexe in both French and English in order to examine and discuss the translation strategies used to render this philosophical work.

The case of Le Deuxième Sexe Much has been written about the first English translation of The Second Sex by Howard M. Parshley (1953/1989). That first, abridged, rendering was critiqued by prominent Beauvoir scholars, such as Margaret Simons (1983) and Toril Moi (2002), who both revealed the extent of the cuts and addressed problematic translation issues. However, Parshley has been recently rehabilitated, thanks to academics working on the relationship between the translator and the publishing house Knopf, in particular in Anna Bogic’s investigation into the correspondence between the translator and the publisher which revealed to what extent the publisher was responsible for determining the outcome of the translation (Bogic 2009). In terms of translation strategies, the first translation can be called a domesticated version, with Parshley offering a fluid and fluent English version that could be easily accepted by the target audience. The second English version (2009), on the other hand, has been criticized by philosophy scholars such as Toril Moi and Nancy Bauer in regard to the overall feeling the text leaves with English-speaking readers; they have also remarked on mistranslations that affect the philosophical content of the book (Moi 2010; Bauer 2011). The insights of Finnish researcher and Beauvoir translator Erika Ruonakoski, who produced the second Finnish version, are useful here: she explains that her (and other translators’) translation choices seek to serve the communicative aspect of a philosophical text best by not making the language itself a source of constant puzzlement. If readers find themselves repeatedly wondering what might have been the original version of a given expression or sentence, the translation is hardly enabling an effortless communication between the author and the reader (Ruonakoski 2017). She thus aims to pursue fluency and domesticate the translation, so as to provide the target readership with an accessible text. Ruonakoski illustrates this point with examples of fluency in the translation, such as the fact that Finnish translators “replaced the narrative first person plural (we, nous) by the first person singular, because the former is seldom used in Finnish” (ibid., 346, emphasis in original). Another strategy that works in opposite ways to that adopted by Borde and Malovany-Chevallier concerns Beauvoir’s frequent use of the semicolon; Ruonakoski writes, “neither did we save the innumerable semicolons; instead we mercilessly chopped the long phrases into shorter ones [. . .]” (ibid., 346). The translators worked on rendering a text which would be better received in the target culture by keeping a Finnish syntax in order to enhance the overall reception of the source text. The following analysis of the latest English rendering of Le Deuxième Sexe, pays attention to some key features of the text, such as its core existentialist terminology. This is the basis of Beauvoir’s study about women, because she deploys both phenomenology and existentialism to thoroughly examine what it means to be a woman and how one becomes a woman. For instance, Beauvoir relies on the concepts of authenticité and immanence, which are the focus of the following section.

The latest English translation of Le Deuxième Sexe (2009) The translation of “authenticité” The main issue with authenticité is that it refers to different concepts, and that polysemy has to be taken into account. In Le Deuxième Sexe, Beauvoir generally grants it a philosophical meaning. The English equivalent, authenticity, shares the same connotations as its French equivalent, as its 231

Marlène Bichet

synonyms are genuineness or veracity (Oxford English Dictionary (OED)); it is interesting to note that the OED makes a direct reference to its philosophical, and especially existentialist, meaning: 1953 H. M. Parshley tr. S. de Beauvoir Second Sex 675. Want of authenticity does not pay: each blames the other for the unhappiness he or she has incurred in yielding to the temptations of the easy way. (OED 2014) As can be seen from the preceding quotation, The Second Sex is cited in the OED, which acknowledges authenticity as a core philosophical concept in existentialism. When authenticité is taken as a philosophical concept and translated as the English authenticity, its cognates authentic or authentically would be the logical choice rather than synonyms such as genuine or true, which do not carry the same philosophical implications. The question is how translators can know whether or not any one case of authenticité conveys a philosophical connotation when they are translating Le Deuxième Sexe? The context of specific passages, as well as a broad knowledge of Beauvoir’s philosophy and terms collocating with authenticité are key. Keeping close to the French syntax can be confusing (and misleading) when translating adverbs, because French and English do not place adverbs in the same position in regard to the verb they modify. In the following example, there are issues with the adverb authentically, which gives the sentence a whole other meaning: Car elle ne choisit pas [. . .] de refuser authentiquement son destin. (Le Deuxième Sexe (LDS hereafter) 1949, tome II, 123; my emphasis) Because, [. . .] she does not choose authentically to reject her destiny. (The Second Sex (TSS hereafter), 2009: 378; my emphasis) In the preceding French quotation, Beauvoir is stating that a girl’s rejection of her fate is done in bad faith; she insists on the act of refusing authentiquement. However, Borde and MalovanyChevallier’s English rendering focuses on the girl’s choice, as the adverb authentically alters the verb to choose: the girl does not “choose authentically.” The subtleties of the French source text are distorted. There are cases in the investigated corpus where authentic is used in English when it does not appear in the French original. This would be harmless if the philosophical implication attached to authentic were not so crucial to de Beauvoir’s argument. As Toril Moi claims in her review, “Parshley mistook philosophical terms for ordinary words: Borde and Malovany-Chevallier treat ordinary words as if they were philosophical terms” (Moi 2010). Let us analyze such an instance: son coeur bat, elle connaît la douleur de l’absence, les affres de la présence, le dépit, l’espoir, la rancune, l’enthousiasme, mais à blanc. (LDS 1949, tome II, 113; my emphasis) her heart beats, she feels the pain of absence, the pangs of presence, vexation, hope, bitterness, enthusiasm, but not authentically. (TSS 2009, 371; my emphasis) The French expression “à blanc” here means “without consequences,” and it does not seem that Beauvoir wanted to give a philosophical turn to the point she was making. The context 232

Translating French feminist philosophers

indicates that authentically is too strong a term. But more importantly, Beauvoir uses her philosophical vocabulary with precision in Le Deuxième Sexe, so she would have opted for authentically had she wanted it. Therefore, we can ask why the translators decided to render “à blanc” as “not authentically,” instead of something more neutral, such as “without consequences” or “with no effect.”

The translation of “immanence” The next example to be analyzed – the translation of immanence into English – will show that using equivalents is possible, and even compulsory in some cases, which does not, however, necessarily imply using foreignization. Beauvoir’s thesis strongly argues that women are more grounded in nature because of the biological constraints they experience: hormonal cycles, menstruation, underdeveloped muscles, which all contribute to lessen women’s “grasp of the world” (The Second Sex, 46). But the most significant burden women have to endure is maternity because it enslaves them to the species and considerably curtails their freedom (Beauvoir refers to “the servitude of maternity,” The Second Sex, 35). Contingencies of place and time need, however, to be taken into account: de Beauvoir’s particularly bleak depiction of maternity was relevant to the specific time when her book was published, so she tries to show that, not only do women’s bodies doom them to immanence, but, more crucially, society does not offer women any other choice besides marriage and motherhood. Let us analyze some examples from Borde and Malovany-Chevallier’s translation, such as the following quotation, in which de Beauvoir explains that women yearn for transcendence and, therefore, rebel against the constraints of their situation: Le même mouvement qui, dans les hordes primitives, soumet la femme à la suprématie masculine, se traduit en chaque nouvelle initiée par un refus de son sort: en elle, la transcendance condamne l’absurdité de l’immanence. (LDS 1949, tome II, 49; my emphasis) The same movement that in primitive hordes subjects woman to male supremacy is manifested in each new ‘arrival’ by a refusal of her lot: in her, transcendence condemns the absurdity of immanence. (TSS 2009, 320; my emphasis) Regarding the translation of the French noun immanence, Borde and Malovany-Chevallier rendered it by the English equivalent immanence, departing from the French syntax by not using a definite article before immanence (or before transcendence either), because they are general concepts. The preceding quotation is a fruitful combination of foreignization as a literal linguistic approach (because it uses a specialized term close to the French original: immanence) and of domestication (because it discards French linguistic norms in terms of articles, and conforms with English grammatical standards). However, the extract also helps unpack other issues, especially in relation to the first clause. Its syntax closely follows the French original, which shows that the chosen translation approach is a calque (Vinay and Darbelnet 1995, 32). The result comes across as tedious and unnatural for the English reader. Moreover, the translation of the French noun initiée is particularly puzzling because Borde and Malovany-Chevallier use the English noun arrival to render it, and even add inverted commas around it, perhaps implying that they are at a loss for a better phrase. However, 233

Marlène Bichet

arrival does not render the French initiée so the reader is left wondering what de Beauvoir might mean. In French, de Beauvoir clearly explains that manhood and womanhood are akin to castes, explaining that girls remain among themselves, distancing themselves from boys (“elles font bande à part,” LDS 1949, tome II, 49), but that they actually would like to belong to the privileged group, that of men (“Elle voudrait appartenir à la caste privilégiée.” LDS 1949, ibid.). Members of those two castes become true insiders (“initiés”), notably through their education. Using arrival to render initié(e) is therefore incoherent and confusing, and it distorts Beauvoir’s smooth prose. Another example of literal syntax can be found in the following quotation, with the same shakiness in English: Dans la “galanterie” proprement dite, aucun chemin ne s’ouvre à la transcendance. Ici encore l’ennui accompagne le confinement de la femme dans l’immanence. (LDS II, 447–448) In ‘amorous adventures,’ properly speaking, no road opens onto transcendence. Here again, ennui accompanies the confinement of woman in immanence. (TSS, 630) The use of the English word ennui here triggers comments on the (non)equivalence between source language and target language terms. Indeed, ennui stems from French and has long been naturalized in English, yet using it instead of a synonym such as boredom is not innocent, because using Gallicisms such as ennui can be seen as elitist and pompous (Renouf 2004, 528). Therefore, although Borde and Malovany-Chevallier claim that “the job of the translator is [. . .] to find the true voice of the original work, as it was written for its time and with its original intent” (Translators’ Note, xxi, my emphasis), they are inadvertently aging the original. Indeed, when they use ennui so as to keep close to de Beauvoir’s text, they seem to overlook the fact that the two words do not share the same undertones in French and in English: ennui is a generic and neutral term in French, whereas it can have a different connotation in English, so that not wanting to “modernize the language Beauvoir used” (ibid., xxii) can actually give younger readers the impression that they are reading an archaic book, or that the author is extremely haughty. This choice is even more puzzling when we notice that the French galanterie is made explicit and rendered by amorous adventures, and not the closer English term gallantry. As the French galanterie refers to (mostly) male seduction of women, amorous adventures seems to contradict the source text, as it connotes a mutual connection, whereas de Beauvoir insists on the opposite, namely the way galanterie traps women into immanence. Finally, a further note can be added about the translation of philosophical terms. The French adverb actuellement is a false friend and can be difficult to translate. The following example came up while the data collection around immanence was proceeding. De Beauvoir explains how women, while being the ‘Other’ for men, have rendered men dependent on them, but are also dependent on men. This mutual dependence illustrates Hegel’s master-slave dialectic and de Beauvoir aims to show that it has been a reality for women: la réciprocité du rapport maître-esclave existait actuellement pour elle (LDS I, 133, emphasis in the original) the reciprocity of the master-slave relationship existed in the present for her (TSS, 89) 234

Translating French feminist philosophers

Borde and Malovany-Chevallier cautiously translated “actuellement” by “in the present” because the French adverb often means “currently,” but in this particular instance, the philosophical meaning of “actuellement” (as used by Beauvoir here) is close to the English “actually” and means “in acts.” What conclusions can be drawn from this analysis regarding the translation of feminist philosophy? It seems that a translation that strives for formal correspondence can be detrimental to rendering philosophy, and that foreignization imparts awkward phrasing to translation, even leading to mistranslation. As a result, I contend that domestication and a translation that respects the norms of the target language, as promoted by the ITT, should be preferred for ease of understanding, and to make the target text clearer to follow.

Conclusion This chapter has explored how specialized philosophical vocabulary is troublesome for translation, because philosophical occurrences need to be recognized as such, which has not always been the case in the latest English translation of Le Deuxième Sexe. Borde and Malovany-­Chevallier’s general approach aims to be faithful to the source text by staying close to it and reducing the influence of the translators. At times, however, their presence is made more obvious, which results in an inconsistency of approaches and disorients the reader. By staying too close to the source text and its syntax, the translators diverge from the sense of Beauvoir’s text (as in our last example about the translation of actuellement), which emphasizes the relevance of using the ITT to translate feminist philosophy. The end result is a translation which appears unsteady and perplexing, and which presents the readers with a difficult rendering, thus not helping the promotion of de Beauvoir’s book. I contend that working towards a favourable reception of de Beauvoir’s essay in the English-speaking sphere and promoting her arguments through translation is a feminist stance. A feminist translation agenda is not merely interested in altering the source text so as to challenge phallogocentrism; it also aims to enhance the readers’ experience, while disseminating the author’s theories, and asserting her position in the feminist philosophical canon. Considering the variety of feminisms, and how de Beauvoir has sometimes been misrepresented as a masculinist, or as a foe to motherhood, the impact of English translations of Le Deuxième Sexe should not be underestimated.

Future directions The translation of feminist philosophy is gaining momentum, as conversations are developing between feminist philosophers from different languages and cultures. International projects have to be encouraged, such as the edited volume Feminist Translation Studies: Local and Transnational Perspectives (2017) or “Voices from the Therīgāthā: Framing Western Feminisms in Sinhala Translation” (2017), in which Kanchuka Dharmasiri brings together the Therīgāthā and Western magnum opuses, such as Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) and Simone de Beauvoir’s Le Deuxième Sexe (1949). In addition, more collaboration and interdisciplinary work is needed between translation studies and feminist philosophers and scholars, so as to improve translation quality and help disseminate feminist philosophy.

Related topics Translation of philosophy, translation of feminist neologism 235

Marlène Bichet

Further reading Stone, Alison. 2007. An Introduction to Feminist Philosophy. Cambridge: Polity Press. This book offers a critical overview of feminist philosophy and discusses core issues in the field, while providing accounts of influential feminist philosophers. Borde, Constance and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier. 2011. Quelques réflexions sur la nouvelle traduction anglaise du Deuxième Sexe. L’Harmattan: l’Homme et la société, 179–180(1), 273–277. This article, written by the two translators of the latest English rendering of The Second Sex, gives an account of the translators’ agenda and their views on translation. Along with the Translators’ Note, it illustrates “the translators-in-terror” syndrome, as described by Jonathan Rée (see References).

Notes 1 Catherine Legrand, the main child protagonist, as well as Valérie Borge, or Denise Causse, all refer to using the pronoun “on.” 2 This very dualism was first dealt with in Simone de Beauvoir’s Le Deuxième Sexe, and rendering the French noun “la femme” led to the same translation issues (Bichet 2017).

References Allen, Jeffner and Iris Marion Young. 1989. The Thinking Muse. Feminism and Modern French Philosophy. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Apter, Emily. 2012. Philosophizing World Literature. Contemporary French and Francophone Studies, 16(2), 171–186. Apter, Emily. 2014. Authenticity, in Oxford English Dictionary. The Definitive Record of the English Language. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Available at: www.oed.com/view/Entry/13325?redirectedFrom= authenticity#eid [Accessed 14 Nov. 2019]. Bauer, Nancy. 2001. Simone de Beauvoir, Philosophy, and Feminism. New York: Columbia University Press. Bauer, Nancy. 2011. The Second Sex Review. Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, np. Available at: https:// ndpr.nd.edu/news/the-second-sex/. Beauvoir, Simone de. 1943. L’invitée. Paris: Gallimard. Beauvoir, Simone de. 1947. Pour une morale de l’ambiguïté. Paris: Gallimard. Beauvoir, Simone de. 1949. Le Deuxième Sexe. Paris: Gallimard. Beauvoir, Simone de. 1953/1989. The Second Sex. Translated and edited by Howard M. Parshley. New York: Knopf. Beauvoir, Simone de. 1954. Les Mandarins. Paris: Gallimard. Beauvoir, Simone de. 2009. The Second Sex. Translated by Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-­Chevallier. London: Jonathan Cape. Bichet, Marlene. 2017. The Treatment of Intertextuality in Translation Studies: A Case Study with the 2009 English Translation of Simone de Beauvoir’s Le Deuxième Sexe. New Voices in Translation Studies, 17, 1–30. Bogic, Anna. 2009. Rehabilitating Howard M. Parshley: A Socio-historical Study of the English Translation of Beauvoir’s Le Deuxième Sexe, with Latour and Bourdieu. Ottawa: Ottawa Library and Archives. Cassin, Barbara, ed. 2004. Vocabulaire européen des philosophies: dictionnaire des intraduisibles. Paris: Le Seuil, Le Robert. Cixous, Hélène. 1979. Vivre l’Orange. Paris: Éditions des Femmes. Daigle, Christine. 2013. The Impact of the New Translation of The Second Sex: Rediscovering Beauvoir. The Journal of Speculative Philosophy, 27(3), 336–347. Flotow, Luise von. 1991. Feminist Translation: Contexts, Practices and Theories. TTR: traduction, terminologie, redaction, 42(2), 69–84. Flotow, Luise von. 2009. This Time “the Translation Is Beautiful, Smooth, and True”: Theorizing Retranslation with the Help of Beauvoir, in James T. Day, ed., Translation in French and Francophone Literature and Film, Vol. 36. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 35–49. Frechtman, Bernard. 1948. The Ethics of Ambiguity. New York: Philosophical Library. Friedman, Leonard M. 1956. The Mandarins. Cleveland: World. Govaert, Marcel. 1971. Paradoxes sur la traduction. Linguistica Antverpiensia, 5, 39–62. 236

Translating French feminist philosophers

Hawthorne, Melanie C. 2000. Contingent Loves. Simone de Beauvoir and Sexuality. Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press. Kirkup, James. 1959. Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter. Cleveland: World, and London: André Deutsch/Weidenfeld and Nicolson. Klaw, Barbara. 1995. Sexuality in Beauvoir’s Les Mandarins, in Margaret A. Simons, ed., Feminist Interpretations of Simone de Beauvoir. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 193–221. Landheer, Ronald. 2000. L’isotopie complexe comme défi traductologique. Studia Romanica Posnaniensia, 25–26, 213–222. Lederer, Marianne. 2010. Interpretive Approach, in Yves Gambier and Luc van Doorslaer, eds., Handbook of Translation Studies, vol. 1. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 173–179. Lederer, Marianne. 2014. Translation: The Interpretive Model. Translated by Ninon Larché. London and New York: Routledge. Le Dœuff, Michèle. 2007. Hipparchia’s Choice: An Essay Concerning Women, Philosophy, etc. New York: Columbia University Press. Moi, Toril. 2002. While We Wait: The English Translation of The Second Sex. Signs, 27(4), 1005–1035. Moi, Toril. 2010. The Adulteress Wife. London Review of Books, 32(3) [pdf]. Available at: www.torilmoi. com/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/LRB-·-Toril-Moi-·-The-Adulteress-Wife1.pdf [Accessed 13 Nov. 2019]. Moyse, Yvonne and Roger Senhouse. 1948. The Blood of Others. New York: Knopf, and London: Secker and Warburg/Lindsay Drummond. Moyse, Yvonne and Roger Senhouse. 1949. She Came to stay. London: Secker and Warburg/Lindsay Drummond. O’Brian, Patrick. 1968. Les Belles Images. London: Collins, and New York: Putnam. Penrod, Lynn Kettler. 1993. Translating Hélène Cixous: French Feminism(s) and Anglo-American Feminist Theory. TTR: traduction, terminologie, redaction, 6(2), 39–54. Rée, Jonathan. 2001. The Translation of Philosophy. New Literary History, 32(2), 223–257. Renouf, Antoinette. 2004. Shall We Hors d’Oeuvres? The Assimilation of Gallicisms in English, in Éric Laporte, Christiant Leclère, Mireille Piot, and Max Silberztein, eds., Lexique, Syntaxe et Lexique-­ Grammaire. Syntax, Lexis & Lexicon-Grammar. Papers in Honour of Maurice Gross. Lingvisticae Investigationes Supplementa, 24, 527–545. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Co. Ruonakoski, Erika. 2017. Retranslating The Second Sex into Finnish: Choices, Practices, and Ideas, in Bonnie Mann and Martina Ferrari, eds., On ne naît pas femme: on le devient: The Life of a Sentence. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 331–354. Sartre, Jean-Paul. 1985. Qu’est-ce que la littérature? Paris: Gallimard. Sellers, Susan, ed. 1994. The Hélène Cixous Reader. London and New York: Routledge. Shread, Carolyn. 2018. Translating Feminist Philosophers, in Piers Rawling and Philip Wilson, eds., The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Philosophy. Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon and New York: Routledge, 324–344. Simon, Sherry. 1996/2005. Gender in Translation: Cultural Identity and the Politics of Transmission. London and New York: Routledge. Simons, Margaret. 1983. The Silencing of Simone de Beauvoir: Guess What’s Missing from The Second Sex. Women’s Studies International Forum, 6(5), 559–564. Tidd, Ursula. 2000. Simone de Beauvoir, in Olive Classe, ed., Encyclopedia of Literary Translation into English, vol. I. London and Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn Publishers, 119–122. Venuti, Lawrence. 1995. The Translator’s Invisibility. A History of Translation. London and New York: Routledge. Vinay, Jean-Paul and Jean Darbelnet. 1995. Comparative Stylistics of French and English. A Methodology for Translation. Translated by Juan C. Sager and Marie-Josée Hamel. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company. Ward-Jouve, Nicole, ed. 1991. To Fly/To Steal; No More? Translating French Feminisms into English, in White Woman Speaks with Forked Tongue: Criticism as Autobiography. London and New York: Routledge, 46–58. Wenzel, Hélène Vivienne. 1981. The Text as Body/Politics: An Appreciation of Monique Wittig’s Writings in Context. Feminist Studies, 7(2), 264–287. Willis, Sharon. 1992. Mistranslation, Missed Translation: Hélène Cixous’ Vivre l’orange, in Lawrence Venuti, ed., Rethinking Translation: Discourse, Subjectivity, Ideology. New York and London: Routledge, 106–119. Wittig, Monique. 1964. L’Opoponax. Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit. 237

Marlène Bichet

Wittig, Monique. 1969. Les Guérillères. Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit. Wittig, Monique. 1971. Les Guérillères. Translated by David Le Vay. New York: Viking Press. Wittig, Monique. 1986. The Mark of Gender, in Nancy K. Miller, ed., The Poetics of Gender. New York: Columbia University Press, 63–73. Wittig, Monique and Sande Zeig. 1976. Brouillon pour un dictionnaire des amantes. Paris: Grasset. Young, Iris Marion. 2005. On Female Body Experience: “Throwing Like a Girl” and Other Essays. New York: Oxford University Press. Zerilli, Linda Marie-Gelsomina. 2005. Feminism and the Abyss of Freedom. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press.

238

18 On Borderlands and translation The Spanish versions of Gloria Anzaldúa’s seminal work María Laura Spoturno

Introduction/definitions The long-awaited translation of Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera. The New Mestiza (henceforward: Borderlands) into Spanish finally made its appearance in the literary and academic scenes through the work of two different translators. In 2015 and 28 years after its original publication, Borderlands was fully rendered into Spanish by prominent Chicana writer and scholar Norma Elía Cantú in an edition that was commissioned and funded by the Programa Universitario de Estudios de Género (PUEG) at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México.1 A second, and practically simultaneous, translation was performed by Carmen Valle Simón and published in Madrid in 2016 by Capitán Swing, a relatively young and innovative publishing house. These translations, which are clearly aimed at different readerships, provide evidence of varied re-inscription processes of Anzaldúa’s work. Faced with the aesthetic and intellectual challenge of recreating a highly complex and polyphonic discourse, the translators also had to re-situate Anzaldúa’s distinctive voice in a fresh space, infused with new power relationships, social and cultural processes. New contexts of production and reception permeate the terrain where meanings are negotiated for the construction of feminine subjectivities in the translated discourse. Borderlands is structured in two sections: the first contains seven chapters, which combine prose with some poetry fragments, while the second consists of a set of poems and a few selftranslated poems.2 The first section has garnered the closest attention of critics. Anzaldúa’s advocacy of a new mestiza consciousness is rooted in a critical vision of language/s, genders, sexualities, races, and classes. Her radical discourse is sustained in the articulation of linguistic and cultural practices which relate to physical, metaphorical and symbolic spaces built around Spanish, English, Nahuatl and other language varieties (Mignolo 1996). Anzaldúa’s project (first published in 1987), at once political, feminist, social and aesthetic, is among the first to make room for the non-mediated presence of new voices in a space that had so far been governed by the paradigm of hegemonic or white feminisms. Her work as author, editor and activist greatly contributed to give visibility to the various experiences of women of color, Indian women and poor women. The influence of Anzaldúa’s philosophy in the fields of feminism and gender and queer studies is now undisputable and the study of the translations of her work into Spanish 239

María Laura Spoturno

allows us to assess the reception, resignification and transformation of her legacy outside Englishspeaking discursivities and formations. Latinx3 texts such as Borderlands may be conceived of as translated discourse in the sense that they exhibit enunciative and discursive procedures that relate to the translator’s work as a mediator across languages and cultures (Rudin 1996; Tymoczko 1999). Also, the strong presence of Spanish in Borderlands is a crucial aspect that contributes to the formation of a highly heteroglossic discourse. Conflict and tension, but also the possibility of negotiation between Spanish and English (and other languages and varieties), is made apparent in Anzaldúa’s work through the use of effective writing strategies and methods. The complexity of translating this kind of text is further increased when Spanish is the translating language, a language that is linguistically, culturally, and symbolically significant to US Latinx literatures and authors and that pervades their writings.4 This chapter has two main goals. First, it provides a general overview of Borderlands, placing the text into the context from which it emerged while focusing on its relevance for (Chicanx) feminisms and translation studies. The major contributions and impact of Anzaldúa’s work are also reviewed in the first section. Second, it examines the translations done in Mexico and Spain and investigates the linguistic, institutional, and sociocultural re-inscription of Anzaldúa’s pathbreaking work. Possible directions for future research are indicated at the end of the chapter.

Historical perspectives The substantial impact of Borderlands has marked academic conversation and reflection across disciplines in spaces as distant as Bolivia, Brazil, Poland, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Israel, and Taiwan (Prada 2014; Costa 2016; Cantú 2018; Pérez 2018). Anzaldúa’s work has been influential in diverse fields and disciplines such as Chicanx studies, border theory, political science, spirituality, literary studies, translation studies, critical pedagogy, epistemology, feminism, gender and queer studies. Her imposing presence is revealed in the proliferation of dissertations, academic papers, journal special issues, edited monographs, readers and anthologies which resume, criticize or re-elaborate her powerful legacy (Keating 2009; Cantú 2011, 2018; Oliver-Rotger 2011; Pérez 2018). The repercussion of her work in the international scholarly community outside the Americas demonstrates its wide and contemporary relevance (Cantú 2011, 2018). Notably, Anzaldúa’s legacy has also inspired the Society for the Study of Gloria Anzaldúa, a community of artists, scholars and activists established at the Women’s Studies Institute of the University of Texas in 2005.5 The interest in Anzaldúa’s work has been renewed and invigorated in the recent translations of Borderlands into Spanish.6 These translations certainly extend the conversations with Anzaldúa’s classic text and fill a significant cultural and literary void in Spanish-speaking discursivities (Garcés 2016). However, these translations have not yet received due attention in reviews, with critics usually taking the translation as an opportunity to revisit the ‘original’ work and scarcely commenting on the translator’s performance and/or the potential role of the translations in literary and cultural landscapes (Garcés 2016; Martínez Llorca 2016; Miguel Trula 2016; Sánchez 2016).

Critical issues and topics Part of the value of Anzaldúa’s project lies in the way it challenges certain long-established notions. Borderlands is not easily classified into a genre or category, a condition which draws attention to its genesis. The nature of the book, at once essay, narrative, autobiography, poetry, 240

On Borderlands and translation

corrido, testimony, and memoir, provides a theoretical statement concerning both creativity and theory making. For Anzaldúa, the book may fall within the category of autohistoria-teoría: a “genre of writing about one’s personal and collective history using fictive elements, a sort of fictionalized autobiography or memoir; an autohistoria-teoría is a personal essay that theorizes” (Anzaldúa 2002, 578). Epistemologically, this practice of self-knowledge is considered as valuable as or more valuable than other knowledge practices. Autohistoria-teoría, which distinguishes the interventions of feminists of color, is typically characterized by a strong social and relational import, productive and critical self-reflection, the interconnection of individual and collective subjectivities, and a sensual perspective towards artistic and intellectual creativity (Keating 2009; Pitt 2017). Through a beautiful autohistoria-teoría, Anzaldúa establishes la conciencia de la mestiza or the new mestiza consciousness; i.e. a transnational and feminist consciousness (Saldívar-Hull 1999) which acknowledges the emergence of a critically claimed subjectivity (Alarcón 1989, 1990) and a distinct sense of simultaneously belonging to different collectivities. The new mestiza inhabits a border space, characterized by convergence, tension, and transformation. In effect, the notion of Borderlands evokes a liminal transgressive territory, which is not restricted to a geopolitical area but defined by psychological, sexual, spiritual and often painful experiences. The new mestiza consciousness is the consciousness of the Borderlands.7 Contradiction and ambiguity mark her identity, which is signaled by “the transgression of rigid conceptual boundaries” (Lugones 1992, 34). This new consciousness both suffers and resists oppression while fostering the creation of a new “theoretical space for resistance” (31). In her work, Anzaldúa critically contests the view that the experience of all women can be approached in the same way, i.e. without recognizing their actual and potential differences and singularities. The invisibilization of the individual and collective experiences of women of color, Indian women and poor women that occurs through a universalist feminist discourse is one of the strongest claims of her proposal (Belausteguigoitia Rius 2015). Certainly, the notion of intersectionality, coined by Kimberlé W. Crenshaw (1989), is already in the making in this and in previous works by Anzaldúa.8 Intersectionality implies the joint consideration of the axes which contribute to shaping subjectivities and identities: gender, ethnic origin, race, culture, (dis)ability, sexual orientation, religion, age, and others. These identity axes do not only overlap or intersect in the shaping of individual and collective subjectivities but they also interconnect and are, therefore, inextricably linked to various systems of oppression, domination, and discrimination. In Anzaldúa’s own words, women of color are faced with the task of “uncovering the inter-faces, the very spaces and places where our multiple-surfaced, colored, racially gendered bodies intersect and interconnect” (Anzaldúa 1990, xvi). In her view, identity formation is never segmented but relational, thereby arguing for a politics of interconnectivity (Keating and González-López 2011). These complex and potent conceptualizations are inscribed in a borderlands discourse which, complex and potent, celebrates diversity, heterogeneity and literary interlingualism through a number of strategies. These strategies, which strongly question the normativity of language, include the use of different language varieties and typographies, various types of code-switching, translation methods and techniques (literal, juxtaposed, contextual, free, absence of translation), and the creative use of metaenunciative and paratextual devices. Borderlands discourse enacts a poetics of hybridization, articulating an interlingual dialogue which indexes “both the resistance to colonialism and the propagation of cultural alternatives” (Arteaga 1997, 36). Thus, by promoting heteroglossia, this manifestly political, multi-voiced discourse suppresses the AngloAmerican aspiration for an English-only ethos turning monologue into dialogue (73). Following Schleiermacher’s proposal ([1813] 2012), Rudin (1996) examines the authority regulating 241

María Laura Spoturno

Chicanx novels. The methods adopted by authors in writing/translating, whether they make concessions for linguistically and culturally unfamiliar readers or present them with a more ‘foreign’ discourse, affect the construction of authorial subjectivity and define a particular reading experience. The linguistic, literary, social, cultural, ethnic, pedagogical, political and ethical dimensions of bilingualism in Latinx literatures have been variously discussed (Castillo [1994] 2014; Pérez Firmat 2003; Esplin 2016, among many others).

Current contributions and research Anzaldúa’s conceptualizations have inspired and continue to inspire a vast number of investigations across disciplines. Research is currently being conducted in areas such as cultural and literary studies, migration studies, activism, women studies, queer studies, sexual education, and critical pedagogy (Cervantes-Soon and Carrillo 2016; Camacho and Lord 2017; Scott and Tuana 2017; Cuevas 2018; Martínez 2018; Pérez 2018, among many others). Of particular relevance to the analysis of the renditions of Borderlands into Spanish are the following proposals. In the field of translation studies, Pilar Godayol (2005, 2013) uses the metaphor Frontera-Spaces to characterize the liminal experience of feminine subjects in translation practices such as writing, translating or theorizing on translation. Drawing from Anzaldúa’s notion of ‘Borderlands’ and the concept of ‘border dwellers’ or ‘world travellers’ (Lugones 2003, 166), Godayol argues that feminine subjectivity must not be seen as static, normative, and universal but, rather, as an open and dynamic category, just as that of ‘woman,’ ‘sex,’ ‘gender,’ ‘identity.’ In her view, “contingency can never be eliminated in the interweaving of gender and translation” (12). Translating as/like a woman entails situating one’s discourse in an intermediate space, questioning given categories and transforming and creating meanings. The current call for decolonial feminist translation practices seems promising for the development of new methodological and theoretical perspectives in the field of translation studies. In the context of Latin American feminisms, Claudia de Lima Costa (2016) explores how translation together with the notion of equivocation9 may contribute to subvert the coloniality of gender, i.e. Western patriarchal binary gender patterns and constructions deriving from colonial power (Lugones 2010). Engaging in a productive discussion that questions equivocal categories such as the division nature/culture, which does not belong in the world views of indigenous peoples, may illuminate our thinking and knowledges. In this scenario, translation is a “key element in forging political alliances and feminist epistemologies that are pro-social justice, antiracist, anti-imperialist and decolonial” (Costa 2016, 56). Also within María Lugones’ analytical framework, Emek Ergun (2018) preliminarily argues for a revision of translation as ‘a praxis of world traveling.’ In keeping with Anzaldúa’s legacy, translation is reconceived as a border area, a site of powerful political and social transformation, in which “asymmetrically situated subjects of difference engage in acts of mutual recognition, confrontation, reconciliation, collaboration, and transformation” (Ergun 2018, n.p.). Decolonial feminist ethics promotes the emergence of multiple and diverse intersubjectivities in the translated text, which, in turn, denaturalizes categories and practices of colonial modernity. Focused on Anzaldúa’s text and more concerned with its interlingual nature, Marlene Hansen Esplin (2016) sheds some new light on Borderlands from a perspective informed by translation studies and literary and Latinx studies. Through the analysis of the use of strategies of self-translation and accommodation, Esplin argues that the two sections of Borderlands display quite different translation methods. The first seems to be more intelligible for a monolingual reader than the second section of poems, in which adjustments are less frequent. For Esplin, as an author-translator, Anzaldúa has a markedly pedagogical and ethnographic agenda, which 242

On Borderlands and translation

becomes palpable in the various conciliatory translation methods displayed in her text such as literal and contextual translation and paratextual commentary.10 An openly interlingual praxis and a transgressive use of language/s define a polemic authorial ethos, which, in my view, is not only conciliatory but also strategic in commanding readers to meet the author halfway. As will be seen in the next section, the re-creation of a new language,“the language of the Borderlands,” a bastard, unauthorized discourse is, no doubt, one of the biggest challenges the translators of Borderlands have to face.

Main research methods Textual analysis The two almost equally long sections of Borderlands are further subdivided into seven and six subsections respectively. A fair number of authorial endnotes, which offer bibliographical references and a series of historical, literary and cultural specifications, are included at the end of the first section of essays. The poetry section contains very few notes.11 To date, there are four editions of Borderlands, which keep Anzaldúa’s work intact and vary mainly in the paratextual narratives produced by critics, artists and activists that introduce or comment on the text. All editions of the book have been published by Aunt Lute Books (1987, [1987] 1999, [1987] 2007, [1987] 2012). Through a qualitative comparative methodology, this analysis has focused on various rhetorical, (para) textual and contextual aspects, which determine the translators’ intervention and positioning in the translated discourse.

The word within the Borderlands Paratextual enunciation remains one of the most effective devices to present the translator’s subjectivity and agenda. At the centre of feminist translation practices (Flotow 1991; Godayol 2013), the analysis of paratexts reveals five key aspects in the translations examined: the challenge of translating Borderlands into Spanish without betraying its spirit, language, culture, and argument; the assumption of a political position; the identification of writing and translation; the concern to elaborate appropriate translation strategies and techniques; the need to recreate a polyphonic and dialogic vision of language/s; and in this category, the translation of grammatical gender as a central problem in the translation of a text, which challenges gender categories and power relations. The responsibility for the Mexican translation, which follows the first edition of Borderlands, is generally attributed to Chicana writer Norma Cantú (2015). However, and much in keeping with an academic ethos, it visibly acknowledges the fruitful collaboration of at least three other people: Marisa Belausteguigoitia, the coordinator of the PUEG, Mexican poet Xanath Caraza, who produced the first draft of chapters 1, 3, and 5 of the first section, and Mexican translator and scholar Claire Joysmith, who translated the poetry in the second section. A high degree of institutionalization determines the intended audience of this translation. Placed before the translator’s preface, a lengthy introduction by Belausteguigoitia (2015) promotes the academic, social, cultural, and pedagogical re-inscription of Anzaldúa’s text in Mexico and, more generally, in Latin America. For Belausteguigoitia, this translation visibilizes Anzaldúa’s experience as a lesbian woman of color while meaningfully connecting it with the experiences of indigenous activists in Mexico.12 The pedagogical import of the translation of Borderlands is further underscored through a significant number of translator’s notes, which clarify terms, concepts, and cultural references. 243

María Laura Spoturno

The second translation was authored by translator Carmen Valle Simón and published in Madrid in 2016 by Capitán Swing. One of the missions of this independent publishing house is to critically broaden the knowledge available in Spanish, particularly in the fields of social studies and philosophy. Based on the second edition of Borderlands, Valle’s version includes the translation of an introduction by Chicana critic Sonia Saldívar-Hull and of an interview between Anzaldúa and Karin Ikas. Contrary to the Mexican translation, the Spanish version explicitly addresses a general audience, since, for Valle, the multilingual nature of the source text should offer no difficulties for an academic reader (Valle 2016). In keeping with her imagined readership, Valle’s translation is accompanied by a reduced number of notes, some of which provide or update historical and terminological aspects. As stated in her introductory notes, this translation, strongly concerned with the problem of gender and how this manifests in the use of Spanish, is intended for each and every human being who finds the patriarchal uniform of gender too tight or suffocating.13

Relocating the Borderlands Relocation and displacement are in order in both translations. However, each translator engages in a different literary and cultural praxis, making readers go through diverse reading experiences. A strong political and cultural awareness is fostered in Cantú’s translation. The political and cultural re-inscription of Anzaldúa’s work in a Mexican (academic) space, marked by old and new border conflicts, is particularly evident in the addition of linguistic, cultural, historical, and geographical references in translator’s and editor’s footnotes as well as within the text. For instance, the more general regional indication in the source text, “Other Spanish-speaking groups are going through the same” (Anzaldúa [1987] 1999, 80), becomes specifically limited in the translation by shifting the focus towards the Spanish language (and not the speaking communities) and by adding the prepositional phrase “en Estados Unidos”: “El español de otros grupos de hispanohablantes (en Estados Unidos) va por el mismo camino” (Anzaldúa [Cantú] 2015, 118).14 The paratextual space is also abundant with linguistic and cultural specifications: “Puesto que Anzaldúa usa the borderland(s) con un significado más complejo . . . hemos decidido no traducirlo”15 (Anzaldúa [Cantú] 2015, 61, emphasis in the original). In turn, Valle’s translation builds a more intuitive cross-cultural awareness, probably indicative of a more distant perspective. While Cantú’s translation invariably reflects the awareness of an insider, some of Valle’s choices demonstrate that she is an outsider to the Chicanx community. This is exemplified by the translator’s use of Mexican Spanish in some passages and the sometimes unpredictable transgression of or adherence to the rules of Castilian Spanish. Such is the case of the choice of the noun ‘chavos’ in “De los chavos y la gente de mi edad aprendí Pachuco” (Anzaldúa [Valle] 2016, 107) to translate the quite neutral ‘kids’ in the source text: “From kids and people my own age I picked up Pachuco” (Anzaldúa [1987] 1999, 78). The decision here to transgress the rule in Spanish to use initial small letters to name languages and linguistic varieties such as ‘Pachuco,’ is contrasted by the highly normative plural ‘gais’ in the following fragment: “Solo los hombres gais han tenido el coraje de exponerse a la mujer que tienen dentro y desafiar la masculinidad actual” (Anzaldúa [Valle] 2016, 142).16 Also, the chance to transform the polysemy in Anzaldúa’s anticipatory dictum, “The queer are the mirror reflecting the heterosexual tribe’s fear: being different” (Anzaldúa [1987] 1999, 40), is missing in Valle’s confusing rendition, in which the addition of the noun phrase ‘los homosexuales’ in apposition to ‘queers’ implies an equivalence in meaning which does not, in fact, exist: “Los homosexuales, los queers son el espejo que refleja el miedo de la tribu heterosexual: ser distinto” (Anzaldúa [Valle] 2016, 59, emphasis in the original).17 244

On Borderlands and translation

Self-images and the Borderlands discourse A knowledgeable, academic, speculative, but also intimate tone pervades Cantú’s paratextual discourse. Translator’s notes serve as effective mechanisms of discursive control (Zoppi Fontana 2007) and as a vehicle to voice the translator’s own experiences and knowledges. For instance, the fact that Anzaldúa menstruated at a very early age is often regarded as inseparable from her work as poet and activist (Castillo [1994] 2014). Cantú offers this biographical information in a note suggesting a personal relationship with the author by addressing Anzaldúa by her first name: “Gloria comenzó a menstruar tempranamente debido a un desequilibrio hormonal” (Anzaldúa [Cantú] 2015, 103).18 In other passages, this intimacy is replaced by a more factual tone: “Anzaldúa estudió en Edinburg, Texas, en la Pan American University, hoy día University of Texas, Pan American” (Anzaldúa [Cantú] 2015, 113).19 The translator’s rather lengthy notes are also used to make (cultural, linguistic or other) corrections and indulge in speculation about the text that is being translated:20 En esta sección Anzaldúa pretende describir los rasgos lingüísticos del habla del sur de Texas y explicar su origen. Aun sin la herramienta académica para describir el fenómeno lingüístico. . . . (Anzaldúa [Cantú] 2015, 117) De seguro Anzaldúa encontró la cita en donde Picaso alega que . . . (Anzaldúa [Cantú] 2015, 128)21 In the first of the quoted fragments, which belong to translator’s notes in chapters 3 and 4, an evaluative tone pervades the translator’s intervention. This is evidenced by the use of the verbal form ‘pretende’ and the concessive adverbial clause (“Aun sin la herramienta académica”), which question the accuracy of some of the observations made in the source text and anticipate the error readers may potentially spot. The image of the translator as a connoisseuse is also patent in the second fragment, in which the translator seems to draw conclusions from Anzaldúa’s literary and cultural background. While Valle’s intervention at the paratextual level is not too evident, her capable hand is apparent in the re-creation of Anzaldúa’s borderlands discourse. As much as in the source text, transgression and translation come forth as intrinsic modes of Valle’s translation practice (Vazquez 2005). Heterogeneity is enhanced through a number of enunciative techniques: the preservation of italics in the translation to signal the presence of Spanish in the source text; a tendency to stick to the original’s word order and diction; the practice of different forms of translation and of contra-traducción, i.e., the non-translation of certain terms and expressions in English, which are assumed to be intelligible for a Spanish-speaking audience; and the use of marked typographical conventions such as capitalizing terms indicating cultural origin. For instance, in the following fragment, the strategic translation of the Spanish saying into English is preserved making the heterogeneous nature of the source text visible in the target text as well: En boca cerrada no entran moscas. “Flies don’t enter a closed mouth” era un dicho que oía mucho cuando era niña. Ser habladora era ser chismosa y embustera, era hablar demasiado. (Anzaldúa [Valle] 2016, 104, emphasis in the original)22 Establishing her position, Valle indicates that the use of strategies which can make the foreign and the hybrid nature of the source text more visible has been one of the main points on her agenda. Her discursively significant interventions facilitate a border reading/crossing dynamics. 245

María Laura Spoturno

In this respect, in Cantú’s otherwise vocal Mexican translation, a tendency towards discourse homogenization is evident in the alteration of word order patterns, the elimination of italics as an indication of Spanish in the source text, and the removal of juxtaposed translated fragments; unlike the translation produced in Spain, the Mexican version of this segment reads, “De niña escuchaba mucho el dicho “En boca cerrada no entran moscas”. Ser habladora era ser chismosa y mentirosa, hablar de más” (Anzaldúa [Cantú] 2015, 114).

Gender on the borderlands of translation That Borderlands makes a strong claim against gender-biased language is unquestionable: “We are robbed of our feminine being by the masculine plural. Language is a male discourse” (Anzaldúa [1987] 1999, 76). However, as noted by Valle (2016), at the time the book was published the reflection on gender and language (and translation) was still incipient. In fact, Anzaldúa’s text makes erratic generic use of the Spanish masculine plural as can be seen in the following fragment in which a plural feminine noun (‘deslenguadas’) is mixed with a masculine form in the same passage (‘somos huérfanos’) to refer to the same subjects: “Deslenguadas. Somos los del español deficiente,” “Racially, culturally and linguistically somos huérfanos” (Anzaldúa [1987] 1999, 80, emphasis in the original). Ambivalence around the use of gender-marked terms is visible in both translations. While singling out the problem of grammatical gender in her prefatory notes, Cantú’s musings seem to fall into the trap of unwanted binarisms: “En algunos casos ha sido possible bifurcar los géneros en la versión traducida, es decir, incluir tanto lo femenino como lo masculino” (Cantú 2015, 53).23 Aware of the limitations imposed by Spanish, the team of translators in Mexico trusts readers will not attribute any sexist constructions in the translation to them. In the case of the Spanish translation, allegedly guided by a “depatriarchalizing intent,” the generic use of the Spanish plural masculine is employed to follow Anzaldúa’s literal diction: “En las partes en que Gloria Anzaldúa se expresa en español utiliza a veces masculinos genéricos y los he respetado” (Valle 2016, 29).24 While this decision may be said to present the reader with a reading experience potentially closer to that triggered by the source text, it seems to be inconsistent with the general (non-academic) reader Valle has in mind, who may (or may not) interpret Anzaldúa’s thinking and expression retrospectively. The following fragments illustrate a few ambivalent moments in both translations, in which gender-related terms are translated from English into Spanish through gender inclusive or exclusive formulae and the introduction of binary oppositions. Faced with the fragment, “For some of us, language is a homeland closer than the Southwest – for many Chicanos today live in the Midwest and the East” (Anzaldúa [1987] 1999, 77), in Cantú’s version, the initial feminine plural form (‘para algunas de nosotras’), and the determination of homeland as a feminine noun in Spanish (‘una homeland’) eventually lead to a binary opposition, which singles out ‘chicanos’ and ‘chicanas’ but determines the compound noun phrase through a generic plural masculine forms (‘muchos’): Para algunas de nosotras, la lengua es una homeland, nuestra tierra, que nos es más cercana que el suroeste estadounidense, pues muchos chicanos y chicanas hoy en día viven en la parte central y en el este del país. (Anzaldúa [Cantú] 2015: 115, emphasis in ‘homeland’ in the original) In Valle’s translation of the same fragment, the masculine (plural) (‘para algunos de nosotros’) is not only used to translate the gender neutral noun phrase in the source text (‘for some of us’) but it is also implied in the notion of ‘patria’ through its Latin etymology (‘of/or pertaining 246

On Borderlands and translation

to the father’). The transformation of ‘Chicanos’ into ‘personas Chicanas,’ a more neutral form, attests to the varied procedures employed in this translation: Para algunos de nosotros, la lengua es una patria más cercana que el suroeste, pues muchas personas Chicanas viven actualmente en Medio Oeste y en el este. (Anzaldúa [Valle] 2016, 106) In spite of the fluctuations in both renditions, Cantú’s version seems more likely to produce current feminist discourse. Confronted with the fragment, “we, the mestizas and the mestizos, will remain” (Anzaldúa [1987] 1999, 86, emphasis in the original), Cantú’s translation reads: “nosotras, las mestizas, permaneceremos” (Anzaldúa [Cantú] 2015, 124), in which all signs of binary and masculine gender forms have been erased through the use of the Spanish feminine plural. Other procedures used in Cantú’s version range from the creation of neologisms using rules which transgress the normativity of Spanish to the introduction of unmarked gender nouns. An innovative way to form compound words and plural forms challenges the rules of Spanish in her translation. For instance, the noun ‘Latinas’ is rendered as ‘latinaestadounidenses,’ thereby preserving the feminine meaning and form in the first noun (Anzaldúa [Cantú] 2015, 118),25 and the plural form of ‘gay’ becomes ‘gays,’ as is a common, albeit transgressive, use in Latin American varieties of Spanish (“Solo los gays tienen el valor de reconocer a la mujer dentro de ellos y de confrontar la masculinidad actual,” Anzaldúa [Cantú] 2015, 144). A tendency to avoid the use of genderspecific forms is observed in Cantú’s version, in which, for example, the noun ‘friends’ is rendered as ‘amistades,’ a plural noun derived from the abstract noun ‘amistad’ (friendship) in Spanish; “ha pedido prestado a sus amistades para poder pagarle al coyote . . .” (Anzaldúa [Cantú] 2015, 71).26

Conclusion and future directions The analysis of the linguistic, cultural, and political re-inscription of Anzaldúa’s Borderlands through the Spanish translations initiates new dialogues and grounds for inquiry. Even if both translations are concerned with the problems of gender and discourse, they necessarily reflect different (feminine) subjectivities and praxis. While Cantú’s collective translation explores the creative and epistemological potentialities of autohistoria-teoría, showing the translators’ own readings and positions, Valle is more concerned with the linguistic and literary challenges in the re-creation of Anzaldúa’s borderlands discourse. A committed insider’s perspective, Cantú’s version develops a mestiza translation consciousness, which contrasts with Valle’s individual and distant presence. The actual impact of these translations and the repercussions they may have for the strategic interaction of Latinx, Latin American and Iberian feminisms are yet to be seen. Some directions for future research include work on the relationship between feminist translation praxis and autohistoria-teoría. Further critical insight into Anzaldúa’s work effected from the perspective of translation, feminism and gender could further examine the complexity of her legacy. Extensive rigorous research into the actual discursive materialization of feminine subjectivities in (re) translation practices may provide key analytical elements to study the interactions of feminisms across the globe. Finally, studies that aim to investigate the notion of decolonial feminist translation praxis seem relevant both for translation studies and critical feminisms.

Further reading Keating, AnaLouise, ed. 2005. EntreMundos/ AmongWorlds. New Perspectives on Gloria E. Anzaldúa. New York: Palgrave MacMillan. 247

María Laura Spoturno

This collective volume provides a programmatic and comprehensive overview of Anzaldúa’s theoretical, aesthetic, political and epistemological inquiries and lifelong contributions. Keating, AnaLouise, ed. 2009. The Gloria Anzaldúa Reader. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. In this Reader, Anzaldúa scholar AnaLouise Keating puts together key texts (previously published and unpublished work), which are fundamental to fully understand the making and development of Gloria Anzaldúa’s political and aesthetic project over time. Costa, Claudia de Lima. 2016. Gender and Equivocation: Notes on Decolonial Feminist Translations, in Wendy Harcourt, ed., The Palgrave Handbook of Gender and Development Critical Engagements in Feminist Theory and Practice. Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 48–61. Informed by cultural studies, critical feminisms, and translation studies, Costa (2016) presents an introductory thought-provoking conceptualization of the political and ethical issues concerned in decolonial feminist translation practices.

Related topics Decolonial feminist translation, transnational feminist translation studies, feminist ethos and translation, gender and retranslation, borderlands feminism and translation

Notes 1 Translations into Spanish of chapters 2 and 4 appeared respectively in bell hooks et al. (2004) and García (2009). Translation into French of chapter 7 was published in Cahiers du CEDREF (2011). 2 A detailed analysis of the poetry section is beyond the scope of this chapter. 3 In this chapter, the “x” in terms such as “Latinx” and “Chicanx” is used to avoid sexist and binary gender constructions. 4 An early paper by Rosario Martín Ruano and África Vidal Claramonte (2004) examines the literary, cultural, ideological, economic and methodological factors implied in the translation of US Latinx literatures. 5 For more information on this Society, see https://elmundozurdo.wordpress.com/about/ 6 Borderlands was completely translated into Italian (Zaccaria 2000) and is now being translated into French (Cantú 2018). 7 See Anzaldúa’s poem “To live in the Borderlands means you” (Anzaldúa [1987] 1999, 216–217). 8 See Anzaldúa and Moraga (1981). On intersectionality and translation, see Flotow (2009). 9 See Costa (2016) for a full development of her proposal. 10 The so-called conciliatory method is, according to Esplin (2016, 182), exemplified by fragments such as “[h]ocicona, repelona, chismosa, having a big mouth, questioning, carrying tales are all signs of being mal criada” (Anzaldúa 1997, 76, my emphasis), in which a translation/explanation of the three Spanish nouns is offered in Anzaldúa’s own text. 11 In this chapter, I follow the second edition of the book. 12 Belausteguigoitia highlights the connections between Anzaldúa’s legacy and the Zapatista Women Movement in Mexico. 13 “Las personas lectoras a las que se ha tenido en mente a la hora de traducir no constituyen un público académico, pues el profesorado y alumnado universitario se maneja ya bastante bien en inglés, por lo que el texto multilingüe de la versión no ofrecería ninguna dificultad. ¿A quiénes se dirige esta edición de Borderlands? ¿Quién puede ser “la Nueva Mestiza” de esta edición? Podría ser cualquier ser humano, mujer, hombre o cualquier otra etiqueta con la que se identifique, a quien el uniforme de género del patriarcado le quede estrecho, le apriete, le ahogue o se le estalle por las costuras” (Valle 2016, 31). 14 A quite literal translation of said passage may read: “The Spanish of other Spanish-speaking groups (in the United States) is going through the same.” Unless otherwise indicated, all English translations of Cantú’s and Valle’s work are my own. Likewise, except when differently specified, emphasis added to certain fragments is mine. 15 “As Anzaldúa uses the borderland(s) in a much more complex way . . . we have decided not to translate this term.” 16 “Only gay men have had the courage to expose themselves to the woman inside them and to challenge the current masculinity” (Anzaldúa [1987] 1999, 106). 248

On Borderlands and translation

17 This is not to say the translator does not know the difference between these two terms. In effect, the translator’s note at page 42 explains the evolution of the use of the term “queer” in the second half of the 20th century. 18 “Gloria started to menstruate early as a consequence of a hormonal disorder.” 19 “Anzaldúa studied in Edinburg, Texas, at the Pan American University, today the University of Texas, Pan American.” 20 For a comprehensive study of the notes in this translation, see Spoturno (2019). 21 “In this section Anzaldúa attempts a description of the linguistic features of the Texan Southern accent and an explanation of its origin. Even without the academic intruments to characterize the linguistic phenomenon . . .; Most certainly, Anzaldúa found the quote where Picasso claims . . .” 22 “En boca cerrada no entran moscas. ‘Flies don’t enter a closed mouth’ is a saying I kept hearing when I was a child. Ser habladora was to be a gossip and a liar, to talk too much.” (Anzaldúa [1987] 1999: 76). 23 “In some cases it has been possible to bifurcate the genders in the translated version; i.e., to include the feminine as much as the masculine.” In a recent paper, Cantú (2018) indicates her personal preference and political position regarding the use of terms such as ‘Latinx’ and ‘Chicanx,’ which may include nonbinary gender constructions. 24 “In the sections in which Gloria Anzaldúa uses Spanish, she sometimes employs masculine generic forms and I have respected them.” 25 The usual form of this word in Spanish is “latinoestadounidenses.” 26 “She’s . . . borrowed from friends in order to pay the coyote . . .” (Anzaldúa [1987] 1999, 34).

References Alarcón, Norma. 1989. Traddutora, Traditora: A Paradigmatic Figure of Chicana Feminism. Cultural Critique (13), 57–87. Available at: www.jstor.org/stable/1354269 [Accessed 23 Aug. 2018]. Alarcón, Norma. 1990. Chicana Feminism: In the Tracks of ‘the’ Native Woman. Cultural Studies, 4(3), 248–256. doi: 10.1080/09502389000490201. Anzaldúa, Gloria. 1987. Borderlands/La Frontera. The New Mestiza. San Francisco: Aunt Lute. Anzaldúa, Gloria. 1990. Haciendo caras, una entrada, in Gloria Anzaldúa, ed., Making Face, Making Soul. Haciendo Caras. Creative and Critical Perspectives of Feminists of Color. San Francisco: aunt lute books, xv–xxvii. Anzaldúa, Gloria. 1987/1999. Borderlands/La Frontera. The New Mestiza. Introduction by Sonia SaldívarHull. 2nd ed. San Francisco: Aunt Lute. Anzaldúa, Gloria. 2000. Terre di confine/La Frontera. Translated by Paola Zaccaria. Roma: Palomar. Anzaldúa, Gloria. 2002. Now Let Us Shift . . . the Path of Conocimiento . . . Inner Works, Public Acts, in Gloria Anzaldúa and AnaLouise Keating, eds., This Bridge We Call Home. New York and London: Routledge, 540–578. Anzaldúa, Gloria. 1987/2007. Borderlands/La Frontera. The New Mestiza. New Introduction with commentaries by artists, activists and teachers. Introduction by Sonia Saldívar-Hull. 3rd edition. San Francisco: Aunt Lute. Anzaldúa, Gloria. 2011. La conscience de la mestiza. Vers une nouvelle conscience. Translated by Paola Bacchetta and Jules Falquet. Cahiers du CEDREF, 18, 75–96. Anzaldúa, Gloria. 1987/2012. Borderlands/La Frontera. The New Mestiza. Introduction by Norma E. Cantú and Aída Hurtado. 4th edition. San Francisco: Aunt Lute. Anzaldúa, Gloria. 2015. Borderlands/La Frontera: la nueva mestiza. Translated by Norma E. Cantú. Introduction by Marisa Belausteguigoitia Rius. City of Mexico: UNAM. Anzaldúa, Gloria. 2016. Borderlands/La Frontera. La nueva mestiza. Translated by Carmen Valle Simón. Introduction by Sonia Saldívar-Hull. Madrid: Capitán Swing. Anzaldúa, Gloria and Cherríe Moraga, eds. 1981. This Bridge Called My Back. Writings by Radical Women of Color. Introduction by Toni Cade Bambara. New York: Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press. Arteaga, Alfred. 1997. Chicano Poetics. Heterotexts and Hybridities. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Belausteguigoitia Rius, Marisa. 2015. Introducción, in Glotia Anzaldúa, ed., Borderlands/La Frontera: la nueva mestiza. City of Mexico: UNAM, 13–44. bell hooks, Avtar Brah, Chela Sandoval et al. 2004. Otras inapropiables. Feminismos desde fronteras. Translated by Rocío Macho Ronco et al. Madrid: Traficantes de sueños. Camacho, Michelle Madsen and Susan M. Lord. 2017. The Borderlands of Education: Latinas in Engineering. Boulder: Lexington Books. 249

María Laura Spoturno

Cantú, Norma. 2011. Doing Work That Matters: The Impact of Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. BROCAR [online], 35, 109–116. Available at: https://dialnet.unirioja.es/servlet/ articulo?codigo=3932790 [Accessed 10 Aug. 2018]. Cantú, Norma. 2015. Traducir: abrir caminos, construer puentes, in Gloria Anzaldúa, ed., Borderlands/La Frontera: la nueva mestiza. City of Mexico: UNAM, 45–57. Cantú, Norma. 2018. Doing Work That Matters: An Introduction to the Special Issue on Gloria Evangelina Anzaldúa. Camino Real [online], 10(13), 13–23. Available at: doing_cantu_CR_2018_N13.pdf [Accessed 15 Aug. 2018]. Castillo, Ana. 1994/2014. Massacre of the Dreamers: Essays on Xicanisma. Foreword by Clarissa Pinkola Estés. 2nd ed. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. Cervantes-Soon, Claudia G. and Juan Francisco Carrillo. 2016. Toward a Pedagogy of Border Thinking: Building on Latina Students’ Subaltern Knowledge. The High School Journal [online], 99(4), 282–301. Available at: www.jstor.org/stable/44075301 [Accessed 22 Aug. 2018]. Costa, Claudia de Lima. 2016. Gender and Equivocation: Notes on Decolonial Feminist Translations, in Wendy Harcourt, ed., The Palgrave Handbook of Gender and Development Critical Engagements in Feminist Theory and Practice. Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 48–61. Crenshaw, Kimberlé W. 1989. Demarginalizing the intersection of race and sex: A Black feminist critique of antidiscrimination doctrine, feminist theory and antiracist politics. University of Chicago Legal Forum, 1, 139–167. Available at: https://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/uclf/vol1989/iss1/8 Cuevas, T. Jackqueline. 2018. Post-Borderlandia: Chicana Literature and Gender Variant Critique. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Ergun, Emek. 2018. Decolonial Feminist Translation as an Enabler of Subversive Mobilities. Loving Perceptions and Cross-Border Connectivities. Paper presented at Conference Toward Decolonial Feminisms, Pennsylvania, 11–13 May. Esplin, Marlene Hansen. 2016. Self-translation and Accommodation: Strategies of Multilingualism in Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza and Margarita Cota-Cárdenas’s Puppet. MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States, 41(2), 176–201. Available at: https://muse.jhu. edu/article/620329 [Accessed 26 Jan. 2018]. Flotow, Luise von. 1991. Feminist Translation: Contexts, Practices and Theories. TTR: traduction, terminologie, rédaction [online], 4(2), 69–84. doi: 10.7202/037094ar. Available at: www.erudit.org/fr/revues/ ttr/1991-v4-n2-ttr1475/037094ar.pdf [Accessed 10 Aug. 2017]. Flotow, Luise von. 2009. Contested Gender in Translation: Intersectionality and Metramorphics. Palimpsestes [online], 22. doi: 10.4000/palimpsestes.211. Available at: http://palimpsestes.revues.org/211 [Accessed 27 Sept. 2017]. Garcés, Helios F. 2016. La nueva mestiza, por fin Gloria Anzaldúa en castellano. Diagonal [online]. Wednesday 13 Apr. Available at: www.diagonalperiodico.net/culturas/29997-la-nueva-mestiza-por-fin-gloriaanzaldua-castellano.html [Accessed 5 May 2017]. García, Cristina, ed. 2009. Voces sin fronteras. Antología Vintage Español de literatura mexicana y chicana contemporánea. New York: Vintage Español. Godayol, Pilar. 2005. Frontera Spaces, in José Santaemilia, ed., Gender, Sex and Translation. The Manipulation of Identities. London and New York: Routledge, 9–14. Godayol, Pilar. 2013. Gender and Translation, in Carmen Millán and Francesca Bartrina, eds., The Routledge Handbook of Translation Studies. London and New York: Routledge, 173–185. Keating, AnaLouise. 2009. Reading Gloria Anzaldúa, Reading Ourselves . . . Complex Intimacies, Intricate Connections, in AnaLouise Keating, ed., The Gloria Anzaldúa Reader. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1–15. Keating, AnaLouise and Gloria González-López. 2011. Building Bridges, Transforming Loss, Shaping New Dialogues: Anzaldúan Studies for the Twenty-First Century, in AnaLouise Keating and Gloria González-López, eds., Bridging. How Gloria Anzaldúa’s Life and Work Translaformed Our Own. Texas: University of Texas Press, 1–16. Lugones, María. 1992. On Borderlands/La Frontera: An Interpretive Essay. Hypatia, 7(4), 31–37. Available at: www.jstor.org/stable/3810075 [Accessed 7 July 2018]. Lugones, María. 2003. Pilgrimages/Peregrinajes: Theorizing Coalition Against Multiple Oppressions. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. Lugones, María. 2010. Toward a Decolonial Feminism. Hypatia, 25(4), 742–759. Available at: www.jstor. org/stable/40928654 [Accessed 7 July 2018]. 250

On Borderlands and translation

Martínez, Norell. 2018. Femzines, Artivism, and Altar Aesthetics: Third Wave Feminism Chicana Style. Chiricú Journal: Latina/o Literatures, Arts, and Cultures, 2(2), 45–67. doi: 10.2979/chiricu.2.2.05. Available at: www.jstor.org/stable/10.2979/chiricu.2.2.05 [Accessed 7 July 2018]. Martínez Llorca, Ricardo. 2016.‘Borderlands. La frontera’, de Gloria Anzaldúa. Culturamas. La revista de información cultural en Internet [online]. Sunday 24 Apr. Available at: www.culturamas.es/blog/2016/04/24/ borderlands-la-frontera-de-gloria-anzaldua/ [Accessed 9 Aug. 2018]. Martín Ruano, Rosario and Carmen África Vidal Claramonte. 2004. Asymmetries in/of Translation: Translating Translated Hispanicism(s).  TTR: traduction, terminologie, rédaction [online], 17(1), 81–105. Available at: www.erudit.org/fr/revues/ttr/2004-v17-n1-ttr1014/011974ar.pdf [Accessed 15 July 2018]. Mignolo, Walter. 1996. Linguistic Maps, Literary Geographies, and Cultural Landscapes: Languages, Languaging, and (Trans)Nationalism. Modern Language Quarterly, 57(2), 181–196 [Print]. Miguel Trula, Esther. 2016. Libros: Borderlands/La frontera, de Gloria Anzaldúa. Altaïr magazine. Thursday 12 May. Available at: www.altairmagazine.com/blog/libros-borderlandsla-frontera/ [Accessed 7 July 2018]. Oliver-Rotger, Antonia. 2011. Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderless Theory in Spain. Signs, 37(1), 5–10. Available at: www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/660169 [Accessed 10 May 2017]. Pérez, Domino Renee. 2018. New Tribalism and Chicana/o Indigeneity in the Work of Gloria Anzaldúa, in Francisco A. Lomelí, Denise A. Segura, and Elyette Benjamin-Labarthe, eds., Routledge Handbook of Chicana/o Studies. New York and London: Routledge, 242–254. Pérez Firmat, Gustavo. 2003. Tongue Ties: Logo-Eroticism in Anglo-Hispanic Literature. New York: Palgrave. Pitt, Andrea J. 2017. Gloria E. Anzaldúa’s Autohistoria-teoría as an Epistemology of Self-Knowledge/ Ignorance. Hypatia, 31(2), 352–369. doi: 10.1111/hypa.12235. Available at: https://onlinelibrary.wiley. com/doi/pdf/10.1111/hypa.12235 [Accessed 14 Aug. 2018]. Prada, Ana Rebeca. 2014. Is Anzaldua Translatable in Bolivia? In Sonia E. Alvarez et al. eds., Translocalities/ Translocalidades: The Politics of Feminist Translation in the Latin/a Americas. Durham: Duke University Press, 57–77. Rudin, Ernst. 1996. Tender Accents of Sound: Spanish in the Chicano Novel in English. Tempe: Bilingual Press/ Editorial Bilingüe. Saldívar-Hull, Sonia. 1999. Introduction to the Second Edition, in Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera. The New Mestiza, 2nd ed. San Francisco: Aunt Lute, 1–15. Sánchez, Brenda. 2016. La UNAM traduce al español Borderlands, de Gloria Anzaldúa: un legado sobre el feminismo chicano. Conexión migrante, Tuesday 8 Nov. Available at: www.conexionmigrante. com/08112016/ launamreivindicaalasfeministaschicanas/ [Accessed 6 June 2017]. Schleiermacher, Friedrich. 1813/2012. On the Different Methods of Translating. Translated by Susan Bernofsky, in Lawrence Venuti, ed., The Translation Studies Reader, 3rd ed. London and New York: Routledge, 43–63. Scott, Charles and Nancy Tuana. 2017. Nepantla: Writing (from) the In-Between. The Journal of Speculative Philosophy, 31(1), 1–15. Available at: www.jstor.org/stable/10.5325/jspecphil.31.1.0001 [Accessed 10 Aug. 2018]. Spoturno, María Laura. 2019. La conquista del espacio enunciativo. Un estudio de las notas en la traducción al español de Borderlands/La Frontera. Lengua y Habla [online], 23, 360–379. Available at: http://erevis tas.saber.ula.ve/index.php/lenguayhabla/article/view/15678/21921926778 [Accessed: 27 Dec. 2019]. Tymoczko, Maria. 1999. Post-colonial Writing and Literary Translation, in Susan Bassnett and Harish Trivedi, eds., Post-Colonial Translation. Theory and Practice. London and New York: Routledge, 19–40. Valle, Carmen. 2016. Traducir Borderlands/ La Frontera, in Gloria Anzaldúa, ed., Borderlands/La Frontera. La nueva mestiza. Madrid: Capitán Swing, 29–31. Vazquez, Edith M. 2005. La Gloriosa Travesura de la Musa Que Cruza/The Misbehaving Glory(a) of the Border-Crossing Muse: Transgression in Anzaldúa’s Children’s Stories. in AnaLouise Keating, ed., EntreMundos/ AmongWorlds. New Perspectives on Gloria e. Anzaldúa. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 63–76. Zoppi Fontana, Mónica. 2007. En las márgenes del texto, intervalos de sentidos en movimiento. Páginas de Guarda, I(4), 11–39 [Print].

251

Part III

Feminism, gender, and queer in translation

19 At the confluence of queer and translation Subversions, fluidities, and performances Pauline Henry-Tierney

Introduction Performative, fluid, subversive – the shared applicability of these adjectives to discourses on both translation and sexuality, underscores the recent confluence of translation studies and queer studies as a necessary and fruitful point of intersection. In her etymological exploration of the roots of the term ‘queer,’ Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick illustrates its mobility describing queer as a “continuing moment, movement, motive – recurrent, eddying, troublant” (Kosofsky Sedgwick 1990, xii). Its Indo-European root – twerkw, meaning ‘across,’ also yields quer (traverse in German), the Latin torquere (to twist), and athwart in English. Interestingly, translation’s own root, from Old French or from the Latin translatio(n), means ‘carried across.’ Both terms are characterized by their relational quality to a perceived original but also, by their departure from it. Their processes of traversing from one mode of being to another is often performative, marked by theatricality and flourish, an unmasking of both linguistic and social norms. As BJ Epstein and Robert Gillet intimate, translation, “as an indefinite deferral of meaning, but also as a site of othering, hegemony and subalternity, marks it out as always already queer” (2017, 1). Yet, despite their overlapping origins and practices, the critical intermeshing of translation studies and queer studies has been relatively tardy despite translation studies’ prolific engagement with gender and feminisms since the mid-1990s.

Historic and current perspectives Casting a look over the field, one of the first voices, and for a considerable time, the only voice to articulate important links between queer identity and translation was Keith Harvey (1998, 2000, 2003a, 2003b), whose work on the translation of gay French writers shed light on the way that “translated texts can suggest models of otherness that can be used in processes of internal identity formation and imagined community projection” (Harvey 2000, 159). Christopher Larkosh’s edited volume Re-engendering Translation (2011), includes several chapters which deal with queer identity, either in relation to texts or their translators. Numerous special issues of journals on translation and queer have appeared in recent years, including the special issue “Translating Queers/Queering Translation” of In Other Words, edited by BJ Epstein (2010); a special issue 255

Pauline Henry-Tierney

of Comparative Literature Studies (2014), “The Gender and Queer Politics of Translation” edited by William J. Spurlin; and a special issue of the Transgender Studies Quarterly edited by David Gramling and Aniruddha Dutta, entitled Translating Transgender (2016). Since the 2015 “Queering Translation – Translating the Queer” conference at the University of Vienna, a more concentrated proliferation of texts has appeared such as the edited volume, Sexology and Translation (2015) by Heike Bauer which focuses on the way in which sexological discourses have been disseminated transnationally via translation; BJ Epstein and Robert Gillet’s edited volume Queer in Translation (2017), which sets out to explore the intersections between queer studies and translation studies in literature, media, politics, linguistics, and culture; and Queering Translation, Translating the Queer (2018) edited by Brian James Baer and Klaus Kaindl, which deals with three main sub-areas, namely, theorizing translation through a queer lens, queer translations and translators, and the role of translation in queer activism. A monograph by Héctor Domínguez Ruvalcaba, Translating the Queer: Body Politics and Transnational Conversations (2016) focuses on queerness in the Latin American context and the production of queer knowledge transnationally, albeit without mobilising discourses from a translation studies perspective. Furthermore, a panel on queer translation at the 2018 International Association of Translation and Interpreting Studies (IATIS) conference highlights the importance of queer interrogations in the discipline.

Critical issues, topics, and research In terms of topics covered at the intersections of queer and translation, an important area of research is an exploration of the translation of literary, filmic, and dramatic queer texts. For example, Spurlin (2016) explores the translation of texts by queer Maghrebi writers such as Nina Bouraoui and Abdellah Taïa and the ways in which they create queer spaces within the colonizer’s language, Cristiano Mazzei (2007) explores how translators deal with the linguistic and cultural challenges of translating a gay-male Brazilian subculture in three contemporary novels, and Jeffrey Angles (2017) examines how the translation of Anglo-American novels articulating queer desire and eroticism into Japanese in the 1990s, helped “shape images of queer sexuality for audiences that went well beyond a queer readership in Japan” (2017, 88). Although yet still largely under-researched, the audio-visual translation of queer films is explored by Dimitris Asimakoulas (2012) in his examination of how transsexual identity is modified via subtitling in the film Strella and most recently by Ting Guo (2018) who explores the strategies employed by Chinese LGBT fan-subbing groups in the translation and dissemination of international queer films. In drama, David Kinloch (2007, 2011) explores how queer Québécois theatre is transmogrified and enriched through a queer Glaswegian vernacular. Another growing area of research concerns more sociologically informed studies of queer translators, such as Eric Keenaghan’s (1998) exploration of gay poet Jack Spicer’s translations of Lorca, Larkosh’s (2011) spotlighting of translation studies’ forefather James S. Holmes as an openly gay man, active on the Dutch leather scene and a prolific translator of queer texts and lastly, Baer’s (2017) portrayal of the 19thcentury Russian poet and musician Aleksei Apukhtin and his queering of Western European lyric poetry through translation. Another key topic concerns translation’s role in the politics of identification. As a category, does the term ‘queer’ both linguistically and conceptually travel seamlessly across borders? Various scholars argue against any form of homogenization of a global queering, since it invariably operates at the level of neo-imperialist control, failing to acknowledge the cultural and linguistic local specificities of the experiential in gendered and sexual modes of being. For example, Wangtaolue Guo (2018) explores the various translations for the term ‘queer’ in the Taiwanese context and their use for self-affirmation and destigmitization by the local LGBTQ community. 256

At the confluence of queer and translation

Shalmalee Palekar (2017) explores the Indian context, highlighting the plurality of indigenous queer lives and bodies and the dangers of ‘chutnification’ they face in translation, rather, as she attests, “it is vital to construct a hybrid queer theory which is capable of accommodating local specificities and pluralities” (2017, 8). A further emergent research topic from this intersection is the use of queer theoretical apparatuses to think through the practice of translation. As Spurlin (2017) intimates, in its othering, translation functions as a queer praxis. Spurlin considers translation as an interstitial space, one which is open to an erotics of alterity and is therefore marked out as queer. Others (e.g. Breen 2017) have reflected upon translation’s propensity for ‘failure,’ in the queer sense, drawing upon Jack Halberstam’s notion (2011) that, in its modes of replication and repetition, a translated text will always ultimately fail, yet by doing so, it is successful in destabilising any feigned constancy of an original, just as queer modes of being dissolve normative conceptualizations of gender and sexuality. José Santaemilia (2018) and Elena Basile (2018) also discuss the sexualization of translation via a queer lens. Through her reading of queer poet, Nathanaël, Basile explores the idea of a ‘fuckable’ text, namely, the idea that the translative intimacy at the scene of the dissolution of cultural and linguistic boundaries is a form of undoing (in the queer theoretical sense imagined by Bersani and Phillips 2008; Berlant and Edelman 2014) which cannot necessarily be separated from the prospect of violence. A further important area of research at the confluence of queer and translation, concerns the translation of queer theory itself. Originating largely in North America from the early 1990s, queer theoretical modes of critical inquiry seek, via poststructuralist approaches, to question and destabilize social constructions of genders, sexes, and sexualities. Coined by scholar Teresa de Lauretis in a special issue of the feminist journal Differences, entitled “Queer Theory: Lesbian and Gay Sexualities” (1991), ‘queer theory’ has been conceptualized and elaborated through work by leading proponents such as Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble (1990), Epistemology of the Closet (1990) by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Annamarie Jagose’s Queer Theory: An Introduction (1996), Jack Halberstam’s Female Masculinity (1998), and No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (2004) by Lee Edelman. More recently, there have been reorientations of queer theory away from questions based on understandings of identity around psychoanalysis, performativity, and language, towards topics such as capitalism, as explored by Rosemary Hennesy in Profit and Pleasure (2000), securitization, counterterrorism, and nationalism, as explored by Jasbir K. Puar in Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (2007) and queer theorizations of disability in Robert McRuer’s Crip Theory (2006). In terms of the dissemination of queer theory, tracing the transnational travels of queer theoretical texts via translation is not only reflective of the ways in which different cultures have engaged with notions of queer identity at various socio-historic moments but is also indicative of the fact that there is a prevailing unidirectional, anglophonic flow of ontological queer thought, albeit local queer lives and practices may be divergent. For example, Butler’s Gender Trouble (1990) now appears in translation in 27 different languages. The first translation appeared in German just one year after initial publication and has since been followed by translations into Japanese (1999), Dutch (2000), Croatian (2000), Hungarian (2006), and Chinese (2008) amongst many others. As Michela Baldo (2018) has investigated, the translation of queer theoretical texts is often precipitated through activism. In her exploration of the Italian context, Baldo highlights how the translation of Butler’s texts was often instigated by queer activist collectives and groups such as Laboratorio Smaschieramenti from Bologna. Furthermore, she reflects that the recent retranslation of four of Butler’s texts can be attributed, in part, to a “need for retelling, expanding and redefining aspects of her theories” (2018, 189–190) in light of recent public debates and in strengthening resolve against anti-gender movements which seek to delegitimize the 257

Pauline Henry-Tierney

important work done in articulating queer lived realities. A further important issue regarding the translation of queer theoretical texts is a linguistic one. According to Gillett (2018), the reason for the swift translation of certain key texts such as Gender Trouble and the uncharacteristically slow uptake of others (i.e. Sedgwick’s Epistemology of the Closet has still not been translated in its entirety in German) can, in part, be traced to lexical problematics, whereby terms for which bilingual approximations can be used such as ‘Geschlechtsidentität’ for gender (literally ‘gender identity’) have more resonance and lend themselves more easily to translation than queer terms which are specifically rooted in anglophonic culture such as ‘closet,’ which gets translated as ‘Versteck’ (literally ‘hiding place’) in German, thus losing connotations of performativity, masquerade, and exposure. In this sense, then, understanding both the contextual factors surrounding the translation of queer theory such as when and why a particular text is translated, but also how a text is translated, looking specifically at a close textual level, is revelatory not only of a particular culture’s engagement with and/or resistance to queer theory but also indicative of how queer theoretical perspectives are either readily assimilated or inflected by localities of queer thought. The following two short case studies of the translations of Gender Trouble and Epistemology of the Closet into French will illustrate these points as well as highlighting, in both cases, the pivotal role which the translator plays in brokering queer thought across cultural, linguistic, and affective borders.

The trouble with Gender Trouble: translating on inhospitable terrain As a foundational text in queer theory, Butler’s Gender Trouble offers a radical rethinking of the ontological categories of identity, highlighting that gender and sex are ultimately always political. By critically engaging the work of theorists such as Jacques Lacan, Simone de Beauvoir, Monique Wittig, and Michel Foucault, Butler navigates the fields of philosophy, anthropology, literary theory, and psychoanalysis, in order to subvert essentialist assumptions of gender and elaborate a theory centred on performativity. As Lisa Disch comments, “Gender Trouble, of all Butler’s work, is the one that we think of as the most French” (2008, 47). Yet, despite the fact that much of Butler’s theoretical thinking in this text is underpinned by work from an amalgam of French theorists, the translation into French of Butler’s key text, experienced what Eric Fassin terms a “delayed broadcast” (2005, 5) of 15 years. The French sociologist attributes this lag to a French reluctance to import what has come to be known as ‘French Theory’ – the intentionally untranslated derisive moniker employed to signal Anglo-American thought. Nevertheless, the changing sociopolitical climate of post-millennial France and fresh debate surrounding issues of gender, meant that Butler’s text offered a timely intervention for elaborating a theory of gender in France and in 2005, Gender Trouble was translated by the American philosopher and academic, Cynthia Kraus, as Trouble dans le genre: Le féminisme et la subversion de l’identité. An exploration of the contextual socio-historical factors surrounding this text sheds important light on how the text was translated and the role which the translator played in rehabilitating Butler for a sceptical French audience. In her preface to the 1999 edition, Butler admits that “Gender Trouble is rooted in ‘French Theory,’ which is itself a curious American construction” (Butler 1999, x). She goes on to underscore Gender Trouble’s foreignness in relation to French intellectual thought, stating that “Gender Trouble tends to read together, in a syncretic vein, various French intellectuals (LéviStrauss, Foucault, Lacan, Kristeva, Wittig) who had few alliances with one another and whose readers in France rarely, if ever, read one another” (ibid.). Butler’s use of quotation marks around the term ‘French Theory’ here serves as a harbinger of another instance of constructed 258

At the confluence of queer and translation

theoretical assimilation which predates Gender Trouble. Similarly encapsulated in inverted commas, the term ‘French Feminism,’ first employed by Christine Delphy, serves to signal AngloAmerican thought, constructed, as Delphy states, “by comparing French writers who cannot be compared, by ‘putting in dialogue’ people who have nothing to say to each other” (1995, 214). Delphy advocates that “ ‘French feminism’ exporters,” as she terms them, have wrongly conflated ‘women writers’ with the ‘women’s movement’ thus obfuscating the activism central to the Women’s Movement in France. For Delphy, this was not a scholarly oversight, instead she argues that ‘French feminism’ exporters such as Alice Jardine (Gynesis, 1985) and Toril Moi (French Feminist Thought, 1987) had a specific ideological agenda and that the purpose of ‘lumping together’ theorists, who in reality had very little to do with one another, was a systematic process of “internal homogenisation and external differentiation” (Delphy 1995, 214) which allowed the French Feminist proponents to have the power to name its Other. Delphy argues that heralding this exotic Other (a voice of straw women who supposedly question and invalidate a feminist approach from within feminism itself ) provided Anglo-American exporters with a form of validation to reintroduce essentialism into feminist debates and thereby eke out a new route for such scholars to re-engage in dialogue with male authors. Claire Moses highlights how the process of translation provides the catalyst for this academic construction, tracing its origins to the American feminist journal Signs, whose associate editor at the time, Domna Stanton, according to Moses, “most likely played the important role of obtaining, if not originating, these translations and analyses for Signs” (1998, 254). As Moses recounts, Signs published the first English language translations of Julia Kristeva and Hélène Cixous in 1975 and 1976. Thereafter, in 1981, in a special issue of the journal entitled ‘French Feminist Theory’ there appeared translations of Kristeva’s “Women’s Time,” Cixous’s “Castration or Decapitation?,” and Luce Irigaray’s “And the One Doesn’t Stir without the Other.” While the editors never referred to these three women as ‘feminist theorists’ but instead as ‘writers’ or ‘intellectuals,’ as Moses illustrates, the way in which the translations were framed sets up a specific group identity which undoubtedly plays a role not only in homogenizing these three thinkers and their critical positions but also in presenting them as the sole exponents of feminist thought in France. As Moses points out, “most U.S. readers would have lacked the knowledge to recognize the omission of other forms of politically significant practice” (ibid.). In this sense, then, Butler’s perpetuation of this American scholarly appropriative reflex left little desire for the French to translate the text, questioning the utility of importing back artificially exported theory. In order to further examine this question, let us turn now to consider why Gender Trouble was translated into French after all, and perhaps more importantly, how it was translated. In his preface to the French edition, Fassin states that the questions Butler poses in Gender Trouble are the same as those French people currently find themselves facing (2005, 7). Two burning topics in the French National Assembly at the time, namely the recognition of homosexual partnerships (known as Pacte civil de solidarité–PaCS) and the question of instituting gender parity in the legislature, brought to light the fact that the political and social system had, until this time, been based unquestioningly on what Fassin terms “ ‘a Symbolic Order,’ in other words, a sexual order” (ibid.) or as Disch terms it, “a presumption of heterosexuality” (2008, 47). Butler’s text, Fassin argues, shines a much-needed light on these contemporary debates around sexuality and Butler offers a way of thinking outside of these heteronorms. Yet, for Butler’s voice to resonate in France, she must be rehabilitated via translation. In her translator’s preface, Kraus delineates certain translation choices she makes, including how she chose to translate the terms ‘French Feminism’ and ‘French Theory.’ Kraus outlines the historic context of controversy, going so far as to provide references to the articles by Moses 259

Pauline Henry-Tierney

and Delphy cited previously. Taking her cue from Butler’s 1999 preface, she states that “ ‘French Feminism’ is neither French – despite the French (mostly male) authors cited [. . .] nor feminist ‘French Feminism’ being closest to differentialist French feminism, a form of essentialism which is, in fact, a form of anti-feminism” (Kraus 2005, 23 (my translation)). She cites this as the reason for opting to leave the term untranslated in the target text flagging it as an untranslated derisive moniker. While this translation strategy is suitable for her translation of Butler’s 1999 preface in which conscious awareness of this imported construct is acknowledged, her use of this translation strategy in the body of Butler’s text, must be questioned. For example, in Chapter 1, the translation reads as follows: TT: Dans l’éventail de la théorie du French feminism et du post-structuralisme, la production des concepts identitaires du sexe est analysée à partir de régimes de pouvoir très différents. (Butler 2005, 85–86) ST: Within the spectrum of French feminist and poststructuralist theory, very different regimes of power are understood to produce the identity concepts of sex. (Butler [1990] 1999, 24–25) If we look at Butler’s text here, it is evident that the term French feminist theory is not marked in any typographical way to flag it as a reference to the ‘made in America’ construction and rightly so, since the text exists in a space before detractors voiced their criticisms and hence before Butler had the chance to reframe her argument as she did in the 1999 preface. Yet, although this reframing is present in the translation, since it includes the 1999 preface, Kraus’s decision to leave the English term untranslated in the body of the French text, serves retroactively to rehabilitate the source text’s ideological footing. By including the term untranslated and italicised in her target text here, Krauss emphasises its alterity, quelling its unpalatability for a French audience, who is already wary of American scholars’ propensity for homogenising different theoretical feminist positions. This is a significant strategy, since not only does it completely alter the meaning of the target text but inherent therein is a presupposition that Butler was aware of the artificially constructed nature of ‘French Feminism’ from the very beginning. Kraus’s rehabilitative translation strategy extends much further and another pertinent translation decision to analyze concerns her deliberation over how to translate the word ‘gender.’ This is notoriously difficult in French since an analogous term is not readily apparent. Kraus outlines her justifications for translating ‘gendered’ with the French word ‘genre,’ citing existing French texts in the fields of sociology, history, and literature which employ this term, to substantiate her translation decision. Likewise, she makes a case for why she opts not to adopt other possible translations for the past participle ‘gendered’ (such as ‘genderisé’ or ‘gendré’). However, the most curious translation decision concerns the nominal term ‘gendering’ for which she chooses the term “le processus de/la mise en genre” (Kraus 2005, 23). She goes on to say that it would have been possible to translate ‘gendered’ by the term “marqué par le genre” but the reason she chose not to do so was that “this expression makes one think straightaway of Monique Wittig’s article ‘The Mark of Gender’ and more generally of the radical materialist position” (ibid. [my translation]). With regard to the criticism levelled at Gender Trouble, a key grievance was Butler’s lack of proper acknowledgement of French materialist feminism in the text. Stevi Jackson argues that Butler’s radical deconstruction of gender “owes much to materialist feminism without itself being materialist” (1995, 13). This was a point of contention for many feminists in France and further fuelled a sense of apprehension vis-à-vis Butler’s gender theory. Here, Kraus deliberately uses this linguistic translation strategy in order to downplay the intertextual reference to Wittig

260

At the confluence of queer and translation

for the French target audience. By suppressing this tangible linguistic link to Wittig’s materialist stance, Kraus averts the target reader’s attention from possible misgivings concerning Butler’s lack of acknowledgement of the influence of materialist feminism on her work and, instead, serves to bolster Butler, setting her apart as an individual authority on the concept of gender identity. Kraus’s interventionist translation approach raises important questions in relation to the ethics of queer theory translation. As a nascent discipline, in a particularly mutable state of constant expansion, redefinition, and problematization, should a translator apply updated critical perspectives to older texts? It seems that in the translation of queer theoretical texts, the role of the translator must indeed go beyond lexical and semantic conveyance, in order to create a queer textual space which affords the target culture the possibility to appreciate different queer perspectives while, at the same time, accommodating local contexts. The translator’s very active role in the dissemination of queer thought is equally evident in the second case study.

Out of the translator’s closet Like Gender Trouble, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s Epistemology of the Closet only arrived on the French scene recently, having been translated, 18 years after its initial publication in English, by academic Maxime Cervulle as Epistémologie du Placard (2008). Shunning the now clichéd role of the ‘invisible translator,’ Cervulle makes his presence extremely visible through both a lengthy preface and in an abundance of translator’s footnotes. Additionally, there is an acknowledgements paragraph in which the translator also thanks le Zoo – a French queer activist collective – who had been requesting the translation of this text since the mid-1990s, again highlighting the important impact of activism in the context of queer translation. In his translator’s preface, Cervulle reflects upon the premise of Sedgwick’s seminal text, namely, a call, via legal, literary, and philosophical approaches, for the destruction of binaries employed to articulate modes of sexual being. The concluding paragraph to his preface emphasises the performative and affective qualities of translation praxis. He says, Ce ne sont là que deux ou trois choses que je sais d’Eve, quelques fragments que j’ai saisis en apprenant à traduire Sedgwick, en apprenant à me fondre dans sa langue, à manier son gout des épithètes, son humour sophistiqué et sa sensibilité décalée. (Cervulle 2008, 21) Those are just a few things I know about Eve, some fragments I grasped while learning to translate Sedgwick, learning to lose myself in her language, to handle her penchant for epithets, her sophisticated humour and her offbeat sensibility. (my translation) His evocation here of the translation process is at once cerebral and corporeal, in the sense that he talks about the dissolution of the self in order to assume Sedgwick’s own idiolect and cadences. The intimacy of this practice is signalled by his use of her first name to refer to Sedgwick here. Cervulle’s illustration of his praxis gives a clear example of the way in which the process of translation can be a queering experience for the individual engaged in the task. Concerning the translator’s notes, Cervulle gives explanations of various American cultural references for his French speaking readership, including a definition of Ivy League universities, clarifications of the US Bill of Rights, as well as literary intertextual references, such as

261

Pauline Henry-Tierney

Sedgwick’s allusion to a poem by Emily Dickinson. He also uses this space to delineate specific queer terminology. For example, in the first translator’s note to accompany Sedgwick’s introduction, he discusses her use of the term ‘liminality’ in relation to the notion of “transitivity between genders” (Sedgwick 1990, 2). Not only does he explain that the French term ‘liminalité’ is the semantic cognate, but he also comments that this term is part of the current lexis of queer and cultural studies in French. The translator also provides footnotes to explain terms which are specific to American gay culture, such as Sedgwick’s reference to the identifier ‘beefcake.’ He explains that the term refers to the homo-erotic imagery of muscled, oiled athletes from the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, which appeared in men’s magazines such as Muscle Power, Pictorial, or Tomorrow’s Man (Cervulle 2008, 130). Not only does he provide this definition along with primary sources, but he also suggests further academic reading on beefcake culture and its gay readership via Thomas Waugh’s (1996) work. In instances when specific queer terminology has no lexical equivalent in the target language, the translator uses footnotes to explain his creation of certain neologisms. For example, he proposes the neologism ‘alloérotisme’ to translate ‘alloeroticism’ and defines it as the antonym of autoeroticism and meaning, “une relation érotique avec une personne autre que soi-même” (Cervulle 2008, 51) [an erotic relationship with someone other than oneself] (my translation). A further translation strategy which is appended with a translator’s note concerns the retranslation of references. In her introduction, Sedgwick includes a lengthy quotation by fellow queer theorist David Halperin in order to evoke the ways in which Halperin’s views on the conceptualization of homosexuality are divergent from Foucault’s interpretation (the former’s assumption based on gender intransitivity and the latter on gender transitivity). The citation comes from Halperin’s One Hundred Years of Homosexuality (1990), which was translated into French by Isabelle Châtelet as Cent ans d’homosexualité (2000). In his translator’s note, Cervulle states that he has retranslated sections of the first and last sentences in the extract, “afin de rendre plus claire la critique du propos de David Halperin par Sedgwick” (Cervulle 2008, 65) [in order to make Sedgwick’s critique of David Halperin’s remarks clearer] (my translation). The retranslation of this intertextual reference highlights the interconnectedness of queer theory and the fact that key terms must be meticulously translated across texts since they exist within constellations of interrelated concepts. One final interesting example when examining how queer theoretical texts are translated is, like the previous example, linked to the linguistic complexity and at times, cultural singularity for expressing concepts related to queer modes of being. Following her introduction, Sedgwick includes a full-page definition for the term ‘closet,’ which she takes from the Oxford English Dictionary. In this entry, there are ten different meanings for the word, some of which are in current usage while others are anachronistic. Among the meanings, closet is defined as a room for privacy or retirement, a place of private devotion or study, a private apartment of a monarch, a repository, a small room, a den, a secret place, a bathroom, a sewer, or a private, meditative space. The translator does not choose to simply translate this dictionary entry, but instead seeks out an entry from Le Petit Robert, the French authoritative dictionary. Interestingly, the French cognate ‘placard’ does not have as many connotations (only seven) and while there are overlapping definitions such as a room or a cupboard, others are extremely different from the English, with the additional meanings of a poster or notice, a coating, a decorative wooden panel adorning a door, and in slang terms, ‘placard’ means a prison. By adopting a domesticating strategy here, the translator highlights the very important point in the translation of queer theory, namely, that although terms can often be easily translated with cognates, the assimilated meanings connected with terms in different locales open queer theoretical perspectives up to a spectrum of different interpretations. 262

At the confluence of queer and translation

Future directions In terms of further research at the intersections of queer studies and translation studies, there is a need for more sociologically informed studies of queer translators and their praxis. While the majority of studies on translating queer identity are based on literary texts, there is scope to understand how other mediatic articulations of queer identity are being translated, for example, via audio-visual translation, translation of social media, and the intersemiotic translation of queer images. To date, there is no substantial body of work on pedagogy and queer translation, neither on translating queer texts, nor on queer methodologies of translation. Another fruitful area to explore would be the domain of interpreting, in terms of public service interpreting, there are important questions to ask about how queer individuals’ voices are heard in different legal, medical, and social settings. Furthermore, what role do interpreters play in transnational queer activism? More scholarly attention must be paid to discovering other queer theoretical perspectives beyond the anglophone context and promoting their dissemination via translation. Finally, as queer theory itself continues to evolve, there will be important work to be done concerning the study of retranslations of canonical queer theoretical texts, as well as the recovery of marginalized queer voices.

Further reading Harvey, Keith. 2000. Gay Community, Gay Identity and the Translated Text. TTR: traduction, terminologie, rédacti, 13, 137–165. One of the first scholars to explore the relationship between queer identity and translation, Harvey examines the way in which translated literature can play a crucial role in the formation of gay subjectivity and community building. Sullivan, Nikki. 2003. A Critical Introduction to Queer Theory. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. A comprehensive introductory guide to different queer theoretical perspectives. Ruvalcaba, Héctor Domínguez. 2016. Translating the Queer: Body Politics and Transnational Conversations. London: Zed Books. This monograph focuses on the dissemination of queer knowledge throughout Latin America via processes of translation, adaptation, and epistemological resistance. Epstein, B. J. and Robert Gillett, eds. 2017. Queer in Translation. London: Routledge. This edited volume brings together scholars examining how queer texts (literary, filmic, theoretical, graphic) are being translated and applies queer thought to issues of translation. Baer, Brian James and Klaus Kaindl, eds. 2018. Queering Translation, Translating the Queer: Theory, Practice, Activism. London: Routledge. This volume focuses on the intersections between queer, translation, gender, and sexuality in transcultural contexts with contributions covering three main areas: theoretical approaches to understanding queer translation, the practical application of queer translation, and the role of translation in issues of queer activism.

Related topics Feminist translation theory, queer theory, gender and sexuality studies, translation and activism

References Angles, Jeffrey. 2017. Queer Translation/translating Queer During the ‘Gay Boom’ in Japan, in B. J. Epstein and Robert Gillett, eds., Queer in Translation. London: Routledge, 87–103. Asimakoulas, Dimitris. 2012. Dude (Looks Like a Lady): Hijacking Transsexual Identity in the Subtitled Version of ‘Strella’ by Panos Koutras. The Translator, 18(1), 42–75. 263

Pauline Henry-Tierney

Baer, Brian James. 2017. A Poetics of Evasion: The Queer Translations of Aleksei Apukhtin, in B. J. Epstein and Robert Gillett, eds., Queer in Translation. London: Routledge, 51–63. Baldo, Michela. 2018. Queer Translation as Performative and Affective Un-doing, in Brian James Baer and Klaus Kaindl, eds., Queering Translation, Translating the Queer: Theory, Practice, Activism. London: Routledge, 188–205. Basile, Elena. 2018. A Scene of Intimate Entanglements, or, Reckoning with the “Fuck” of Translation, in Brian James Baer and Klaus Kaindl, eds., Queering Translation, Translating the Queer: Theory, Practice, Activism. London: Routledge, 26–37. Bauer, Heike, ed. 2015. Sexology and Translation: Cultural and Scientific Encounters Across the Modern World. Philadelphia, PA, Rome and Tokyo: Temple University Press. Berlant, Lauren and Lee Edelman. 2014. Sex, or the Unbearable. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press. Bersani, Leo and Adam Phillips. 2008. Intimacies. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Breen, Margaret Sönser. 2017. Translation Failure in James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room, in B. J. Epstein and Robert Gillett, eds., Queer in translation. London: Routledge, 64–76. Butler, Judith. 1990. Gender Trouble. Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. 1st ed. London and New York: Routledge. Butler, Judith. 1999. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. 2nd ed. London and New York: Routledge. Butler, Judith. 2005. Trouble dans le Genre: Pour un féminisme de la subversion. Translated by Cynthia Kraus. Paris: Editions de la Découverte. Cervulle, Maxime. 2008. Deux ou trois choses que je sais d’Eve. Translator’s preface to Kosofsky Sedgwick, Eve. Epistémologie du placard. Paris: Editions Amsterdam. De Lauretis, Teresa. 1991. Queer Theory: Lesbian and Gay Sexualities. Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, 3(2), iii–xviii. Delphy, Christine. 1995. The Invention of French Feminism: An Essential Move. Yale French Studies, 87, 190–221. Disch, Lisa Jane. 2008. “French Theory” Goes to France, in Samuel Chambers and Terrell Carver, eds., Judith Butler’s Precarious Politics: Critical Encounters. New York: Routledge, 47–61. Edelman, Lee. 2004. No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. Durham: Duke University Press. Epstein, B. J., ed. 2010. Translating Queers/Queering Translation. Special Issue: In Other Words, 36. Epstein, B. J. and Robert Gillett, eds. 2017. Queer in translation. London: Routledge. Fassin, Eric. 2005. Trouble-genre. Preface to Butler, Judith. Trouble dans le Genre: Pour un féminisme de la subversion. Paris: Editions de la Découverte. Gillett, Robert. 2018. Between the Brackets: Queer Theory in German. Paper presented at IATIS 2018 conference, Hong Kong, 4 July, unpublished. Gramling, David and Dutta Aniruddha, eds. 2016. Translating Transgender. Special Issue: Transgender Studies Quarterly, 3(3–4). Guo, Ting. 2018. Translation and Queer Feminism in China: Jihua Network and Carol. Paper presented at the Translating Feminism Conference. Unpublished, University of Glasgow, 15 June. Guo, Wangtaolue. 2018. Kindred Soul, Cool Kid, and Bizarre Fetus: Sinophone Circulation of Queerness in Taiwan. Paper presented at IATIS 2018 conference, Hong Kong, 4 July, unpublished. Halberstam, Jack. 1998. Female Masculinity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Halberstam, Jack. 2011. The Queer Art of Failure. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Halperin, David M. 1990. One Hundred Years of Homosexuality. New York: Routledge. Halperin, David M. 2000. Cent ans d’homosexualité. Translated by Isabelle Châtelet. Paris: EPEL. Harvey, Keith. 1998. Translating Camp Talk. Gay Identities and Cultural Transfer. The Translator, 4(2), 295–320. Harvey, Keith. 2003a. Intercultural Movements: American Gay in French Translation. Manchester: St. Jerome. Harvey, Keith. 2003b. “Events” and “Horizons”: Reading Ideology in the “Bindings” of Translations, in Maria Calzada Perez, ed., Apropos of Ideology. Manchester: St. Jerome. 43–69. Hennessy, Rosemary. 2000. Profit and Pleasure: Sexual Identities in Late Capitalism. New York: Routledge. Jackson, Stevi. 1995. Récents débats sur l’hétérosexualité: une approche féministe matérialiste. Nouvelles Questions Féministes, 17, 5–26. Jagose, Annamarie. 1996. Queer Theory: An Introduction. New York: New York University Press. Jardine, Alice. 1985. Gynesis: Configurations of Woman and Modernity. New York: Cornell University Press.

264

At the confluence of queer and translation

Keenaghan, Eric. 1998. Jack Spicer’s Pricks and Cocksuckers. Translating Homosexuality into Visibility. The Translator, 4(2), 273–294. Kinloch, David. 2007. Lilies or Skelfs: Translating Queer Melodrama. The Translator, 15(1), 83–103. Kinloch, David. 2011. A Queer Glaswegian Voice, in Dimitris Asimakoulas and Margaret Rogers, eds., Translation and Opposition. Bristol: Multilingual Matters, 129–145. Kraus, Cynthia. 2005. Note sur la traduction. Translator’s preface to Butler, Judith, in Trouble dans le Genre: Pour un féminisme de la subversion. Paris: Editions de la Découverte. Larkosh, Christopher, ed. 2011. Re-engendering Translation: Transcultural Practice, Gender/Sexuality and the Politics of Alterity. Manchester: St. Jerome. Mazzei, Cristiano. 2007. Queering Translation Studies. MA Thesis, University of Massachusetts Amherst. McRuer, Robert. 2006. Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability. New York: New York University Press. Moi, Toril. 1987. French Feminist Thought: A Reader. Oxford and New York: Blackwell. Moses, Claire. 1998. French Feminism in Academia. Feminist Studies, 24(2), 241–274. Palekar, Shalmalee. 2017. Re-mapping Translation: Querying the Crossroads, in B. J. Epstein and Robert Gillett, eds., Queer in Translation. London: Routledge, 8–24. Puar, Jasbir K. 2007. Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times. Durham: Duke University Press. Ruvalcaba, Héctor Domínguez. 2016. Translating the Queer: Body Politics and Transnational Conversations. London: Zed Books. Santaemilia, José. 2018. Sexuality and Translation as Intimate Partners? Towards a Queer Turn in Rewriting Identities and Desires, in Brian James Baer and Klaus Kaindl, eds., Queering Translation, Translating the Queer: Theory, Practice, Activism. London: Routledge, 11–25. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. 1990. Epistemology of the Closet. London: Penguin. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. 2008. Epistémologie du placard. Translated by Maxime Cervulle. Paris: Editions Amsterdam. Spurlin, William, ed. 2014. The Gender and Queer Politics of Translation: Literary, Historical, and Cultural Approaches. Special Issue: Comparative Literature Studies, 51(2), 201–214. Spurlin, William. 2016. Contested Borders: Cultural Translation and Queer Politics in Contemporary Francophone Writing from the Maghreb. Research in African Literatures, 47(2), 104–120. Spurlin, William. 2017. Queering Translation: Rethinking Gender and Sexual Politics in the Spaces Between Languages and Cultures, in B. J. Epstein and Robert Gillett, eds., Queer in Translation. London: Routledge, 172–183. Waugh, Thomas. 1996. Hard to Imagine: Gay Male Eroticism in Photography and Film from Their Beginnings to Stonewall. New York: Columbia University Press.

265

20 Feminism in the post-communist world in/as translation1 Kornelia Slavova

In the early 1990s, after the collapse of communism, feminism emerged in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) in and as translation – literally and figuratively speaking. Unlike the feminist movements in North America and Western Europe, which came into being through years of grass-roots women’s organized activism, the feminist projects in the post-communist world emerged as a process of translating Western liberal ideas through direct political acting from “outside” and from “above.”2 This top-down strategy of infusing gender equality through legislation, funding, and university programmes has been seen by some scholars as yet another form of Westernization, Americanization, “EU dirigisme” (Weiner 2009, 211), “feminism from above” or even “room-service feminism” (Miroiu 2004, 208). In an attempt to transcend the East/West binarisms, the current chapter (focusing on case studies from Bulgaria, Romania, Croatia, and the Czech Republic) approaches the post-communist feminist projects as culturally translated practices in the global flow of feminisms at the end of the 20th century. Through the lens of cultural translation, it poses broader questions: Can this form of “intellectual feminism” really trigger social change in the region? What does it mean to be gendered in a Slavonic language? Which meanings of Western liberal feminism have been toned down, contested or rewritten in the process of translation, self-translation, and reverse translation?

Historical perspectives In most CEE countries women’s movements existed since the late 19th century – as part of the nationalist liberation movements, nation-building movements or those demanding women’s suffrage. Despite the different intensities of these women’s movements, after World War II (when the communist regimes took power in the Soviet sphere of influence) their activities were interrupted, their property was confiscated, and most women’s organizations were banned.3 Seen as a Western bourgeois ideology, feminism was rejected as the Communist Party was supposed to take care of women, giving them access to education, work, childcare, and protection from the state. Hence, in most socialist states (with the exception of Yugoslavia where Tito’s regime followed a policy of non-alignment with the USSR) there were no independent women’s organizations and almost no women’s activism beyond the Party-controlled women’s organizations. After the collapse of communism in 1989 feminist ideas and practices were transplanted into 266

Feminism in the post-communist world

the region with two major factors pushing for change. First, in the early 1990s, Western financial and academic institutions, agencies, and foundations (such as Soros Open Society Institute, World Bank, Ford Foundation, IMF, USAID, UNDP, as well as women’s NGOs) supported feminist projects in the region in an effort to enhance democratic processes and promote Western liberal ideas. In the late 1990s and the beginning of the 21st century the feminist projects gained additional momentum in the preparation of CEE countries for their accession to the European Union (EU), demanding new standards of gender equality. Paradoxically, feminist ideas were met with suspicion and resistance despite the worsening of women’s status during the transition (in terms of unemployment, lower income compared to men, loss of social privileges, weaker political representation and so on). Once again, feminism was displaced because it was seen as smacking of Bolshevism or left-wing ideologies – now unacceptable ideologies. Yet, despite this negative situation on the ground, marked by gaps in theory and practice, lack of feminist structures, and overall resistance to feminism, many feminist ideas did travel to post-communist societies precisely through translation channels. In the 1990s, there began a massive process of translating philosophical and political theory (primarily from English) in an attempt to catch up with Western developments after 45 years of Marxist-Leninist indoctrination. This opened the doors to the translation of feminist texts dealing with diverse issues such as reproductive health, body politics, criticism, and sophisticated gender theories. The initiators of these translation projects were primarily academic women, seeking new methodologies for their research, successful educational platforms or models to reform social policies as a whole.

Feminism through the lens of cultural translation The study of women’s and feminist movements in CEE had been neglected for obvious reasons under communism but after its collapse the perspectives of women from the region were still missing from transnational research. Because of this persistent neglect some scholars have claimed that the “second world” has fallen through the cracks of transnational feminist discourses, a kind of “non-region,” positioned vis-à-vis the first world – a legacy from the Cold War (Nowicka 1995; Suchland 2011). Indeed, feminist and gender politics as part of the Cold War divide were a blindspot in Cold War cultural studies, though it had been an integral part of state politics and had influenced enormously the lives of women in CEE. The Cold War legacy can still be felt in recent scholarship on feminism in the post-communist world, where discussions are often framed in comparison and/or opposition to Western feminisms (publications by scholars such as Nanette Funk, Magda Mueller, Barbara Einhorn, Susan Gal, Gail Klingman, Krassimira Daskalova, Laura Grünberg, Biljana Kašić, Hana Havelková, Kornelia Slavova, and others). Much existing research has employed historical, social or political frameworks of analysis and has focused on the uneasy alliances between East/West feminisms, thus cementing to a great extent Cold War divisions. My own background as an activist and veteran translator of feminist texts has alerted me to the instrumental role of translation in the transnational feminist exchange. This is why I approach this rather text-centred, intellectual, and academic phenomenon as feminism in/as translation – not simply as cultural imposition or import but as a two-way incomplete process (in translation), a set of culturally translated practices, ideas, analytical models, and concepts that have developed through contact and negotiation. Such a translational perspective can trigger a more nuanced and non-hierarchical understanding of the East/West feminist interactions, placing the so-called second world within the bigger frame of feminist geography. Also, this approach corresponds to the latest developments in the field of feminist translation studies (FTS), which has acted as a double catalyst of innovation in recent years. On the one hand, FTS has expanded translation 267

Kornelia Slavova

studies research by placing on its map discussions about the visibility of women translators across languages and cultures, about the negotiations of gender, religious, and regional aspects of identity through translation – i.e., it has boosted the “internationalization of translation studies,” which – as Luise von Flotow and Farzaneh Farahzdad have insisted – “by definition, must be international, but which has long been dominated by Anglo-American and European perspectives” (2017, XIII). On the other hand, FTS has invigorated feminist praxis because as Olga Castro and Emek Ergun rightfully argue, “the future of feminisms is in the transnational and the transnational is made through translation” (2017, 1). Yet there has been little research on the interconnections between feminism and translation in CEE: the existing scholarship has focused primarily on the linguistic (un)translatability of “gender,” on the imposition of English as a lingua franca in feminist discourses, or on sexist language in Slavonic languages (Havelková 1997; Kašić 2004; Temkina and Zdravomyslova 2006; Tratnik 2011; Valdrová 2016).4 This is why it is necessary to go beyond the linguistic aspects of translation towards translation as cultural and social practice, taking into consideration ideology, history, and politics, as well as various categories of social and cultural difference. The recent “cultural,” “activist,” “sociological,” and “performative” turns in translation studies reflect the expanding use of the translation paradigm – especially in regard to the societal impact and consequences of translations. In the last decades, cultural translation theory has been successfully employed for so many purposes: to do “comparative analysis in global ways” (Asad 1986; Clifford 1997); to analyze cultural communication as well as resistance and violence (Venuti 2002); to discuss conflict and power imbalance (Tymoczko and Gentzler 2002) or “to understand different modes of being, living and acting in the world” (Maitland 2017). Feminist translation scholars have also emphasized the transformative potential of translation as an act of “coauthorship” and “co-operation” (Massardier-Kenney 1997); as a theory and practice of political responsibility (Spivak 1992; Flotow 2014) or as a tool for social transformation and activism (Anzaldúa 1987; Castro and Ergun 2017). By employing the combined lens of cultural translation and FTS, we can look at the contradictory feminist developments in today’s CEE not simply as a zone of expansion but as a “translation zone” (Apter 2006) – a space of translation practices, of intense interaction across languages, as well as conflict and change in time. This transnational multilayered translation zone (beyond the national framework) involves the co-presence and clash of heterogeneous cultures, ideologies, traditions, and values: from patriarchal legacies, through communist myths of equality to principles of Western liberalism and postmodern postfeminist frivolities.

Feminism in/as translation: appropriation and distanciation Feminism in the post-communist world began its existence in a rather translational and academic mode, as a form of intellectual activism (Gajewska 2010; Grünberg 2011; Slavova 2014). In the very beginning the feminist flow went primarily in one direction – from West to East, from the countries with stable democracies to the so-called countries in transition. This process was erratic and unsystematic, and there was no logical order in introducing feminist theory and criticism: deconstructionist and postmodern works were translated before feminist classics – for example, the works of Judith Butler, Seyla Benhabib, David M. Halperin, Joan W. Scott, Laura Mulvey, Shoshana Felman, Jacques Derrida, Julia Kristeva, and others appeared in Bulgarian, Czech, and Romanian before the classics by Simone de Beauvoir, Virginia Woolf, or Kate Millett.5 The leap in time caused a paradoxical situation: more recent anti-foundationalist texts (post-structuralist, queer, and post-identity theories) spoke in Slavonic languages before the very foundationalist texts they had been built upon or reacted to. 268

Feminism in the post-communist world

The chaotic and piecemeal practices of translating Western texts brought about many paradoxes and negative effects. First, skipping decades of feminist development and debate made it impossible to make connections between various stages and trends in feminist theory (such as liberal, radical, cultural, Marxist, etc.). Second, this artificially created the impression of feminism as one monolithic movement (under the common denominator “Western feminism”) and obscured the fact that there are multiple feminisms and multiple Western feminisms too. Until today no distinction is made between Anglo-American, French, Third World feminisms, black feminism, Chicano feminism, Islamic feminism, and so on. Third, the idea of one monolithic and monolingual feminism that speaks English (with a pronounced American accent), has simplified feminist knowledge and has erased the distinction between major types (for example, between equality feminism and feminism of difference). The same holds true for the translation of major concepts of Western feminisms – such as ‘gender,’ which has caused much confusion in Slavonic languages. The social and cultural meanings of the term were unfamiliar before the 1990s (only its linguistic usage was known), which turned out to be both a blessing and a curse. The fact that ‘gender’ had no ideological baggage related to communist dogmas, and that it sounded less openly feminist and more inclusive towards men, gave a strong momentum to its appropriation. At the same time, the novelty of the concept and the lack of knowledge about its almost 30-year history in Western theory created many difficulties and conundrums. Four major strategies have been employed for rendering the nomadic concept of ‘gender.’ The first one uses the corresponding grammatical term (‘rod’ in Bulgarian, Slovenian, Czech, Russian, and Serbian or ‘gen’ in Romanian) – a solution preferred by linguists and literary scholars, who want to emphasize the role of language as a regulatory fiction, thereby insisting on the separation of “sex” and “gender.” The second strategy – trying to keep both the connection and the distinction between “sex” and “gender” – coined neologisms such as “social sex,” “sociosex,” or “cultural sex,” which explicitate the connection with the body in a rather descriptive but confusing manner. For example, in Slovenian (and other Slavonic languages) “sex” has been rendered as “biološki spol” (biological sex) and “gender” as “drušbeni spol” (social sex). The third strategy involves transcribing or transliterating the English word – the easiest option, but it marks the term immediately as foreign. This is common in Russian and Czech (“гендер”/“gender,” respectively) but it has also been adopted by many NGOs in CEE because of their closer ties with Western institutions, women’s advocacy groups, and gender think-tanks, which also promoted the term “gender” through their gender action plans or consultancy practices. A fourth strategy, adopted primarily by administrative institutions, uses the familiar term “sex” to refer to gender constructs in a more accessible manner: such as “spol” in Slovenian, “pol” in Serbian, Croatian, Bulgarian, and Russian, “pohlavie” in Slovak. All these multiple equivalents are used simultaneously and produce a cacophony of feminist idiolects. Often, they do not work with established gender definitions but against them. The conceptual confusion surrounding the porous term “gender” has produced further discrepancies and contaminations: logical and historical connections between the different meanings and uses of the term have been lost in translation; the nuances concerning the sex/gender distinction have often disappeared, which made the translations of some philosophical texts extremely challenging.6 Gradually, “gender” as an analytical category has totally displaced the category of “women” or “feminism.” This conceptual shift has brought about serious political consequences: it has depoliticized feminism and has further accentuated the d/rift between practice and theory. Gender is often used to refer to women as a social group – thus taking over body, sexuality, and other categories of human difference such as class, race, and ethnicity, while simultaneously failing to establish intersectional connections with them. As a stand-alone 269

Kornelia Slavova

category gender is not productive: for example, trafficking of women in CEE is seen primarily as a women’s issue without being related to the deteriorating economic position of women in the new capitalist order. The fluidity of “gender” has affected the translation of many other related terms such as gendersensitization, gender-mainstreaming, gender-blindness, transgender, gender-bender, queer, queering, drag queen, etc. Such has been the case with the concept of “queer,” which operates differently when transplanted into post-communist reality: in most Slavonic languages the word has been simply transliterated or non-translated, despite its strong foreign feel. Initially, as was the case with “gender,” there were attempts to introduce coinages: for example, “queer theory” was translated into Bulgarian as “teoria na obratnite” (theory of the non-straight ones); “queer studies” was translated into Polish as “studia pedalskie” (faggot studies) or “studia odmieńców” (studies of outsiders) but in both cases the idea of non-normativity was lost and pejorative connotations are easily felt. Suzana Tratnik, translator of gay and lesbian fiction and queer theory into Slovenian, has commented how in her translations she “was forced to queer her native language in order to accommodate concepts and lifestyles that as yet had no place in Slovenian” (2011, 137). The difficulty here concerns not simply finding an appropriate equivalent for specific words but translating lesbian and gay cultures as a whole – i.e. deconstructing in translation major categories and binarisms that have shaped the understanding of sexuality and gendered identities for centuries on end.7 Non-translations involve the risk of oversimplification and theoretical imprecision, despite the fact that usually they are accompanied by lengthy editor’s or translator’s explanations, prefaces or notes – what Kwame Appiah calls “thick translation” (1993, 817 in Venuti 2000, 417). But thick translation cannot make up for the thinning or distortion of meaning. For example, the Western academic fields of feminist studies or women’s studies were ‘translated’ and safely packaged in CEE in the more inclusive and trendy label “gender studies,” which was easier to be approved by academic and political institutions (for example, teaching and research institutions in the Czech Republic use “gender studies” and not the translated form “rodová studia” or “studia rodu”).8 However, diverging academic and epistemological projects are often hidden behind such newly adopted or borrowed terms: for example, the Russian distinction between women’s studies and gender studies does not correspond to the Anglo-American distinction as the “former deals with demography, psychology and family sociology in the Soviet tradition, whereas the latter is more related to Western developments” (Temkina and Zdravomyslova 2006, 242). Another twist of meanings can be observed in Polish: “ ‘feminism’ implies an activist bent, whereas ‘gender studies’ refers to a kind of academic feminism, dealing with theory and criticism” (Gajewska 2010, 11). Similar ambiguities have arisen in reverse translation or self-translation when we try to theorize our own communist or post-communist experience in the politically correct and sophisticated Western terminology. It is not accidental that major Western liberal concepts such as “equality,” “women’s question,” “women’s rights,” and “emancipation” reverberate cynically in a post-communist setting – for more than four decades in the past they were used as clichés and empty slogans by communist propaganda, hence, they still carry strong ideological inflections. Let me give two recent examples of cultural translation of EU gender policies, which have produced somewhat ironic effects because of the misuse of concepts in the past or their misappropriation in the present. The first one concerns the institutionalized policy of gender equality in Croatia, the Czech Republic, Romania, and Bulgaria as part of harmonizing national laws with EU legislation. The greater part of EU policy papers and laws primarily use the wording “gender equality” (such as The European Pact for Gender Equality) or the more descriptive

270

Feminism in the post-communist world

wording (such as The New European Pact for Equality between Women and Men for the Period 2011–2020). In an attempt to make EU and local policy papers accessible to general audiences, the respective national documents in translation use different variants for “gender.” For example, in Croatian and Bulgarian the term “sex” (“spol” or “pol,” respectively) substitutes “gender” as evidenced in the following titles: Nacionalna politika za ravnopravnost spolova od 2011 do 2015 and Natsionalna strategiya za nasurchavane na ravnopostavenostta na polovete za perioda 2009–2015 (emphasis mine). In Czech and Romanian “gender” is often explicitated as “men and women” as in the following titles: Aktualizovaná opatření Priorit a postupů vlády při prosazování rovných příležitostí pro ženy a muže and Strategia nationala pentru egalitatea de şanse între femei şi bărbaţi pentru perioada 2010–2012 (emphasis mine). Obviously, official translations in the local languages aim at greater clarity but in practice they have either obliterated the distinction between “sex” and “gender” or have reduced the meaning of “gender” to the two traditional genders only. In addition, EU translated documents reveal an interesting slippage of terms: “equality” has been gradually replaced by safer (less ideologically loaded) terms such as “equity,” “equal opportunities” or “gender ­mainstreaming” – a noticeable trend in the Western world too. Initially, the cultural and linguistic mimesis in translating the Anglo-American concept of “gender” seemed to work: it avoided ideological confrontation and ensured easier inclusion into global discourses and policy-making. But as in any process of translation there comes a moment when accumulated misapprehension backfires – as demonstrated recently in the case with the so-called Istanbul Convention. In fact, the appellation refers to Treaty No 210 of the Council of Europe – a 30-page document postulating measures on preventing and combating violence against women and domestic violence – which was signed in Istanbul by almost all EU countries in 2011. In January 2018, the Bulgarian Parliament did not ratify the Convention because of the confusing translation of “gender” as “sotsialen pol” (socially constructed sex), which was misinterpreted as “third sex” by some religious institutions, nationalist parties, and political organizations – hence, seen as a dangerous gateway to legalization of transgender people and gay marriages.9 After heated debates, protests, and petitions on all possible sides, the Bulgarian Parliament cancelled the ratification process. This case of translational contestation demonstrates the serious consequences of translation as a political act and proves that domestication does not happen on the page of the translated text but in everyday social practices.

Feminism in/as translation: adaptation and rewriting After the initial phase of intense translations of Anglo-American gender-centred texts into the languages of CEE countries, there followed a process of interpreting and re-thinking of what had already been translated and paying greater attention to the context of the receiving cultures, the political systems, the applicability and translatability of concepts and practices. The Western feminist knowledge already translated did not remain a static foreign product – it was re-created and rewritten from the vantage point of the receiving cultures. There followed a process of CEE women speaking back or translating back their specific experience under two drastically different social and political systems into the dominant paradigms and discourses of Western feminism – through local publications in the respective languages or in international journals in English, blogs, local and international conferences. The rapidly growing feminist research in CEE (on women’s history, literature, culture, politics, law, etc.) in the respective languages reveals bifurcated tongues and positions of local feminists in their attempt to “translate” Western theories into local politics and vice versa.

271

Kornelia Slavova

Over the years, the cultural struggle over meanings has become less dramatic with the realization that gender roles and conceptions of sexuality are different from culture to culture, from language to language (as evidenced in the resignifications of feminisms and gender in German, French, Chinese, and other languages). The early stages of resistance and distanciation have given way to more productive feminist negotiations through translation. One such inspiring example of transnational feminism in post-communist CEE has been the adaptation of the American feminist classic Our Bodies Ourselves (OBOS), published first in 1971 by The Boston Women’s Health Book Collective, and already translated into 40 languages. Around the beginning of the 21st century seven NGOs in CEE published their translated versions of the book (funded through the Soros Open Society Network) into Russian (1995 and 2007), Bulgarian, Serbian, and Armenian (2001), Romanian (2002), Polish (2004), and Albanian (2006). As the first medical resource book on women’s health these editions were groundbreaking. They informed women how to be educated consumers of health care at a moment when the old healthcare system had been dismantled; they empowered them at a time marked by increasing feminization of poverty and unemployment, growing drug abuse, abortion rates, and domestic violence, as well as trafficking of women, and many other problems. All these editions have to a different extent adapted the content and structure of the original OBOS by cutting certain sections or chapters from the original, as well as adding locally relevant information and visual material. For example, the Bulgarian and Armenian adaptations stress the ideology of the book as a program for women’s health movements, whereas the Polish adaptation and the Moldovan edition (distributed in Romania too) focus on medical information rather than political activism. The Bulgarian team included activists and doctors who seriously adapted the chapters on nutrition or over-medicalization as they were not relevant in a country with medication and food deficits at the time.10 Apart from paying attention to the feminist politics of the original, the translators had to take into account the poetics of translation too. Translating such a rich and non-hierarchically written book of testimonials by women of different race, age, class, profession, religion, and sexual orientation, who spoke openly about their bodies and sexuality was a rather challenging task for Eastern European translators, trained in uniformity, sameness, and pseudo-prudery. As translator of the Bulgarian edition Nashite tela, nie samite I was simultaneously overwhelmed and frustrated by the polyphony of voices in the book: how to render the inclusive “we” language in a form that sounded natural and inviting for Bulgarian readers who had a strong aversion to consciousness-raising practices after decades of enforced Bolshevik collectivism? This is why the more extreme collective calls for global sisterhood had to be toned down in the Bulgarian language. Thanks to the editorial freedom enjoyed, the adaptations of OBOS in CEE have been meaningfully and creatively domesticated by bringing the book closer to the needs and the cultural norms of the receiving societies – thus serving as a successful model for transnational feminist collaboration and activism through translation. Gradually, in the last two decades, “feminism in/as translation” has grown into a doublesided project of simultaneous construction and deconstruction: appropriating relevant Western feminist knowledge and methodologies, while critically adapting and revising them; bending the languages and cultural norms in CEE, while destabilizing the language and foundations of existing feminisms. The continued process of feminist translation and self-translation in CEE has brought more and more tensions and contradictions to light, questioning established conceptions and ideas such as the Western understanding of patriarchy and patriarchal structures; the universality of women’s oppression and victimization as the sole basis for feminist struggle; the narrowness of “the equality of rights agenda”; the universality of feminist goals, methods, theories, and analytical concepts; the role of alliances with men; the automatic alliance between feminism and Marxism, and other serious issues.11 272

Feminism in the post-communist world

Conclusion The newly emerging feminist projects in the post-communist world have demonstrated once again that translation is essential to the process of change that feminism advocates: on the one hand, as culturally translated practices, they have destabilized established meanings and categories of feminist thought, but on the other, they have evolved and particularized in the very process of translation. Despite the time warps and divergences in the CEE feminist “translation zone,” the body of translated feminist texts, policies, and ideas has had an invigorating effect on societal transformation in the region in many ways: by providing transferable knowledge through which a whole range of new methodologies, standards, analytical concepts, and categories were brought into research in the region; by breaking representational taboos about sexuality and the body, and creating new sensitivity (including gender-sensitive language) to combat sexism and homophobia; by operating as a tool of democracy building, fostering greater critical thinking about overall power structures and oppression based on “gender” and other categories of human difference, as well as other positive effects. At the same time, the incomplete development of the feminist projects in/as translations in CEE can hopefully provide useful material for continued research in the area of cross-cultural collaboration and activism as well as transnational feminism – which are by default translational.

Further reading Aspasia: International Yearbook of Central, Eastern, and Southeastern European Women’s and Gender History. The only journal in English on the history of women in CEE; contains useful clusters on The Birth of a Field: Women’s and Gender Studies (2011, Volume 5 (1)), Gendering the Cold War in the Region (2014, Volume 8 (1)), Ten Years After: Communism and Feminism Revisited (2016, Volume 10 (1)). Flotow, Luise von and Farahzad Farzaneh, eds. 2017. Translating Women: Different Voices and New Horizons. New York: Routledge. The collection introduces case studies on feminist translation practices from under-researched locations such as Iran, Egypt, Japan, Eastern and Central Europe, China, and other regions. Jusová, Iveta and Jiřina Šiklová, eds. 2016. Czech Feminisms: Perspectives on Gender in East Central Europe. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. An informative book about gender, sexuality, and ethnicity issues in Czech culture, drawing parallels with other CEE countries. Phoenix, Ann and Kornelia Slavova, eds. 2011. Living in Translation: Voicing and Inscribing Women’s Lives and Practices. The European Journal of Women’s Studies, 18(4). This special issue discusses the connection between language, translation, and women’s identity in Europe, including CEE.

Related topics Feminist translation studies, women in central and Eastern Europe, cultural translation, gender studies, transnational feminism

Notes 1 The research for this chapter was made possible by the generous support of IFK, Kunstuniversität Linz in Wien. 2 “Post-communist world” or “CEE” are used here as umbrella terms to delineate common tendencies – claiming neither universality for the 29 countries involved nor exhaustive investigation. The terms ‘communism’ and ‘socialism’ are used interchangeably: the former refers to the specificity of the communist political regime whereas the latter to society, economy, and way of life as a whole under ‘state socialism.’ 273

Kornelia Slavova

3 See Alena Wagnerova, Women as the Object and Subject of the Socialist Form of Women’s Emancipation. In Czech Feminisms (2016); Georzheta Nazarska. 2007. The Bulgarian Association of University Women 1924–1950. Aspasia, 1, 153–175; Maria Bucur and Mihaela Miroiu, eds. 2002. Patriarchy and Emancipation in the History of Romanian Political Thought. Iaşi: Polirom. 4 Slavonic languages are synthetic and highly inflectional, with three genders and rigid marking in nouns, adjectives, and tense forms. The pervasive usage of gender-specific suffixes and forms facilitates sexist usage: as Jana Valdrová explains about the Czech language, “due to generic masculine forms women are invisible in language use and sexist patterns are common” (2016, 272). 5 See the anthologies Miglena Nikolchina, et al., eds. 1997. Vremeto na zhenite. Sofia: Sofia University Press; Sneja Gunew, ed. 2002. Feministkoto znanie. Sofia: Polis; Martina Pachmanová, ed. 2002. Neviditelná žena: antologie současného amerického myšlení o feminismu, dějinách a vizualitě. Praha: One Woman Press. Former Yugoslavia makes an exception as the first feminist texts were translated there as early as the 1970s (works by Shulamith Firestone, Kate Millet, Betty Friedan, Germaine Greer, Julia Mitchell, and Julia Kristeva). 6 For example, Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity makes no sense in Bulgarian translation [D. Zaharieva, trans. 2003. Bezpokoistvata okolo rodoviya pol. Feminisum i podrivane na identichnostta. Sofia: KH] due to the obliterated distinction between sex and gender. The translations into other languages in the region adopt diverse strategies as seen in their titles: Bogdan Ciubuc, trans. 2000. Genul – un mar al discordiei. Feminismul si subversiunea identitatii. Bucuresti: Editura Univers; Suzana Tratnik, trans. 2001. Tezave s spolom: Feminizem in subverzija identitete. Ljubliana: ŠKUC Lambda; Jana Juráňová, trans. 2003/2015/2017. Trampoty s rodom. Feminizmus a podrývanie identity. Bratislava: Aspekt; Mirjana Paić-Jurinić, trans. 2003. Nevolje s rodom. Feminizam i subverzija identiteta. Zagreb: Ženska infoteka; Karolina Krasuska, trans. 2003/2005/2008. Uwiklani w pleć. Warszawa: Krytyka Polityczna. 7 Under communism homosexuality was criminalized and medicalized – often presented as yet another dimension of Western decadent bourgeois lifestyle. However, there were some noticeable differences in CEE: translations in the field of sexuality and homosexuality were popular in former Yugoslavia as early as the 1980s through alternative sub-culture and women’s and lesbian groups. Socialist Czechoslovakia also had a more enlightened politics – the first country in the Eastern bloc to decriminalize homosexuality in the mid-1960s, which explains its more tolerant public attitude towards gays and lesbians as well as its vocal LGTB community today. 8 Ironically, years later the label “gender studies” turned out not to be so safe: for example, in 2018 the Hungarian government banned gender studies programs, forcing the leading institution in the development of gender studies in CEE (Central European University) to move to Vienna after 25 years of existence. 9 The resistance was targeted primarily to article 3(c), which defines “gender” as “the socially constructed roles, behaviors, activities and attributes that a given society considers appropriate for women and men,” Available at: www.coe.int/en/web/conventions/full-list/-/conventions/rms/090000168008482e 10 The prefaces to the translated editions are available at: http://ourbodiesourselves.org/global-projects). For more on the travelling of OBOS see Kathy Davis. 2007. The Making of Our Bodies, Ourselves: How Feminism Travels across Borders. Durham, NC: Duke University Press; for Eastern European adaptations, see Anna Bogic ‘Translating into Democracy: The Politics of Translation, Our Bodies, Ourselves, and the “Other Europe.” ’ In Flotow, Luise von and Farahzdad Farzaneh, eds. 2017. Translating Women: Different Voices and New Horizons. New York: Routledge, 56–75. 11 For a more detailed analysis of this double-sided project, see Kornelia Slavova (2006).

References Anzaldúa, Gloria. 1987. Borderlands/ La Frontera: The New Mestiza. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books. Appiah, Kwame Anthony. 1993. Thick Translation. Callaloo, 16(4), 808–819. Appiah, Kwame Anthony. 2000. Thick Translation, in Lawrence Venuti, ed., The Translation Studies Reader. New York: Routledge, 417–429. Apter, Emily. 2006. The Translation Zone. A New Comparative Literature. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Asad, Talal. 1986. The Concept of Cultural Translation in British Social Anthropology, in James Clifford and George E. Marcus, eds., Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 141–164. Castro, Olga and Emek Ergun, eds. 2017. Feminist Translation Studies. Local and Transnational Perspectives. New York: Routledge. 274

Feminism in the post-communist world

Clifford, James. 1997. Routes. Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Flotow, Luise von. 2014. Translation and Gender. Translating in the ‘Era of Feminism.’ London and New York: Routledge. Gajewska, Agnieszka. 2010. Translating Feminism. Przekładaniec. A Journal of Literary Translation, 24, 7–18. Grünberg, Laura, ed. 2011. From Gender Studies to Gender IN Studies. Case Studies on Gender-Inclusive Curriculum in Higher Education. Bucharest: UNESCO-CEPES. Havelková, Hana. 1997. Transitory and Persistent Differences. Feminism East and West, in Cora Kaplan, Debra Keates, and Joan W. Scott, eds., Transitions, Environments, Translations. Feminisms in International Politics. New York and London: Routledge, 56–62. Kašić, Biljana. 2004. Feminist Cross-mainstreaming Within ‘East-West’ Mapping: A Postsocialist Perspective. European Journal of Women’s Studies, 11(4), 473–485. Maitland Sarah. 2017. What Is Cultural Translation? London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic. Massardier-Kenney, Françoise. 1997. Towards a Redefinition of Feminist Translation Practice. The Translator, 3(1), 55–69. Miroiu, Mihaela. 2004. State Men, Market Women. The Effects of Left Conservatism on Gender Politics in Romanian Transition. Feminismo/s, 3, 207–234. Nowicka, Wanda. 1995. Statement from the Non-Region. The Fourth World Conference on Women, Beijing, Sept. 13. Slavova, Kornelia. 2006. Looking at North-American Feminism Through the Double Lens of Eastern Europe and the Third World, in Jasmina Lukić, Joanna Regulska, and Darja Zaviršek, eds., Women and Citizenship in Central and Eastern Europe. Aldershot: Ashgate, 245–263. Slavova, Kornelia. 2014. Gender on the Move: Shifting Meanings Between Western and Non-Western Worlds, in Guyonne Leduc, ed., Comment faire des Etudes-Genres avec de la littérature: Masquereading. Paris: L’Harmattan, 31–44. Spivak, Gayatri. 1992. The Politics of Translation, in Michele Barrett and Anne Phillips, eds., Destabilizing Theory: Contemporary Feminist Debate. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 177–200. Suchland, Jennifer. 2011. Is Postsocialism Transnational? Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 36(4), 837–862. Temkina, Anna and Elena Zdravomyslova. 2006. Gender and Women’s Studies in Contemporary Russia, in Marlen Bidwell-Steiner and Karin Wozonig, eds., A Canon of Our Own? Kanonkritik und Kanonbilding in den Gender Studies. Wien: Studies Verlag. Tratnik, Suzana. 2011. Translation Trouble. Translating Sexual Identity into Slovenian, in Brian James Baer, ed., Contexts, Subtexts and Pretexts: Literary Translation in Eastern Europe and Russia. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins,137–146. Tymoczko, Maria and Edwin Gentzler. 2002. Translation and Power. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Valdrová, Jana. 2016. Typological Differences Between Languages as an Argument Against Gender-Fair Language Use? In Iveta Jusová and Jiřina Šiklová, eds., Czech Feminisms: Perspectives on Gender in East Central Europe. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 270–283. Venuti, Lawrence. 2002. The Scandals of Translation: Towards an Ethics of Difference. London and New York: Routledge. Weiner, Elaine. 2009. Dirigism and Déjà-vu Logic: The Gender Politics and Perils of EU Enlargement. European Journal of Women’s Studies, 16(3), 211–228.

275

21 The uneasy transfer of feminist ideas and gender theory Post-Soviet English-Russian translations Tatiana Barchunova

Introduction Russia has a rich history of feminism going back to first-wave feminism dealing with political rights (Stites 1991). However, in the late 20th century, feminism was perceived as a Western phenomenon. Therefore, when the interest in gender studies and feminist theory arose in the 1990s, these topics began to develop within two frameworks: that of the history of the women’s movement and private life in Russia connected with earlier Russian traditions, on the one hand, and that of research on economics, the sociology of gender, and the history of Western feminist philosophy, on the other hand. The second framework was essentially a translation project per se, though some translation projects were also realized within the first framework. The great majority of the translated texts in this late 20th century period were from English. This chapter focuses on translations of broadly understood feminist academic texts including texts in feminist theory and gender studies, but excluding fiction and political journalism. Russian gender studies and translations of gender studies and feminist texts developed in several waves. The first wave began in the ten-year period between 1992 and 2002. It was followed by a high wave of translations from 2003 to 2006 when these were funded by private Western funds and individuals, and printed by publishing companies of varying sizes. The decline of the systemic funding occurred between 2007 and 2015 when Western foundations had to close or reduce their grant programs and leave Russia. This situation was caused by a crisis in the relations between the Russian Federation and the West. The activities of Western charity organizations began to be perceived as an instrument of brain drain and ideological subversion. The wave of gender studies and feminist translations after 2007 has not been high. However, certain publishers continue to print interesting materials on sexuality and everyday history, and Internet networks accumulate and disseminate feminist translations and resources, which all contribute to the development of feminist discourse. This chapter is based on an analysis of the texts translated and published during the first two waves, and my own experience of translating from English to Russian during the first and third waves of recent feminist and gender studies. I see translation in this field as a process of creating a new type of economy of discourse, which occurred not only in gender studies in Russia but in the other social sciences and humanities as well. By economy of discourse, I understand 276

Feminist ideas and gender theory

a certain mode of organizing texts (and communication in general) related to a certain institutional framework. Translation is not just a transfer carried out through Russian-language texts; it plays a role in the constitution of a new economy of discourse which is perceived as Western although over time it has come to include more and more non-Western texts. I will expose the differences between the ‘old’ and the ‘new’ types of economy of discourse later in the chapter (see sections two and three). This chapter consists of four sections. The first three deal with the institutional and discursive settings of the translation of feminist texts into Russian. They provide descriptions and explanations of the challenges that the translators of feminist and gender studies texts encountered. Section one deals with the Russian language as lingua franca during pre-Soviet, Soviet, and post-Soviet times. Section two deals with the Soviet economy of discourse and its approach to translation. Section three addresses the issue of the transformation of the Soviet economy of discourse since the 1990s and the constitution of the new discourse. Here, I look at the emergence of gender studies in the post-Soviet context, and how translation as a practice has changed within the framework of the social transformation the USSR underwent. Section four is an empirical analysis of the conceptual challenges the Russian translators faced in their attempts to appropriate the Western discourse of feminist and gender studies.

Section one: Russian language as lingua franca The first waves of translation of feminist materials in the former Soviet Union comprise largely English texts moving into Russian; the translations I refer to come from the Republic of Belarus, the Russian Federation, and Ukraine, three independent states constituted by a treaty in 1991. Today, Belarussians and Ukrainians also translate from English into the corresponding titular languages. Single translation projects of feminist literature into Russian were implemented in other post-Soviet states. These translations into Russian tended to continue the language policy of both pre-Soviet Russia and the Soviet Union. Both Belarus and Ukraine became parts of the Russian Empire before 1917, before the October Revolution. Belarus became a part of the Russian Empire at the end of the 18th century, and some parts of Ukraine even earlier. After the revolution of 1917, both regions became socialist republics, and were later integrated into the Soviet Union. The official policy of the Russian Empire was russification. In 1836, education in the Belarusian language was forbidden, and the Latin alphabet was forbidden in 1859. Ukraine went through the same process. In 1876, the publication of books in Ukrainian was forbidden. In the Soviet Union this policy continued, and the Russian language was officially announced as “the language for international communication.” Between 1989 and 1991, language policy changed radically with the Baltic States and other former republics of the Soviet Union becoming independent states. Today, the linguistic situation varies in different post-Soviet countries. In some cases, the Russian language has lost its official status and been replaced by titular languages of the respective nation state plus English. In Belarus, however, Russian remains one of the important communication instruments. The major reason for translation into Russian seems to be pragmatic: the non-governmental organizations that funded the translations thought that if the text were translated into Russian more people would read it than if it were translated into the titular languages of the new post-Soviet states. The good thing about the Russian language as lingua franca is that it is open to borrowings. Such novel concepts as gender, queer, sexism, heteronormativity, hegemonic masculinity, and cathexis were phonetically calqued and integrated into the discourse of social sciences. However, some terms, such as “emphasized femininity,” or words such as “empowerment,” “advocacy,” 277

Tatiana Barchunova

“sensibility,” “standpoint,” and others, are more difficult to appropriate since they cannot be readily calqued and need to be introduced through lexical innovation. This takes time and discussion. What is difficult about Russian is that it is a strongly gendered language. It has three grammatical genders. Nouns, pronouns, adjectives, participles, and verbs in the past tense are gendered and have to be gender coordinated. Therefore, the English-Russian translation of feminist texts demands that any subject be designated either as male or female. In English, this aspect is very often indeterminate but the Russian translator has to make a choice. Very often, it is not clear which version is preferable. This problem is not just a grammatical issue. It raises the question about how the subject of feminism is to be understood: is it always a woman or can it be a man?

Section two: the Soviet economy of discourse, and translation practice Registers of the Soviet discourse The transfer of Western feminist ideas through Russian translation proved to be a complex project of appropriating concepts that did not exist in Russian-language social sciences. Further, besides the particular conceptual challenges, translators had to deal with different principles of organization of discourse and translation practice in general. Therefore, to understand the dramatic process of searching for equivalence it is important to look at a wider framework which may help consider concrete cases of misinterpretation that obscured the meanings of the source texts through deliberate translation solutions. The general Soviet economy of discourse had much in common with earlier discursive traditions. The pre-Soviet Russian economy of discourse was constituted by three unequally developed registers: official, private, and public. Experts in Russian history, literature, political philosophy, and linguistics claim that the Russian communication system is dominated by two registers – the official and the private; while the public register, which is quite prominent in the English language economy of discourse, is underdeveloped (Vakhtin and Firsov 2016). The Russian official discourse originates in the concept of a single truth of the Orthodox Christianity. Later it evolved into the concept of monopoly of the state to know the one truth and to transfer this truth to the people. The official register is a formal and highly ritualized type of discourse. The goal of this type of discourse is not to discuss a problem, or develop negotiation that aims for consensus. It is rather a ritual designed to demonstrate a formal agreement of the members of a collective. A typical case of such an official discursive situation might be a meeting of the Communist Party or the Communist Union of Youth (Komsomol) members, which had a very strict protocol with several speeches and a final vote in favour of the resolution that had been written before the meeting. The essential part of the official register is to unmask dissidents. It is called a critique but it is not about critique per se. It is about othering that can imply stigmatization or exclusion from the collective – exile or professional segregation. This is not a specifically Russian phenomenon. The goal of communication in the private register is not negotiation or discussion either. Its goal is to express one’s opinions, but it has little to do with a common agenda or action (Vakhtin 2017). A typical Soviet case of a private conversation is the so-called kitchen-talk. The Soviet kitchen was a semi-public semi-private space to discuss political and world view problems and to raise the famous Russian questions – “Who is guilty?” and “What should be done?” – and sometimes even to suggest answers. Private discourse can be very passionate and produce 278

Feminist ideas and gender theory

conflict but usually it will not lead to any common action. The participants of the kitchen-talk express their opinions but they will not reach an agreement or common agenda. The public register aims at a free exchange of opinions, sharing information, and making a collective decision to act. It must be based on arguments essential to persuade the opponents. This register is either totally lacking or is underdeveloped at different stages of Russian history.

Official register and the translation canon The official register had a strong impact on the Soviet approach to translation in social sciences and literature. Academic discourse, which covers such scientific genres as conference papers, publications in periodicals, books, and dissertations including translations of academic literature, is normally considered a version of the public register. It must be different from the official register because, as a public discourse, it has to be based on the argumentation: its goal is to prove a thesis by demonstrating the empirical data and theoretical bases. It is also different from the private register since it proceeds from shared assumptions, and its goal is to persuade the reader of the correctness of the conclusions. However, in pre-Soviet Russia and in the Soviet Union, the impact of the official discourse on science was determined by the political control of the Russian Academy from its incipience in the 18th century. The impact of the official register was realized through three interrelated practices: structural organization of texts, state control of publications, and conceptual design. These three principles also constituted the Soviet approach to the translation of scientific and popular science literature, especially in the social sciences. The compulsory principle of the structural organization of any text in the social sciences was ideological framing, the so-called critique of bourgeois science from a progressive Marxist-Leninist standpoint that proclaimed the advantages of socialism over capitalism. The so-called critique of bourgeois social sciences was the canonical way of exposing any Western concept or theory that was inconsistent with Marxism-Leninism. The Marxist-Leninist approach was considered a universal explanatory model. For example, in the preface to the translation of the book Words and Things. A Critical Account of Linguistic Philosophy and a Study in Ideology by Ernest Gellner, the Soviet philosopher Vladimir V. Mshvenieradze writes: Gellner who was brought up in the traditions of the bourgeois culture, is not devoid of the bourgeois prejudices against the revolutionary proletariat and its ideology–MarxismLeninism. [. . .] Ignoring Marxist-Leninist philosophy closes to the author [Gellner] the only scientific way to crush linguistic philosophy. (1962, 21, 23) (my translation) The political part of Marxism-Leninism – scientific communism – involved the schematic exposition of Marxist ideas about the development of human society and its inevitable climax – a socialist revolution – as a means of attaining a society with justice and equality. In a sense, Marxism-Leninism followed the old Russian tradition of doing philosophy as a world view represented by the philosophical ideas of Russian writers. However, unlike pre-Soviet thought, the Soviet approach was characterized by apologetic attitudes and the lack of criticism towards the current political regime. And in regard to gender, since the socialist revolution was considered the universal means to solve the women question, such problems as occupational hazards and discrimination against women were silenced. Mainstream women’s history had to describe the experience of those women who were involved in the revolutionary movement or World War II, who belonged to the progressive classes, contributed to the building of socialism, or belonged to the artistic milieu. There were also books about women-scientists. Though 279

Tatiana Barchunova

women’s history written under the Soviet regime was one-sided, the appropriation of Western gender and women’s history through Russian translations was smoother than the appropriation of feminist philosophy. The quality of translations of historical texts was better even during the first wave of translations. In Soviet Russia, strict state control filtered any publication that went beyond the permitted criticism of minor deficiencies of the social system. The risk of being persecuted for a critique of the socialist economy or human condition was high. When in the late 1970s, a group of women intellectuals in Leningrad tried to openly address issues of discrimination against women, they were persecuted and eventually exiled. Even mild forms of criticism could imply the total dispossession of the critic. The members of editorial boards risked their status and employment if they published papers that might provoke debates. The only translated book on the women question I could read before the 1990s was Woman and Socialism by August Bebel translated from German by an anonymous translator and published in 1959 by the State Publishing House of Political Literature. My hypothesis is that it could be printed at that time for two reasons. First, it was the so-called Khrushchev Thaw period, when Soviet readers got more access to Western literature. And second, the book was ideologically proper from the point of view of the Soviet authorities. Bebel qualified the independent women’s movement as bourgeois. Yet, the goals of the socialist liberation movement coincided with the goals of women’s movement. He supported the doctrine that women could suffer only under capitalism, while under socialism all problems of discrimination would be automatically solved. This doctrine rendered an independent women’s movement and feminism as its ideology superfluous. It is the socialist state, the society, that has to address women’s problems. Soviet women were ‘allowed’ to associate only for the sake of solidarity with those who suffered under the yoke of capitalism. Translation of any materials addressing the issues of mobilization of women into independent movement was impossible. State control over the translation and circulation of Western resources implied the formation of a canonical approach to printed texts in general and to translations in particular. The constituting character of the canon is standardization. There are several traits of this standardization: standardized registers, standardized editorial norms, and selection of lingua franca. A positive side of the canon was professional editorial preparation of the manuscript. The standardization of stylistic and grammatical requirements and strict scheduling of publications implied highquality editorial work, copy-editing, and spell-checking. Using Russian as lingua franca was a part of the canon.

Section three: the post-Soviet economy of discourse: translation becomes an instrument to appropriate Western gender studies and feminism Institutional changes and naive translation At the end of the 20th century the radical changes in economic and social policies brought with them changes in the institutional design of the economy of discourse and in the politics of translation. In the early post-Soviet period, the so-called Transformation of the 1990s, an avalanche of Western texts flowed into the former Soviet Union. The Soviet economy of discourse encountered the Western economy of discourse directly and in a different setting. Mediation by the state substantially decreased while other agents appeared on the translation scene. Texts in gender studies and feminist theory comprised only a part of the multi-temporal and multi-­paradigmatic English discourse that had to be appropriated. 280

Feminist ideas and gender theory

The institutional setting included both new and old agents in the translation process. Among the old agents were professional translators and researchers in the relevant areas who could act as either translators or editors. Among the new agents were private publishers, foreign private funders, and “naïve translators.” “Naïve translator” is not an absolute and unified category. A naïve translator is not familiar with the subject matter of the source text, and their command of the languages of both target and source texts may be low. The level and the quality of naïveté can differ. Basically, a naïve translation has linguistic mistakes (grammatical and stylistic) and is either totally or partially semantically non-transparent. Naïve translators, unlike amateur translators, are often unaware of the difference between their own translation competence and accepted linguistic and publication standards. Sociologically, they can be volunteers in non-­ governmental organizations or freelancers who do not have sociological, historical, philosophical, or any other appropriate background for the work in question. The post-Soviet version of the Russian economy of discourse inherited the problem of the underdeveloped public register of discourse. However, the domination of the official register over the scientific discourse decreased with the decrease of state control over publication processes. The discursive rituals such as references to the ideologically approved texts and the critique of bourgeois science were gone with the new winds from the West. Major agents promoting the introduction of gender studies into Russian academia were private Western funders that funded single projects via relatively extensive grant programs. For instance, American publisher and editor Katrina van den Heuvel supported the translation and publication of The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan (Friedan 1994). She also supported publication of the Russian version of the famous book Our Bodies, Ourselves. A Book by Women and for Women by The Boston Women’s Health Book Collective which was printed in 1995 by Progress and Univers Publishers. The majority of English to Russian translation projects were funded by The J.D. and C.T. MacArthur Foundation, and the George Soros Open Society Foundation. The most extensive translation project was realized by the Soros Foundation that supported single book translations and the series of translations entitled “Gender Collection. Foreign Classics,” which consisted of about ten books and some other editions. The selection of articles and book chapters for Russian-language readers or anthologies in many cases follows the Western canon of feminist and gender studies readers and anthologies. They include papers and single book chapters by such authors as Judith Butler, Nancy Chodorow, Carol Gilligan, Heidi Hartmann, Laura Mulvey, Gayle Rubin, Joan W. Scott, and others which were selected by editors of anthologies in the West. Some translations in gender studies and other fields of the social sciences and humanities, which were printed under the auspices of the private foundations, were done by translators who had appropriate linguistic and professional training. However, the private funding and printing of translation projects had an ambiguous effect on the translation scene. Making a tremendous contribution to opening up Western science and philosophy to the Russian-speaking readers, these projects also promoted the marketization of translation and precarious employment: underpayment, limited contract time, lack of professional editing and proofreading, lack of time for professional discussions. The private funders operated through a grant system, which may have been too strict for professional translators who were used to different timing. This is when naïve translators entered the scene. They were not familiar with the publication canon: stages of translation, editing, and proofreading. Some of them were volunteers, enthusiastic about the subject matter of the source texts but lacking the appropriate skills. Since the state no longer controlled the quality of the publications, the quality of printed translations decreased. Many texts produced by translators in the 1990s and the early 2000s are examples of naïve translation, and they are abundant. For instance, all translations of Judith Butler’s texts made at that time were naïve. 281

Tatiana Barchunova

I will give two examples of naïve translations here. The first example is the anonymous translation of the article by Susan Moller Okin Gender, the Public and the Private (Okin 2001). The source text was published in the collection of papers Political Theory Today (Held 1991). However, in the Russian annotation, the collection of papers is called “Political Sciences Tuday” [sic]. The quality of editorial preparation of the manuscript is poor. Many English-language references are confusing. The author of the article is called Okeen (Okin 2001, 129, 131). The reader of the book will have difficulties in recognizing Rawls in Rouls (129); Elshtain – in Elstain (130) and Elstein (129); Pateman – in Paitman (131); A. Jaggar – in E. Jegger (ibid.), etc. The philosophical competence of the translator and editor is insufficient to interpret the argumentation in the source text. They do not seem to be familiar with the discussions about the dichotomy of private and public in liberal philosophy, and its criticisms. For their interpretation of these terms they selected terms from the repertoire of Marxism-Leninism – social and personal (общественное и частное or личное) – that have different connotations than the ‘public and private’ dichotomy. According to Marxism, private property has to be demolished, while for liberal writers the area of the private and privacy have a special value. Thus, Okin, following Virginia Woolf, writes about the importance of privacy for women. The cohesion of the target text is ruined when privacy is translated as “seclusion” (уединенность) (see more about incoherence of translations in Section four of this article). The term gender is translated as sex (пол), though by 2001, the term gender (гендер) was already widely used in Russian. In cases where Okin discusses both gender and sex, her argumentation in the target text is not transparent. One of the major concepts of the source text – construction and deconstruction – are semantically disconnected in the target text. Construction is translated as structure, or form (оформленность) while deconstruction becomes analysis (разбор) (114, 119). The dichotomy ‘masculine and feminine’ is translated as ‘masculinist and feminist’ (маскулинистский и феминистский) (119). Another case of the naïve translation is the Russian version of Collins Dictionary of Sociology by David Jary and Julia Jary ( Jary and Jary 1999). It is a more radical example of a naïve translation because one expects that a dictionary as a normative text is clear and correct. There is no mention of the editorial board of the Russian edition. The edition is full of mistakes: grammatical, stylistic, semantic, terminological, factual. I will give only a few examples here (for more examples, see Barchunova 2001). For instance, in the translation of the title of the book by Claude Lévi-Strauss Wild Opinion (Дикое мнение) ( Jary and Jary 1999, vol. 1, 62), it is very difficult to recognize the original title La Pensée sauvage. Simone de Beauvoir is hidden behind the name Bovua (Бовуa) (388, 411, Vol. 1), Helene Cixous – behind the noun sixa (cикса) (Vol. 1, 208) and the name Six (Vol. 2, 388). Almost every article of the Dictionary has references to the literature, but there is no bibliography or index. Some articles related to gender and feminism sound anecdotal to say the least. Femininity is called feminity (Vol. 1, 208). The concept of homosexuality is medicalized and translated as homosexualism (Vol. 1, 125); suffragette is called sulfragette (Vol. 2, 312); gay marriage is translated as licentious (беспутный) (Vol. 1, 61). Naïve translations of this kind undermine the readers’ trust in the content of the source texts and the potential effects of the feminist agenda.

English-Russian conceptual gap The major paradigmatic gap between the Soviet social science tradition and Western gender theory is found between the materialistic foundationalism of the former, and the social constructionism of the latter. For many years, Russian-speaking social scientists had to follow the simplified version of Marxist social theory and to refer to its basic statement: matter is primary, and consciousness is secondary. In social science, this so-called materialistic approach meant 282

Feminist ideas and gender theory

reducing social phenomena to economics and the development of the mode of production. This reduction was defined as the principle of causality, which was proclaimed as one of the advantages of historical materialism in comparison to bourgeois sociology. The concept of gender as a social construct and social constructionism in general in opposition to essentialism and naturalism (materialism) proved to be one of the challenges for translators who were educated in the spirit of materialistic foundationalism. The appropriation of the term gender is a graphic illustration of the conceptual gap that loomed large. At first, the way that the concept of gender was appropriated reproduced the reductionist schematics of materialism. After the publication of Russian translations of several important constructionist and phenomenological works in sociology and social anthropology (Berger and Luckmann 1995; Schütz 2003; West and Zimmerman 1997) the interpretation of gender as a social construct became more consistent, and the term itself slowly but surely began to be used on a par with the term sex. In 1992, gender was first used in brackets and translated as social sex (социальный пол) (Voronina 1992, 11, 109). In 1994, both sex (пол) and gender (гендер) were used to translate the term gender (Lorber 1994). By 1997, gender (гендер) began to be widespread. In 2002, the Dictionary of Gender Terms (Denisova 2002) fixed the term gender (гендер) and its various implementations in social science and humanities. However, in order to overcome the materialistic schematics certain other notions were needed as well. The most important of these was the denial of the biological origin of gender differences, and the implantation of the idea that social reality is constructed through social interaction: for example, recognition of the fact that emotions and responses to them are social phenomena and can lead to beliefs that men are rational and women are not. The notion that social reality is socially constructed proved to be very difficult for the interpreters/translators of gender-focused texts who were used to the naïve realism of Marxism-Leninism. I will demonstrate this later in the chapter. An example of the materialistic reductionism in the interpretation of gender is the translation of the famous definition of gender by Joan W. Scott. Scott presents her definition of gender as consisting of two parts, and the second part is more important than the first (see Table 21.1). In her interpretation of the text, the Russian translator E. Ananieva reproduces the materialist scheme, Marxist naturalism, though in a sophisticated way. The translator also divides the definition into two parts but unlike the source text, the first part of the target text refers to gender, while the second one refers to sex. The meaning of the target definition is: there is a primary biological substratum (sex), and there is gender which is consciousness of differences between sexes.

Table 21.1 Definition of gender by Joan W. Scott in Russian translation Original

Printed translation from English into Russian

Reverse translation

“[. . .] gender is a constitutive element of social relationships based on perceived differences between the sexes, and gender is a primary way of signifying relationships of power” (Scott 1988, 42)

“осознание гендерной принадлежности – конституирующий элемент социальных отношений, основанный на воспринимаемых различиях между полами, а пол – это приоритетный способ выражения властных отношений” (Cit. in: Lorber 1994, 127)

“the awareness of belonging to a gender is a constitutive element of social relationships based on perceived differences between the sexes, while sex is a prior means to express power relations” (Cit. in: Lorber 1994, 127)

283

Tatiana Barchunova

Later interpretations of the cluster of terms constructionism are variable. The spectrum of translation of the terms construct, construction, and constructionism is wide and inconsistent. I will give some selected examples from the translation of the paper by Alison M. Jaggar Love and Knowledge: Emotion in Feminist Epistemology ( Jaggar 1989). For one thing, Jaggar develops a constructionist interpretation of emotions. One of the sections of her paper is titled Emotions as Social Constructs ( Jaggar 1989, 134). This title is translated as Emotion as a Social Product ( Jaggar 2005, 159), which does not fit Jaggar’s conceptualization of the social construction of emotions as a process. Further, in the same section, the concept “socially constructed” (134–135) is interpreted as “social origin” (социальное происхождение) (159) and “social basis” (социальная основа) (160). The verb “to construct” (135) is interpreted as “to emerge” (возникать). The phrase about concepts as “socially constructed ways of organizing and making sense of the world” (135) is interpreted as “a way of social organization of knowledge and understanding of the world” (способ социальной организации познания и понимания мира) (159) which ascribes a different meaning to Jaggar’s statement. Jaggar’s statement refers to concepts about emotions, while the translated text refers to institutional arrangements of knowledge. The wrong interpretation of the idea of social construction brings in further conceptual aberrations. Jaggar’s point is that emotions are not “passive or involuntary responses to the world. Rather, they are ways in which we engage actively and even construct the world” (137). Therefore, they can be also reconstructed, i.e. changed. However, the interpretation has the opposite meaning: “The emotions were created by the society. Therefore, let them be again recreated” (162). The translator does not perceive social construction as a key concept that runs throughout the paper. She uses several equivalents to translate it into Russian, which undermines the cohesion of the argument. While the source text aims at the constructionist subversion of approaches to emotions as physiological reactions, the target text communicates a different notion. That notion focuses on how abstract society determines emotions. This notion seems to be better than the notion of emotions as “natural kinds,” which Jaggar criticizes, but it is not adequate to her standpoint that insists on active perception through emotions. It is this active perception that makes emotions so vital for knowledge. Besides the concept of social construction, there are other concepts that are a challenge for Russian translators. They are such basic concepts as exclusion/inclusion, agent/agency, contingent/ contingency, to enact/enactment, negotiations, performance, dispossession, economy, welfare state, empowerment, subjectivity, sensibility, and many others. These challenges are the result of the lack of appropriate theoretical training and the gaps between the English and Russian economies of discourse. Here, I will illustrate some ways of coping with the concept of negotiations. The notion of negotiation (переговоры) as a social practice is not typical for the totalitarian economy of discourse and for the totalitarian system in general. In Soviet social science, negotiations were discussed primarily as the practice of professional diplomats. Such notions as negotiation of meaning or negotiation of identity sound unusual in Russian with its dominance of top-down approaches to making decisions and social interaction. Negotiations belong to the same register as debate and discussion, which for a long time were underdeveloped. O. Dvorkina, the translator of the paper Feminism and Science by Evelyn Fox Keller (Keller 1989) completely avoids the concept “negotiating” which is used in the source text: the word “negotiating” is omitted (Keller 2005, 208). Similarly, Alexei Garadja, the translator of the A Manifesto for Cyborgs by Donna Haraway (1990, 208) also omits the concept of negotiation in the phrase negotiating child care (Haraway 2005, 346). In the translation of Judith Butler’s paper Contingent Foundations: Feminism and the Question of “Postmodernism” (1992, 6, 7) by Zaven Babloyan, this concept is replaced by the concepts “to endorse (to coordinate)” (согласовать) 284

Feminist ideas and gender theory

(Butler 2001, 239) and “to reconcile” (улаживать) (Butler 2001, 241). Therefore, the meaning of the target text is unclear and very remote from the idea of negotiations. Unlike the notion of negotiations, the target notion of coordination is a very typical element of the Soviet economy of discourse. To endorse the documents in the official register usually means to get the document approved or sanctioned by the authorities. It has nothing to do with negotiations.

Section four: problems of textual cohesion Inconsistency in the translation of key concepts Textual cohesion is provided by anaphoric references, consistency of interpretation of terms and concepts, lack of unwarranted omissions, stylistic isomorphism. The most common and the most damaging to the cohesion of target texts is inconsistency in the interpretation of the key concepts, as in one of the preceding cases seen in regard to the cluster around constructionism. There are many other such examples. But I will give only one more illustration that shows how the meaning of the target text dissipates due to lack of consistency in the way how a concept that runs through a text is translated. This example comes from the translation of A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s by Donna Haraway (2005). The major goal of A Manifesto is to develop the idea of ironic faith, which is grounded in the image of the cyborg – a fusion of machine, human, and animal. Cyborg is a monster, a fiction that provides a perspective on the post-gender world. Haraway here considers ironic faith a “blasphemous myth.” Though her mythological “dogmatics” seems to offer an alternative to “secular-religious, evangelical traditions of U.S. politics including the politics of socialist feminism,” she often refers to Christianity and Marxism. Her discursive instruments include religiously charged concepts such as the Garden of Eden, or garden, Fall, apocalypse, original innocence (no innocence), guilt, genesis, pollution, worship, conversion, the Enemy, God, rebirth without flaw, etc. Sometimes, her statements involve several religious metaphors (1990, 199). She also considers religious organizations important “women’s historical locations in advanced industrial societies” (1990, 212). These religious concepts and metaphors in the Manifesto seem to be a challenge for the Russian translation which undermines the cohesion of the target text. For example, the first passage of the original text begins with a statement: “this chapter is an effort to build an ironic political myth faithful to feminism, socialism, and materialism. Perhaps more faithful as blasphemy is faithful, than as reverent worship and identification. [. . .] At the centre of my ironic faith, my blasphemy, is the image of the cyborg” (190–191). In the Russian translation the four occurrences of “faithful” are translated as “adequate” (адекватный, адекватно), while “faith” in this passage is translated as “вера,” i.e. by the direct Russian equivalent (2005, 322–323). The other translations of the original words with the root ‘faith’ are inconsistent. Since the cluster ‘faithfaithfulness-faithlessness’ is essential for the original discourse, the lack of consistency in its translation undermines the coherence of the argumentation. There are numerous other instances of lack of consistency in the translation of essential concepts in this target text (for example, for terms such as translation, location, essentialist, incorporation, appropriation).

Successive approximation Often times, different translations of the same term constitute a sort of successive approximation to equivalence. The primary occurrence of the term is translated incorrectly, while further occurrences are translated adequately. Let me give an example of how successive approximation undermines the coherence of the argumentation – from the translation of the concept of “ensemble” in 285

Tatiana Barchunova

Julia Kristeva’s paper Women’s Time (1997). In this paper, Kristeva discusses different approaches to temporality by different generations of women’s movements. She analyzes this problem within the framework of the crisis of the idea of nation. She argues that the nation as a dream of the 19th century based on “economic homogeneity, historical tradition, and linguistic unity” was crushed by several historical events, including World War II (Kristeva 1997, 860). Kristeva states that “a new social ensemble superior to the nation has [. . .] been constituted, within which the nation, far from losing its own traits, rediscovers and accentuates them in a strange temporality, in a kind of “future perfect,” where the most deeply repressed past gives a distinctive character to a logical and sociological distribution of the most modern type.” She assumes that Europe is a “representative of such a sociocultural ensemble” (860). Unlike the nation, the sociocultural ensemble is based on “art, philosophy, and religions manifest” (ibid.), which constitute the collective memory. This is one of her key concepts, which she discusses in detail in the first section of the paper. She uses it six times before she proceeds to a detailed analysis of various notions of temporality in feminism. In Russian, the first occurrence of the concept is translated as social distribution (Kristeva 2005, 123); the next one is translated as structure (123), then there come structuration (124) and structures (124). In the final paragraph of the theoretical introduction where Kristeva formulates her agenda and speaks about the ensemble “Europe” as a “repository of memory” through which “female sensibility” should seek “its own trans-European temporality” (1997, 864), the translator finally comes up with a more appropriate term for ensemble (ансамбль) but uses it in quotation marks (128) demonstrating that the term still remains alien to her. This successive approach to the correct final decision seems to represent the translator’s process of understanding the text which leads to her realization that the word ensemble is the essential concept, and different from structure, structuration, and sociocultural distribution. However, the lack of consistent translation of the key term hampers the process a Russian reader needs to mobilize to understand the text, and even more so because it is not the only case of target text incoherence.

Inversion of meaning and its snowball effect The most paradoxical cases of meaning shift occur when the target text communicates a meaning that is the opposite of the original meaning. These cases are not as rare as one might expect. They do damage not only to the phrase where they occur, but also to further parts of the target text since the translators have to adjust their wrong decisions to the context and thus offer ad hoc interpretations. One typical case of how the meaning of the source text is inverted in the target text occurs in a discussion of the impact of sexist gender stereotypes on biological research by Helen E. Longino (1989). Among gender stereotypes she mentions the “assumption of male mathematical superiority,” and the “designation of appropriate and inappropriate behaviours for male and female children.” She writes, “we did not find [. . .] that these assumptions mediated the inferences from data to theory that we found objectionable. These sexist assumptions did affect the way the data were described. What mediated the inferences from the alleged data [. . .] was what we called the linear model” (1989, 210). The Russian translator replaces the notion of mediation with the notion of influence and thus the text loses its coherence and there emerges a statement which is the opposite of what Longino claims. The reverse translation from Russian into English goes as follows: “However, we have not discovered that these assumptions influence the theoretical conclusions. The sexist assumptions, in fact, have not affected the description of the data. The mediating link between the inferences from the data was the model which we called the linear model” (Longino 2005, 241) (italics mine). Here, we see the snowball effect of an accumulation of the kinds of mistakes we mentioned previously. An inaccurate translator’s hypothesis that simplified the author’s statement made 286

Feminist ideas and gender theory

her adjust the next statement to the wrong hypothesis and this adjustment, in its turn, said the opposite of what the author expressed in the original.

Conclusions 1

2

To translate from English into Russian means to transfer from one type of economy of discourse to another. The Russian economy of discourse and its Soviet version were originally, and to a substantial extent still are, different from the Western economy of discourse in its configuration of registers, institutional regime, and conceptual basis. Unlike the discourse in English with its developed public register, the Soviet economy of discourse, inherited from earlier times, was dominated by the official register. The Soviet official register infused the academic discourse as a variant of public discourse, including translations of scientific literature, and produced a canonical approach to the interpretation of Western texts. Institutionally, the Soviet discursive canon was configured by censorship and governmental control over the publication process. Conceptually, it was configured by the schematics of Marxism-Leninism which attributed gender egalitarianism to the nominally socialist social system of the Soviet Union. The Soviet version of the Russian economy of discourse had a very specific regime of access to Western intellectual resources. This access for the general public was mediated by professional translators and reviewers. The latter, in their turn, were controlled by multiple state agents who selected, abridged, and edited the original resources in the spirit of the dominant ideology and political situation. The social transformation that began at the end of the 1980s and in the early 1990s was the precondition for substantial changes in the approaches to translation as a practice. The postSoviet economy of discourse began to converge with the Western one, both institutionally and conceptually. The institutional setting of translation as a practice has substantially changed in the post-Soviet period. State censorship and governmental control over the publication process have been eliminated. The new agents – Western individual sponsors, private foundations, and state exchange programs – supported scientific and social projects aimed at problematizing the Soviet gender order and introducing new models and methods of social research. Translations of texts in gender studies and feminist theory were one of the ways of appropriating the critical approaches and presenting alternatives to the simplified versions of Marxist-Leninist interpretations of social problems.

However, the process of the convergence of the two economies of discourse was controversial, both institutionally and conceptually. Together, the new international agents on the publication scene and the lack of state control brought about the de-professionalization of translation and the emergence of naïve translators. The strict determinism and foundationalism of Soviet social science was shaken up by various new approaches, but the gap between the two types of discourse was too wide to be covered easily and quickly. The translators of Western gender studies and feminist texts had to acquire different theoretical and methodological notions. The appropriation has been a slow and non-linear process of designing new ways of thinking about social reality as a contingent, performative, precarious, non-homogeneous world of exclusions and inclusions, fluidity and rigidity, negotiations and redefinitions of conventions, and traditions. This approach is different from the determinist world of Marxism-Leninism. 3

The analysis of the post-Soviet English-Russian translations reveals several clear strategies in the translation of gender studies and feminist literature. The basis of these strategies begins with a certain selection of canonical Western texts in gender studies and feminist literature, 287

Tatiana Barchunova

i.e. those texts which were included in Western readers and curricula. The publication of the first post-Soviet translations of these canonical texts had two goals: to make available the contents of the texts to Russian readers, and to act in solidarity with an international collectivity of experts in gender studies and activists. The latter goal was as important as the former one. The importance of performativity was one of the factors affecting the emergence of naïve translation because in this case, the coherence of the target text is secondary to the act of its publication. The other factor was the new institutional setting of the translation process that did not provide enough time and expertise to make texts coherent. The naïve translations analyzed earlier should have been edited by professional editors, specialized in the relevant topics. Such editors were not generally available, however. The terms and concepts that were misinterpreted by Russian translators were either nonexistent in the Marxist-Leninist approaches to social science (agency, social construction, contingency, enactment), or contradicted the principles of the official register of the Soviet economy of discourse (negotiations, debates, argumentation). The major defect of the bulk of translations is inconsistency in the interpretation of the key terms, which undermines the logic of the texts. Recent trends in translation are multidirectional. The development of the public register of discourse and the Russian national school of gender studies provide hope for a new influx of fresh ideas that may help immunize minds against the growing impact of conservative ideology and the politics of isolation.

Future directions On a par with printed English-Russian translations and their online versions, Internet networks of feminists have emerged who regard translation as a form of political activism. It will be interesting to see how their translations contribute to the evolution of the Russian economy of discourse. It will also be interesting to see if the proliferation of naïve translations not only in gender studies and feminism but in other areas of social science helps to identify untranslatabilities.

Further reading Adlam, Carol. 2010. Feminism, Untranslated: Russian Gender Studies and Cross-cultural Transfer in the 1990s and Beyond, in Alastair Renfrew and Galin Tihanov, eds., Critical Theory in Russia and the West. London and New York: Routledge, 152–172. This paper presents and analyzes differences between Western and Russian feminisms that complicate the Russian perception of Western gender studies and the Western perception of Russian gender studies. Avtonomova, Nataliya. 2016. Poznanie i perevod. Opyty filosofii iazyka [Knowledge and translation. Essays on the philosophy of language]. Moscow, Saint Petersburg: Tsentr gumanitarnykh initsiativ. A book by one of the famous Russian translators of philosophical literature on translation as a process, and its constitutive role in social science and philosophy. Barchunova, Tatiana. 2006. A Library of Our Own? Feminist Translations from English into Russian, in Marlen Bidwell-Steiner and Karin S. Wozonig, eds., A Canon of Our Own? Kanonkritik und Kanonbildung in den Gender Studies. Innsbruck, Wien and Bozen: Studien Verlag, 133–147. This paper provides a discussion of theoretical gaps that imply translation gaps. Barchunova, Tatiana. 2009. Gender Studies in Russia as a Transnational Project, in Martina, Ineichen, Anna K. Liesch, Anja Rathmann-Lutz, and Simon Wenger, eds., Gender in Trans-it. Transcultural and Transnational Perspectives. Contributions to the 12th Swiss Gender History Conference. Zürich: Chronos Verlag, 95–104. This is a study of the impact of international academia on Russian intellectual traditions and translation. English-Russian translations are discussed as an illustration of the paradox of translation formulated by Walter Benjamin: translations are not for those who cannot read the original. 288

Feminist ideas and gender theory

Gilburd, Eleonory. 2018. To See Paris and Die. The Soviet Lives of Western Culture. Cambridge, MA and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. The author develops the concept of translation as appropriation and domestication of Western culture in the Soviet Union. She exposes the importance of the translator who is perceived as a co-author. Liljeström, Marianne. 2016. Constructing the West/Nordic: The Rise of Gender Studies in Russia, in Ulrika Dahl, Marianne Liljeström, and Ulla Manns, eds., The Geopolitics of Nordic and Russian Gender Research (1975–2005). Stockholm: Södertörn University, 133–174. The article includes a discussion of politics of locality, the emergence of gender studies in Russia, and gender studies education as well as gender studies as a translation project.

Related topics The most important related topic in Russia is education. Because of the huge gap between the English-language resources, on the one hand, and English-Russian translation potential, on the other, the challenge is to improve the linguistic competence of students. Another important topic is sustainability of gender education and consciousness growing for all gender groups in the context of an expanding conservatism.

References Barchunova, Tatiana. 2001. Neiskushennyi fal’sifikatsionizm? Rev. of ( Jary D., Jary J. 1999). Sotsiologicheskii jurnal [online] (1–2), 180–190. Available at: www.isras.ru/index.php?page_id=2384&id=637&l= [Accessed 23 Feb. 2019]. Bebel, August. 1959. Zhenschina i Sotsializm [Woman and Socialism]. Moscow: State Publishing House of Political Literature. Berger, Peter L. and Thomas Luckmann. 1995. Sotsial’noie konstruirovaniie real’nosti. Traktat po sotsiologii znaniia [The Social Construction of Reality. A Treatise on Sociology of Knowledge]. Moscow: Medium. Boston Women’s Health Book Collective. 1995. O vas i vashem tele: kniga o zhenschinakh i dlya zhenschin [Our bodies, ourselves: A Book by and for Women]. Moscow: Progress, Univers. Butler, Judith. 1992. Contingent Foundations: Feminism and the Question of “Postmodernism”, in Judith Butler and Joan Wallach Scott, eds., Feminists Theorize the Political. New York and London: Routledge, 3–21. Butler, Judith. 2001. Sluchaino slojivshiesia osnovaniia: feminizm i vopros o “postmodernizme”. Translated by Zaven Babloian, in Sergei Zherebkin, ed., Vvedeniie v gendernyie issledovaniia. Chast’ II. Khrestomatiia [Introduction into gender studies. Part II. A reader]. Khar’kov: KCGS and Saint-Petersburg: Aleteia, 235–257. Denisova, Alla, ed. 2002. Slovar’ gendernykh terminov [Dictionary of Gender Terms]. Moscow: Informatsia 21 vek. Friedan, Betty. 1994. Zagadka jenstvennosti [The Feminine Mystique]. Moscow: Progress, Litera. Haraway, Donna. 1990. A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s, in Linda Nicholson, ed., Feminism/Postmodernism. New York and London: Routledge, 190–233. Haraway, Donna. 2005. Manifest kiborgov: nauka, tehnologiia i sotsialisticheskii feminizm 1980-h. Translated by Alexei Garadja, in Liudmila Bredihina and Katy Deepwell, eds., Gendernaya teoriia i iskusstvo. Antologiia: 1970–2000. Moscow: Rosspen, 322–377. Held, David, ed. 1991. Political Theory Today. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press. Jaggar, Alison M. 1989. Love and Knowledge: Emotion in Feminist Epistemology, in Ann Garry and Marilyn Pearsall, eds., Women, Knowledge, and Reality: Explorations in Feminist Philosophy. Boston: Unwin Hyman, 129–155. Jaggar, Alison M. 2005. Lubov’ i znanie: emotsii v feministskoi epistemologii. Translated by O. Dvorkina, in Ann Garry, E. Ballaeva, and Marilyn Pearsall, eds., Jenshiny, poznanie i realnost’: Issledovaniia po feministskoi filosofii. Moscow: Rosspen, 152–179. Jary David, Jary Julia. 1999. Bolshoi tolkovyi sotsiologicheskii slovar [Collins Dictionary of Sociology], vol. 1, 2. Translated into Russian by Nikolai N. Marchuk. Moscow: Veche, AST. Keller, Evelyn F. 1989. Feminism and Science, in Ann Garry and Marilyn Pearsall, eds., Women, Knowledge, and Reality: Explorations in Feminist Philosophy. Boston: Unwin Hyman, 175–188. Keller, Evelyn F. 2005. Feminizm i nauka, Translated by O. Dvorkina, in Ann Garry, Elena Ballaeva, and Marilyn Pearsall, eds., Jenshiny, poznanie i realnost’: Issledovaniia po feministskoi filosofii. Moscow: Rosspen, 200–214. 289

Tatiana Barchunova

Kristeva, Julia. 1997. Women’s Time, Translated from French by Alice Jardine and Harry Blake, in Robin R. Warhol and Diane Price Herndl, eds., Feminisms: An Anthology of Literary Theory and Criticism. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 860–879. Kristeva, Julia. 2005. Vrem’ia jenshin, translated from English by Irina Borisova, in Liudmila Bredihina and Katy Deepwell, eds., Gendernaya teoriia i iskusstvo. Antologiia: 1970–2000. Moscow: Rosspen, 122–145. Longino, Helen E. 1989. Can There Be a Feminist Science? in Ann Garry and Marilyn Pearsall, eds., Women, Knowledge, and Reality: Explorations in Feminist Philosophy. Boston: Unwin Hyman, 203–216. Longino, Helen E. 2005. Vozmojno li sushestvovaniie feministskoi nauki? Translated by O. Dvorkina, in Ann Garry, E. Ballaeva, and Marilyn Pearsall, eds., Jenshiny, poznanie i realnost’: Issledovaniia po feministskoi filosofii. Moscow: Rosspen, 232–248. Lorber, Judith. 1994. Pol kak sotsial’naia kategoriia [Sex as a Social Category]. Translated by E. Ananieva. Thesis [pdf] (6), 127–136. Available at: https://igiti.hse.ru/data/360/313/1234/6_2_2Lorb.pdf [Accessed 18 Oct. 2019]. Mshvenieradze, Vladimir V. 1962. Words or Things? Introduction, in Ernest André Gellner, ed., Slova i veschi [Words and Things]. Moscow: Izdatel’stvo inostrannoi literatury, 5–23. Okin, Susan Moller. 2001. Problema pola: obschetvennoie i chastnoie, in David Held and V. I. Danilenko, eds., Sovremennaia politicheskaia teoriia [Political Theory Today]. Moscow: Nota bene, 102–133. Schütz, Alfred. 2003. Smyslovaia struktura povsednevnogo mira: ocherki po phenomenologicheskoy sotsiologii [The Semantic Structure of Everyday World: Essays on Phenomenological Sociology]. Moscow: Institut fonda “Obshestvennoie mnenie.” Scott, Joan Wallach. 1988. Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis, in Joan Scott, ed., Gender and the Politics of History. New York: Columbia University Press, 28–50. Stites, Richard. 1991. The Women’s Liberation Movement in Russia: Feminism, Nihilism, and Bolshevism, 1860– 1930. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Vakhtin, Nikolai and Boris Firsov, eds. 2016. Public Debate in Russia. Matters of (Dis)Order. Translated into English by Ralph M. Cleminson. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Vakhtin, Nikolai and Boris Firsov. 2017. Discourse of Argumentation in Totalitarian Language and PostSoviet Communication Failures, in Nikolai Vakhtin and Boris Firsov, eds., “Sindrom publichnoi nemoty.” Istoriia i sovremennyie praktiki publichnykh debatov v Rossii [“The Syndrom of Public Muteness.” History and Current Practices of Public Debates in Russia] [online]. Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie. Available at: https://mybook.ru/author/kollektiv-avtorov-3/sindrom-publichnoj-nemoty-istoriya-i-sovre mennye-p/reader/ [Accessed 3 Oct. 2018]. Voronina, Olga, ed. 1992. Feminizm: perspektivy sotsial’nogo znaniia [Feminism: Perspectives of Social Knowledge]. Moskva: Institut nauchnoi informatsii po obshestvennym naukam, Institut filosofii. West, Candace and Don H. Zimmerman. 1997. Sozdaniie gendera [Doing Gender]. Translated by Elena Zdravomyslova, edited by Aleksandr Kletsyn. Gendernyie tetradi (1), 94–124. Works of Saint-Petersburg SI RAS.

290

22 Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, Simone de Beauvoir’s Le Deuxième Sexe, and Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble in Polish Feminism, translation, and political history Ewa Kraskowska and Weronika Szwebs

Introduction Modern feminist discourse in Poland (of the 20th and 21st centuries) has been shaped by factors both foreign and domestic. The legacy of the 19th century, an era of partition and lack of state sovereignty for Poles, has comprised transnational emancipatory slogans proclaimed since the Enlightenment as well as traditions of female political activity disseminated during the first wave of feminism. In the Polish environment, these Western influences overlapped with strong models of Polish patriotism concentrated on the fight for independence and the accompanying idea of nationhood (Walczewska 2000). The formation of gender models was also affected by the tradition of Sarmatism, the epitome of Old Polish culture, which produced the model of a wise woman (mulier sapiens) who was independent and capable of replacing a man in his tasks as a breadwinner, an estate manager, and even its defender (Bogucka 1998, 66–85). Deeply rooted Polish Catholicism with its extraordinarily strong Marian cult has also been influential for these paradigms. A combination of domestic factors as well as those adopted from dominant Western cultures – Anglo-Saxon, Romance, and Germanic – have characterized Polish feminism until the present day. One of the key elements conducive to this symbiosis is a transfer of feminist ideas, theories, terms, and practices through translation. With that in mind, this chapter will discuss how Polish culture received the three books now considered to be milestones in the development of Western feminist discourse: A Room of One’s Own (1929) by Virginia Woolf, Le Deuxième Sexe (1949) by Simone de Beauvoir, and Gender Trouble (1990) by Judith Butler.

Historical perspectives Western feminism may encounter criticisms or rejection in non-Western countries, but it is still a basic point of reference all over the globe. Debates and polemics rage within this discourse, keeping it alive and well, and evolving all the time, while transnationally, this trans-border and 291

Ewa Kraskowska and Weronika Szwebs

trans-cultural flow of feminist thought and practice has encountered all sorts of barriers, especially in political terms. One such hindrance was the division of Europe into two distinct sectors, following the end of World War II and the Yalta Conference, into Western Europe, on the one hand, and what would come to be known as the ‘Eastern Bloc’ (dominated by the Soviet Union) on the other. After the so-called Iron Curtain descended across Europe, actual contacts between ‘socialist states’ and ‘capitalist states’ (in the words of the time) were effectively hindered for many decades. This state of affairs applied to all spheres of public and private life. The Eastern Bloc countries were particularly affected by the so-called deficit economy, which rendered their living standards drastically lower than in liberal Western democracies and free market conditions. The complete inefficiency of the planned economy, which was implemented under this system, had a major impact on the situation of women, who were primarily responsible for obtaining household staples. Although equal treatment of women did represent an important element of the ideology and actions of communist regimes, the general conditions of the totalitarian system and production, which resulted in constant shortages of the most basic goods and services, did not allow for any meaningful development of feminist movements or discourses. The raison d’être of feminism is to question the existing social order and aim to change it, and in the countries of the so-called people’s democracy, this approach and activity were firmly suppressed. Consequently, women in Poland at the time were professionally active, had access to legal abortion, and could place their children in free nurseries and kindergartens, while at the same time, they had no real representation in power. Furthermore, they were excessively burdened by double work: professional and domestic. Knowledge about Western feminist movements reached beyond the Iron Curtain to a very limited degree, and in the circles of anti-Communist opposition, which actively developed in Poland from the mid-1970s despite repression, these phenomena were treated with a considerable dose of distrust and condescension. In this context it is worth quoting the opinion of Maria Janion (b. 1926), in the past a Marxist, later a devotee of hermeneutics, and at present the honoured tutor of Polish apprentices in feminist and gender studies: All those years I recognized a clear demarcation of things that were important and unimportant; in the face of subjugation striving for independence is important whereas unimportant is the struggle for women’s rights. Towards the end of the 1980s, I expressed this view during a feminist forum in West Berlin, where I patiently explained to women from the Free World that their way of thinking does not fit in with Polish experience. Solidarność, I stubbornly maintained, has to first win independence and democracy for the entire society and only later we shall tackle the issue of women in common. ( Janion 1999, 25) This situation changed as a result of the political and economic transformations which took place in the socialist countries of central and Eastern Europe, as well as Soviet Union, towards the end of the 1980s, and with the fall of communism in the early 1990s, when the model based on central planning gave way to the development of free market economies, and the formation of a political system based on rules of democracy and neo-liberalism. In almost an instant, Western-style feminism – radical, anti-patriarchal, and founded on solid theoretical thought – became an ingredient of these changes.

Critical issues and topics Let us first consider the dates of publication of the three books we are interested in. If we were to include one more work, which is equally important to the annals of 20th-century feminism – 292

Feminism, translation, political history

Sexual Politics by Kate Millett – we would realize that they appeared at almost evenly spaced, 20-year intervals: 1929 (A Room of One’s Own), 1949 (Le Deuxième Sexe), 1970 (Sexual Politics) and 1990 (Gender Trouble). This cycle could be explained by the sequence of generations and historical experiences. A Room of One’s Own is the work of a writer whose education and social development took place in the last years of the Victorian era. Le Deuxième Sexe appeared shortly after the end of World War II, when Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir were shaping the intellectual life of Paris, and their influence on literature, philosophy, and behaviours reached far beyond French borders. Sexual Politics is a product of counter-cultural movements in the 1960s, while the radical ideas presented in Gender Trouble developed thanks to a whole set of complex factors affecting culture and the humanities of the 1980s, such as poststructuralism, so-called French Theory, and the cultural turn. However, Kate Millett’s book, which for many US readers became a landmark text, was not keenly read in Poland, and translated here only in parts (Millett 1982), which is why it is not included in our study. The same is more or less true of The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan (1963), though its appearance in print is considered to mark the start of what is now called ‘second-wave feminism.’ And yet, she too mainly shaped the thought processes of American readers and thinkers, because her book was largely concerned with the problems of middle-class women of Anglo-America. In Poland, until recently it was almost unknown and appeared in translation only a couple of years ago (Friedan 2012). First, let us have a look at A Room of One’s Own, Le Deuxième Sexe, and Gender Trouble from the perspectives of genre, themes, ideology and style, asking questions about problems their translators might have had to contend with. The life of Virginia Woolf and her work are largely shaped by a rebellious reaction to the Victorian culture and mores, which marked her childhood and early adulthood. A Room of One’s Own was created in a post-Victorian spirit, and – differently to the avant-garde prose she wrote – it was intended for a broader readership, though initially, it was written as a series of lectures delivered at two women’s colleges at Cambridge University. In her diary Woolf refers to the book as a ‘trifle.’ It is a relatively short text, written in accessible English, rich in rhetorical devices which make reading it both easier and more pleasant. It is imbued with subtle yet clear irony, sometimes bordering on sarcasm, while the syntax is based on complex structures, occasionally sprinkled with single sentences, often phrased as questions. The translator’s task can therefore be seen as one that replicates the orality, so clearly stressed in the text, and to find equivalents for the ironic intonation. This is not particularly difficult, and so the translations of A Room of One’s Own have not sparked much critical discussion in their target audiences. The key words and topoí which emerged from it, such as the titular “room of one’s own,” “Shakespeare’s sister” or “man’s sentence” versus “her sentence,” are easy to embrace, resulting in their often being used as quotes, allusions, intertextual references and paraphrases. A Room of One’s Own deals with the question of how personal space and financial independence affects women’s ability to be creative, but it is also about the exclusion of women from certain patriarchal fortresses, such as the worlds of academia or mainstream culture, hinting at the ways in which this exclusion can be turned into an advantage. It is this message that gives Woolf ’s essay a timeless and trans-cultural universality. Le Deuxième Sexe is the complete antithesis of a ‘trifle.’ This lengthy, two-volume treatise on the history of women and constructs of femininity was written by Simone de Beauvoir with the ambition to present, first of all, women’s experiences from physiological, psychological, and cultural anthropology perspectives, from the times of antiquity up to the mid-20th century. Secondly, it was “to [. . .] demonstrate how ‘feminine reality’ has been constituted, why woman has been defined as Other, and what the consequences have been from men’s point of view;” and thirdly – to describe “the world from the woman’s point of view such as it is offered to her” 293

Ewa Kraskowska and Weronika Szwebs

(Beauvoir 2010, 38). Academic and philosophical discourses are combined in this work with elements of creative writing and journalism. According to the authors of the second English translation, Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier, Beauvoir’s style in Le Deuxième Sexe is defined by its “long and dense paragraphs” which are “essential, integral to the development of her arguments” (Borde and Malovany-Chevallier 2010, 16). Controversies connected with the first (1953) and second (2010) translations into English are well-known and revolve around critics such as Toril Moi (2002, 2010), Margaret A. Simons (1983) and Anna Bogić (2010). For our purposes, though, it is enough to say that the translator is here faced with the choice of strategy between domestication or foreignization in the target language. Domestication, intended to make the reading easier, takes place mostly at the expense of omissions and simplifications of complex philosophical terminology, while foreignization, driven by the need to preserve the ideas and style of the source text, reduces fluidity and readability in the target text. The famous sentence which opens the second volume has been the cause of particular controversy: “On ne naît pas femme: on le deviant” (Mann and Ferrari 2017) – “One is not born, but rather, becomes a woman” in Howard M. Parshley’s translation (Beauvoir 1953, 273). Differences of interpretation are mainly related to the question of whether this book is a manifestation of social constructivism, or rather existentialist phenomenology. In fact, one does not exclude the other, since we are not dealing with opposites here, Beauvoir’s thought being ruled more by dialectics than binaries. It is worth noting already at this point though that the Polish translation changes the singular into plural and the sentence reads: “we are not born women, we become women” (Beauvoir 2003, 299). The third book we will be looking at, Gender Trouble by Judith Butler, represents contemporary academic writing from the field of humanities and contains all the strengths and weaknesses of this genre. The book is a challenge in terms of both content and linguistic form; it is interesting to note that its complicated lexis and syntax, a real challenge for translators, resulted in the author winning the Bad Writing Contest in 1998 from the journal Philosophy and Literature. And yet, the originality and innovativeness of the ideas contained in its pages transcend the book’s flaws, making it a founding text of a new branch of cultural studies – queer studies. Butler initiated her performative theory of gender with a discussion of Le Deuxième Sexe, thus emphasizing the continuity of feminist thought. However, she was relying on its first English translation by Parshley, which probably led to some misreading of Beauvoir’s canonical work (Myers 2016). In the next part of the chapter, the most important issues related to Polish translations of the preceding three texts will be discussed.

A Room of One’s Own The essay appeared in print when its author was a well-recognized figure in the world of literary modernists, and had already published her best novels: Mrs Dalloway (1925) and To the Lighthouse (1927). Her prose was being translated in the 1920s, though often these were fragments which appeared in the foreign press such as a section of To the Lighthouse titled Le Temps Passe translated by Charles Mauron, published in the Paris quarterly Commerce no. 10 in 1926 (Woolf 1926), which appeared before the novel was published in English. The earliest translations of her books were: a Swedish version of Jacob’s Room (Woolf 1927b, original 1922), a Czech version of Orlando. A Biography (Woolf 1929b, original 1928b), as well as translations of Mrs Dalloway into German (Woolf 1928a) and French (Woolf 1929a). However, A Room of One’s Own was not of interest to foreign language publishers and the only pre–World War II translation of this text was the result of Woolf ’s own personal literary connections. The author of the Spanish translation (Un Cuarto Propio) was Jorge Luis Borges, and it was published in Buenos Aires by 294

Feminism, translation, political history

Victoria Ocampo, a writer friend of Woolf ’s, in Sur, a literary magazine, dated December 1935 to March 1936 (Woolf 1936, Kirkpatrick 1980). Continental Europe received Woolf ’s writing much like other parts of the world where her books appeared in translation. Up until the 1970s, she was seen mostly as an apolitical author of avant-garde psychological prose, a representative of high-brow modernism. Her experimental novels such as Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, The Years (Woolf 1937) took precedence in translation. Woolf ’s debut, The Voyage Out (Woolf 1915), the most “traditional” of her prose works, was left far behind: in Poland it was only translated and published in 2009 (Woolf 2009). It was with second-wave feminism that A Room of One’s Own was rediscovered, making its author one of the most celebrated feminist writers of the time and, as it turned out, of the whole century. In Poland Woolf ’s prose was being translated from the late 1950s onwards, a time marked by the death of Joseph Stalin and the end of what has since been referred to as his “era.” The first full Polish translation of Woolf ’s writing – small fragments of her prose were rendered in Polish in the 1930s – was The Years (Lata 1958), then Mrs Dalloway (Pani Dalloway 1961), To the Lighthouse (Do latarni morskiej 1962), and also selected literary essays published as a book which took its title from one such essay The Leaning Tower (Pochyła wieża 1977) along with The Waves (Fale 1983) (Terentowicz-Fotyga 2002; Klitgård 2002). Once the era of socialist realism (1949–1956), during which writers were forced to tackle strictly defined propagandist themes, came to an end, modernism and the avant-garde dominated Polish prose, poetry, and drama, resulting not only in a new form of Polish writing but also leading to spectacular growth in the market for translations of Western literature. Such translations were often crafted to a very high standard, thanks to the demanding publishing criteria of that time. As a result of the absence of second-wave feminism in communist countries, the ‘discovery’ of Virginia Woolf as one of the main (albeit posthumous) post–World War II figures in feminism took place in Poland as late as the 1990s. The first Polish translation of A Room of One’s Own (Woolf 1997) became a kind of feminist manifesto. This was produced by Agnieszka Graff (b. 1970), a Polish feminist academic and activist educated in the US, who helped initiate the feminist movement in Poland in the 1990s, and by Izabela Filipiak (b. 1961, who recently changed her name to Morska), who penned a very personal introduction to the book. Filipiak is a writer who, in that decade, was the most well-known representative of new feminist prose in Poland, thanks mainly to her novel Absolute Amnesia (Absolutna amnezja), published in 1995 and derisively referred to by some critics as ‘menstrual literature’ (Świerkosz 2014, 114–129). In 1998, Filipiak used the pages of the glossy fashion magazine Cosmopolitan (the 15th February issue) to perform the first public act of lesbian ‘coming out’ in Polish history, and in the aforementioned introduction she drew attention to the relevance of themes featured in A Room of One’s Own, in the context of contemporary women writers, making reference to her own personal and professional experiences. The second (‘revised’) translation, produced by Ewa Krasińska, a professional and very experienced translator of English literature, was published in 2002 in one volume with the translation of Three Guineas by the same publishing house Wydawnictwo Sic! (Woolf 2002). Krasińska is also the author of the introduction to this edition, which nevertheless is limited to an overview of historic contexts in which both essays were created as well as a summary of their contents. These translations do, of course, differ in certain ways – Graff ’s version retains traces of English syntax, while Krasińska’s features a fuller form of domestication – though the language of the source text did not cause either translator any major problems. But there is one notable exception. The narrator of Woolf ’s essay is supposed to present a lecture on the topic of “women and fiction” to an auditorium full of female listeners. The word “fiction” does not have a straightforward equivalent in Slavonic languages – the Polish “fikcja” is its false friend, seeing as it means 295

Ewa Kraskowska and Weronika Szwebs

something falsely imagined or “dreamt up.” Graff presents the topic of the lecture as “women and literary creations,” while Krasińska as “women and literature.” Neither decided to apply the genre term “novel,” which would perhaps be more appropriate here, since Woolf ’s text is actually devoted to female novelists. The high regard, in which Woolf ’s essay has been continuously held in the target Polish culture thanks to its translation, is confirmed by the recent literary and editorial project developed on the 90th anniversary of the publication of the original. It is a volume featuring the text of A Room of One’s Own translated by Agnieszka Graff along with six narratives about how the postulates formulated by Woolf are being enacted by Polish women who engage in creative work. These narratives were developed by the feminist writer Sylwia Chutnik and the journalist Karolina Sulej, based on the interviews conducted by them. They feature well-known figures in Poland: the singer and songwriter Edyta Bartosiewicz, novelist Joanna Bator, actress Małgorzata Cielecka, artist Katarzyna Kozyra, traveller and reporter Martyna Wojciechowska, and psychologist Ewa Woydyłło. In the introduction to this publication, Chutnik wrote: “For my generation of now forty-year-old feminists, Woolf was one of the key instructors. [. . .] she gave us A Room of One’s Own, that is, the opportunity to be an independent artist – without guilt or shame. Times have changed but A Room of One’s Own remains a gem” (Chutnik and Sulej 2019, 6).

Le Deuxième Sexe While we referred to A Room of One’s Own as ‘post-Victorian,’ Le Deuxième Sexe could be considered a ‘post-War’ book. According to Elizabeth A. Houlding: “Le Deuxième Sexe stepped into history directly out of World War II and the German occupation of France [. . .] with its specific gender conditions” (Houlding 1993, 40). These specific gender conditions include the tangible lack of men in both the private and public spheres (as a result of deaths or imprisonments), the Vichy government’s conservative pro-family and pro-natalist policy, which “forcefully bound women as wives and mothers to the home” (ibid., 41) as well as the hardships experienced during the occupation and in the years right after. “Through her exposure to the nature of women’s everyday lives during the Occupation, Beauvoir first began to perceive the active construction of femininity,” (41) claims Houlding, who notes that such details as the unique turban the French writer wore, were “yet another sign of the practical times, as trips to the beauty salon became increasingly expensive and shampoo increasingly rare” (44). Much has been written (Bogić 2010; Mann and Ferrari 2017) on how Le Deuxième Sexe was perceived to be scandalous in France, and about the translations of this work into various languages (numbering almost 40), while interest in the topic has amplified since the 50th anniversary of its original publication in 1999. Two English translations of the treatise have been thoroughly dissected, especially in terms of their deficiencies. In Poland we have only one translation of this work at our disposal, but it has an interesting history. The “first life” of Le Deuxième Sexe in Polish started in 1972, in socialist times. The “second life” was initiated after the political and economic transformation of 1989 when the book was re-edited in 2003, entered into a new phase in 2014, and has been sustained since by several re-issues published up to 2019. Two remarkable translators worked on the book: Gabriela Mycielska (1902–1991) handled the first volume and Maria Leśniewska (1916–1990) the second (Beauvoir 1972). They belonged to a generation of emancipated Polish women who enjoyed the newly regained state independence, had a better-quality education during the years between the World Wars, and led a successful professional life in the second half of the century. They could speak a range of languages; Mycielska produced Polish translations of the prose works of Herman Hesse and François 296

Feminism, translation, political history

Mauriac, while Leśniewska those of Leo Tolstoy, Ivan Bunin, J.W. Goethe, and Albert Camus. She also translated the diaries of Tolstoy’s wife Sophia, which proved useful during the translation of the chapter titled “Marriage” in Le Deuxième Sexe, where they are frequently quoted. These two translators represent a sizeable group of remarkable women-translators, responsible for the extremely high-level literary translation achieved in Poland during the communist era. Although all literary output of the time was subject to official censorship, it was, on the other hand, free from the commercial influence of market forces. Their translations of Le Deuxième Sexe do not suffer from significant omissions and are considered to be faithful to the original. However, with one exception. The inviolable rule of censorship in socialist countries was to reduce formulations that might contain any criticism of the Soviet Union and Marxist doctrine. Typically, Simone de Beauvoir refers to the USSR in a positive context; otherwise, the book would not have been approved for publication in the Polish language. So, among the references to the situation of Soviet women sprinkled around the original text, the following sentence in chapter 3 of volume 1 was crossed out in the Polish version: “Ce sont exactement ces vieilles contraintes du patriarcat que l’U.R.S.S. a aujourd’hui ressuscitées; elle a ravivé les théories paternalistes du mariage; et par là, elle a été amenée à demander à nouveau à la femme de se faire objet érotique: un discours récent invitait les citoyennes soviétiques à soigner leur toilette, à user de maquillage, à devenir coquettes pour retenir leur mari et attiser son désir” (Beauvoir 1966, 103). In the new English translation, this passage reads as follows: “These old patriarchal constraints are exactly the ones the U.S.S.R. has brought back to life today; it has revived paternalistic theories about marriage; and in doing so, it has asked woman to become an erotic object again: a recent speech asked Soviet women citizens to pay attention to their clothes, to use makeup, and to become flirtatious to hold on to their husbands and stimulate their desire” (Beauvoir 2011, 68). The preceding example of censorship vividly illustrates how absurd the intrusions of the Communist censor could be. The year 1956 saw the development of key political shifts in the Soviet Bloc, anti-Soviet in character: the Hungarian Uprising against the Soviet-imposed policies was quashed in bloody fashion, whereas in Poland mass worker protests ended with the so-called Polish October and the rise in power of the reform faction within the ruling Polish United Workers’ Party. This shift resulted in the liberalization (‘thaw’) of cultural politics which in Poland had a significantly larger scale than in other countries of the bloc. The intellectual ferment and artistic activity which followed these events led to wide reception of literature, philosophy, and culture from the West. Jazz, rock’n’roll, film noir, and other trends of Western pop culture became en vogue among young generations of Poles. The ensuing fashion for French existentialism meant the works of Sartre and Beauvoir started to appear in Polish translation as early as 1957. It helped that both were perceived as so-called poputchiks, fellow travellers – Western intellectuals, writers, and academics who sympathized with communist ideology and the Soviet empire. By 1972 as many as 11 volumes of Sartre’s works had been published in Polish: Rozważania o kwestii żydowskiej [Réflexions sur la Question Juive] (Sartre 1957b), Dramaty (Sartre 1957a), Wiek męski [L’âge de Raison] (Sartre 1957c), Zwłoka [Le Sursis] (Sartre 1958c), Rozpacz [La Mort dans l’âme] (Sartre 1958b), Mur [Le Mur] (Sartre 1958a), Huragan nad cukrem [Ouragan sur le Sucre] (Sartre 1961), Słowa [Les Mots] (Sartre 1965, 1968b), selection of literary criticism entitled Czym jest literatura [What is Literature?] (Sartre 1968a), and Wyobrażenie: fenomenologiczna psychologia wyobraźni [Imaginaire: Psychologie Phénoménologique de L’imagination] (Sartre 1970). These were followed by another four volumes before the end of communism. Beauvoir was slightly less popular, but also well-represented. Before the appearance of Le Deuxieme Sèxe, six of her books were published in Polish (Mandaryni [Les Mandarins] in 1957, Pamiętnik statecznej panienki [Mémoires d’une Jeune Fille 297

Ewa Kraskowska and Weronika Szwebs

Rangée] in 1960, Cudza krew [Le Sang des Autres] in 1963, W sile wieku [La Force de l’âge] in 1964, Siłą rzeczy [La Force des Choses] in 1967 and Śliczne obrazki [Les Belles Images] in 1968). This connection between Sartre/Beauvoir and communism in its Soviet incarnation can present a paradox: an anti-authoritarian existentialist doctrine of individualism (it is sufficient to recall Sartre’s famous statement that “Hell is other people” from the play Huis Clos (Sartre 1976, 45) is after all not easy to combine with the collectivized social experiment introduced by Soviet leaders. What links existentialism with Marxism is how work is seen as a condition of individual freedom and agency. Under the Soviet system, however, work did become a tool for oppression and punishment, something neither Sartre nor Beauvoir wanted to take into consideration. Le Deuxième Sexe also addresses themes of work as a condition of women’s empowerment and agency. It compliments the Soviet state in this regard, and often refers to Marx and Engels as relevant thinkers, which was a welcome and even obligatory practice within the framework of the socialist – and therefore also Polish – publishing policy. With its elaborate discourse on sexuality, Le Deuxième Sexe was also effectively incorporated in transformations of morality, which marked the Polish culture of the 1970s. In Stalinist times, the Communist authorities displayed a certain kind of ‘sexophobia’; this attitude was, particularly symptomatic of Władysław Gomułka’s rule, who became the First Secretary of the Polish United Workers’ Party after the events of 1956, and in practical terms, the head of the state. Consequently, references to sexuality were very limited and rarely explicit in literature, art, and media. However, the year 1970 witnessed another wave of workers’ protests related to the economic conditions and power was assumed by a government that was even more open to contacts with the West. Thanks to loans from Western countries, there was a palpable growth in the economy and consumer products, which translated into some crucial changes in the private lives of Polish men and women. The liberalized attitude towards sexual matters manifested itself, among others ways, in the publication of popular guides about sex, such as for example Theodoor Hendrik van de Velde’s Ideal Marriage. Its Physiology and Technique translated and published in 1972 (Van de Velde 1926, 1935, 1972), or Mikołaj Kozakiewicz’s Małżeństwo niemal doskonałe (Almost Ideal Marriage) published from 1968 onwards and Michalina Wisłocka’s renowned Sztuka kochania (The Art of Love) from 1978. Some reviewers, as well as most ‘common readers,’ tended to perceive Le Deuxième Sexe as a representative of this particular genre of writing, which was in great demand at the time. Another important aspect in the context around the Polish translation of Le Deuxiéme Sexe was the emergence of individual yet distinctive and powerful voices of female writers and artists at the end of the 1960s and in the 1970, which could be referred to as a “small second wave of feminism” (Kraskowska 2009, 32), even though at the time it was not perceived in such terms. This ‘wave’ was largely driven by the women artists and intellectuals who, like Beauvoir, had been educated in the interwar period. The more widely known representatives include the poet Anna Świrszczyńska (recognized in the English-speaking world as Anna Swir) or the sculptor and graphic artist Alina Szapocznikow, among others. At the time, femininity was also supported by UN initiatives, which announced the year 1975 as the Year of Women, and the years 1976–1985 as their Decade. Poland, similarly to other East Bloc countries, attached considerable importance to UN activity, because a membership in this organization legitimized its democracy and lawfulness. However, the feminist and anti-patriarchal message of Beauvoir’s work was not entirely reflected in the first edition of its Polish translation. This is strikingly illustrated by its introduction whose author was Konstanty Grzybowski, a male professor of law and philosophy. The 16-page text focuses mainly on the book’s place within the existentialist movement, leaving the feminist questions aside. The few reviews that were published in official literary 298

Feminism, translation, political history

periodicals do stress the centrality of the ‘women’s cause’ in Beauvoir’s treatise, yet they express a certain condescension towards her theory, calling it outdated and unnecessary in the communist society. As philosopher Elżbieta Pakszys puts it: “the timing was wrong, and the book was met with modest interest, although it sold well. At that time, it could not possibly have a target reader. The feminist movement in Poland was nonexistent. Its official ersatz [. . .] could not be taken into account” (Pakszys 2000, 177). Grzybowski’s introduction disappeared from the second edition of the translation, which was published with no paratexts in 2003 by a private publisher founded by the prominent psychologist and therapist Jacek Santorski. This moment may be considered as symbolically closing the decade of the 1990s when the Western feminist discourse in Poland had been intensely received, initiated by a wave of book and magazine publications familiarizing Polish readers with the ideas of the second Anglo-Saxon wave of feminism, the French écriture feminine, and the new feminist trends emerging at the turn of the millennium. Around the same time, the English-language article by Agnieszka Graff entitled aptly Lost Between the Waves? The Paradoxes of Feminist Chronology and Activism in Poland came out, where the author wrote: What makes Polish feminism exciting – and paradoxical from the point of view of the movement’s history as it is written in the West – is its peculiar mixture of second wave politics and third wave themes and tactics. Our goals concern basic reproductive rights, domestic violence, equal pay for equal work; our street performances show the drudgery behind the domestic ideal. But this content – reminiscent of second wave manifestos [. . .] – is dressed in a campy form very much in tune with the third wave of feminism. Either we are “lost between the waves,” or what we are building calls for a description that goes beyond the wave metaphor. (Graff 2003, 103) A dozen years later, Graff ’s diagnosis is still up-to-date, although there is another factor that determines it today, which would have been unfathomable in the 1990s: the so-called antigender war waged by the Catholic church and right-wing, nationalistic populists since the start of the 21st century in many European countries (not just post-communist states), as well as in other parts of the world (Kuhar and Patternotte 2017). These campaigns make use of linguistic manipulation, exploiting the lack of knowledge many social groups have about what the term “gender” represents – a term which is then subjected to a unique form of “intralingual translation.” Linguistic creations such as “genderization,” “gender ideology,” “gender lobby,” “gender delusion,” “gender fascism,” and “culture of death” are coined as “a specific (mis)representation of [. . .] feminist and queer theories, which is used as a background story to delegitimize all kinds of progressive policies in the fields of gender and sexuality” (Mayer and Sauer 2017, 24). One of the many reactions of the Polish feminists to the attacks made by the Church and conservative groups was a reissue of the translation of Le Deuxième Sexe in 2014 by Jacek Santorski’s publishing house, which in the meantime had been renamed Czarna Owca (“black sheep”) and had significantly broadened its range. This time, Beauvoir’s treatise was prefaced by the Polish female philosopher and feminist activist Magdalena Środa (b. 1957), who entitled it Widmo krąży po Europie. Widmo gender . . . [A spectre is haunting Europe – the spectre of gender . . .] (Beauvoir 2014, 7). By making a reference to the famous opening sentence of Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto, Środa rendered Beauvoir’s work a timeless message while simultaneously inscribing it in another historically up-to-date cultural context. Thus, with the use of a paratext, the book was reframed as a feminist classic serving as a statement in a current ideological conflict. 299

Ewa Kraskowska and Weronika Szwebs

Gender Trouble Though Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity by Judith Butler quickly gained the status of an important, influential, widely discussed, and controversial text, Polish publishers did not rush to publish it. By 2008, when its complete translation did come out, Butler’s theories were already well known, especially by representatives of Polish academic feminism and gender studies, as well as the broader community of the humanities. This came about as a result of fragments of Gender Trouble having been translated and published earlier, in journals and anthologies, of influential discussions authored by Polish researchers, as well as individual readings of the book in English. The first Polish translation of a fragment of Gender Trouble appeared quite early on, dated 1994/1995, in the collected volume Feminist Encounters [Spotkania feministyczne], which was the product of feminist seminars. This minor publication had a limited reach, however, and the translation itself, produced by Barbara Kopeć, a translator who would later come to specialize in literary texts, was marked by flaws in terminology and contained risqué conceptual solutions which did not find favour with the theoretical community. The next translation of a fragment of Butler’s book appeared in 2003, produced by Iwona Kurz, a specialist in visual cultures, published in an arts journal focused on theatre – it went on to be reprinted three times in various anthologies (Butler 2003, 2005, 2007). A subsequent translation was done by Krystyna Kłosińska, a literary expert specializing in feminist criticism, and Krzysztof Kłosiński, an academic specializing in literary theory. Their translation was published in 2006 in an anthology of texts intended for students (Butler 2006b). In that same year, another version was published in an academic journal by Karolina Krasuska (Butler 2006a), who would later translate the whole book. Her complete translation of Gender Trouble (Butler 2008), produced while she was studying for her doctorate in cultural studies, was received by an already prepared audience. The book was published by Krytyka Polityczna, a press connected with a leftist journal of the same name. It opens with an introduction which is short and popular rather than academic in character, written by the novelist Olga Tokarczuk (b. 1962), who was to become internationally famous as the 2018 Nobel prize winner. In her characteristic, metaphoric style, and drawing upon her own philosophy of identity, Tokarczuk wrote: If reality resembles a kind of tent stretched over a frame made of notions, thinking habits, and ideas, then Butler’s book strikes at one of the fundamental pillars of this frame, at its main axis. The blow is so severe that the tent starts to teeter, its surface ripples and loses its familiar appearance. Then, in front of our eyes, it assumes a new shape, and this is what we need to grow accustomed to, revising what is taken for granted, everything that is “normal” and domesticated. Well, this is how important books achieve a breakthrough. (Tokarczuk 2008, 5) The translation is also accompanied by a short afterword, penned by the translator, covering questions of Butler’s style and justifying some of the solutions adopted in the Polish version. Krasuska explains (among other things) the motivations for choosing a rather controversial Polish title Uwikłani w płeć. Feminizm i polityka tożsamości [Entangled in Gender. Feminism and Identity Politics]. This title is complicated by the fact that the word she uses, płeć, is a traditional term, equivalent to the English sex. However, the translation troubles do not end there, seeing as the most commonplace way of rendering the sex/gender dyad in Polish (aside from using the word gender in its original form) involves adding to this basic, well-established noun ‘płeć’ various

300

Feminism, translation, political history

defining and differentiating adjectives – such as ‘biological’ and ‘cultural’ (and so sex becomes ‘biological’ and gender ‘cultural’). At first, it might seem that the title refers to the ‘old’ understanding of gender/sex, and yet Krasuska argues that such a choice was motivated by the shifts Butler makes in relation to these terms, disrupting the gender/sex dyad and insinuating that sex is also a cultural construct. The translation of the words sex and gender is one of the key challenges the translators of Butler’s book have had to contend with, forcing them to choose between leaving the foreign sounding gender as it is, using one of several existing Polish versions, or else finding a new variant. Further, it is also challenging to describe the mechanisms of gender performativity, because the Polish language does not allow for easy fluidity of meaning or the linking of commonplace and theoretical uses of some words, as in Butler’s treatise (to perform, performativity, performance, to act, act, enactment etc.). Other difficulties arise from the translation of terms such as drag, butch, femme, or crossdressing and are related to the changing state of Polish discourse about gender and sexuality. Challenges also appear in the theoretical jargon used by Butler and her numerous references to other theoreticians, whose works may not have been translated or well-grounded in the Polish language. An analysis of the Polish translations of fragments of Gender Trouble and then the full text shows the reciprocal influence that translations and critical discourse can have, and allows us to see certain general tendencies in interpretation. In the case of this series of texts, translations have mostly drawn from the already existing solutions rather than inspiring new ones. Attempts to introduce new variants or modifications of the existing materials have not substantially affected the state of the language of criticism in Polish humanities. What is notable is translation’s strong connection to English-speaking discourse – translators often make the decision to keep the foreign terms (e.g. the couple butch and femme), probably for lack of accurate, well-established Polish equivalents. Moreover, tracking the ways of rendering important terms allows researchers to observe that along with a growing number of translations, an increasingly better availability of sources, and a richer reception of the foreign-language thought translations become saturated with recognizable theoretical references and evolve towards more sensitivity to the political implications of linguistic choices. Today, Judith Butler is a well-known figure in the Polish humanities, and her theory has enjoyed great popularity. We owe this state of affairs to both the overviews of her thought featured in books and articles by Polish authors and the translations. This chapter cannot possibly elaborate on the intricacies of Butler’s reception in Poland, particularly her concepts on gender and their influence on the development of the Polish queer studies. However, it is noteworthy that in the first instance, key roles were played by Polish commentaries on her theories rather than the translations of fragments of her work that were published in magazines and collaborative volumes. The book translations – since Gender Trouble, 2008; Antigone’s Claim: Kinship between Life and Death (Butler 2010b); Excitable Speech (Butler 2010a); Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? (Butler 2011); Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism (Butler 2014); The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection (Butler 2018); Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly (Butler 2016) – represent the apex of in the reception of an already recognized theoretician.

Current contributions and research The three books we have discussed earlier have shaped the rhythm of how feminist discourse developed in Western culture. Virginia Woolf ’s essay represents ideas belonging to the first

301

Ewa Kraskowska and Weronika Szwebs

wave of feminism (emancipation, education, equal rights, and economic independence for women), amplified by reflections on the theme of women’s creative and artistic potential. Simone de Beauvoir’s treatise is a sort of summary of this first wave and a forerunner of the second – for many women writers, philosophers, and theoreticians who shaped feminist discourse in the 1960s and 1970s it became one of the most important points of reference, much like the rest of Beauvoir’s output. Gender Trouble – Judith Butler’s academic treatise – belongs to the post-feminist, post-structuralist criticism of binarism and essentialism in relation to sex and gender. In Poland, as well as in other Eastern Bloc countries, this rhythm was disturbed by several decades of communist hegemony, sometimes politely referred to as real socialism (a term coined in the 1960s, which should not be mistaken for “socialist realism,” the Stalinist doctrine of proletarian arts). As Agnieszka Graff observed at the start of the 21st century, this disruption caused contemporary feminism in post-communist countries to become “eclectic” (Graff 2003, 104), meaning that after 1989 these countries received a broad and intensive influx of texts – and not only those from the 20th century – representing the entire Western canon of feminist and gender-related thought. In less than three decades, authors (writers, theoreticians, philosophers) representing various historical epochs, as far back as Mary Wollstonecraft, were translated and commented upon. Wollstonecraft, a precursor of women’s emancipation, was almost unknown in Poland (the first translation of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman was published in 2011), although the works of the Enlightenment thinkers (including Jean-Jacques Rousseau, to whom Wollstonecraft makes direct reference) belong to a philosophical tradition which is well established there. The stories behind the transfer of Western feminist and gender classics into Polish show that the translation is often the crowning glory of the reception the original has already received, facilitated by other channels of dissemination – summaries, discussions, reviews, paraphrasing and the like – which is the way all academic discourses evolve and travel. Of the three texts and their translations covered earlier, A Room of One’s Own has managed to meet the actual needs of its new and present target audience, not only initiating a revival of interest in the writings of Virginia Woolf and allowing new interpretations of her work, but also helping today’s women in the former communist countries to find their own path of personal development. Written in the interwar period, it has become one of the most important feminist manifestos of the 20th century. Its literary merits, which have stood the test of time, have certainly helped the essay achieve lasting success. The history of the Polish translation of Le Deuxième Sexe illustrates, on the other hand, how in volatile political conditions, this work continues to fit in the strategies of resistance against the systems oppressing femininity. Contrary to these two titles, which address a relatively broad range of readers, the translation series that aimed at rendering Gender Trouble in the Polish language is a strictly academic phenomenon, hence, limited to rather hermetic circles. Despite that, the role which Judith Butler played in the constitution and advancement of Polish queer studies (Warkocki 2013) has also rippled outside academia, in the increasingly noticeable participation of LGBT movements in Polish public life. It is these movements that are currently exposed to the most ruthless attacks from the authorities and Church in Poland. Another interesting phenomenon that can also be partly attributed to the reception of Butler’s theories is the extensive growth of Polish masculinity studies, which were practically nonexistent before the year 2013, and which today can boast a diverse output of considerable value, both thematically and methodologically (Matuszek 2016; Śmieja 2016; Kaliściak 2017; Dziadek 2018; Dziadek and Mazurkiewicz 2018). Their representatives emphasize their link and affinity with feminist discourse as well as queer theory and gender studies. 302

Feminism, translation, political history

Future directions It would be difficult to point to a work in the area of Polish feminist discourse and practice of the past three decades – 1989 to 2019 – that could compete with the cultural and academic impact of the three books discussed previously. This does not mean that the discourse has been exhausted, but rather that it has entered a phase of a certain problematic and spatial dispersion. Local projects of specific historical, cultural, social, and political placement are gaining importance over diagnoses of universal ambitions or great narratives in the style of Le Deuxième Sexe. The role of texts translated from foreign languages – especially from English – seems to have diminished in Polish academic circles, mostly due to the increasingly widespread knowledge of this language among scholars, and the free circulation of foreign-language scientific literature. Prior to the collapse of the Soviet Bloc and the era of the Internet, it was rare to find quotations from English-language works in books and articles written in Russian, Polish, Hungarian, Czech, etc. (the situation was better with regard to German and French source texts), it is the norm today. Nowadays, as the Polish administrators of academic funding seek to internationalize local research, a greater emphasis is being placed on translating from ‘peripheral’ into ‘dominant’ languages rather than the other way around. The National Program for the Development of Humanities, launched in 2010 by the Polish Ministry of Science and Higher Education, is a good example of this translation policy. Its goal is to finance major research projects from the area of the humanities. One of the modules of this program includes the translation of prominent foreign-language works in philosophy, theory, history, sociology, and so forth into Polish. In the almost ten years of the program’s operation, not even one translation of a work representing feminist trends in academic studies has been financed. Fortunately, numerous Polish-language dissertations, typically published by local university presses, are written, whose aim is the critical reading of major internationally recognized feminist works (see, e.g., Kłosińska 2010; Majbroda 2013; Szopa 2018). In the next decade, it is likely that the above-characterized trends will continue.

Further reading Caws, Mary Ann and Nicola Luckhurst, eds. 2002. The Reception of Virginia Woolf in Europe. London and New York: Continuum. This multi-authored monograph explores the impact of Woolf ’s work in European literary tradition. It also includes bibliographical material, as well as information on translations of Woolf ’s work. Mann, Bonnie and Martina Ferrari, eds. 2017. On ne naît pas femme: on le devient . . . The Life of a Sentence. New York: Oxford University Press. This collection of 19 essays by authors from different countries covers multiple themes for which a meticulous analysis of the famous single sentence opening the second volume of Le Deuxième Sexe is a starting point. A separate section is devoted to translations of Beauvoir’s treatise into several languages. Kuhar, Roman and David Paternotte, eds. 2017. Anti-Gender Campaigns in Europe: Mobilizing Against Equality. London and New York: Rowman & Littlefield International. This multi-authored collection of essays examines how an academic concept of gender, when deliberately mis-translated and mis-used by the Roman Catholic Church and right-wing politicians across European countries, becomes a weapon of propaganda against gender equality. David-Ménard, Monique and Penelope Deutscher. 2014. Gender, in Barbara Cassin, Emily Apter, Jacques Lezra and Michael Wood, eds., Dictionary of Untranslatables. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 641–648. This entry in the magnificent dictionary of multi-lingual philosophical concepts discusses issues of understanding and translating the term ‘gender’ and explains the distinction between ‘gender’ and ‘sex.’ It contains a sidebar by Judith Butler reviewing different theories and linguistic aspects of ‘gender’ in the light of her own approach. 303

Ewa Kraskowska and Weronika Szwebs

Acknowledgements The authors would like to acknowledge the translators of this chapter Mark Kazmierski and Katarzyna Szuster.

References Beauvoir, Simone de. 1949. Le Deuxième Sexe. Paris: Gallimard. Beauvoir, Simone de. 1953. The Second Sex. Translated and edited by Howard M. Parshley. London: Jonathan Cape. Beauvoir, Simone de. 1957. Mandaryni [Les Mandarins]. Translated by Aleksandra Frybesowa i Ewa Krasnowolska. Warszawa: Państwowy Instytut Wydawniczy. Beauvoir, Simone de. 1960. Pamiętnik statecznej panienki [Mémoires d’une Jeune Fille rangée]. Translated by Hanna Szumańska-Grossowa. Warszawa: Państwowy Instytut Wydawniczy. Beauvoir, Simone de. 1963. Cudza krew [Le Sang des Autres]. Translated by Kazimierz Kossobudzki. Warszawa: Czytelnik. Beauvoir, Simone de. 1964. W sile wieku [La Force de l’âge]. Translated by Hanna Szumańska-Grossowa. Warszawa: Państwowy Instytut Wydawniczy. Beauvoir, Simone de. 1966. Le Deuxième Sexe. Les Faits et les Mythes. Paris: Gallimard. Beauvoir, Simone de. 1968. Śliczne obrazki [Les Belles Images]. Translated by Czesława i Mirosław Żuławscy. Warszawa: Państwowy Instytut Wydawniczy. Beauvoir, Simone de. 1972. Druga płeć. 1st ed., 2 vols. Translated by Gabriela Mycielska and Maria Leśniewska. Foreword by Konstanty Grzybowski. Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie. Beauvoir, Simone de. 1967. Siłą rzeczy [La Force des Choses]. Translated by Jerzy Pański. Warszawa: Państwowy Instytut Wydawniczy. Beauvoir, Simone de. 2003. Druga płeć. 2nd ed. Translated by Gabriela Mycielska and Maria Leśniewska. Warszawa: Jacek Santorski & Company. Beauvoir, Simone de. 2010. The Second Sex. Translated by Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-­Chevallier. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Beauvoir, Simone de. 2014. Druga płeć. Translated by Gabriela Mycielska and Maria Leśniewska. Introduction by Magdalena Środa. Warszawa: Wydawnictwo Czarna Owca. Bogić, Anna. 2010. Uncovering the Hidden Actors with the Help of Latour: The ‘Making’ of the Second Sex. MonTI 2 (Monographs in Translation and Interpreting): Applied Sociology in Translation Studies, 173–192. Bogucka, Maria. 1998. Białogłowa w dawnej Polsce. Kobieta w społeczeństwie polskim XVI-XVIII wieku na tle porównawczym. Warszawa: Wydawnictwo TRIO. Borde, Constance and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier. 2010. Translator’s Note, in Simone de Beauvoir, ed., The Second Sex. Translated by Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 16–21. Butler, Judith. 1990. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York and London: Routledge. Butler, Judith. 1994/1995. Podmioty płci/płciowości/pragnienia. Translated by Barbara Kopeć, in Spotkania feministyczne. Warszawa: OŚKa. Butler, Judith. 2003. Gra płci. Translated by Iwona Kurz. Dialog, 10, 94–106. Butler, Judith. 2005. Zapis na ciele, performatywna wywrotowość. Translated by Iwona Kurz, in Agata Chałupnik and Leszek Kolankiewicz, eds., Antropologia widowisk. Zagadnienia i wybór tekstów. Warszawa: Wydawnictwa Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego, 585–596. Butler, Judith. 2006a. Od “wnętrza” do performatywów płci. Translated by Karolina Krasuska. Poznańskie Studia Polonistyczne. Seria Literacka, 13, 127–136. Butler, Judith. 2006b. Zapisy na ciele, wywrotowe odgrywanie. Translated by Krystyna Kłosińska and Krzysztof Kłosiński, in Anna Burzyńska and Michał Paweł Markowski, eds., Teorie literatury XX wieku. Antologia. Kraków: Społeczny Instytut Wydawniczy Znak, 514–529. Butler, Judith. 2007. Zapis na ciele, performatywna wywrotowość. Translated by Iwona Kurz, in Mieczysław Dąbrowski and Robert Pruszczyński, eds., Lektury inności: antologia. Warszawa: Dom Wydawniczy Elipsa, 36–46. Butler, Judith. 2008. Uwikłani w płeć. Feminizm i polityka tożsamości [Entangled in Gender. Feminism and Identity Politics]. Translated by Karolina Krasuska. Introduction by Olga Tokarczuk. Warszawa: Wydawnictwo Krytyki Politycznej. 304

Feminism, translation, political history

Butler, Judith. 2010a. Walczące słowa: mowa nienawiści i polityka performatywu [Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative]. Translated by Adam Ostolski. Warszawa: Wydawnictwo Krytyki Politycznej. Butler, Judith. 2010b. Żądanie Antygony: rodzina między życiem a śmiercią [Antigone’s Claim: Kinship Between Life and Death]. Translated by Mateusz Borowski and Małgorzata Sugiera. Kraków: Księgarnia Akademicka. Butler, Judith. 2011. Ramy wojny: kiedy życie godne jest opłakiwania [Frames of War: When is Life Grievable?]. Translated by Agata Czarnecka. Warszawa: Instytut Wydawniczy Książka i Prasa, Teatr Dramatyczny m. st. Warszawy im. Gustawa Holoubka. Butler, Judith. 2014. Na rozdrożu: żydowskość i krytyka syjonizmu [Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism]. Translated by Michał Filipczuk. Warszawa: Wydawnictwo Krytyki Politycznej. Butler, Judith. 2016. Zapiski o performatywnej teorii zgromadzeń [Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly]. Translated by Joanna Bednarek. Warszawa: Wydawnictwo Krytyki Politycznej. Butler, Judith. 2018. Psychiczne życie władzy: teorie ujarzmienia [The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection]. Translated by Tomasz Kaszubski. Warszawa: Wydawnictwo Krytyki Politycznej. Chutnik, Sylwia and Karolina Sulej. 2019. Własny pokój Virginii Woolf, tłumaczenie Agnieszka Graff. O stawaniu się kobietą mówią: Edyta Bartosiewicz, Joanna Bator, Magdalena Cielecka, Katarzyna Kozyra, Martyna Wojciechowska, Ewa Woydyłło. Warszawa: OsnoVa. Dziadek, Adam, ed. 2018. Formy męskości I [Forms of Masculinity I]. Warszawa: Wydawnictwo IBL. Dziadek, Adam and Filip Mazurkiewicz, eds. 2018. Formy męskości II [Forms of Masculinity II]. Warszawa: Wydawnictwo IBL. Filipiak, Izabela. 1995. Absolutna amnezja. Poznań: Obserwator. Friedan, Betty. 1963. The Feminine Mystique. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. Friedan, Betty. 2012. Mistyka kobiecości. Translated by Agnieszka Grzybek. Warszawa: Czarna Owca. Graff, Agnieszka. 2003. Lost Between the Waves? The Paradoxes of Feminist Chronology and Activism in Contemporary Poland. Journal of International Women’s Studies, 4(2), 100–116. Houlding, Elizabeth A. 1993. Simone de Beauvoir: From the Second World War to “The Second Sex”. L’Esprit Créateur, 33(1), 39–51. Janion, Maria. 1999. Za wolność waszą i naszą [For Our Freedom and Yours]. Gazeta Wyborcza/Gazeta Świąteczna, 153, 3–4 (25 July). Kaliściak, Tomasz. 2017. Płeć Pantofla. Odmieńcze męskości w polskiej prozie XIX i XX wieku [The Gender of Pantofel. Queer Masculinities in the Polish Prose of the 19th and 20th Centuries]. Warszawa: Wydawnictwo IBL. Kirkpatrick, Brownlee Jean. 1980. A Bibliography of Virginia Woolf. 3rd ed. New York: Oxford University Press. Klitgård, Ida B. 2002. Waves of Influence: The Danish Reception of Virginia Woolf, in Mary Ann Caws and Nicola Luckhurst, eds., The Reception of Virginia Woolf in Europe. London and New York: Continuum, 165–185. Kłosińska, Krystyna. 2010. Feministyczna krytyka literacka [The Feminist Literary Criticism]. Katowice: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Śląskiego. Kozakiewicz, Mikołaj. 1968. Małżeństwo niemal doskonałe [Almost Ideal Marriage]. Warszawa: Wydawnictwo Iskry. Kraskowska, Ewa. 2009. Her-story w twórczości Jadwigi Żylińskiej [Her-story in the Work of Jadwiga Żylińska]. Fa-Art, 3(77), 26–33. Kuhar, Roman and David Paternotte, eds. 2017. Anti-Gender Campaigns in Europe: Mobilizing Against Equality. London and New York: Rowman & Littlefield International. Majbroda, Katarzyna. 2013. Feministyczna krytyka literatury w Polsce po roku 1989. Tekst, dyskurs, poznanie z odmiennej perspektywy [The Feminist Literary Critcism in Poland After 1989. Text, Discourse, Cognition from a Different Perspective]. Kraków: Universitas. Mann, Bonnie and Martina Ferrari, eds. 2017. On ne naît pas femme: on le devient . . . The Life of a Sentence. New York: Oxford University Press. Matuszek, Dawid. 2016. Imiona ojców. Możliwość psychoanalizy w badaniach literackich [Fathers’ Names. The Possibility of Psychoanalysis in Literary Research]. Warszawa: Wydawnictwo IBL. Mayer, Stefanie and Birgit Sauer. 2017. “Gender Ideology” in Austria: Coalitions Around an Empty Signifier, in Roman Kuhar and David Paternotte, eds., Anti-Gender Campaigns in Europe. Mobilizing Against Equality. Kindle ed. London and New York: Rowman & Littlefield International, 23–40. Millett, Kate. 1970. Sexual Politics. New York: Doubleday. Millett, Kate. 1982. Teoria polityki płciowej. Translated Teresa Hołówka, in Teresa Hołówka, ed., Nikt nie rodzi się kobietą [No One Is Born a Woman]. Warszawa: Czytelnik, 58–111. Moi, Toril. 2002. While We Wait: The English Translation of The Second Sex. Signs, 27(4), 1005–1035. Moi, Toril. 2010. The Adulteress Wife. London Review of Books, 32(3), 3–6. 305

Ewa Kraskowska and Weronika Szwebs

Myers, Kali. 2016. Translating Gender (Troubles): Simone de Beauvoir, Judith Butler, and the American Appropriation of ‘French Theory’. Lilith: A Feminist History Journal, 22, 91–103. Pakszys, Elżbieta. 2000. Egzystencjalizm vs. esencjalizm albo Druga płeć Simone de Beauvoir po 50 latach [Existentialism vs essentialism or The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir After 50 Years], in Grażyna Borkowska and Liliana Sikorska, eds., Krytyka feministyczna. Siostra teorii i historii literatury [Feminist Criticism. Sister of Theory and History of Literature]. Warszawa: Wydawnictwo IBL, 175–186. Sartre, Jean-Paul. 1957a. Dramaty [Selected Plays]. Translated by Jerzy Lisowski and Jan Kott. Warszawa: Państwowy Instytut Wydawniczy. Sartre, Jean-Paul. 1957b. Rozważania o kwestii żydowskiej [Réflexions sur la Question Juive]. Translated by Jerzy Lisowski. Warszawa: Spółdzielnia Wydawniczo-Handlowa “Książka i Wiedza”. Sartre, Jean-Paul. 1957c. Wiek męski [L’âge de Raison]. Translated by Julian Rogozinski. Warszawa: Państwowy Instytut Wydawniczy. Sartre, Jean-Paul. 1958a. Mur [Le Mur]. Translated by Jerzy Lisowski. Warszawa: Czytelnik. Sartre, Jean-Paul. 1958b. Rozpacz [La Mort dans l’âme]. Translated by Julian Rogozinski. Warszawa: Państwowy Instytut Wydawniczy. Sartre, Jean-Paul. 1958c. Zwłoka [Le Sursis]. Translated by Julian Rogozinski. Warszawa: Państwowy Instytut Wydawniczy. Sartre, Jean-Paul. 1961. Huragan nad cukrem [Ouragan sur le Sucre]. Translated by Zbigniew Stolarek. Warszawa: Państwowe Wydawnictwo Iskry. Sartre, Jean-Paul. 1965. Słowa [Les Mots]. Translated by Julian Rogoziński. Warszawa: Państwowy Instytut Wydawniczy. Sartre, Jean-Paul. 1968a. Czym jest literatura? wybór szkiców krytycznoliterackich [What Is Literature?]. Edited by Anna Tatarkiewicz. Translated by Janusz Lalewicz. Introduction by Tadeusz M. Jaroszewski. Warszawa: Państwowy Instytut Wydawniczy. Sartre, Jean-Paul. 1968b. Słowa [Les Mots]. Translated by Julian Rogoziński. Warszawa: Państwowy Instytut Wydawniczy. Sartre, Jean-Paul. 1970. Wyobrażenie: fenomenologiczna psychologia wyobraźni [Imaginaire: Psychologie Phénoménologique de L’imagination]. Translated by Paweł Beylin. Warszawa: PWN. Simons, Margaret A. 1983. The Silencing of Simone de Beauvoir: Guess What’s Missing from The Second Sex. Women’s Studies International Forum, 6(5), 559–564. Śmieja, Wojciech. 2016. Hegemonia i trauma. Literatura wobec dominujących fikcji męskości [Hegemony and Trauma. Literature Against the Dominant Fictions of Masculinity]. Warszawa: Wydawnictwo IBL. Środa, Magdalena. 2014. Widmo krąży po Europie. Widmo gender . . . [A Spectre Is Haunting Europe. The Spectre of Gender . . .]. Translated by Gabriela Mycielska and Maria Leśniewska. Foreword by Magdalena Środa, in Simone de Beauvoir, Druga płeć, 3rd ed. Warszawa: Wydawnictwo Czarna Owca, 7–14. Świerkosz, Monika. 2014. W przestrzeniach tradycji. Proza Izabeli Filipiak i Olgi Tokarczuk w sporach o literaturę, kanon i feminism [In the Spaces of Tradition. Prose by Izabela Filipiak and Olga Tokarczuk in Disputes about Literature, Canon and Feminism]. Warszawa: Wydawnictwo IBL PAN. Szopa, Katarzyna. 2018. Poetyka rozkwitania. Różnica płciowa w filozofii Luce Irigaray [The Poetry of Flowering. Gender Difference in the Philosophy of Luce Irigaray]. Warszawa: Wydawnictwo IBL. Terentowicz-Fotyga, Urszula. 2002. From Silence to a Polyphony of Voices: Virginia Woolf ’s Reception in Poland, in Mary Ann Caws and Nicola Luckhurst, eds., The Reception of Virginia Woolf in Europe. London and New York: Continuum, 127–147. Tokarczuk, Olga. 2008. Kobieta nie istnieje [A Woman Doesn’t Exist], in Judith Butler, ed., Uwikłani w płeć. Feminizm i polityka tożsamości. Warszawa: Wydawnictwo Krytyki Politycznej. Van de Velde, Theodoor Hendrik. 1926. Volkomen huwelijk: studie omtrent zijn physiologie en zijn techniek, voor den arts en den echtgenoot geschreven. Leiden: Leidsche Uitgeversmaatshappij. Van de Velde, Theodoor Hendrik. 1935. Małżeństwo doskonałe: jego fizjologia i technika [Ideal Marriage: Its Psychology and Technique]. Warszawa: Wydawnictwo J. Przeworskiego. Van de Velde, Theodoor Hendrik. 1972. Małżeństwo doskonałe: studium fizjologii i techniki. Translated by Kazimierz Imieliński. Warszawa: Państwowy Zakład Wydawnictw Lekarskich. Walczewska, Sławomira. 2000. Damy, rycerze, feministki. Kobiecy dyskurs emancypacyjny w Polsce [Ladies, Knights, Feminists. Women’s Emancipatory Discourse in Poland]. Warszawa: Wydawnictwo eFKa. Warkocki, Błażej. 2013. Różowy język. Literatura i polityka kultury na początku wieku [Pink Tongue. Literature and Cultural Policy at the Beginning of the Century]. Warszawa: Wydawnictwo Krytyki Politycznej. Wisłocka, Michalina. 1978. Sztuka kochania [The Art of Love]. Warszawa: Wydawnictwo Iskry.

306

Feminism, translation, political history

Wollstonecraft, Mary. 2011. Wołanie o prawa kobiety [A Vindication of the Rights of Woman]. Translated by Ewa Bodal, et al. Introduction by Zefiryna Żegnałek. Warszawa: Mamania. Woolf, Virginia. 1915. The Voyage Out. London: Duckworth & Co. Woolf, Virginia. 1922. Jacob’s Room. London: The Hogarth Press. Woolf, Virginia. 1925. Mrs Dalloway. Published by Leonard and Virginia Woolf. London: The Hogarth Press. Woolf, Virginia. 1926. Le Temps Passe (the middle section of To the Lighthouse). Translated by Charles Mauron. Commerce, 10 (Winter), 89–113. Woolf, Virginia. 1927a. To the Lighthouse. New York: Harcourt, Brace & Company. Woolf, Virginia. 1927b. Jacobs Rum [Jacob’s Room]. Translated by Siri Thorngren-Olin. Stockholm: Hugo Gebers. Woolf, Virginia. 1928a. Eine Frau von fünfzig Jahren [Mrs Dalloway]. Translated by Theresia Mützenbecher. Leipzig: Insel Verlag. Woolf, Virginia. 1928b. Orlando: A Biography. London: The Hogarth Press. Woolf, Virginia. 1929a. Mrs Dalloway. Translated by Simone David. Paris: Stock, Delamain et Boutelleu. Woolf, Virginia. 1929b. Orlando: imaginární životopis [Orlando: A Biography]. Translated by Staša Jílovská. Prague: Symposion. Woolf, Virginia. 1929c. A Room of One’s Own. Published by Leonard and Virginia Woolf. London: The Hogarth Press. Woolf, Virginia. 1936. Un Cuarto Proprio. Translated by Jorge Luis Borges. Buenos Aires: SUR. Woolf, Virginia. 1937. The Years. Published by Leonard and Virginia Woolf. London: The Hogarth Press. Woolf, Virginia. 1958. Lata [The Years]. Translated by Małgorzata Szercha. Warszawa: Czytelnik. Woolf, Virginia. 1961. Pani Dalloway [Mrs. Dalloway]. Warszawa: Państwowy Instytut Wydawniczy. Woolf, Virginia. 1962. Do latarni morskiej [To the Lighthouse]. Warszawa: Czytelnik. Woolf, Virginia. 1977. Pochyła wieża: eseje literackie [The Leaning Tower: Literary Essays]. Warszawa: Czytelnik. Woolf, Virginia. 1983. Fale [The Waves]. Translated by Lech Czyżewski. Kraków and Wrocław: Wydawnictwo Literackie. Woolf, Virginia. 1997. Własny pokój [A Room of One’s Own]. Translated by Agnieszka Graff. Introduction by Izabela Filipiak. Warszawa: Wydawnictwo Sic! Woolf, Virginia. 2002. Własny pokój; Trzy gwinee [A Room of One’s Own; Three Guineas]. Translated by Ewa Krasińska. Warszawa: Wydawnictwo Sic! Woolf, Virginia. 2009. Podróż w świat [The Voyage Out]. Translated by Michał Juszkiewicz. Warszawa: Prószyński Media.

307

23 Translating feminism in China A historical perspective Zhongli Yu

Introduction Feminisms in history have developed in many different social and cultural contexts, and translation has often played a role (cf. Flotow 2012). This chapter provides a historical overview of the translation of Western feminist work in China. I will first briefly introduce the differences between what feminism means in the West and in China. The subsequent overview of the Chinese translation of Western feminist works will help explain the relationship between Western and Chinese feminisms and the role played by translation in the development of Chinese feminism.

Feminism: Western and Chinese Feminism in general has long been a negative term in the People’s Republic of China (PRC), especially in Chinese Communist Party literature, where it is usually qualified as “bourgeois” or “Western.” Feminism has been excluded from the official discourse, and the history of Chinese feminism erased from the public mind (Wang 1999, 1). But what is feminism? In what follows we distinguish between Western feminism and Chinese feminism.

Western feminism Feminism in the West has been a troublesome term due to its complexity and diversity (Beasley 1999, ix). To put it simply, feminism is “a recognition of the historical and cultural subordination of women” (where women are the only world-wide majority to be treated as a minority), and a resolve to do something about it (Goodman 1999, x). Feminism is regarded as being “innovative, incentive and rebellious” (Beasley 1999, 3). The history of Western feminism is commonly divided into three waves (see Krolokke 2005; Rampton 2008), though some feminists do not see the wave metaphor as a helpful way to understand “stages” in feminist history (Howie 2007, 283). The first wave covers the late 19th and the early 20th centuries and its agenda appeared to be largely political in nature, either from a liberal or socialist point of view. The activities and writings of the suffragette movement are typical of this wave. The second wave began in the 1960s and continues into the 1980s, is often referred to as radical, and is concerned with a 308

Translating feminism in China

wider range of issues, such as sexuality, reproductive rights, family, clothing, the workplace, as well as the rights of oppressed minorities such as lesbians, women of colour, women of developing countries, etc., under the general slogan “the personal is political.” In the 1970s, the term eco-feminism was coined to relate the oppression and domination of all subordinate groups (such as women, people of colour, children, and the poor) to the oppression and domination of nature (such as animals, land, water, and air) and to capture the sense that because of their biological connection to earth and lunar cycles, women were natural advocates of environmentalism (Rampton 2015). Informed by postcolonial and postmodern thinking, the third wave, emerging in the 1990s, is more oriented to diversity, multiplicity and even ambiguity in women’s lives. In Europe, this is referred to as new feminism, concerning itself with issues such as trafficking, violence against women, pornography, etc., while theoretically undermining the earlier notion that there can be universal womanhood. In some cases, supporters even shun the very label “feminist” to characterize themselves as rejecting the dichotomy of “us and them.” Some third-wavers claim the writings of feminists of colour from the early 1980s as the beginning of the third wave (Heywood and Drake cited in Snyder 2008, 180). However, the three waves should not be seen as independent of each other. The boundaries are fuzzy; there is no sharp shift in attitude, content, or even dates. For instance, Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Women, Virginia Woolf ’s A Room of Her Own, as well as Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, may all be said to be iconic texts of the first wave of feminism. Yet, Wollstonecraft’s book appeared as early as 1792 ( just after the French Revolution), fighting under the liberal flag of political rights; Woolf ’s in 1929 (between the two world wars), introducing the notion of female bisexuality as well as announcing women’s unique voice in writing; and Beauvoir’s in 1949 ( just after the Second World War), critiquing patriarchy and the way it ‘others’ women. The Second Sex, together with Betty Friedan’s 1963 work The Feminine Mystique, have also been regarded as inaugurating the second wave feminism (Min 2005, 279). The second wave ended in the 1980s with internal disputes over issues such as sexuality and pornography, which ushered in third-wave feminism in the early 1990s. The third wave has been thought to be a continuation of the second wave as well as a response to the failures of the second. It continues to emphasize personal experience, but rejects the claim that all women share a set of common experiences (Snyder 2008, 184–186). Some people regard the third wave as just another way of talking about the contemporary moment, while some others prefer to call it post-feminism. Post-feminism literally means “after feminism” or what is “left when feminism is over.” Open to many different, conflicting, and problematic interpretations on the one hand, post-feminism seems to connote that feminism is in a mess, in decline, and has failed (Showalter in Gillis et al. 2007, 292). Recently, fourth-wave feminism is said to be emerging, partly because of the millennials’ articulation of themselves as their own kind of feminist. Feminism of the fourth wave goes beyond the struggles of women. It sounds clarion calls for gender equity and a broader awareness of oppression along with racism, ageism, classism, ableism, and sexual orientation (Rampton 2015).

Chinese feminism Chinese feminism is no less difficult to define, due to its linguistic and conceptual ambivalence and controversy (Ko and Wang 2006, 463). The birth of Chinese feminism was “an event of global proportions” at the turn of the 20th century (Liu et al. 2013, 4–6). The wave metaphor was also translated into Chinese to delineate the evolution of Chinese feminism which can also be divided into four waves. The first wave began in the May Fourth Movement (1915–1921) when Western feminism was introduced to China. The May Fourth Movement 309

Zhongli Yu

was an anti-imperial, political, social, and cultural revolution with the Chinese women’s liberation movement as a part of it, during which Chinese male intellectuals adopted “a Western view of history” and endeavoured to awaken Chinese women to “break from the traditional Confucian highly unequal social relation of men and women” (Min 2005, 274–275). Arranged marriage was condemned, and young people got the right to choose their own marriage partners. The custom of foot-binding was denounced, and the new women were to be educated just like their brothers. The term “feminism” at this time was translated into “女权主义 nüquan zhuyi” [women’s rights-ism] to reflect the political desires and demands of feminists (Xu 2009, 203). The spirit of the May Fourth Movement flowed and ebbed, and the feminist movement declined in the decades to come. The period from the establishment of the People’s Republic of China in 1949 to the 1970s can be taken as the second wave, during which Chinese feminism was a state policy designed to mobilize rural and urban women into the public sphere (Barlow 2001, 1288). As an important aspect of socialistic revolution and construction, Chinese feminism is called “socialist feminism” (社会主义女权主义 shehui zhuyi nüquan zhuyi, or 社会主义女性主义 shehui zhuyi nüxing zhuyi) (Chen 2003, 278), or “socialist state feminism” (社会主义国家女权主义 shehui zhuyi guojia nüquan zhuyi) (Wang 2017, 11), and gender relations were integrated with the MarxistLeninist-Maoist view of gender equality. During the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976), with Maoist ideology of “Woman can hold up half the sky,” the Chinese Communist Party was committed to re-moulding women according to the male standards and emphasized the masculinization of women. The masculinized women “liberated” by the state mitigated the long-held gender stereotypes, but were still held responsible for carrying out the noble functions of mother and wife in the family (Leung 2003, 359–366). From 1949 to the end of Cultural Revolution, China turned inward on the whole, and writings from the capitalist West became unavailable to ordinary educated people. Western feminism re-entered China in the 1980s when China adopted open policies. This marked the start of the third wave. The “movement towards the liberation of thought” and economic reform after the Cultural Revolution increased women’s self-awareness. A collective feminist consciousness arose among Chinese women, with growing recognition of gender differences and inequality. As China started to shift from “state-socialism” to “market-­socialism,” Chinese women became more vulnerable, more frequently turned into sex objects, and exploited and discriminated against in employment contexts. The differences between men and women were re-emphasized to “justify inequalities” that came with economic reform (Min 2005, 275–276). At this stage, Chinese feminism showed an enthusiastic return to a female identity or “female essence” (女性气质 nüxing qizhi) (Zhong 2006, 637), i.e. imagined femininity. With the proliferation of feminism in China, the previous translation of feminism as “women’s rights-ism” became unsatisfactory and now is often a derisive term in China, as it implies the stereotype of a “man-hating he-woman hungry for power” and is usually related to “more Western-oriented, politically-based oppositional feminism.” In the 1990s, the new translation of feminism as “女性主义 nüxing zhuyi” [womanism/women’s gender-ism/feminine-ism] replaced the old one in the academy in China, to “describe the orientation of the Chinese women’s movement” and to “distinguish Chinese from western feminism” (Xu 2009, 203), while “women’s rights-ism” is reserved for Western feminism. The new term sounds “far less threatening” and is more popular among Chinese feminist scholars. It is said that it implies “promoting femininity” and “reinforcing gender distinctions,” a position that would hardly be regarded as feminist in the anglophone world (Ko and Wang 2006, 463). Now it also refers to “new cultural strategies and attitudes towards women in the twenty-first century” and signifies a “ ‘smiley’ or friendly/complimentary Chinese-styled feminism” (Schaffer and Song 2007, 310

Translating feminism in China

20). According to Huang Lin (cited in Schaffer and Song 2007, 20), contemporary Chinese feminism is “sharp but not aggressive,” concerned with “the harmonious development of both sexes” and focused on the “eternal subject of humanity.” The implications behind the two (May Fourth politicized, contemporary depoliticized) Chinese terms for feminism reflect a “pluralist and complex feminism in China, where the formula of ‘difference within commonality’ put forth by international feminism” (Spakowski 2011, 47) does not fit. Like in the West, the fourth wave seems to have come with the turn of the new century, a wave informed by activism, in spite of heavy censorship on civic activism (Yu 2019). Focusing on gender inequality and sexual misconduct, feminist activists of the young generation and NGOs have organized various campaigns, both online and offline. For instance, students of Fudan University in Shanghai have organized activities on V-Day – a day established as part of a movement to stop violence against women and young girls – since 2004 with an annual production of The Vagina Monologues. The recent #MeToo Movement in China (cf. Yu 2019) is another case in point. The growing online activism, which came with the development of digital technology and partly because the Internet has become a new source of women’s oppression, reconfirming real-world power hierarchical relations (cf. Han 2018), has led to the emergence of a Chinese digital feminism. In the digital era, Chinese feminist activism has close connections with or is actually part of global feminism, as can be seen in the two examples just mentioned, although they carry distinct local characteristics and elements. It should be noted that the term Chinese feminist activists use to refer to feminism is “women’s rights-ism,” signifying that women’s rights are still an important issue today; meanwhile, the milder version “womanism” is often used in academia. It should also be pointed out that some academics use both terms, such as Li Yinhe (李银河), a sociologist and sexologist at China Academy of Social Sciences and Ai Xiaoming (艾晓明), a professor in Gender Studies at the Sun Yat-sen University, also widely known as a feminist activist, active in safeguarding the rights and interests of women, including anti-(sexual) violence against women (Yu 2015, 73). Unlike many Chinese women intellectuals who are reluctant to be tagged a feminist, Li Yinhe bluntly acknowledges that she is a 女权 主义者 nüquan zhuyi zhe (women’s rights-ist). Condemning the demonization of feminism in China, she interprets feminism as targeting a harmonious relationship between men and women and argues that anyone who advocates equality between men and women is a women’s rights-ist (Su 2010). According to Ai Xiaoming, there is not much difference between womanism and women’s rights-ism. She uses one or the other, depending on the circumstances. When facing a male chauvinist, she prefers to use the term “女权 nüquan” [women’s rights]. She believes that the key issues of feminism are rights, resources, and power relationships (Yu 2015, 73).

Translation of Western feminism into Chinese feminism The above very brief account of Western feminism and Chinese feminism provides a framework for examining Chinese feminism from the perspective of translation. This section is an inventory of what feminist works have been translated in different periods of time in the history of Chinese feminism, which will further reveal the trajectories and features of Chinese feminism. The majority of the following data come from CNKI (China national knowledge infrastructure) and Baidu (the world’s largest Chinese search engine), collected with a focus on academic and non-fictional writings on feminism and gender. Some data was collected randomly from the quotations in academic writings in women’s studies and feminist studies. The data is not exhaustive as not much can be found from before 1949 on CNKI and Baidu, but a story can be told with the key information collected. Literary works are excluded because of the scope of this study. The following examination falls into three chronological periods, roughly 311

Zhongli Yu

following the waves of Chinese feminism: Late Qing (1895–1911) and Republican (1912–49), the Mao era from 1949 till the late 1970s, and post-Mao era from the 1980s to the present.

Late Qing (1895–1911) and Republican (1912–1949) Western feminist concepts or ideas came to China with the late Qing reformers who were learning from the West about how to strengthen the nation. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the concept of “女权 nüquan” [women’s rights] was introduced to China when Chinese reformers, all men, promoted the notions of people’s rights or civil rights, human rights, and natural rights with the goal of strengthening the nation. This is regarded as the beginning of feminism in modern China (Ko and Wang 2007, 2). The term “女权 nüquan” was generally understood as women’s rights. In his Chinese translation of Herbert Spencer’s 1851 treatise Social Statics: Or the Conditions Essential to Human Happiness Specified, and the First of Them Developed, Ma Junwu (马君武) translated the expression “rights of women” into “女权 nüquan.” As the first translation on the subject of women’s rights in Chinese, Spencer’s work was extremely influential. From 1902, 女权 nüquan became a slogan in discourses of women’s liberation. On the eve of 1911, there emerged debates on women’s rights, giving rise to the articulation of different gender roles for women, such as mothers to the nation, equals in duty to men, seekers of new social roles for women without gender distinction, and women as the main agents of their own liberation (rather than looking to men for liberation) (Sudo 2006, 475–486). The debates on women’s rights in this period of the early 20th century are deliberate efforts by Chinese women elites, such as Jin Tianhe (金天翮), Qiu Jin (秋瑾), Zhang Zhujun (张竹君), and He Zhen (何震, aka He-Yin Zhen 何殷震) to construct their versions of Chinese modernity and new womanhood. The debates continued into the May Fourth Movement (1915–1921), with shifted focuses and theoretical underpinnings. An exalted motherhood based on a mixture of biological determinism, eugenics, and sexology was translated from Japan, the USA, and Europe. During this period, the women’s rights movement in the global context was introduced in journals, leading to the emergence of feminist organizations nationwide which demanded women’s rights to equal educational and employment opportunities, freedom of marriage and divorce, and equal political participation (Ko and Wang 2007, 5–6). In the May Fourth era, the definition of women’s rights was much expanded to include all the preceding. The educated women who acted from their newly acquired subject position of “being a human” formed a new social category called “new women” (Wang 1999, 14). “To be a human” in that time meant “to be a man” with all the constituting modern values. In other words, the May Fourth Movement advocated that Chinese women should be the same as men, and not become ‘the other’ of men. This May Fourth emphasis on women being human quickly took root in China, and equality between men and women as a principle was written into the platform of both the Chinese Communist Party and the Nationalist Party (i.e. Kuomingtang) (Wang 1999, 19). The Chinese Communist Party was founded in 1921, a time when feminism, women’s liberation, and equality between men and women were under heated discussion. Because several key founders had been vocal advocates of feminism, the Party endorsed the May Fourth feminist demand for equal rights for women from its inception. After the Party turned to Marxism, members steered the debates on women’s rights towards a socialist program, emphasizing the elimination of private ownership and the class system, and adopting an exclusionary strategy copied from European socialists to differentiate the “proletarian women’s liberation movement” (focusing on the Party’s goal) from the “bourgeois feminist movement” (focusing on gender equality). As the Party aimed for political alignment rather than theoretical development, the promotion of its feminist agenda on women’s rights co-existed with a disparagement 312

Translating feminism in China

of women’s rights-ism. As a result, feminists in the Party learned to manoeuvre in the discursive space of a “proletarian women’s liberation” so as to avoid the negative label of women’s rightsism that made them “bourgeois narrow feminists” (Ko and Wang 2007, 5–6).

The Mao era from 1949 until the late 1970s In the Mao era, feminism was a taboo subject. The intellectual space for debating women’s rights and social spaces for women’s spontaneous activism were closed down (Ko and Wang 2007, 6). During the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976), the publishing industry suffered serious restrictions and translation publishing almost stopped. Only one book on women of socialist countries is found: a book imported from the Soviet Union (China’s ally at that time), with two Chinese translations of it being published respectively in 1950 and 1951. This translation choice underlies the then current socialist ideology of women. The Party’s Marxist position on women meant that women’s liberation could only be guaranteed by a socialist revolution with a top-down approach. Mao’s statement “Men and women are the same,” uttered in 1964, somewhat echoed the May Fourth ideal of humanist inclusion of women. During this period, the push for male-female equality is said to have been the strongest, and the boundaries separating the sexes were overridden by the movement of women into men’s work and political activism (Mann 2011, 49). The May Fourth urban middle-class “new women” were replaced with the rural or lower-class urban “iron girls” (铁姑娘 tie guniang, referring to the selfless hardworking women of the 1960s). The term “iron girls” embodies the socialist gender ideology and the socialist value that women should be regarded as important builders of society. The perception of women as constructing socialism laid a foundation for some degree of gender equality (Wang Lihua 1999, 27, 34). However, a women’s liberation idea that maintained the male-universal as the norm was problematic, because such equality between men and women actually deprived women of their difference, and androgenized women somehow created the illusion that Chinese women were liberated and enjoyed equal status as men (Yu 2015, 170), when in fact many of them found the masculinist Maoist gender equality oppressive (Wang 1999, 19).

The post-Mao era from the 1980s to the present In the post-Mao era, though still loaded with negative connotations, the term “feminism” reemerged, marking an opening-up of both discursive and social spaces for feminist contestations and activism. The translation and publishing of feminist works in the decades after the Cultural Revolution has been governed by policies for a publishing industry working in a complex social and political context, and this has resulted in ups and downs in translation publishing, showing three distinct features: the revival and fluctuation of translation publishing from 1980 to 1989; the depression and reformation of translation publishing from 1990 to 1999; and the marketoriented development of translation publishing in the 21st century (Yu 2015, 162–167). The following review explores these three periods, with special attention to works with retranslations, with year of publication indicated in the brackets after the source text title.

The 1980s The reform and opening up that occurred in China from the late 1970s, especially the emancipation of the mind, provided favourable conditions for Western theories coming into China, which began to appear from the mid-1980s. At that time, about 20 feminist works were imported. They were concerned with the female body, female sexuality, married women, working women, 313

Zhongli Yu

and gender sociology. Among them, Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (TSS) (1986, 1988×2, 1998, 2004, 2009×2, 2011), and Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (1988×3, 1992) were the most popular. Each had three translations published in the 1980s and retranslations in the following decades. Another three works that had retranslations are Susan Griffin’s Woman and Nature: The Roaring inside her (1988, 2007), Robin Norwood’s Women Who Love Too Much (1989, 2011), Our Bodies, Ourselves of the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective (1989, 1998). Of all these works, Beauvoir’s TSS is the most influential one, with eight Chinese translations published from 1986 to the present, showing its lasting influence. The arrival of TSS in China is seen as marking the advent of European and American feminism. An important reason for the popularity of Beauvoir’s book in China is that the difficult situation of women discussed in its Book II is very similar to the situations Chinese women were facing as a result of the transformations in China after the Cultural Revolution. Beauvoir’s naming of women as the second sex reflected the experience of Chinese women as an invisible gender in society. Chinese urban women in the 1980s were in theory equal to men at the political, economic, and legal levels created by the socialist system. However, under this seemingly absolute equality, women faced the heavy burden of a male standard of work in society and the concealed expectations of being “贤妻良母” [good wife and virtuous mother] at home. The icons of model workers or “iron girls” elevated during the Cultural Revolution were being replaced with “socialist housewives,” the new exemplar for women who were committed and devoted to the family role (Leung 2003, 365). The campaign of emancipating the mind at the turn of the 1980s showed a tendency to reconstruct a patriarchally centred gender order, and Chinese women’s political and social status deteriorated with the economic reform. Beauvoir’s naming women as the second sex struck a chord among Chinese intellectual women and prompted them to reflect on their own experiences as the second sex. Chinese feminists of the 1980s made use of the phrase “women, the second sex” to mark the existence of gender differences so as to break through their invisibility at a time when slogans proclaimed “men and women are the same,” and to cultivate women’s consciousness as being essentially different from men’s (Yu 2015, 168–170).

The 1990s In the 1990s, about 40 translations were published. The increased number owed much to the Fourth United Nations Conference on Women held in Beijing in 1995. This Conference is regarded as an important marker in the reform-era history of China’s women’s movement in its relationship with international feminisms, and a watershed in the history of Chinese feminism (Wang and Zhang 2010). Through the Conference slogan of “gender mainstreaming,” the concept of gender (as opposed to biological sex) was clearly introduced. Moreover, the Conference led to the growth of women’s NGOs in China, and increased the number of gender-related international development projects, in which many women’s studies scholars participated. Through projects, academic conferences, seminars, and workshops, the Conference brought Chinese feminists into much more frequent encounters with Western feminists. A major concern that developed at this time was what exactly constituted Chinese feminism as Chinese feminists perceived the need to “indigenize feminisms” within China (Xu 2009, 197). Since the early 1990s, Chinese feminists are said to have enthusiastically embraced the global feminist concept of gender and used it innovatively to create local practices of “gender training” (Wang and Zhang 2010, 40). Examples of such innovation are not rare (cf. Min 2017), signifying transformation and localization or indigenization of Western feminism to suit the local context. One result is that the term “womanism” instead of “women’s rights-ism” became current as the translation of feminism. 314

Translating feminism in China

In this period, the translated works concerned not only women’s secondary position, women’s lives, the female body, female sexuality, and gender, but also women’s rights, needs, and selfesteem, feminist theology, and feminist literary criticism. The most influential book was Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, with two translations being published respectively in 1995 and 1996, and several retranslations later (2005, 2006, 2012, 2016). The Hite reports were very popular too. The Hite Report: A Nationwide Study of Female Sexuality was first published in 1994, with two retranslations being published in 2002. Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch (1991) and Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics (1999) were both retranslated respectively in 2003 and 2000. These key works were repeatedly translated and published in the next century, implying that women’s rights are still a major concern of Chinese feminists, as the market economy, officially called the “socialist market economy,” which started from 1994, has resulted in the rehabilitation of patriarchal culture and caused new problems for women as is discussed later in the chapter. These developments explain why feminist activists prefer the version “women’s rights-ism” as mentioned before.

The 21st century A more market-oriented economy in the new century promoted the growth of translation publishing. From 2000 up to July 2018, at least 214 works on feminist topics were published, covering a wider range of issues. While the topics introduced in the 1980s and 1990s continue, the imported works cover many more subjects on women, such as psychology, history, language, literature, power, law, citizenship, economics, art, music, leisure, and women’s decision not to marry. Gender has become another major subject, moving beyond issues of women and men to address homosexuality, bisexuality, intersex, queer, desire, identity, history, ethics, science, semiotics, media, and public administration. Prostitution is a new topic, with three translated works published respectively in 2000, 2003, and 2009. Besides the retranslations already mentioned, four other works have retranslations: Betty Friedan’s The Second Stage (2000, 2007), Karen Horney’s Feminine Psychology (2000, 2009), Marilyn Yalom’s A History of the Wife (2002, 2016), and Women’s Lives: A Psychological Exploration by Claire A. Etaugh and Judith S. Bridges (2003, 2012). Translations of Shere Hite’s other reports were published. The translation of the Hite report on male sexuality was published in the same year as the retranslation of the Hite report on female sexuality (2002). In 2008, Chinese translations of the three Hite reports respectively on Shere Hite herself, the family, and sex and business were published. The subjects of the translations and retranslations reflect social issues in China of the new century, such as trafficking, prostitution, prejudice against female university students in the job market, prejudice against gender minorities, and violence against women, including sexual harassment and rape, partly exposed in the recent #MeToo Movement in China. From the translations, Chinese readers learned not just concepts and theories, but also practical approaches for activism, as discussed in Zhongli Yu (2017, 2019).

Conclusion The brief explanation of Western feminism and Chinese feminism demonstrates both differences and interconnections. The overview of translations of Western feminist works in each period largely shows how these coincide with the features of Chinese feminism in different waves, and reveals their impact on Chinese women and feminism. The preceding discussion focuses on works that have retranslations, regarding them as being more important for Chinese feminism, with many more translations not mentioned due to lack of space. To sum up, 315

Zhongli Yu

the translation of Western feminism has experienced three phases in China: introducing and importing, learning and imitating, and transforming and localizing. The imported feminism was transformed when interacting with the local society, and gradually developed into Chinese feminism to accommodate local needs and agendas. Naturally, there exist both differences and similarities between Western and Chinse feminisms. The influx of Western feminism since the 1980s has led to a series of changes in China, demonstrating the important role of translation in the development of Chinese feminism. From the 1980s, courses, programs, and centres of women’s studies and gender studies were gradually established in Chinese universities to counter gender-blindness in a class-focused Marxist theory of women, the neglect of women in general history, and the ignorance about and prejudice against gender minorities. From the 1990s, NGOs for women and gender minorities developed online and offline. Activities or campaigns for women and gender minorities emerged and have been developing despite strict censorship from the authorities. All such changes deserve scholarly attention.

Future directions In addition to academic and non-fictional writings on feminism and gender discussed in this study, a larger number of feminist literary works have been imported, and many are very popular among Chinese readers: for example, Jane Eyre, Pride and Prejudice, Tess of the D’Urbervilles, The Scarlet Letter, Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, and The Golden Notebook, to name but a few. The imported feminist literary works are an important part of (feminist) translation history, a historical study of which would shed further light on the history of Chinese feminism, and hence should be explored in the future.

Further reading Liu, Lydia H., Rebecca E. Karl, and Dorothy Ko, eds. 2013. The Birth of Chinese Feminism: Essential Texts in Transnational Theory. New York and Chichester: Columbia University Press. This book introduces the birth of Chinese feminism at the turn of the 20th century. It focuses on three important thinkers, i.e. He-Yin Zhen (何殷震, 1884–1920?, a pre-eminent feminist theorist and founding editor of an anarcho-feminist journal Natural Justice), Liang Qichao (梁启超, 1873–1929, a journalist, philosopher and reformist), and Jin Tianhe (金天翮, 1874–1947, a liberal educator and political activist), and includes in the volume their major feminist texts (translated from Chinese). The latter two were male scholars, another indication that the first wave of Chinese feminism was led by Chinese male intellectuals (cf. Yu 2019). Spakowski, Nicola. 2011. ‘Gender’ Trouble: Feminism in China Under the Impact of Western Theory and the Spatialization of Identity. Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique, 19(1), 31–54. This paper examines articulations or rhetorics of a Chinese feminist “identity” as part of a new conceptual grid of global-local interrelations. It takes reflections on “gender” as a departure to move on to wider discussions of what Chinese feminism is in light of theory imported from the West. Wang, Zheng and Ying Zhang. 2010. Global Concepts, Local Practices: Chinese Feminism Since the Fourth UN Conference on Women. Feminist Studies, 36(1), 40–70. This paper discusses feminist conceptual, organizational, and social transformations in China since the early 1990s, which have unfolded in conjunction with transnational feminist movements during the period when China became a global capitalist giant. It locates Chinese feminism at the intersection of local and global processes, contributing to understanding the dynamics between locally grounded feminist strategies and the global circulation of feminist concepts and practices. Yu, Zhongli. 2017. Relay Translation of Feminism in China: An Intralingual Case. Journal of Translation Studies (New Series), 1(2), 47–74. This paper discusses an intralingual case of relay translation of feminism in China, i.e. the Chinese campus production of The Vagina Monologues by students of Fudan University in Shanghai. It examines 316

Translating feminism in China

the translators’ behaviour in the specific social context, particularly the strategies of the translators for dealing with constraints that arise from social context and cultural differences. Yu, Zhongli. 2015. Translating Feminism in China: Gender, Sexuality and Censorship. London and New York: Routledge. This book explores how Western feminism is translated in China, with reference to two feminist works The Second Sex and The Vagina Monologues. It pays special attention to how the content on the female body and female sexuality (including lesbian love) is translated or censored, the influence of the translator’s gender identity, as well as the social and political contexts in dealing with such content.

Related topics Feminist studies, women’s studies, gender studies, feminist theory, feminist history, translation history

Acknowledgement Thanks goes to Dr Beibei Tang and Ms Chang Li who made great contribution to data collection for this work.

References Barlow, Tani E. 2001. Globalization, China, and International Feminism. Signs, 26(4), 1286–1291. Beasley, Chris. 1999. What Is Feminism? An Introduction to Feminist Theory. London, Thousand Oaks and New Delhi: SAGE. Chen, Tina Mai. 2003. Female Icons, Feminist Iconography? Socialist Rhetoric and Women’s Agency in 1950s China. Gender and History, 15(2), 268–295. Etaugh, Claire A. and Judith S. Bridges. 2003. 女性心理学 [Women’s Psychology]. Translated by Su Yanjie 苏彦捷. Beijing: Peking University Press. Etaugh, Claire A. and Judith S. Bridges. 2012. 心理学：关于女性 [Psychology: About Women]. Translated by Shi Yi 施轶. Shanghai: Shanghai People’s Publishing House. Flotow, Luise von. 2012. Translating Women: From Recent Histories and Re-translations to Queerying Translation, and Metamorphosis. Quaderns: Revista de traducción, 19, 127–139. Friedan, Betty. 1963. The Feminine Mystique. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc. Friedan, Betty. 2000. 非常女人 [The Second Stage]. Translated by Shao Wenshi 邵文实 and Yin Tiechao 尹铁超. Haerbin: Beifang Wenyi Publishing House. Friedan, Betty. 2007. 第二阶段 [The Second Stage]. Translated by Xiaoyi 小意. Nanjing: Jiangsu People’s Publishing House. Gillis, Stacy, Gillian Howie, and Rebecca Munford, eds. 2007. Third Wave Feminism: A Critical Exploration. Expanded 2nd ed. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Goodman, Lizbeth, ed. 1999. Literature and Gender. London: Routledge in association with The Open University. Greer, Germaine. 1991. 女太监 [The Female Eunuch]. Translated by Ouyang Yu 欧阳昱. Guilin: Lijiang Publishing Limited. Griffin, Susan. 1988. 自然女性 [Natural Woman]. Translated by Zhang Minsheng 张敏生 and Fan Daizhong 范代忠. Changsha: Hunan People’s Publishing House. Griffin, Susan 2007. 女人与自然 [Woman and Nature]. Translated by 毛喻原. Chongqing: Chongqing Publishing Group. Han, Xiao. 2018. Searching for an Online Space for Feminism? The Chinese Feminist Group Gender Watch Women’s Voice and Its Changing Approaches to Online Misogyny. Feminist Media Studies, 18(4), 734–749. doi: 10.1080/14680777.2018.1447430. Hite, Shere. 2002. 海蒂性学报告女人篇 [The Hite Report: A Nationwide Study of Female Sexuality]. Translated by Lin Shuzhen 林淑贞. Haikou: Hainan Publishing House. Horney, Karen. 2000. 女性心理学 [Feminine Psychology]. Translated by 窦卫霖. Shanghai: Shanghai Wenyi Publishing House. 317

Zhongli Yu

Horney, Karen. 2009. 女性心理学 [Feminine Psychology]. Translated by许科 and 王怀勇. Shanghai: Shanghai Jinxiu Wenzhang Publishing House. Howie, Gillian. 2007. Interview with Luce Irigaray, in Stacy Gillis, Gillian Howie and Rebecca Munford, eds., Third Wave Feminism: A Critical Exploration. Expanded 2nd ed. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 283–291. Ko, Dorothy and Zheng Wang. 2006. Introduction: Translating Feminisms in China. Gender and History, 18(3), 463–472. Ko, Dorothy and Zheng Wang (eds.) 2007. Translating Feminisms in China. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing. Krolokke, Charlotte. 2005. Three Waves of Feminism. Available at: www.sagepub.com/upm-data/6236_ Chapter_1_Krolokke_ 2nd_ Rev_Final_Pdf.pdf [Accessed 8 Oct. 2011]. Leung, Alicia S. M. 2003. Feminism in Transition: Chinese Culture, Ideology and the Development of the Women’s Movement in Chin. Asia Pacific Journal of Management, 20, 359–374. Mann, Susan L. 2011. Gender and Sexuality in Modern Chinese History. New York: Cambridge University Press. Millett, Kate. 1999. 性的政治 [Sexual Politics]. Translated by Zhong Liangming 钟良明. Beijing: Social Sciences Academic Press. Min, Dongchao. 2005. Awakening Again: Travelling Feminism in China in the 1980s. Women’s Studies International Forum, 28, 274–288. Min, Dongchao. 2017. Translation and Travelling Theory: Feminist Theory and Praxis in China. London and New York: Routledge. Norwood, Robin. 1989. 爱的太多的女人 [Women Who Love Too Much]. Translated by Jiang Ling 江棱. Beijing: Baowentang Book Store. Norwood, Robin. 2011. 爱得太多的女人：给所有为爱迷茫的女人 [Women Who Love Too Much: To All Those Who are Lost in Love]. Translated by Pang Pai 庞湃. Beijing: Beijing United Publishing Co. Lit. Rampton, Martha. 2008. The Three Waves of Feminism. Pacific, The Magazine of Pacific University [online]. Available at: www.pacificu.edu/magazine_archives/2008/fall/echoes/feminism.cfm [Accessed 8 Oct. 2011]. Rampton, Martha. 2015. Four Waves of Feminism. Available at: www.pacificu.edu/about/media/four-wavesfeminism [Accessed 30 July 2018]. Schaffer, Kay and Xianlin Song. 2007. Unruly Spaces: Gender, Women’s Writing and Indigenous Feminism in China. Journal of Gender Studies, 16(1), 17–30. Snyder, R. Claire. 2008. What Is Third-Wave Feminism? A New Directions Essay. Signs, 34(1), 175–196. Sudo, Mizuyo. 2006. Concepts of Women’s Rights in Modern China. Translated by Michael G. Hill. Gender & History, 18(3), 472–489. Su, Feng 苏枫. 2010. 主张男女平等的都是女权主义者 [Anyone Who Advocates Equality Between Men and Women is a Feminist]. 小康 [Insight China], 1, 104–105. Wang, Lihua. 1999. The Seeds of Socialist Ideology: Women’s Experiences in Beishadao Village. Women’s Studies International Forum, 22(1), 25–35. Wang, Zheng. 1999. Women in the Chinese Enlightenment: Oral and Textual Histories. Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press. Wang, Zheng. 2017. Finding Women in the State: A Socialist Feminist Revolution in the People’s Republic of China, 1949–1964. Oakland, CA: University of California Press. Xu, Feng. 2009. Chinese Feminisms Encounter International Feminisms. International Feminist Journal of Politics, 11(2), 196–215. Yalom, Marilyn. 2002. 老婆的历史 [A History of the Wife]. Translated by Xu Dejin 许德金 and Huo Wei 霍炜. Beijing: Hualing Publishing House. Yalom, Marilyn. 2016. 太太的历史 [A History of the Wife]. Translated by He Yingyi 何颖怡. Hangzhou: Zhejiang University press. Yu, Zhongli. 2015. Translating Feminism in China: Gender, Sexuality and Censorship. London and New York: Routledge. Yu, Zhongli. 2017. Relay Translation of Feminism in China: An Intralingual Case. Journal of Translation Studies (New Series), 1(2), 47–74. Yu, Zhongli. 2019. A New Wave of Feminism: China’s #MeToo. Policy Forum. Available at: www.policy forum.net/a-new-wave-of-feminism-chinas-metoo/ [Accessed 17 Jan. 2019]. Zhong, Xueping. 2006. Who Is a Feminist? Understanding the Ambivalence Towards Shanghai Baby,‘Body Writing’ and Feminism in Post-Women’s Liberation China. Gender and History, 18(3), 635–660.

318

24 Queer transfeminism and its militant translation Collective, independent, and self-managed Laura Fontanella

Introduction This chapter focuses on queer transfeminist work in translation in European countries outside the anglophone world. It defines the concept and then explores the work of selected groups, mainly operating in Italy and Spain, who use translation as a political and queer transfeminist tool, and concludes with research suggestions that might enlarge this topic to non-Western countries and map non-European realities of queer transfeminist and militant translation.

Beyond feminist translation Much has been written on “feminist translation,” its development in the 1970s and 1980s, the strategies observed and deployed in feminist interventionist work, the theories developed, and broader feminist perspectives on translation and translation studies. The field has operated in a context of linguistic creativity and political resistance (Sarapegno 2010), finding ways for women to emerge in translation and in histories of translation with their femininity, their desires, and their power. Feminist translation is largely about seeing and using translation as an act of rewriting, of active intervention, an approach that takes a stand against chauvinism in all its forms (Saidero 2013). While these efforts have rendered women visible in certain texts, at least to some extent, these processes have also raised some political doubts (Castro 2009, 2012). Feminist translation has largely been a ‘Western’ praxis since the scholars who first opened up the topic were mainly English-speaking and addressed English topics. Now a growing interest in the field has allowed it to expand into other contexts and cultures, as in the work of Claudia de Lima Costa and Sonia Alvarez (2014), Zhongli Yu (2015), and others (Castro and Ergun 2017; Flotow and Farahzad 2017). This type of feminist translation has focused mainly on women. Originating from a particular historical context that paid attention to the sociopolitical differences existing between men and women, it was centred on the naturalization of the concept of woman as the subject of feminism (Baldo 2018). This interest in women alone is understandable but it has led to the exclusion 319

Laura Fontanella

of other categories of people who are oppressed because of their gender or sexual identity by the hetero-cis-patriarchy (Butler 1988, 1990, 2014). Still, with the development of new areas of study such as queer, lesbian, gay, and transgender studies, it has become evident that there are similarities in the way patriarchy oppresses women and LGBTQI subjectivities. New alliances are being born from this common denominator (Green 2006).

More inclusive approaches: translation, transition, transgender The term transfeminism started circulating in the 2000s with the publication of the Transfeminist Manifesto, a text written by scholar and activist Emi Koyama. This text states that transfeminism is “a movement by and for trans women who view their liberation to be intrinsically linked to the liberation of all women and beyond” (Koyama 2003, 244–245). The term includes “queer, intersex, non-trans people, all those subjectivities who are sympathetic towards the needs for trans women” (Baldo 2018, 1), and has spread all over Europe but acquired a particular resonance in Spain and Italy where a variety of groups and collectives have declared themselves to be transfeminist: some have started translation projects, seeing in translation a tool with which to practice transfeminism. According to Michela Baldo, “the term transfeminism can be considered [to refer to] a form of feminism informed by transgender politics” (Baldo 2019, 1). It defines a feminism that is not just for cis and trans women but includes all others who have suffered gender and sexual discrimination: intersex people, trans men, non-trans women, non-trans men, non-binary, gender fluid. Recognizing that trans, lesbian, bisexual, gay, queer and non-binary people are subject to hetero-cis-patriarchal oppressions and violence (Green 2006) has caused proponents of feminist translation to become more conscious of this movement’s own power dynamics, and construct a more intersectional feminism as well as a more inclusive practice of feminist translation and theorization (Santaemilia 2005; Hill Collins 2017). This recognition has been further developed by explorations of the similarities between translation studies and transgender studies: Like transgender studies, translation has historically been preoccupied with issues of authenticity. Writers have historically characterized translation as secondary work, an unfaithful and deceptive practice to be scrutinized with deep suspicion [. . .] this inherited concern about authenticity allows us to draw parallels with the harassment that trans*,1 non-binary, and trans persons experience in the violent accusation of deceitfulness and assertions that their genders are not real and they are not faithful to the gender assigned at birth. (Concilo 2016, 463) This analysis by Arielle A. Concilo, which argues that the preoccupation with the authenticity of translation somehow mirrors/reflects similar preoccupations around trans or non-binary persons, has produced further discussion drawing attention to geographical and gender borders, binarisms and language transitioning (Gramling and Dutta 2016). For instance, discussion around the politics of monolingualism bring in translation as a political tool and praxis that may subvert and transgress norms that force identities and languages into limited, normative form, dividing them into what is internal and what is external to the modern nation-state. This can be compared to the cisgender system, and so the task of the politically aware translator is to remain in the queer zones, in the untranslatable areas, in the “interstitial spaces produced in the encounter between cultures [. . .] sites for addressing multiple lines of social invention, resistance” (Spurlin 2014c, 1–2). Since translation works not only across linguistic and national borders but across social categories as well, the purpose of the transfeminist queer approach is not only to let transfeminist 320

Queer transfeminism, militant translation

and queer identities emerge in a text but also to inquire critically about transfeminist queer expressions, terms and lexemes that can or cannot be translated from one culture into another. Many scholars have shown how this specific approach can bring identities to the surface that, otherwise, would be marginalized, rendered invisible, and newly oppressed. Annarita Taronna (2006) has shown how the last Italian translation of Virginia Woolf ’s Orlando (1993) by Alessandro Rossatti partially deletes the queer identity of the main character. In English, Orlando’s transition from female to male is marked by a moment of simultaneity. During the transition, we can clearly read that Orlando, even for a moment, is both. The erasure of this gender-double aspect has caused damage to Woolf ’s own writing and to Italian readers’ perception of it. In Italian we read: Ma sotto ogni altro aspetto, rimaneva lo stesso Orlando di prima. Il mutamento di sesso poteva mutare il futuro dei due Orlando, ma non certo la loro identità. I loro visi, come provano i ritratti, rimasero identici.” [But in every other way, it was the same Orlando as before. The change in sex could change the future of the two Orlandos, but certainly not their identity. Their faces, as the portraits prove, remained identical] In Virginia Woolf ’s English text, however, we read: But in every other respect, Orlando remained precisely as he had been. The change of sex, though it altered their future, did nothing to alter their identity. Their faces remained, as their portraits prove, practically the same [. . .] Rossatti, sacrifices the possible gender nuances, the diverse gender options included in Woolf ’s “they\their” introducing, in Italian, the term “due” which means two – giving Orlando’s transformation a binary connotation that is not suggested in the English test. In Rossatti translated version, even the title is different: it reinforces gender binarisms too. While Virginia Woolf ’s title was originally Orlando, in Rossatti edition we can find a relevant adding: Orlando. É uomo? É donna? [Is he a man? Is she a woman?]. This textual addition suggests the existence of only two genders, reinforces binary concepts, underlines the fact that human existence has, necessarily, only two possible exits: either you are a woman or you are a man – something that, in Virginia Woolf ’s text, is not given. This title cannot abide doubt, indefiniteness, the queer zone, anything beyond the margins. This title shows the didactic need to put things back in their place, to put the elements back into their taxonomy. Similarly, Crisitano Mazzei (2007) has analyzed the situation of two novels: Silviano Santiago’s Stella Manhattan, translated into English by George Yúdice in 1994, and Caio Fernando Abreu’s Onde andarà dulce Veiga?, translated by Adria Frizzi in 2001 with the title Whatever Happened to Dulce Veiga? In the first case, the protagonist Eduardo Silva is described with both masculine and feminine gender referents (Santiago 1985), while the English translation shows Eduardo entrapped in only a female body as only the pronouns ‘she’ and ‘her’ occur (Santiago 1985). In the second case, the character of Jacyr, a cross-dressing adolescent, is called “louca,” “a word used by transvestites to address themselves” (Mazzei 2007, 50) but this is translated into English as “crazy girl” (Prado 2008; Abreu 1990, 2010) which erases its political queer value. These examples show how the translation of transfeminist queer identities is not an easy process. Deborah Elena Giustini gives further evidence in her analysis of the Russian translation of Sappho’s ancient poems. In particular, Ode number two in which Sappho decants her jealousy for another woman completely loses its lesbian connotation in Russian. The gender pronouns that 321

Laura Fontanella

show that the object of Sappho’s jealousy is a woman, are shifted, changed, and masculinized, thus “obliterating any reference to a taboo lesbian relationship” (Giustini 2015, 17–18). The act of translation can thus easily tamper with queerness in texts, erasing, ignoring, or neglecting references to oppressed people rather than using its potential as a political tool to set free those oppressed people (Cavagnoli 2010, 2012). Not only feminist translation but many other translation theorists and researchers (Baker 1992, 2006; Venuti 1992, 2004; Tymoczko 2000, 2010) have shown how politics and translation are linked in their relation to power and how translation can serve as a device to stand up to power, give voice to the marginalized, excluded and oppressed. If translation is an instrument able to give voice to those communities, subjectivities and identities that are squashed and flattened by the hetero-cis-white-bourgeois-patriarchal system, it is easy to see the pressing need felt by the members of these groups to translate in order to change the dominant narratives. The need to emerge in writing and in translation has led to the creation of collectives, associations, organizations whose members come together to produce self-managed, independent, anti-capitalist, anti-racist, queer transfeminist and postcolonialist approaches to translation, with a focus on the emergence of every kind of Alterity.

Queer transfeminist collectives and their translations With the terms “Queer Transfeminism Collective,” I refer to groups that practise intersectional feminism, a type of feminism that includes not only cisgender women but also trans people, non-binary and gender fluid subjects, lesbians, gays, bisexuals, racialized people, subjects from different classes and different cultural backgrounds. Queer, in this sense, is used to reinforce the idea that this intersectionality is based on an alliance between feminist and LGBTQI movements. The terms “Queer Transfeminist” are often a collocation used to describe certain leftwing radical collectives, at least, in Italy. Western countries may be experiencing a burgeoning number of publications about gender and feminist issues in response to risks of feminist struggles being subsumed by patriarchy and capitalism (Federici 2012), but the writings that are fundamental to a radically politicized queer transfeminist audience often run the risk of remaining locked away in drawers. The mainstream publishing industry does not seem to be very interested in publishing such texts. Some collectives and independent associations are trying to address this problem, the more prominent of which are described later. They include “Traduzioni Militanti,” a group born from an Italian feminist blog, “Ideadestroyingmuros,” whose members are mainly based in Spain and who have already translated masterpieces connected with the gender studies culture, “Plumas Traidoras” who have applied the concepts of identity politics to the way they assign translations to a translator, “LesBitches,” one of the most influential translation collectives in Italy, “Utopia” with its translation ‘atelier,’ and finally, “BLA” and “Interprise” which are also involved in interpreting. These collectives have been chosen because of their proximity to the author and because, in the militant Italian context they are the best known. For instance, I am a member of the group “Traduzioni Militanti” – described later – and have translated an extract from the Transfeminist Manifesto by Emi Koyama, for “LesBitches.” Because of this collaboration and because we are part of the same activist network, it has been possible to contact the different collectives, interview them on their work and discuss shared interests in gender and translation. “Traduzioni Militanti” (Militant Translations), founded in 2013 through the famous feminist blog, “Femminismo a Sud” (Feminism to South) and linked to the Facebook page “Abbatto i Muri” (Tear Down Walls) has been filling the gap described previously in recent years. This

322

Queer transfeminism, militant translation

group was born thanks to a “call for translatxr”2 issued by Isabella Gerini, administrator of the website. It now offers a service where customers can request the translation of articles, interviews and texts about gender issues via email. The text is then assigned to an available translatxr who shares the translation using social platforms such as the blog abbattoimuri.wordpress.com. The group has gained social popularity and helped spread queer transfeminist contents via the Internet. Recently, the translatxr have been translating different articles, pdf files and materials written and shared by ICRSE, the International Committee on the Rights of Sex Workers in Europe from English to Italian. Other translated articles are from online newspapers such as Huffpost, The Independent, VICE, BuzzFeed News, USA Today [. . .]. The translatxrs have also translated brief extracts from Le ventre des femmes. Capitalisme, racialisation, féminisme [Women’s wombs. Capitalism, racialization, feminism] by Françoise Vergès (2017). Ideadestroyingmuros,3 another such group, describe themselves as follows: a trans-cultural collective formed in 2005. [. . .] In the light of our displacements towards Granada, Paris, Barcelona, Palermo and Valencia we need practicing resistance, creative processes, auto-anthropological research routes and self-management. The perspective that we have chosen to share is based on several border positions in relation to: nation, gender, sexuality, language and creation. [. . .] The instruments by which we transform our limitations into resources are feminist research, translation and writing. Because of its clear political positioning and its publication of Paul B. Preciado’s Anal Terror (2009), the group has gained great visibility in Europe becoming an inspirational collective in the field of translation and activism. As the first group to provide a translation of Preciado, a work that was available in Spanish only. Ideadestroyingmuros understood the importance of that text before any official publishing house did. In an interview released on January 2017, one of the members of this collective using the nickname Mery, provided the reasons behind their decision to translate not only Preciado from Spanish into Italian but also Pat Califia’s One of the Occult Sides of Lesbian Sexuality from English into Spanish. Preciado represented the cornerstone of a theoretical apparatus completely lacking in Italy. Preciado, who knew the “Queer,” was pushing us on something completely unreleased. Our translation has been made collectively. [. . .] We found many difficulties because many terms, in Italian, didn’t exist. We didn’t want to publish our translations through a publishing house because we didn’t want to enter into a capitalistic mechanism. We have published everything via self-production and self-funding. A transfeminist group, this collective works without reproducing hierarchical structures – also in the translation process –, avoiding power dynamics and instead, sharing knowledges, competences, insights, and suggestions. Moreover, it tries, sentence by sentence, to transpose the discussions on gender, sexuality and feminism in their works, keeping feminist and LGBTQI identities, maintaining them in translation, saving them from oblivion. One example of this practice can be spotted in the word “transmaricabollo,” a term widely used by the collective in their translations as a general replacement for the word queer. Once again, the reasons behind this choice are political. At first glance, this is a composite noun, made by ‘trans’ for transgender, ‘marica’ for gay or effeminate man and ‘bollo’ – which literally means pastry, pie, donut – for lesbian. Originally created by the Spanish queer activist assembly of Madrid, Asamblea Transmaricabollo de Sol, this term – together with its political

323

Laura Fontanella

intentions – has been adopted by other collectives which want to distance themselves from both heterosexual norms and the dominant mainstream LGBT activism. According to Ideadestroyingmuros, some of whose members are involved in the Spanish queer activist network, the term queer would hyper-politicise position in gender and sexuality policies rather than a specific set of identities. Ideadestroyingmuros members have collectively decided to use this ironic and provocative neologism in their translations from English in order to explicitly point out the diversity of this coalition’s concerns which encompass issues such as the normalization of sex-work, the antifascist and anticapitalistic struggle, the criticism of national borders, the management of migrants and austerity – issues that the mainstream LGBT movements do not generally take on, or refuse to face. Another example of their approach can be seen in their translation of work by Pat Califia, an American trans man who has become popular because of his essays about sexuality and his erotic fictions and poems. His paper, “A Secret Side of Lesbian Sexuality” which first appeared in English in a book entitled Public Sex: the Culture of Radical Sex (Cleis Press 1994) has been translated as “Un lado oculto de la sexualidad lésbica” [One of the occult sides of lesbian sexuality] and published in 2008, by Bellaterra Publishing House, as an essay inside the book BDSM. Estudios sobre la dominación y la sumisión, [BDSM. Studies on Domination and Submission]. Ideadestroyingmuros translated this already translated text from Spanish to Italian. In the very first lines of this text, where the author, in English used “the closet,” we find the Spanish term “El armario” [the closet]: El armario es mucho más grande de lo que se cree y no debería haber razones por las que estamos en él, pero estamos allí. Es obvio que las fuerzas conservadoras, como la religión institucionalizada, la policía y otros representantes de la mayoría tiránica, no quieren que el sadomasoquismo florezca en ninguna parte, y las mujeres sexualmente activas siempre han representado una amenaza que el sistema no tolera (Califia 2008). In Italian, there is no expression related to the sexual closet, and, for this reason, no translation for the collocation “coming out” which tends to simply be left in English in Italian texts. The activists chose to use two different terms. In the first case they left the word “closet” in English, inserting a glossary note at the end of the chapter explaining the term to the readers. The term, according to Serena Bassi in her Displacing LGBT: Global Englishes, Activism and Translated Sexualities, is one of those terms that is gradually become well-known to the international LGBTQI community members: the Ideadestroyingmuros activists thus decided to leave this term in English since this would not compromise readers’ comprehension. In the second case, they translated the two words literally as “armadio sessuale” [sexual closed]. Following is the Italian translation by the Ideadestroyingmuros activists: Il closet/l’armadio sessuale è molto più grande di quel che si crede e non ci dovrebbero essere ragioni per le quali ci troviamo in esso, però ci stiamo. E’ ovvio che forze conservatrici come la religione istituzionalizzata, la polizia e altri rappresentanti della maggioranza tirannica, non desiderano che il sadomasochismo fiorisca in nessun luogo inoltre le donne sessualmente attive hanno sempre rappresentato una minaccia che il sistema non tollera. [The closet/sexual closet is much bigger than you think and there should be no reason why we are in it, but we are there. It is obvious that conservative forces such as institutionalized religion, the police and other representatives of the tyrannical majority do not want sadomasochism to flourish anywhere, and sexually active women have always represented a threat that the system does not tolerate.] 324

Queer transfeminism, militant translation

At the end of the text we find an explanation for this translation: With the English term Closet sexual or Spanish Armario sexual we mean making our sexual choice public. It normally refers to a homosexual condition or choice. The typical Spanish “salir del armario” or English “coming out” means to declare and make publicly visible one’s homosexuality. In this case, even we have left closet unvaried as first result, the Italian armadio sessuale was preferred to literally translate the expression “closet sexual” meaning a series of social constructions that create a boundary between the heterosexual normative and hidden homosexuality. Contrary to the work done by Ideadestroyingmuros, who split up the assignments among members according to the length of the text and the time each member has available, Plumas Traidoras,4 a group mainly composed of Italian activists who migrated to Marseille, France, choose to divide their tasks according to a further variable. Since they claim to not be interested in speaking for other subjectivities, they exploit an identity politics approach: We assigned the pages that had to be translated according with our identity, starting from who we are, choosing the portion of the text depending on self-conscious processes and discussions. Plumas Traidoras organizes its work according to members’ identities and specific oppressions. They theorize that translation tasks have to be assigned to someone who directly feels the same specific oppression felt by the author. Through this practice, based on the feminist practice of self-awareness, they hope to guarantee the absence of any gender, sexual, class, or ethnic bias in the translation. Moreover, like Ideadestroyingmuros, Plumas Traidoras is particularly sceptical and critical of publishing houses. They write: We are not interested in entering the publishing mainstream and capitalistic world – especially when it is ready to exploit our forces. We prefer to publish these texts on our blog. LesBitches5 (The Bitches) is a collective that defines itself as “transanimalfemminist*,” declaring they are “bitches projected beyond gender, race, class borders who share the passion for activism and for militant translations.” In this case, the asterisk at the end of the word transanimalfemminist* is used as a gender-neutral suffix in order to avoid masculine or feminine endings. In 2016 this group translated “Manifesto Xenofeminista” that appeared on the web page of the xenofeminist transnational collective, Laboria Cuboniks, joined by activists and researchers such as Amy Ireland, Diann Bauer, Helen Hester, Katrina Burch, Lucca Frase, and Patricia Reed, that same year. The Laboria Cuboniks collective has spread across five countries and three continents. Their purpose is “to dismantle gender, destroy the ‘family’, and do away with nature as a guarantor for inegalitarian political positions. Their name is an anagram of ‘Nicholas Bourbaki,’ a pseudonym under which a group of largely French mathematicians worked towards an affirmation of abstraction, generality and rigour in mathematics in the early 20th century.”6 LesBitches translated Johanna Hevda’s “Sick woman theory,” an essay published in January 2016 in Mask Magazine, which later appeared in the online magazine Effimera. They have also translated “Reproducing futures without reproductive futurability,” by Helen Hester, senior lecturer in media and communication at the University of West London and member of the Laboria Cuboniks group. Most recently they translated Emi Koyama’s Transfeminist Manifesto, written in 2001, published in 2003 and translated into Italian in 2018. LesBitches divided Koyama’s writing by sections, assigning each part to a comrade. 325

Laura Fontanella

Since Italian is a gendered language which needs to inflect nouns, pronouns and adjectives following only two different declinations – always masculine and feminine – the activist who translated the section entitled Body image /Consciousness as Feminist Issue, tried to avoid any particular gender in translation. Following is a brief extract: Many of us feel so uncomfortable and ashamed of our appearances that we opt to remain in the closet or to endure electrolysis, hormone therapy or surgical intervention to modify our bodies in congruence with our identity as women. These procedures are costly, painful and time-consuming [. . .] Why would anyone opt for such a seemingly inhumane practice? The Italian version is as follows: Molte di noi si sentono così a disagio e provano così tanta vergogna per il proprio aspetto da scegliere di rimanere nascoste oppure di sottoporsi a elettrolisi, terapie ormonali, interventi chirurgici per modificare i propri corpi in modo congruo alla propria identità di donne. Queste procedure sono costose, dolorose, richiedono molto tempo [. . .] Perché qualcun* dovrebbe volersi sottoporre a procedure così disumane? In Italian,“molti,” with –i suffix, is used to refer to a masculine plural subject while “molte,” with – e suffix, stands for a feminine plural subject. These two options, with –e and with –i, are those with which we generally create our plurals. In the first line, the activist translator has chosen to translate “Many of us” which is gender neutral in English as “Molte di noi,” a feminine expression. Indeed, in many cases – political assemblies, events, collective meetings – at least in those countries in which gendered languages are spoken, comrades tend to use the feminine plural forms in open contrast to and criticism of the falsely neutral masculine plural, which supposedly “includes” everyone. Since Koyama’s entire text was translated using the general feminine, the various translators involved doubtless collaborated in the decision-making process. Although generalized feminine forms were chosen as the gender of the text, activists affirm that it is also addressed to other people experiencing some forms of femininity. Accordingly, in the last line of this extract, we can spot an asterisk on “qualcun*,” a symbol used widely to avoid any specific gender suffix and to let other subjectivities emerge. In Italian, in particular, the asterisk is used by militant collectives as a symbol indicating every type of human. Using it in a text represents a precise political will: women are not only those people who were designated as such at birth. Jinny Dalloway, a nickname used by one of the LesBitches members, agreed to answer questions about their translative and political work: As LesBitches we work mainly online because we have always been geographically far away one from each other. [. . .] Translating militant or politically involved writings means being part of a transfeminist and transnational community, breaking national borders, opening channels and creating new alliances of solidarity that let us feel stronger. LesBitches claim not to be interested in mainstream and capitalistic publishing but, differently from other collectives, they also have critical positions about other media. In other words, they recognize the capitalism behind specific and common tools but at the same time, they also recognize its matrix in other devices: Internet, social networks, and platforms are not better devices 326

Queer transfeminism, militant translation

than publishing houses. On the contrary, they can maintain and reproduce those same capitalistic mechanisms of exploitation, marginalization, or subsumption that they condemn. We can negotiate with them and regulate ourselves strategically from time to time. Indeed, as Les Bitches, we have translated a text for a publishing house, Mimesis, in 2007. During the same year, together with Deborah Ardilli, I have translated Manifesto SCUM, written by Valerie Solanas for Vanda/Morellini editions. [. . .] When I work hard on a militant transfeminist queer translation to me it represents “cultural work” and I do it as a political act so I don’t care about being paid for it. Even when the publishing houses are politically close to the person translating, the risk of being exploited remains. Unfortunately, in certain contexts, the idea still prevails that a translator who is a militant – and a woman – does not mind being underpaid or not paid at all. Sometimes this is justified as “contributing to ‘the cause,’ ” an approach that fails to recognize the difference between volunteer work and an unpaid job. The boundary between these two modalities can be very ambiguous. Consent, like in other contexts, seems to be the only way to negotiate these situations. LesBitches works are available on their website, https://lesbitches.wordpress.com/ whose contents are reposted through their Facebook page. Some members of LesBitches are not only activists but also academics who have recognized in translation the perfect tool for their activism. Since the group is composed not only of linguists, translators, and other experts in these fields, but also professionals in gender and women studies who have years of experience in activism, politics, and transfeminist collectives, their translations are widely claimed to be effective.

Other militant experiences in translation Utopia is an independent group from Marseille, France, a translation collective made up of people that have been touched by a range of different discriminations and oppressions. They specialize in what they call “traduction située” [situated translation]. Even if they do not declare themselves explicitly as a queer transfeminist collective, the group claims to be communitybased and self-managed by women, queer, and/or trans translators. Moreover, on their website they guarantee a leftist, political and militant approach, a work done by professionals, the accuracy of the linguistic variables, the theoretical and cultural knowledge of the translator selected for each project. With the term traduction située we mean that our translations will be realized by militant translators who are interested in the topics faced by the text, who feel themselves included in the social categories and in the geo-linguistic spaces represented. This concept, of course, includes gender, sexuality, class, race and their intersections. They claim to be a “chosen mixity,” a group of people chosen among others for certain characteristics: the group is indeed made up of all sorts of people except those who describe themselves as white, heterosexual, cisgender males. The choice to explicitly exclude men is based on political reasoning about privilege, positioning, power dynamics that could be unleashed, if men were accepted in the group. The idea is that even though men (like all other subjectivities) might have the necessary skills to be part of a translation group, they have been socialized in such a way since birth, that they would be much more confident in making a speech during a meeting, in interrupting other comrades during their talks, in over-determining times, spaces and others’ methods in translation. 327

Laura Fontanella

On the other hand, women and the other subjects – because of social mechanisms and the gender discriminatory education they have received – will be more hesitant in participating actively in discussions and in the translation tasks, revealing doubts, uncertainties, and fragilities that would never be expressed in other situations. Although there could obviously be exceptions to these assumptions, Utopia members have established certain limits: the “chosen mixity” approach provides women and other people who may suffer oppression related to their gender identity with confidence so that they feel comfortable to go into mixed spaces together with men. This case too underlines the preferred profile of the militant translator: a person who not only has experienced collective forms of politics, specific oppressions or discrimination, but also a person who has the appropriate experiences, skills, and knowledge in the field of translation studies. Utopia is divided into two different ‘channels.’ One channel can be described as more institutional and represents the public face of this organization. Their translation services are used by the public and made visible. One of their most recent jobs was with a film crew who required a French ‘située’ translation [a situated translation] of the movie they had made about trans experience in Kurdistan. Utopia fulfilled this request by putting the team in touch with the most appropriate militant translator available. The second channel is more informal and is made up of those militants who organize a twice yearly “translation atelier” in which they discuss transfeminist postcolonial translations with other realities and collectives similar to theirs. The collective is made up of people from different cultural backgrounds and gender identities. Some translators are Irish with Moroccan origins, some are from the Caribbean and others are from Latin America. They are constantly in touch via Internet and their website page. BLA7 is a collective that invests its energies in supplying support materials for interpreting. They are a non-profit autonomous collective formed and maintained by volunteers involved in grass-roots activist groups and networks across Europe. On their web page, they claim to be connected with the activist network Reclaim the Field, a constellation of people and collective projects willing to go back to the land and reassume control over food production. They also claim to have been inspired by another translation collective called Coati, acronym for Colectivo para la autogestión de tecnologías para la interpretación,8 formed in 2009, and coming out of the international anti-capitalist, free-spaces and NoBorders networks and the experiences of free and open source software, independent radio, and volunteer interpreting. BLA saw the need to create a new interpretation-equipment collective, given the many and different multi-language meetings that take place in Europe. They work with principles of horizontal self-organization, consensus decision making, as well as open-source tools. They consider that every person is involved and actively part of different power systems which lead to oppression and privilege, based on social categories (such as class, race, gender, age, culture, language abilities) and, for this motivation, they also believe neutral positions do not exist in such power systems and that these dominations are present and active in group discussions. Because some languages were, and still are, brutally imposed by colonial power relations (like English, French, Spanish), these languages and people who speak them still dominate in multilingual transnational meetings. Therefore people who speak ‘minority’ languages often don’t understand well and/or don’t feel confident enough to contribute to assemblies that use dominant languages. We want to use bla’s technical equipment in multilingual meetings in order to allow people to listen to and express themselves in a language in which they feel comfortable understanding and speaking. While the other collectives mentioned are involved mainly in written translations or papers, articles, and essays, BLA also works orally. They use two different systems, depending on the size 328

Queer transfeminism, militant translation

of the events in which they participate and the given conditions. For smaller events, workshops, or events without power supply they use the COATI Open Source Spiders, a device they can build themselves – and that anyone can build on her\his own. The interpreter speaks into a microphone connected to the spider, which diffuses it to 12 headphone exits. With the help of an extension the number of possible listeners can go up to 24 pro spider. For bigger events, they use radios and transmitters. The speaker uses a microphone; the interpreters listen through headphones to have a clear sound. Each interpreter speaks into a transmitter, and represents one language. The transmitters use short distance radio waves and can be received by radios, which BLA also supply. Listeners tune their radio into the frequency of the language they want to listen to and have simultaneous interpretation of all that is spoken. In order to attend these meetings and conferences, activist interpreters need to travel. They normally charge for the interpretation tasks and transport, but since they want to guarantee an affordable and sustainable interpretation service, they claim to be open to collaborations with collectives, groups, or organizations who either can’t pay much or at all. According to their website, they can provide translation – using their technologies – for a maximum of 600 people. BLA’s purpose is to help fight a hegemony that is linked to linguistic abilities by making this problem visible and providing equipment for simultaneous interpretation in different languages. Since their aim is to support horizontal, self-organized groups and collectives active in social movements and struggles, especially those that oppose capitalism, they work as translators and interpreters only for those events they appreciate politically, and they insist on certain working conditions: We want to have a short amount of time (approx. 10 minutes) at the very beginning of an event to talk about what we are doing, how and why we do it. If we feel that the need arises, we want the possibility to talk about discrimination and power systems: namely be able to make statements and talk about feminism, colonialism, language, class dominations, etc. The last group is called InterpRISE, an interpreting experience, located in Leipzig, Germany. They support groups that are opposed political, social, or cultural power structures. We want to raise awareness about the importance of interpreting by being a visible group. We also want to show how language and oppression are connected and that mediators are humans, not machines. We want to act politically. We think of ourselves as a collective that is critical towards hierarchies and that acts by consensus. While they don’t explicitly define themselves as a queer transfeminist collective, they claim their anti-oppression stance: We want to support self-organized groups and projects that are critical of hierarchies and all kinds of oppression. We do not want to support groups that have a strict hierarchy or depend on church or government. Furthermore, we do not want to support the charity sector. We do not want to provide jobs for free which should be adequately remunerated. Unfortunately, the online trace of this collective disappeared in 2017. For this reason, we cannot provide more information apart from that still present on their old blog: https://interprise.nirgendwo.info/. On their blog they point out, for example, the political 329

Laura Fontanella

and cultural problems behind the main use of English and German, underlining with particular vehemence their aim to reduce, contain and uproot these oppressive dynamics. Marginalised languages are often not interpreted to a sufficient extent; for example, by omitting the details or through lack of concentration which results in information being simplified or lost. Sometimes, for those languages, there is no interpretation at all. The majority of the languages we offer are majority languages. And the fact that this text only exists in German and English shows that there is still a long way to go in order to break up the hegemony of certain languages. As we have seen, some collective realities in Europe have clearly declared themselves as queer transfeminist groups with a particular dedication to or interest in translation. They have identified their form of resistance as translation; translation for them is a tool with which to struggle against the hetero-cis-patriarchal and capitalist system, a method with which to oppose the reproduction of these systems through language. Those that do not declare they are queer transfeminist groups still claim to be politically involved in the fight against any form of gender or sexual discrimination.

Future research: can the translatxr speak? On elitism, classism, and identity politics Militant queer transfeminist translation represents a powerful opportunity to create new narratives and attack the hetero-cis-patriarchal system, but its theorization and its practices reveal some limits. For one thing, the figure of the militant queer transfeminist translator is a complex one: acting alone or in a collective this person has to merge linguistic and translation skills with their personal oppression. The preferred character seems to be someone who is both a translator and an activist, a person able to move in these fields and across their intersections, able to transform the discrimination felt in society into linguistic practice. This person is in transition between worlds, is living in the queer zones, blurring the edges. While it is hard to find people involved in both politics and translation studies, it is probably harder to find people aware of their privileges and of their bias in translation. In some of the collectives that were studied, activists are often asked not to translate texts that discuss a form of oppression they have not directly experienced. Research might thus focus on this specialization of the queer transfeminist translator: How are they formed? How do they work? What strategies do they need to acquire and deploy? In training sessions held so far, queer transfeminist workshops were divided into two parts: a theoretical moment of sharing acquired knowledges and a moment of practice in which extracts from texts of interest were translated, and discussions of the translation decisions ensued. In each workshop group, texts were selected according to each participant’s own oppressions, own personal experience. The choice was made after a moment of collective discussion, designed to alert participants to their privileges and the oppressions the others around the table might be suffering. Throughout, the emphasis was on guaranteeing the self-determination of each subjectivity and identity in translation. The decision to use this methodology was inspired by the experiences shared by the collectives here studied and analyzed. The outcome of such workshopping can be, for example, that a cisgender white woman is not asked to translate a text written by a trans black woman. This is not something decided at random, but is due to a precise choice about one’s own oppressions. The cisgender white

330

Queer transfeminism, militant translation

woman can obviously understand the life conditions of the transgender black woman but, at the same time, the two are not living the same marginalization. For the former, understanding specific oppression means taking a step back, giving the latter more space, giving her a voice. For this reason, it may be better that the transgender black woman be translated by another transgender black woman, by a person who can truly comprehend her identity. Though this may sound discriminatory, the idea that empathy can fill gaps is in fact naïve and innocent. The empathy of an ally can become a justification to talk in someone else’s place, or a paternalistic excuse, an ideal instrument with which to silence those who are socially labelled as subalterns. Further research could not only explore other militant queer transfeminist groups and collectives, mapping their activities, their needs, theories and methods around the world – highlighting those realities in non-Western countries – but such research could also become less elitist. Translation and gender studies are still, for many, unreachable areas of knowledge: only people who can attend – and afford – universities have a chance to enter into contact with these theorizations and discourses. Even if some translations are available online, shared through blogs and platforms, their contents and even more the methodology used to produce them still remain too specific, too obscure, and too hard to understand for too many people lacking an education in these matters. This issue could be summarized as a class problem or a form of discrimination, a dilemma that queer transfeminist translation has to face. How can these precious lessons be shared among others? Through which languages can such knowledge be made accessible to the masses? How might this discourse on translation and transfeminism break its own barriers? Finally, how can we overcome the problem of the ghettoization of specific oppressions? How can we train a white cisgender woman to translate a black transgender woman’s text and avoid the reproduction of prejudices, stereotypes and factionalisms? These are just some of the paths that scholars, academics, intellectuals – with their comrades inside the political queer transfeminist collectives – could explore, in the near future, perhaps generating new theories and new practices for a more solid intersectionality.

Defeating ethnocentrism: other words for other gender experiences This chapter began with the description and discussion of collective realities involved in the militant translation of queer transfeminist texts, writings, and contents in Europe. It has highlighted the existence of collectives that are explicitly working in this area. But little is known about such organizations in other parts of the world – and this, of course, is not a surprise. One important reason is the different categorizations that are used in Western countries to define gender, transfeminism, and queer. As asserted by Shalmalee Palekar, “our understanding of the term queer is primarily a western concept and theory has been translated and retranslated across various cultural contexts to codify a kind of globalized queerness” (Palekar 2017, 8). However, even if Serena Bassi in “Feminist Translation Studies: Local and Transnational Perspectives” (Castro and Ergun 2017) has rightly recognized the existence of a global LGBTQI language, mainly in English – both an imperialist and colonial language – other languages find many other and different ways to categorize sexual and gender identities. Research (Mazzei 2007; Spurlin 2014a) has shown how languages resist the LGBTQI language globalization process. In Finnish, the word transgender, for example, is usually translated as “sukupuoliidentiteetti” where the first part of the compound means sex, gender and the second part identity. In Hindi, the same term is rendered, generically, with hira although there are many more specific words for more specific cases, varieties, identities such as catla (sari-wearing), kotis (effeminate men), and zenana

331

Laura Fontanella

kotis (Muslim-associated women-men). In Chinese, the word “queer” is transliterated as “kuer”: “ku” means cruel, cold and extreme while “er” means child, son. (Castro and Ergun 2017). These examples underline not only the fact that different socio-linguistic-geographical and political contexts find their own ways of describing their realities and the identities embodied by the people living in them (Gramling and Dutta 2016) but also that these differences in categorizing gender experiences and identity constitute an obstacle in researching the realities themselves, especially outside Europe. All these difficulties, all these translations, transliterations, and local varieties represent a great richness, the ultimate evidence for an abundance of jargons and differences outside the dominant anglophone linguistic border. Discovering the existence of these diversities, recognizing this multiplicity as legitimate and valid, is an important research objective that may help resist the global power of the English language as well. However, this richness also represents research difficulties in regard to transfeminist queer collectives that practice transfeminist queer and militant translation, and this is due to the fact that ‘queer’ may not be the right keyword. Queerness has always existed outside non-Western contexts and in non-Western languages but it has been differently inscribed (Spurlin 2014b). Indeed, it is wise to ask if a term used for gender and sexual identity in one language has an equivalent in other languages; that is what our trans queer praxis should focus on. Another research problem that has emerged centres on the difficulty in finding militant collectives doing transfeminist translation, especially in non-Western countries. These groups may not make themselves publicly available, and if they do this may be managed by the entire collective, which makes it difficult establish contact with anyone in particular. Moreover, groups often insist on a collective decision before they establish contact with external researchers, which takes time. Because their translations are not published using capitalistic mainstream tools, their works are hard to find. This difficulty is made worse through censorship, marginalization, or even illegality of the LGBTQI feminist and militant community. For this reason, transfeminist and queer collectives are sometimes forced to act anonymously, preserving their identities and their own safe space. For all these reasons we hope this chapter will lead scholars and researchers to pay more attention to collective organizations aggregated on the basis of a common purpose: to change the world’s narrative translation by translation.

Further readings Epstein, B. J. and Robert Gillet. 2017. Queer in Translation. London: Routledge. Epstein and Gillet’s book shows how queerness can be applied as an approach to translation and how translators can respect the translation of queerness. Castro, Olga and Emek Ergun. 2017. Feminist Translation Studies – Local and Transnational Perspectives. London and New York: Routledge. Castro and Ergun bring the feminist translation of the 1970s to an intersectional level and consider these practices as political activism. Flotow, Luise von. 1997. Translation and Gender: Translating in the ‘Era of Feminism.’ Manchester: St. Jerome Publishing. Feminist translation with its interventionist approach wants to deconstruct patriarchal language, hamper its repetition via translation; indeed, the main goal of feminist translation consists in sharing feminist ideas, knowledge and the value of women’s empowerment in other languages. Gramling, David and Aniruddha Dutta. 2016. Translating Transgender. Transgender Studies Quarterly, 3(3–4), 333–356, 462–484. Assuming that gender transition as a process from a point A to a point B is limitative is like understanding translation as a mere passage from a language X to a language Y; translation (and transition) is much more and can escape from ethnocentric and monolingual frameworks. 332

Queer transfeminism, militant translation

Notes 1 ‘Trans*’ is the term used for people who define themselves as transgender and/or transsexual.   The other term ‘trans’ is for people who define themselves in transition, avoiding any specific destination. 2 The word ‘translator’ is used to refer to men and women who translate. Despite its usage and despite the fact that English is generally misunderstood as a genderless language, translator is a masculine term that is mainly used as a gender-neutral term. Actually, there existed, during the 15th century, a term ‘translatress’ that was the feminine form. Using ‘translatxr’, Isabella Gerini tries to construct with that middle ‘x’ a real gender-neutral term, able to indicate both genders. 3 ‘Ideadestroyingmuros’ is a term made up of three other words: ‘idea,’ ‘destroying,’ and ‘muros.’ Two of three are in Spanish: this is because the collective is mainly based in Spain. The word ‘destroying’ has been left in English since the collective translates from English to other languages. With this name, the collective aims to destroy the cis-hetero-white-patriarchal borders – or walls – that choke our society and identities. 4 Plumas Traidoras means ‘traitorous feathers.’ This expression refers to a sexist metaphor ‘les belles infidels,’ invented by philologist Gilles Ménage in 1654 to describe translations: if the translation adhered to the original, it was faithful but ugly. If it was beautiful, however, it was also unfaithful – supposedly like a woman. The members of this collective have decided to claim back their infidelity as translatresses. 5 ‘LesBitches’ is the name chosen by this collective. It uses the English word ‘bitches’ but it also creates a word pun by manipulating the Italian term ‘lesbiche’ [lesbians]. Moreover, because this collective is involved in translation, they have chosen code switching as a tool for suggesting their interests in languages: ‘Les’ is a French definite article while ‘Bitches’ is an English term 6 www.monoskop.org/Laboria_Cuboniks 7 “Bla, bla, bla” is widely used as an onomatopoeia in comics bubbles to refer to an indistinctive chatting among characters. BLA, as a translation collective, has decided to use this onomatopoeia to refer to their ability to talk in other languages. 8 Collective for the self-management of the interpreting technologies.

References Abreu, Caio Fernando. 1990. Onde andarà dulce Veiga? São Paulo & Rio de Janeiro: Companhia Das Letras. Abreu, Caio Fernando. 2010. Whatever Happened to Dulce Veiga? Translated by Adria Frizzi. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. Baker, Mona. 1992. In Other Words: A Coursebook on Translation. New York and London: Routledge. Baker, Mona. 2006. Translation and Activism: Emerging Patterns of Narrative Community. The Massachusetts Review, 47(3), 462–484. Baldo, Michela. 2018. Translating Affect, Redeeming Life: The Case of the Italian Queer Transfeminist Group Idea Destroying Muros. The Translator, 13–26. Baldo, Michela. 2019. Translating Spanish Transfeminist Activism into Italian. Performativity, DIY, and Affective Contaminations. Gender and Sexuality Italy, g/s/i, 6, 66–84. Butler, Judith. 1988. Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory. Theatre Journal, 40(4), 519–531. Butler, Judith. 1990. Gender Trouble. New York and London: Routledge. Butler, Judith. 2014. Fare e disfare il genere. Translated by Federico Zappino. Milano: Mimesis. Califia, Pat, ed. 1994. A Secret Side of Lesbian Sexuality, in Public Sex: The Culture of Radical Sex. Minneapolis: Cleis Press, 158–167. Califia, Pat. 2008. Un lado oculto de la sexualidad lésbica. Translated and edited by Thomas Weinberg, in BDSM. Estudios sobre la dominación y la sumisión. Bellaterra: Ediciones, 141–152. Castro, Olga. 2009. Re-examining Horizons in Feminist Translation Studies: Towards a Third Wave? MonTI, 1, 59–86. Vigo: Universidade de Vigo. Castro, Olga. 2012. Translating Gender. Translation Studies, 5(3), 376–379. Castro, Olga and Ergun Emek. 2017. Feminist Translation Studies: Local and Transnational Perspectives. London and New York: Routledge. Cavagnoli, Franca. 2010. Il proprio e l’estraneo nella traduzione letteraria di lingua inglese. Monza: Polimetrica. Cavagnoli, Franca. 2012. La voce del testo. Milano: Feltrinelli. Concilo, Arielle. 2016. Pedro Lemebel and the Translatxrsation: On a Genderqueer Translation Praxis. Translating Transgender, Transgender Studies Quarterly, 3(3–4), 462–484, Duke University Press. 333

Laura Fontanella

Da Lima Costa, Claudia and Sonia Alvarez. 2014. Translation, Feminist Scholarship and the Hegemony of English*. Dislocating the Sign: Toward a Translocal Feminist Politics of Translation. Signs, 39(3), 557–563. Federici, Silvia. 2012. Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction and Feminist Struggle. Brooklyn and Oakland: Common Notions PM Press. Flotow, Luise von and Farzaneh Farahzad, eds. 2017. Translating Women: Different Voices and New Horizons. London and New York: Routledge. Giustini, Deborah Elena. 2015. Gender and Queer Identities in Translation. From Sappho to Present Feminist and Lesbian Writers: Translating the Past and Retranslating the Future. Norwich Papers, 23, 1–13, University of Manchester. Gramling, David and Aniruddha Dutta. 2016. Translating Transgender, TSQ Transgender Studies Quarterly, Volume 3, Number 3–4, Duke University Press, Duke University. Green, E. 2006. Debating Trans Inclusion in the Feminist Movement. Journal of Lesbian Studies, 10(1–2), 231–248. Hevda, Johanna. 2016. Sick Woman’s Theory. Mask Magazine. New York. Available at: www.maskmaga zine.com/not-again/struggle/sick-woman-theory [Accessed 16 Nov. 2019]. Hill Collins, Patricia. 2017. The Difference That Power Makes: Intersectionality and Participatory Democracy. Investigaciones Feministas, 8, 19–39, Madrid: Ediciones Complutense. Koyama, Emi. 2003. The Transfeminist Manifesto, in Rory Cooke Dicker and Alison Piepmeier, eds., Catching a Wave: Reclaiming Feminism for the Twenty-First Century. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 244–259. Mazzei, Cristiano. 2007. Queering Translation Studies. Master’s thesis 1911, Feb. 2014, 44, Amherst, University of Massachusetts. Palekar, Shalmalee. 2017. Remapping Translation: Queerying the Crossroads, in B. J. Epstein and Robert Gillet, eds., Queer in Translation. London and New York: Routledge, 8–12. Prado, Guilherme de Almeida. 2008. Onde andarà Dulce Veiga? São Paulo: Imprensa Oficial. Preciado, Paul B. 2009. Terror Anal, in Guy Hocquenghem, ed., El deseo homosexual. Translated from English by Geoffroy Huard de la Marre. Santa Cruz de Tenerife: Editorial Melusina. Saidero, Deborah. 2013. La traduzione femminista in Canada. Udine: Forum. Santaemilia, José. 2005. Gender, Sex, and Translation. Manchester, UK: St. Jerome Publishing. Santiago, Silviano. 1985. Stella Manhattan. São Paulo and Rio De Janeiro: Companhia Das Letras. Santiago, Silviano. 1995. Stella Manhattan. Translated by George Yúdice. Durham: Duke University Press. Sarapegno, Maria Serena. 2010. Che genere di lingua? Sessismo e potere discriminatorio delle parole. Roma: Carocci Editore. Spurlin, William J. 2014a. The Gender and Queer Politics of Translation: New Approaches. Comparative Literature Studies, 51(2), 201–214. Spurlin, William J. 2014b. The Gender and Queer Politics of Translation: Literary, Historical, and Cultural Approaches. Comparative Literature Studies, 15(2), 201–343. Spurlin, William J. 2014c. Queering Translation, in Sandra Bermann and Catherine Porter, eds., A Companion to Translation Studies. Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 298–309. Taronna, Annarita. 2006. Pratiche traduttive e gender studies. Roma: Aracne. Tymoczko, Maria. 2000. Translation and Political Engagement. The Translator, 6(1), 23–47. Tymoczko, Maria. 2010. Translation, Resistance, Activism. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Venuti, Lawrence. 1992. Rethinking Translation: Discourse, Subjectivity, Ideology. London and New York: Routledge. Venuti, Lawrence. 2004. The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation. London and New York: Routledge. Vergès, Françoise. 2017. Le ventre des femmes. Capitalisme, racialisation, féminisme. Paris: Albin Michel. Woolf, Virginia. 1993. Orlando. É un uomo o è una donna? Translated by Alessandro Rossatti. Milano: Rizzoli, BUR. Woolf, Virginia et Alessandro Rossatti. 1993. Orlando. É un uomo? È una donna? New York: Rizzoli. Yu, Zhongli. 2015. Translating Feminism in China: Gender, Sexuality and Censorship. London and New York: Routledge.

Web sites Abbatto I Muri: www.facebook.com/AbbattoMuri/. [Bla . . .]: https://bla.potager.org/. Coati: https://coati.pimienta.org/index.it.html. Femminismo a Sud: https://femminismo-a-sud.noblogs.org/. 334

Queer transfeminism, militant translation

Ideadestroyingmuros: www.ideadestroyingmuros.info/. Interpise dolmetschkollektiv Leipzig: http://interprise.nirgendwo.info/who-we-are/. Laboria Cubonics: www.laboriacuboniks.net/it/index.html#zero/2. LesBitches: https://lesbitches.wordpress.com/info/. LesBitches–Translation of Transfeminist Manifesto by Emi Koyama: https://lesbitches.wordpress.com/2018/ 07/13/manifesto-transfemminista/. Reclaim the Field: https://reclaimthefields.org/. Utopia Traductions: http://utopiatrad.neowp.fr/ (website closed in 2019).

335

25 Translating queer Reading caste, decolonizing praxis Nishant Upadhyay and Sandeep Bakshi

Introduction In April 2018, a Botany professor in the southern Indian state of Kerala, commented: “a woman who dresses up like a man. What will be the character of the child this woman gives birth to? The name of these children is ‘transgender’ or ‘napumsakam’ ” (Entertainment Desk 2018). The incident garnered significant attention in press, and the state government subsequently filed legal action against the professor. However, the emphasis on the word “transgender” instead of “napumsakam” relayed in the press, speaks to the linguistic complexities in the context. The Malayalam word “napumsakam” is derived from the Sanskrit word “napumsak” – which can be variously translated as genderless, third gender, impotent, hijra, eunuch. Needless to say, transgender is not napumsakam; these are two very different words rooted in different linguistic, cultural, and historical genealogies. Reflecting on violence against queer and trans peoples, and the limits of language and translation in understanding queer and trans experiences, this chapter theorizes inescapable incommensurabilities of translating queer, trans, hijra, and other gender non-conforming identities in India.1 We do so by centring on anti-caste and decolonial theoretical frameworks, especially in view of the caste structures and the past and ongoing colonial and postcolonial processes in the making of the Indian nation-state. Centring on these contradictions and tensions, in this chapter we ask:2 How are processes of homophobia and transphobia shaped through colonialism and caste structures in postcolonial India? Are words like “queer” and “trans” applicable in the Indian context or are they impositions of the global north? How does brahminical supremacy shape all queer and gender non-conforming identities? If English functions as the imperial language in India, how can the corpus of available translations support a decolonial praxis in the queer Indian context? Furthermore, given the pertinent and crucial critiques from Dalit feminist and queer writers (Pawar and Moon 2008; Kamble 2009; Pawar 2009; Kang 2016; Moulee 2016; Angayarkanni 2017; Jyoti 2017) what enunciations does queer articulate with respect to caste-ism? Why do caste structures and violence remain de-activated within the study of India? These questions are central to theorizing queer and trans subjectivities in India in order to partially unpack the possibilities of “the geopolitics of queer studies and the sexual politics of Dalit studies” (Ramberg 2016, 223). 336

Translating queer

Scholars and activists continue to debate if words like queer and trans can be translated in the Indian context (Dutta and Roy 2014; Arondekar and Patel 2016), and in the legal and bureaucratic structures of the Indian state as evident through recent judgments on queer, hijra, and trans rights. Building upon the im/possibilities of translating queer into Indian languages, this paper adds to these debates to argue that understanding and translating queer and trans experiences needs to foreground anti-casteist and decolonial praxis. We argue that without an anti-casteist praxis, decolonial praxis within the Indian context is incomplete and limiting.

Historical perspectives In her seminal work on the hijras of India, Serena Nanda, presents the challenges of translating the term “hijra” into English, averring that cultural definition and significance inhabit elusive terrains (Nanda 1999, xix–xxi). In contemporary times, hijra and transgender movements are simultaneously parallel and contrarian despite the global impact of discourses on genders and sexualities. In the Indian context, “trans” has occasionally acquired an dominant-caste elite space with access to global products in the form of English, whilst hijras have been relegated to the non-English/“vernacular” non-modern category (Ahmad 2017; Hossain 2017). Similar complex articulations of translating gender and feminism have emphasized transnational and global(-ized) interaction in general (Flotow 1997; Santaemilia 2005) and local specificities of caste and English/other hierarchical language binary in India in particular (Patel 1997; Rege 2006; Sen 2017). In the contexts stated previously,‘queer’ becomes peculiarly embedded in histories of linguistic intersections in India, whereby multiple regional and national languages including English contest a singular narrative/narration/translation of its meaning. Whilst the translation of the term through its realignment to the Palestinian movement as an instance of “diversity of experience” (Maikey in Alsaafin 2013) becomes an example of its relentless multiplication globally, the conceptualization of queerness in Italian demonstrates the challenge of translatability as a rugged terrain (Ross 2017). Additionally, given the counter-hegemonic historical production of the term ‘queer’ and its continuous connotative shifts, it functions as a ‘crossing’ into the realm of unbounded meaning in the Anzaldúan sense (Anzaldúa 1987, 70). Recent research in translation studies of queerness therefore attends to the evolving versions of queer both globally and transnationally, highlighting the similarities between translation of language/cultures and translation of experience (Bauer 2015; Gramling and Dutta 2016; Dominguez-Ruvacalba 2016; Epstein and Gillett 2017; Baer and Kaindl 2018). In the Indian context, translation historically operates in multiple sites due to the presence of plural language communities. Whilst queer scholars, such as Naisargi Dave (2012) and Shalmalee Palekar (2017), have noted the hegemonic self-referential position of English in translation studies “to make explicit a certain kind of globally accessible queerness” (Palekar 2017, 18), we attempt to locate translation(s) of queerness as a pluralistic political formation akin to Tejaswini Niranjana’s (1998) formulation of the “already-translatedness” feminist conceptualization in India, whereby it functions as “a space in which one simultaneously holds on to and negotiates different sorts of languages, conceptual as well as linguistic” (134). In the 1980s, new vocabularies pertaining to queerness emerged specifically in the Hindispeaking North India with the words such as samlingik, which roughly translates as same-sex loving. Propelled in part by NGOs and activists, this crossing created a category of gay people in local contexts by translating disparate terms such as gay, queer, homosexual as samlingik. This coinage originates in the attempts by Indians living abroad, the Non-Resident Indians (NRIs) as they are labelled, to find equivalence for homosexuality in Indian languages. This particular term came into use through the US-based organization Trikone, San Jose, California in the 337

Nishant Upadhyay and Sandeep Bakshi

1980s. Critiquing the recent theorizations of postcolonial queer experience in the works of Ruth Vanita and Devdutt Pattnaik, the blogger B, a queer Indian academic, contends that the “dangerous subtext of this emerging genre is, queerness can exist in [a regional language], but has to be rescued by English” (B 2012). However, cultural translations of queer in India need to encompass caste as one of the most significant fractures in India. Caste, as we argue later, shapes and structures all forms of social identities, structures, hierarchies, and violences. Thus, caste is central to understanding queer and trans formations in contemporary India.

Critical topics and issues I: anti-caste critiques Caste structures in India are derived from the Hindu ideologies of brahminical supremacy, with brahmins (priest caste) at the top of the caste hierarchy. Caste supremacy predates white supremacy and European colonialism by centuries, making it one of the oldest forms of oppression. According to Bhim Rao Ambedkar, architect of the Indian constitution, “Inequality is the official doctrine of Brahmanism and the suppressions of the oppressed classes aspiring to equality have been looked upon by them and carried out by them without remorse as their bounden duty” (1990, 215). Intertwined with socio-religious notions of “purity” and “pollution,” and endogamic cis-heteropatriarchy, caste is an everyday lived reality, not only in India, but across South Asia and the diasporas. Caste, however, remains mostly unanalyzed, as Chinnaiah Jangam notes, “within South Asian studies, the subject of caste remains neglected, both as a subject for analysis and as a lived reality of daily existence for millions. Generally, there is widespread ignorance and denial of caste-based oppression and violence in academic disciplines and also by the political elites of India” (2017, 4). Dalit, a word derived from Sanskrit, means “ground down,” “broken into pieces,” and “crushed.” The term is widely used in South Asia as a self-chosen political identity by communities erstwhile recognized as “untouchables” or avarna (without caste) communities. According to Arjun Dangle, one of leaders of the Dalit Panthers, Dalit is: “not a caste but a realization and is related to the experiences, joys and sorrows, and struggles of those in the lowest stratum of society. It matures with a sociological point of view and is related to the principles of negativity, rebellion and loyalty of science, thus finally ending as revolutionary” (Dangle qtd. in Mukherjee 2007, xiii). Dalit feminists have theorized important and critical intersections between caste, gender, and sexuality. They have shown how heteropatriarchy is fundamental to the broader ideologies of caste. Caste structures are maintained through heteropatriarchal endogamic reproduction practices, controlling women as well as sexual and gender non-conforming peoples. Endogamy controls both oppressed caste and dominant caste women’s sexualities, albeit in different ways, and the latter are complicit in violence against Dalit and oppressed caste women. Academic scholarship has bestowed scant critical attention on the intersections of caste and sexuality. However, outside mainstream academia, there is a growing assertion of Dalit queer, trans, and hijra identities critiquing brahminical dominant caste queer, trans, and hijra movements in India. Focusing on the intersections of caste, gender, and, sexuality, Dalit queer, trans, and hijra writers argue that sexual/queer/trans liberations are impossible without the annihilation of brahminical heteropatriarchal caste structures. They have shown how queer and trans movements in India have maintained dominant caste hegemony by focusing on urban, upwardly mobile, dominant caste, queer cis-men identities and issues, invisibilizing all Dalit, Bahujan (oppressed caste peoples), and Adivasi (indigenous peoples) queer, trans, and hijra peoples. At the Delhi Queer Pride in November 2015, Dhrubo Jyoti declared: “We bring caste up because caste is everywhere and in my everything. Caste is in my shirt. Caste is in my pant. Caste is in my sex. Caste is in my being and caste is in every part of you too!” ( Jyoti 2015). Living Smile Vidya says: 338

Translating queer

“Our gender identity is linked to caste in such a way that it is impossible to separate the two at all. We talk about the difference in our caste and class background. [. . .] We also critique Brahmanism and vegetarianism which is linked similarly in inseparable ways in India” (Ahmad 2015). These critiques demonstrate how structures of caste, gender, and sexuality are not only interconnected but also how caste plays a key role in reproducing hegemonic caste structures and dominant caste privilege in queer, trans, and hijra spaces and movements. Endogamic practices are central to brahminical cis-heteropatriarchy that seek to maintain caste boundaries through gender and sexuality.

Critical topics and issues II: decolonial critiques The knowledge industry as it appears today is a regimented, controlled, and highly reproductive epistemological field. The reproduction of the white/Western/global north canon through self-perpetuation and linking to the modernity/coloniality binary operates as its safeguard and as gatekeeping (Mignolo 2002; Wynter 2003, 261). Commencing in the early 1990s, scholars of decoloniality offer robust critiques of this particular system of knowledge production that subtends through universities and institutional validation. Decolonial praxis in this context includes the conceptualization of crucial ways of resistance that translate as re-existence of local histories, oral archives and memory through an almost “wrenching out from” the system of coloniality of power set by hegemonic structures. It invariably conceives of decoloniality per se as a repossession of history, language, and knowledges from enduring systems of colonial pasts. In this sense, it incorporates a practice of healing from colonial wounds in order to enact a re-existence and a re-emergence.3 Any configuration that locates the Western (often elitist and white male) perspective at the centre of discourse on same-sex rights and marriage, queer kinship, and decriminalization of homosexuality in parts of the global South de-privileges existing cultural manifestations of same-sex intimacy and by extension queerness, and appoints the global North as the arbiter of what constitutes queerness, thereby maintaining a coloniality of power over it. The critiques that materialize from the relational consideration of queer and transnational frameworks implicate queer discourses in novel formations that confront other pervasive structures of racial, class, caste, or national privilege. The reiteration of caste as the over-arching floating signifier in the Indian context points to its erasure ad infinitum in savarna (or dominant caste) theorization of same-sex representations of ancient Hindu cultures or in queer enunciations of contemporary Bollywood. The absence of caste-based analysis maintains the coloniality of power of brahminical queerness in India. In her articulation of the hijra/kinnar/transgender paradigm, the celebrated hijra of Brahmin descent, Laxmi Narayan Tripathi argues for the caste-lessness of hijra clans in her interaction with local transgender groups in South India. Recently, her wilful determination to uphold the Hindu claim to build a temple at the site of the destroyed mosque in Ayodhya, India, has led to a condemnation by the queer community (The News Minute Staff 2018). Tripathi’s claim emanates from her dominant caste status in Indian society. The myth of a post-caste society embedded in Tripathi’s claim, akin to post-race adumbrations in the West, serves to reinforce the discourses of modernity and its concomitant liberal framework of progress. However, decolonial thinkers such as Walter Mignolo and Aníbal Quijano demonstrate the inherent failure of linking modernity to progress and development. Instead they reflect upon the “darker side of modernity” that coloniality exemplifies (Quijano 2007; Mignolo 2011). Tripathi’s effacement of caste operates as a coloniality of power that inevitably suppresses Dalit voices in formulations of queerness. Translating the term “queer” therefore implies taking cognizance of not only the 339

Nishant Upadhyay and Sandeep Bakshi

linguistic complexities that undergird the multiple languages of India but concurrently shifting the discussion to decolonially accounting for the silence around caste. Grounding these colonial complexities, in the next section, we provide a quick overview to understanding the intersections of caste, gender, and sexuality.

Current contributions and research In their essay “Decolonizing Transgender in India” (2014), Anirruddha Dutta and Raina Roy, instructively allude to the possibility of assessing (even repositioning) the co-imbrication of globalized transgender categories and local transgender categories in Eastern India. They suggest that through the implication of NGO-speak and narratives of development, transgender as an analytic category in Eastern India in particular and by extension in the global south in general, runs the risk of being condensed “as merely ‘local’ expressions of transgender identity, often without interrogating the conceptual baggage (such as homo-trans and cis-trans binaries) associated with the transgender category. As scholars before them have argued, this reproduces “colonial forms of knowledge production” that promote transgender as “the” universal category with local translations (2015, 321; see also Stryker and Aizura 2013). Building upon these heuristic departures in transnational transgender studies, we contend that decolonial praxis for the category of queer should consist of a set of enabling methods engaging with how queer (1) insists on its global applicability and therefore its replication, as does the Western canon and (2) maintains local versions of queer as a self-referential translation, a version of itself. In this critical evaluation, along with decolonial theories we attempt to underscore the reading of Dalit and anti-caste thinkers who deploy strategies of vernacular narratives to overcome the stultifying effects of casteist epistemic violence, for as Jangam argues, brahminical knowledges impose “epistemic violence while enforcing material and social deprivation in order to crush Dalits’ sense of self and to dehumanize their existence” (2017, 5). Further, in their book Dalit Studies (2016), Ramnarayan Rawat and K. Satyanarayana emphasize the significance of Dalit vernacular narratives functioning alongside and in opposition to struggles for independence in colonial India. The schism (“opposition”) and continuation (“alongside”) of the two approaches is vital to form an understanding of decolonial praxis. The double-oppression faced by Dalits in British India instantiates the coloniality of power maintained by a Western-­educated liberal elite, often the caste of Hindus (including Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru and other dominant-caste independence activists) over Dalit populations in India. In her study of the English language in colonial India, Shefali Chandra (2012) highlights the intersections of caste, gender, sexuality, and coloniality in the spread of English education amongst the native elites. She argues that “The normative gendered subject . . . [was] produced in a crucible of caste-based desires that provide[d] coherence to the English-education project” (23). As subjects of English education, dominant caste heteronormative elites were able to solidify their positionalities within the colonial state, further marginalizing oppressed caste and religious communities, and thereby actively partaking in the colonial processes. As British rule progressed, Jangam notes, colonial powers were forced through Dalit assertion to make education accessible for oppressed caste peoples in British India (2017). While dominant caste elites were the initial beneficiaries of English education, the native elites’ monopoly was broken down. Thus, Jangam argues: “Despite the many contradictions, colonialism may be regarded historically as an enabling factor in the complex processes of articulation and emancipation of untouchable communities in different parts of India” (2017, 141). This positivist approach to colonialism does not efface colonial violences; instead, it demonstrates the complexities of colonial processes and how they shaped, and were shaped through, caste structures in colonial and casteist India. 340

Translating queer

Given the intersections of caste and coloniality in colonial and postcolonial India, the lack of attention paid to anti-caste and decolonial praxes is indeed unsettling. Critiquing postcolonial and subaltern studies scholars, Chandra asks: “What are the real politics of these silences, and why do some Indian historians defer to colonial power as the point of origin while rendering caste heterosexuality as natural, inevitable, and anticolonial?” (2012, 25). Similarly, Jangam argues that scholars have “failed to provide critical framers to unravel the epistemic violence ingrained in Hindu Brahmanical ideology” (2017, 108). Rupturing the dominant caste temporal and spatial parameters of coloniality and anti-coloniality, Jangam asserts that Dalit anti-caste epistemologies challenge the ideas of an “ideal” precolonial Hindu past, and draw from precolonial anti-caste struggles to the “postcolonial” present. Dalit and anti-caste critiques problematize the binaries of colonizer vs. colonized and show how caste/class/gender created complex hierarchies of power, whereby native caste elites worked in tandem with colonizers. Further, they demonstrate that there was never a “true” decolonial moment, and that caste ruptures any easy categorizations of precolonial/colonial/postcolonial frameworks. Chandra’s work demonstrates how ideas of heteronormativity were enforced through the convergences of brahminical caste violences and British colonialism. These confluences become visible when looking at the struggles against homophobia in India. Any translation of key terms in queer activism including “queer,” “transgender,” “homophobia” or “lesbian” and “gay” would inexorably defer to caste hierarchy through recourse to English. In this regard, popular Indian magazines in languages other than English offer no translation per se of the aforementioned terms. A complex concept-term such as “homophobia,” for instance, remains untranslatable in Indian languages. In other words, the appropriation of English terms for defining concepts of queer theory and mobilization uncovers two critical fissures in the Indian context: the primacy of English and the coloniality of the power this exercises over other Indian languages, which illustrate the postcolonial continuation of colonial linguistic hierarchy. Given the transnational circulation of the English language, its position is further strengthened in India. More importantly, it points to the exclusion and alienation of queer Dalit subjectivity, which often has little to no access to English. Decolonial praxis in this context therefore adheres to what Walter Mignolo and Catherine Walsh consider a reflection and analysis “in continuous movement, contention, relation, and formation” (2018, 19). Thus, without foregrounding the convergences of caste and colonial violences, queer and trans struggles in India remain necessarily incomplete. Within mainstream movements of queer equality, in the struggle against section 377 to decriminalize homosexual acts in India until September 2018 when same-sex sexual acts were finally decriminalized, the translation of “queer” and “equality” remains elitist in general and casteist in particular. The long-established queer movement in India remains very urban, dominant caste, and English-centric. Queerness is articulated primarily through caste logics. The queer activist scene in Delhi, for instance, – the epicentre of the legal struggle against the criminalization of homosexuality – is predominantly led by cis dominant caste upwardly mobile English-speaking North Indian men. These dominant caste activists have colonized queerness through their caste privilege, and even though there is a growing assertion of Dalit queerness in these spaces, the tensions around their activism remain fraught ( Jyoti 2015, 2017, 2018; Kang 2016, 2018; Moulee 2016; Tellis 2013). Recently, in a piece on the logics of love, Dhrubo Jyoti wrote, “I had been trained to know what good looks are (Brahmin) and what good queerness is (English-speaking)” (2018, n.p.). This painfully captures the caste(ness) of queerness in India. Translating queerness in such a fraught context therefore becomes a nearly impossible task that will involve uncovering the intelligibility of queer cultural memory encoded and embodied in languages other than English, and this will only become accessible through recourse to a pluriversal approach without a 341

Nishant Upadhyay and Sandeep Bakshi

centre or epistemological pivot. Akin to savarna feminist movements, caste in queer mobilization results in the erasure of caste privilege and casteist violence. In other words, queer narratives often enact the effacement of caste supremacy. This is recurrent as with the aforementioned example of the hijra celebrity Laxmi N. Tripathi who takes pride in her Brahmin lineage. Thus, we contend that without an anti-casteist praxis, decolonial praxis within the Indian context is incomplete and limiting.

Further reading Dutta, Aniruddha and Raina Roy. 2014. Decolonizing Transgender in India: Some Reflections. TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly, 1(3), 320–336. This essay is an important text in transgender studies in the Indian context and its intersection with decolonial studies. It foregrounds the shift in perspective on reading transgender through the decolonial lens rather than conventional mainstream interpretations of the transgender frames. Jangam, Chinnaiah. 2017. Dalits and the Making of Modern India. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Jangam’s book offers a consolidated view of the range of Dalit studies in contemporary times. It provides a nuanced cultural critique of grand narratives of postcolonial engagements with the independence movements making space for the significance and centrality of Dalit labour in social justice movements. Palekar, Shalmalee. 2017. Re-mapping Translation: Queerying the Crossroads, in B.J. Epstein and Robert Gillett, eds., Queer in Translation. London: Routledge, 8–24. This article elaborates on the critical conceptualization of translation and queer studies as converging fields of inquiry. It orients translation studies into new directions engaging them in a novel enterprise with queer thinking in the Indian linguistic landscape.

Related topics Dalit studies, queer mobilization, decolonial theories

Notes 1 The term hijra has received considerable critical attention from queer scholars. Incorporating a continuum of non-conventional man/woman binary identities, they live in hijra communities in South Asia. However, self-definition by hijras overrides academic accounts and descriptions and, as Serena Nanda suggests, they perceive themselves as neither man nor woman. 2 We want to begin by locating ourselves in the knowledge continuum. I (Nishant) am a brahmin (dominant caste), gender non-binary, English-speaking, uninvited guest Indigenous territories, stolen by the US. I acknowledge the territories I live and work on to position my presence on those lands as complicit in ongoing colonization of Turtle Island. As an “Overseas Citizen of India” I also recognize how the Indian state continues to colonize Kashmir, North East of India, and Adivasi lands. This is not just a token list, but rather a daily reminder of how these violences are central to the colonial projects that our work seeks to “decolonize.” I (Sandeep) am an dominant caste, i.e., brahmin, queer, English-speaking, citizen of the global north. My position enunciates alongside the queer and non-queer Dalits, who like the Kashmiris live under occupation by the Indian brahminical state. Whilst I do not claim to speak for the Dalits, I choose to speak alongside, with them. 3 As one of us (Nishant) is a settler scholar based in North America, we also take from the theorizations of Indigenous scholars who center on land in conceptualizing decolonization. Eve Tuck (Unangax) and K. Wayne Yang remind us: “decolonization is not a metaphor” (Tuck and Yang 2012). From Indigenous perspectives, there is no decolonization in the Americas without returning Indigenous lands to Indigenous peoples. We extend this theorization to the Indian context, where caste and occupation play a central role in the formation of the postcolonial nation-state and those “with land” or without land. Decolonization in the Indian context would mean not only decolonizing the ongoing legacies of European colonization but also dismantling caste along with de-occupation of Kashmir, North East of India, and Adivasi lands.

342

Translating queer

References Ahmad, Asam. 2015. An Interview with Panmai, a Trans and Mixed-Caste Theatre Troupe from India. BGDBlog [online]. 28 Sept. Available at: https://www.bgdblog.org/2015/09/an-interview-with-pan mai-a-trans-and-caste-oppressed-theatre-troupe-from-india/ [Accessed 12 Dec. 2018]. Ahmad, Ibtisam. 2017. The Hijra Community and the Complex Path to Decolonising Gender in Bangladesh. TQ [online]. 20 Aug. Available at: https://thequeerness.com/2017/08/20/the-hijra-communityand-the-complex-path-to-decolonising-gender-in-bangladesh/ [Accessed 2 July 2018]. Ambedkar, Bhim Rao. 1990. Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar: Writings and Speeches, vol. 9. Edited by M. Vasant. Bombay, MH: Education Department. Alsaafin, Linah. 2013. Though Small, Palestine’s Queer Movement Has Big Vision. The Electronic Intifada [online]. 12 July. Available at: https://electronicintifada.net/content/though-small-palestines-queermovement-has-big-vision/12607 [Accessed 22 June 2018]. Anzaldúa, Gloria. 1987. Borderlands/la frontera: The new mestiza. San Francisco: Aunt Lute. Angayarkanni, V. 2017. Queer, Dalit and Not Yet Proud: This Is My Story. YouthkiAwaaz [online]. Available at: https://www.youthkiawaaz.com/2017/11/queer-dalit-and-not-yet-proud-this-is-my-story/ [Accessed 12 Dec. 2018]. Arondekar, Anjali and Geeta Patel. 2016. Area Impossible: Notes Toward an Introduction. GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 22(2), 151–171. B. 2012. What Queer Could Look Like in Hindi: Translated Poetry and Queerness in Regional Tongue. StoneTelling [online]. http://stonetelling.com/issue7-mar2012/b-queerhindi.html [Accessed 20 July 2018]. Baer, Brian James and Klaus Kaindl. 2018. Queering Translation, Translating the Queer: Theory, Practice, Activism. New York: Routledge. Bauer, Heike. 2015. Sexology and Translation: Cultural and Specific Encounters Across the Modern World. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Chandra, Shefali. 2012. The Sexual Life of English: Languages of Caste and Desire in Colonial India. Durham: Duke University Press. Dave, Naisargi. 2012. Queer Activism in India: A Story of the Anthropology in Ethics. Durham: Duke University Press. Dominguez-Ruvacalba, Hector. 2016. Translating the Queer: Body Politics and Transnational Conversations. London: Zed Books. Dutta, Aniruddha and Raina Roy. 2014. Decolonizing Transgender in India: Some Reflections. TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly, 1(3), 320–336. Entertainment Desk. 2018. Women Who Wear Jeans Give Birth to Transgenders: Indian Professor. The Express Tribune Minute [online]. 8 Apr. https://tribune.com.pk/story/1680545/4-women-wear-jeansgive-birth-transgenders-indian-professor/ [Accessed 12 Oct. 2018]. Epstein, B. J. and Robert Gillett. 2017. Queer in Translation. London: Routledge. Flotow, Luise Von. 1997. Translation and Gender: Translating in the “era of Feminism”. Manchester: St. Jerome Publications. Gramling, David and Aniruddha Dutta. 2016. Introduction, Translating Transgender. TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly, 3(3–4), 333–356. Hossain, Adnan. 2017. The Paradox of Recognition: Hijra, Third Gender and Sexual Rights in Bangladesh. Culture, Health & Sexuality, 19(12), 1418–1431. Jangam, Chinnaiah. 2017. Dalits and the Making of Modern India. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Jyoti, Dhrubo. 2015. Dalit, Queer, Proud – Liberation Lies at the Margins of Our Intersection. Velivada [online]. Available at: http://velivada.com/2017/04/17/dalit-queer-proud-liberation-lies-at-the-mar gins-of-our-intersections-dhrubo-jyoti/ [Accessed 12 Dec. 2018]. Jyoti, Dhrubo. 2017. Being a Queer Dalit and the Assertion of Dalit Identities in Pride Marches. Feminism in India [online]. 22 June. Available at: https://feminisminindia.com/2017/06/22/queer-dalit-asser tion-pride-marches/ [Accessed 12 Dec. 2018]. Jyoti, Dhrubo. 2018. Caste Broke Our Hearts and Love Cannot Put Them Back Together. Buzzfeed [online]. 28 Feb. Available at: https://www.buzzfeed.com/dhrubojyoti/will-you-buy-me-a-pair-ofshorts?utm_source=dynamic&utm_campaign=bffbbuzzfeedindia&ref=bffbbuzzfeedindia&fbclid=Iw AR04UBN6GGDTPEA5qVDCtYxGMEtPArlcjcnIHqMhJWeNQ_rC7KVNR91Mfd4 [Accessed 12 Dec. 2018]. Kamble, Baby. 2009. The Prisons We Broke. Translated by M. Pandit. New Delhi: Orient Black Swan.

343

Nishant Upadhyay and Sandeep Bakshi

Kang, Akhil. 2016. Queering Dalit. Tanqeed a Magazine of Politics and Culture [online]. Oct. Available at: http://www.tanqeed.org/2016/10/queering-dalit-tq-salon/ [Accessed 12 Dec. 2018]. Kang, Akhil. 2018. SC Verdict on Section 377 Won’t End Fight Against Inequality; Love Is as Much About Caste, Class, and Religious Struggle. First Post [online]. Sept. Available at: https://www.firstpost.com/ india/sc-verdict-on-section-377-wont-end-fight-against-inequality-love-is-as-much-about-casteclass-and-religious-struggle-5126261.html [Accessed 30 Mar. 2019]. Mignolo, Walter. 2002. The Geopolitics of Knowledge and the Colonial Difference. The South Atlantic Quarterly, 101(1), 57–96. Mignolo, Walter. 2011. The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Options. Durham: Duke University Press. Mignolo, Walter and Catherine Walsh. 2018. On Decoloniality: Concepts, Analytics, Praxis. Durham: Duke University Press. Moulee, T. S. B. K. 2016. “Safe” Queer Spaces – How Inclusive is Inclusive? RoundtableIndia [online]. 13 Mar. Available at: http://roundtableindia.co.in/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id= 8502:safe-queer-spaces-how-inclusive-is-inclusive&catid=119:feature&Itemid=132 [Accessed 12 Dec. 2018]. Mukherjee, Arun P. 2007. Joothan: A Dalit’s Life. Translated by Arun P. Mukherjee. Kolkata: Samya Publishers. Nanda, Serena. 1999. Neither Man nor Woman: The Hijras of India. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Publishing Company. Niranjana, Tejaswini. 1998. Feminism and Translation in India: Contexts, Politics, Futures. Cultural Dynamics, 10(2), 133–146. Palekar, Shalmalee. 2017. Re-mapping Translation: Queerying the Crossroads, in B. J. Epstein and Robert Gillett, eds., Queer in Translation. London: Routledge, 8–24. Patel, Geeta. 1997. Home, Homo, Hybrid: Translating Gender. College Literature, 24(1), 133–150. Pawar, Urmila. 2009. The Weave of My Life: A Dalit Woman’s Memoir. Translated by M. Pandit. New York: Columbia University Press. Pawar, Urmila and Meenakshi Moon. 2008. We also Made History: Women in the Ambedkarite Movement. Translated by Wandana Sonalkar. New Delhi: Zubaan. Quijano, Aníbal. 2007. Coloniality and Modernity/Rationality. Cultural Studies, 21(2–3), 168–178. Ramberg, Lucina. 2016. Backward Futures and Pasts Forward: Queer Time, Sexual Politics, and Dalit Religiosity in South India. GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 22(2), 223–248. Rawat, Ramnarayan and K. Satyanarayana. 2016. Dalit Studies. Durham: Duke University Press. Rege, Sharmila. 2006. Writing Caste, Writing Gender: Reading Dalit Women’s Testimonios. New Delhi: Zubaan. Ross, Charlotte. 2017. Qu@*ring the Italian Language. Queer Italia Network [online]. 12 Jan. Available at: https://queeritalia.com/2017/01/12/queeringitalian/ [Accessed 12 Dec. 2018]. Santaemilia, José. 2005. Gender, Sex and Translation: The Manipulation of Identities. London: Routledge. Sen, Shoma. 2017. The Village and the City: Dalit Feminism in the Autobiographies of Baby Kamble and Urmila Pawar. The Journal of Commonwealth Literature. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1177/ 0021989417720251 [Accessed 18 Aug. 2018]. Stryker, Susan and Aren Aizura, eds. 2013. The Transgender Studies Reader 2. New York: Routledge. Tellis, Ashley. 2013. Disrupting the Dinner Table: Re-thinking the “Queer Movement” in Contemporary India. Jindal Global Law Review, 4, 142–156. The News Minute Staff. 2018. LGBTQIA+ Community Condemns Trans Activist Laxmi Narayan Tripathi’s Ram Temple Comment. The News Minute [online]. 24 Nov. https://www.thenewsminute. com/article/lgbtqia-community-condemns-trans-activist-laxmi-narayan-tripathis-ram-temple-com ment-92152 [Accessed 27 Nov. 2018]. Tuck, Eve and K. Wayne Yang. 2012. Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor. Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education and Society, 1(1), 1–40. Wynter, Sylvia. 2003. Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation--an Argument. CR: The New Centennial Review, 3(3), 257–337.

344

26 Sinicizing non-normative sexualities Through translation’s looking glass Wangtaolue Guo

Introduction In his seminal book Method in Translation History, Anthony Pym (2014b) suggests a new translational framework known as interculture, a concept which he defines as “beliefs and practices found in intersections or overlaps of cultures” (177). Although Pym, at the time of writing, called his act of “smuggl[ing] a symbolic translator (Tr) into the intercultural space” a “hypothesis” (ibid.), such an undertaking has incited researchers to examine the role of translation in facilitating “the merging of information and sentiments across societal and national borders” (Baldo and Inghilleri 2018, 296). Regarding the circulation of knowledge between the Sinophone and the Western world, previous scholarship1 has acknowledged that translation was instrumental in bringing Euro-American/Japanese experience of technology, culture, and science to the Chinese-speaking regions in the 20th century. Dynamics of cultural transmission between the Chinese and the non-Chinese, however, have been frequently depicted as an unequal, colonial exchange, implying a unilateral relationship between Chinese translators and Western sources. Yet, as new research on sinicizing non-normative sexualities repositions translation in an intercultural network, the multiple and diverse purposes of translation practices appear in a new light, suggesting both a sensitivity to localization and an awareness of transnational contacts. In this chapter, I examine various attempts at sinicizing Western/Euro-American non-­ normative sexualities in China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. In the first part of the chapter, I offer an overview of scholarship on male homoeroticism in pre-modern China, which may be deemed “sedentary” (Pym 2014b, 180) but sets the foundation for ensuing investigations into translating Western/Euro-American non-normative sexualities. In the second part, I examine the critical issues and current contributions in historicizing and scrutinizing translational discourses of contested sexualities. By highlighting the question of translation, I discuss how Sinophone cultures have been tackling old and new concepts, such as homosexuality, gay, lesbian, and queer, which have been used to refer to contested sexualities in Western/Euro-American discourses. The diversity manifested in translated materials attests to the possibility of intercultural understanding and coalition.

345

Wangtaolue Guo

Historical perspectives Translation and sinicization of Western/Euro-American non-normative sexualities has not been regarded as a serious academic subject until recently. Male homoeroticism in pre-modern China, however, has attracted much scholarly attention. In 1984, 小明雄 Xiaomingxiong2 (one of the pseudonyms used by 吳小明 Ng Siu-ming), a Hong Kong gay rights activist, published 中國同性愛史錄 Zhongguo tongxing’ai shilu (History of Homosexuality in China), one of the earliest comprehensive historical studies of Chinese homosexuality. The book presents an extensive array of documented evidence of homoeroticism in pre-modern China, ranging from literary productions in the spring and autumn period (770 BCE–476 BCE) to historical records in the Qing dynasty (1644–1911). Given the author’s idiosyncrasies and political agenda, Xiaomingxiong’s work has been criticized for its historiographical rationale, scant discussion of female homoeroticism, and lack of in-depth analysis. Yet, Xiaomingxiong’s meticulous work in combing through literature and historical records written in classical Chinese makes his study a critical sourcebook that other scholars have constantly resorted to and built their work on. One such researcher is Bret Hinsch, whose study provides “a valuable service in laying to rest several common modern Chinese and Western misconceptions” (Kretschmer 1993, 594). In Passions of the Cut Sleeve: The Male Homosexual Tradition in China, Hinsch (1990) not only provides English translations of original sources, which delineate homosexual tradition in China, but also categorizes the social manifestations of Chinese (male) homosexuality into four relational forms: “trans-generational,” “trans-genderal,” “class-structured,” and “egalitarian” (11). Based on Xiaomingxiong’s collection as well as his own, Hinsch presents to the audience an alternative representation of homosexual behaviours and relationships that does not completely align with conventional Eurocentric perceptions. He is also aware of the specificities one has to pay attention to when comparing and contrasting cultural phenomena transtemporally and transnationally. Although hailed as a pioneering work written in English on homosexuality in China, this monograph has caused a few controversies. For instance, Hinsch’s explication of the origins of homophobia in pre-modern China is rather ambiguous. In the middle of the book, he argues that it was “theoretical disapproval of sensuality by Neo-Confucians and Buddhists” (ibid., 97) that enacted a uniform hostility to homosexuality, suggesting a religion-based homophobia that was similar to that of the West. Yet in his epilogue, he attributes such intolerance to the reproductive unit, known as 家 jia [family], in the Chinese tradition. On a macro level, Charlotte Furth also points out that Hinsch’s largely anecdotal examples contribute to “the kind of romantic Western valorization of indigenous Asian erotic mores associated with Orientalism” (1991, 911). Informative as Hinsch’s book is, the multiple layers of homoeroticism in dynastic China need further explanation. Acknowledging Hinsch’s exploration of homosexual tradition in China, Wu Cuncun3 adds her discreetly crafted perspective to the discussion of same-sex unions in pre-modern China. In Homoerotic Sensibilities in Late Imperial China, Wu (2004) looks into three major forms of homosexual relationship in the Qing dynasty: “between upper-class men (literati, officials and merchants) and dan (boy-actors),” “between affluent men and their boy servants,” and “between men of equal status” (8). Since Wu has been trained in universities in and outside China, she is more rigorous than Hinsch in her employment of analytical vocabulary. Unlike Hinsch, who argues for a middle ground between essentialists’ and social constructionists’ views towards homosexuality, Wu frames sexuality as a “cultural system” (ibid., 23), a term borrowed from Clifford Geertz (see, e.g., Geertz 1973). Additionally, her interpretation of 男風 nanfeng – homosexual “aesthetic and behavioural preferences that found expression in cultural life” (ibid., 6) – is much 346

Sinicizing non-normative sexualities

less embellished than Hinsch’s. Through careful scrutiny of homoerotic representations in 筆 記 biji (miscellaneous literati writings) and 花譜 huapu (guidebooks to the famous 旦 dan of the entertainment quarters and their nightclubs), she argues that the homoerotic sensibility illustrated between literati and boy actors was a mode of male bonding and a manifestation of masculinity that depended on those boys as passive sex objects. Another scholar who has been working on the interplay of Chinese male homoeroticism and masculinity is Giovanni Vitiello (2011). His nuanced study The Libertine’s Friend: Homosexuality and Masculinity in Late Imperial China also focuses on literary representations of male homosexuality in pre-modern China. Citing a wider array of primary fictional sources from vernacular novels like 水滸傳 Shuihu zhuan [Stories from the Water Margin] to pornographic stories in 品 花寶鑒 Pinhua baojian [Precious Mirror for Ranking Flowers] than his predecessor Sophie Volpp did, Vitiello claims that sexual encounters between an adult man and a boy actor and the desire for male beauty in Ming (1368–1644) and Qing (1644-1912) dynasties were deemed normative, in contrast to Volpp’s statement that male homoerotic culture was marginalized and not tolerated (2001). Further, one of the future directions for research laid out in Wu’s book – “a comparison of the homoerotic sensibilities with the qing [romantic love] aesthetic” (2004, 158) – is extensively addressed by Vitiello in his monograph. He identifies the different ways in which fictional ­manifestations – romantic scholar, chivalric hero, wise man, sexy libertine, etc. – and their historical evolution contribute to “the generic concept of romantic love, irrespective of the gender of the lovers involved” (2011, 7). The book not only introduces new primary sources for research but also expounds on the intertwined histories of homosociality, homoerotic love, and masculinity. Although the aforementioned scholarship may not directly relate to the interactions and exchanges between Western/Euro-American and Chinese standpoints on the shifting dynamics of non-normative sexualities, it is, because of the intercultural nature of translation studies, still fundamentally necessary to form a basic understanding of same-sex erotics and construction of sexual awareness in pre-modern China. On the one hand, multiple existing studies on homoeroticism in dynastic China contest (modern) perspectives on ways of explicating the specificities of a pre-modern (but transtemporal) phenomenon, an intertemporal modality of analysis that can be appropriated for intercultural studies. On the other hand, those scholarly works, in one way or another, address one of the initial causes for translation (Pym 2014b) – a source/target context – which constitutes the epistemological prerequisite for describing norms and establishing networks. Moreover, a few researchers, such as Hinsch and Vitiello, end their respective monographs with epilogues that briefly describe the shifting perceptions of same-sex desire/ identity in Republican (1912–1949) and Communist (1949 onwards) China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. Hinsch offers an indiscriminate cultural imperialist view on Western-­Sinophone interactions in the 20th century by arguing that “Christian missionaries and other Western moralists had championed a realignment of Chinese sexuality along Western European ideals” (1990, 167). Vitiello, in contrast to Hinsch who has been criticized for lack of evidence and overgeneralization in his argument, presents a more sophisticated account of same-sex desire and gay activism in modern China, illustrating negotiations between the traditional and the contemporary (2011, 201–204), the local revolutionary and the global postmodern (ibid., 208–210). Regardless of differences, both Hinsch and Vitiello have set the foundation for understanding the changing dynamics of contested sexualities in the Sinophone world. Meanwhile, a new gap – how Chinese and non-Chinese discourses on non-normative sexualities interacted with each other in the 20th century and the new millennium – is being established, and translation can be a critical site in understanding the circulation of sexual awareness and identity, and expounding the intersection of erotics, politics, activism, and culture. 347

Wangtaolue Guo

Critical issues and current contributions Sexuality studies, as Vera Mackie and Mark McLelland (2015) observe, has become “a distinctive field of academic inquiry” (1) over the last few decades. As cultures change, perspectives on human (hetero-/homo-)sexuality have shifted from the paradigm that situates sexuality in the network of biology, psychology, and sexology (Weeks 2017) to the one that associates sex and sexuality with “cultural meanings, imaginaries, and identities” (Mackie and McLelland 2015, 1). Given the plasticity and intersectionality of sexuality as an academic discipline, there is no wonder that it has also become an analytical keyword in translation studies, shedding new light on not only “the linguistic representations of sexual practices” (von Flotow 2009, 122) but also cultural trappings in the form of symbols, contexts, and ideologies. The development and transformation of sexual awareness in China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan during the 20th century and the new millennium suggest that the contemporary, diversified Sinophone discourses of non-normative sexualities, affected by several waves of translation, no longer support what Michel Foucault calls “ars erotica” (1978, 57), nor do they constitute a derivative of “scientia sexualis” (ibid., 58), represented by Western/Euro-American sexology. For instance, according to the report on China in Gay and Lesbian Communities the World Over, China’s adoption law “specifically identifies partners that adopt children as being husband and wife” (Simon and Brooks 2009, 121), reinforcing a heteronormative regime even though there are no laws criminalizing homosexual activity between consenting adults. In post-martial law (1987) Taiwan, however, homosexual-themed literature and publications have been in mass circulation, with 同志 tongzhi (one of the Chinese translations for queer) discourse occupying a central discursive position for same-sex sexuality and identity politics (Lim 2008). The ­transnationality/transculturality of Sinophone sexual awareness and its multifarious manifestations have attracted a number of scholars to examine the intersection of translation and nonnormative sexualities. Current research in sinicizing contested sexualities coalesces around four topics: translation of European sexology; sinicizing LGBTQ identities in Hong Kong and Taiwan; queering Sinophone cultures through translation sociology; Sinophone queer literature in translation. All three research directions that Luise von Flotow summarizes in Routledge Encylopedia of Translation Studies – “macro-analyses of translation phenomena . . . micro-analyses of translated texts . . . [and] intersection of translation theories and praxis” (2009, 123) – are demonstrated in the existing scholarly works.

Translation of European sexology and Chinese modernity Western/Euro-American sexology started to enter the Chinese public discourse through translation from the 1920s onwards. In the epilogue to his book, Giovanni Vitiello (2011) has already mentioned two prominent figures – 張競生 Zhang Jingsheng and 潘光旦 Pan Guangdan – who introduced Western/Euro-American (hetero-/homo-)sexual theories into Republican China during that time. In addition to Pan’s Chinese translation4 of Havelock Ellis’s Psychology of Sex: A Manual for Students, other Euro-American sexologists translated into Chinese included Magnus Hirshfeld, Richard von Krafft-Ebing, and Edward Carpenter. The translations (sometimes in the format of rewriting or adaptation) appeared not only in medical manuals for sex education but also in urban journals and magazines that promoted anti-feudal perspectives on sex, relationships, and education. An investigation into those locally reconfigured materials would reveal that Chinese modernity is a translational modernity (Liu 1995). One of the earliest scholars who looks into the translational discourse of homosexuality in Republican China is Tze-lan Deborah Sang. In Translating Homosexuality: The Discourse of 348

Sinicizing non-normative sexualities

Tongxing’ai in Republican China (1912–1949), Sang (1999) departs from a long line of traditional scholarship centring around Chinese male homoeroticism exclusively and argues for a discourse of alternate modernity, which includes female experience and “mirror[s] women’s greater participation in social and public life” (297). Surveying five critical, yet less discussed, journal articles on 同性愛 tongxing’ai [same-sex love] over the period from 1911 to 1927, translated respectively by 善哉 Shan Zai, Shen Zemin, 晏始 Yan Shi, 薇生 Wei Sheng, and 謝瑟 Xie Se, Sang showcases a spectrum of shifting views on (female) homosexuality in Republican China at a time when different European sexologists’ works were intentionally selected, introduced, or even rewritten by Chinese translators. The translators’ complementing or competing standpoints5, as Sang claims, demonstrate “a fascinating mixture of liberalism and conservatism” (ibid., 292). Those Chinese translators’ agency, although never uncircumscribed, refuted “the whole-scale Western cultural . . . imposition in the name of universality” (ibid., 276–277). She further points out that the translational tongxing’ai discourse in Republican China signified “an intersubjective rapport rather than . . . a category of personhood, that is, an identity” (ibid., 292–293), a modality in contrast to the Western/Euro-American essentialist paradigm of non-normative sexualities which was usually credited to European sexology. Another key feature of this new discourse, as Sang concludes, is “a supplement of interiority and emotionality to pre-existing Chinese terminology for same-sex intercourse and erotic pleasure” (ibid., 297). The main arguments made in this article became an integral part of a later monograph by Sang (2003), The Emerging Lesbian: Female Same-Sex Desire in Modern China, in which she explores how global currents shaped the Sinophone discourse on (female) homosexuality throughout the 20th century. Extending her discussion from female same-sex desire in the May Fourth and New Culture period (1915–1937) to post-martial law Taiwan, where a number of identity-based social movements and battle cries of feminist and queer theorists have emerged, Sang aims for a resignification of the word lesbian in the Sinophone world. Her attempt at reconstructing this cultural/social/ sexual identity, which is heavy with geography-/period-specific meanings, will be discussed in more detail in the next section. In addition to Sang’s groundbreaking work on female homosexuality, male same-sex desire in Republican China has also attracted scholarly attention. Wenqing Kang (2009), in Obsession: Male Same-Sex Relations in China, 1900–1950, analyzes the changing cultural significance of male same-sex desire and relations in an era of transition. Complementing Sang’s argument about female homoeroticism and femininity is Kang’s explication of male same-sex love and masculinity by presenting a wider range of primary sources, including literary works, tabloid newspapers, and translated sexological writings. In the eponymous chapter on sexology, Kang lays out a series of heated exchanges between Chinese intellectuals and tabloid writers, who had contrasting ideas about tongxing’ai during the 1930s and 1940s. By evaluating writings of 楊憂 天 Yang Youtian, who frequently translated sexological terms coined by European sexologists such as Richard von Krafft-Ebing and Karl Heinrich Ulrichs for his readers, Kang differs from Sang’s overgeneralizing claim that translating homosexuality as tongxing’ai highlighted “romantic love between people of the same sex” (Sang 2003, 104). When addressing the central difference between Yang’s stance on the Western/Euro-American concept of homosexuality and that of his peers like 胡秋原 Hu Qiuyuan, Kang contends that “Yang emphasized the dimension of physical sex, whereas Hu highlighted the aspect of emotional love” (2009, 42). He even links this interpretative difference to translation, arguing that it was “caused as much as by the confused usage of the term “love” in Western sexological writing as by its Chinese translation ai and lian’ai, in which the meaning of love was often conflated with that of sex” (ibid.). In the second half of the chapter, Kang touches upon the issue of homophobia in Republican China. Unlike Hinsch, who attributes the Chinese intolerance of homosexuality to a “stringent application of 349

Wangtaolue Guo

Neo-Confucian rhetoric regarding the family” (1990, 162), Kang reworks Hinsch’s social statement6 and speculates that the long tradition of stigmatization of Chinese male same-sex relations is rooted in May Fourth Chinese intellectuals’ understanding of pathologized homosexuality as social deviance. Influenced by Western/Euro-American theories of eugenics and Darwinist evolutionary thinking, they deemed male same-sex relations detrimental to social reformation and nation building. Admittedly, both aforementioned scholars, in their respective studies, offer a resounding opposing response to Frank Dikötter’s claim that early 20th-century Chinese intellectuals did not grasp the European concept of (hetero-/homo-)sexuality (1995). Their shared agenda of treating homosexuality exclusively as a social problem, however, remains questionable to other scholars. Howard Chiang (2011), for instance, calls that modality “an oversimplification” (104). In “Epistemic Modernity and the Emergence of Homosexuality in China,” Chiang rejects the idea that homosexuality was only a social problem in the May Fourth era, nor does he agree with Sang and Kang who categorize the translation of Western/Euro-American sexology as “a condition of modernization” (ibid., 105). Instead, Chiang proposes a concept called “epistemic modernity” (ibid.), which concerns an “epistemological history” in the Foucauldian sense that “ ‘is situated at the threshold of scientificity” ’ (ibid., 108). Zhang Jingsheng’s and Pan Guangdan’s differing views on the aetiology and significance of same-sex love and respective attempts at promoting their treaties, according to Chiang (2011), reflected not a social history of homosexuals in translation in Republican China but two levels of truth production: the object of scientific knowledge and the cultural indicators of authenticity and modernity. In a later essay, Chiang (2015) makes it clearer that the translated homosexuality was “a by-product of a contested historical process” (78). Therefore, the cultural transmission of Western/Euro-American scientia sexualis constituted not an alternate modernity, as was brought forward by Sang, but a “productive historical moment” (ibid., 80) in which intellectuals-cum-translators like Zhang Jingsheng and Pan Guangdan domesticated the Western/Euro-American psychiatric style of reasoning and argumentation. Current scholarship, such as Sang’s, Kang’s, and Chiang’s, has revealed different aspects of historiographical significance of Chinese translations of Western/Euro-American sexology. Tongxing’ai discourse – as a cultural/social/scientific product of such a translation(al) ­phenomenon – proves to be a critical tool to be employed when one decides to dissect the historical formation of contested sexualities, gender/sexual liberation, and nationhood in Republican China. Issues concerning gender/sexual awareness, heteronormative hegemony, and cultural transformations that have arisen from scholarly debates on this topic can also help us understand old and new discussions about Sinophone translations of LGBTQ activist theories/discourses in the late 20th century.

Sinicizing queer in Hong Kong and Taiwan In contrast to their flourishing status over the May Fourth and New Culture period, intellectual translations and public discussions regarding non-normative sexualities diminished significantly after the 1940s due to China’s unceasing conflicts with Japan, the political catfight between the KMT7 and the Communist Party, and prevalent conservatism under Mao’s regime. Tze-lan Deborah Sang (2003) observes that, in socialist China, “there are practically no artistic representations touching on it [homosexuality] from the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. Nor did the official sex-advice material make any mention of homosexuality” (26). Similarly, homosexual representations in the public sphere dwindled in Taiwan, as the KMT enforced martial law from 1949. It was not until the 1980s that dispute over gender/sexual awareness resumed a position 350

Sinicizing non-normative sexualities

in Sinophone society. Resurfacing in post-Mao China, however, were “outdated medical theories of homosexuality as [. . .] psychic pathology” (ibid., 27). Meanwhile, in Hong Kong and Taiwan, the post-martial law era has witnessed new translational discourses on philosophizing, theorizing, and utilizing non-normative sexualities. Drawing examples from Sinophone queer practices, current research on sinicizing queer discourse in Hong Kong and Taiwan investigates the multifarious dynamics of translation, language, identity politics, and interculturality. One prominent characteristic that distinguishes the sinicization of queer from that of homosexuality is the nomenclatural quibbles sparked by different translations of the term queer. Unlike the May Fourth and New Culture period, when Chinese intellectuals shared one translated Chinese term for homosexuality,8 the 1980s and 1990s have witnessed three different Chinese translations – 同志 tongzhi [kindred soul], 酷兒 ku’er [cool kid], and 怪胎 guaitai [bizarre fetus] – for queer in Hong Kong and Taiwan. Cultural implications and political agendas manifested in those translational acts soon became a scholarly interest for some researchers. In his seminal book Tongzhi: Politics of Same-Sex Eroticism in Chinese Societies, Chou Wah-shan (2000) traces the etymology of tongzhi and analyzes its cultural/political resonance as being one of the Chinese equivalents to queer. According to Chou, tongzhi, appropriated by the organizers of Hong Kong’s first gay and lesbian film festival in 1989, embodies a rejection of “essentialism and behaviourism” (ibid., 3), which aligns with the semantic clout and resistance to definition of the word queer. Yet, Chou also points out that when queer – together with its cultural and political discourses – was translated into tongzhi in the Sinophone world, an indigenous understanding that individual legal/social rights had to be interpreted within the context of personal relationships (to be more exact, personal relationships within the family) was added to evoke local solidarity. Although his monograph is path-breaking, Chou’s reasoning in it proves to be partial, if not biased, due to the purview of his study. For instance, he vigorously promotes the adoption of tongzhi discourse in Hong Kong by highlighting only its positiveness – “cultural references, gender neutrality, desexualization of the stigma of homosexuality, politics beyond the homo-hetero duality” (ibid., 2). Nevertheless, he ignores the dynamics of competing discursive terms and long-existing local epithets in the Sinophone world. Adopting Chou’s etymological approach, Jens Damm and Song Hwee Lim describe the multiple attempts at sinicizing queer in Taiwan, which Chou fails to present in his book. When examining the reception of postmodernist theories of gender and sexuality in 1990s Taiwanese publications, Jens Damm (2003) notices the emergence of another translated term for queer. He briefly mentions that, in addition to tongzhi, which was introduced to Taiwan from Hong Kong in 1992, ku’er was first coined by a group of young writers and scholars at the National Taiwan University as an alternate translation of queer, since the new term was “not restricted to the more political meaning/interpretation of ‘tongzhi,’ [but] was considered to be the ‘other,’ the non-mainstream” (ibid., 207). His failure to support his own observation, however, has resulted in later criticism. For instance, Song Hwee Lim (2008), who conducts comprehensive research on the development of discursive terms in Mandarin Chinese for queer, offers an alternate explication in “How to Be Queer: Translation, Appropriation, and the Construction of a Queer Identity in Taiwan.” Differing from Damm’s unscrupulous claim, Lim traces the first appearance of ku’er in Taiwan back to 1994, when 島嶼邊緣 Daoyu bianyuan [Isle Margin] – one of Taiwan’s avant-garde cultural publications in the 1990s – featured an issue titled “酷兒 QUEER.” At the same time, he points out that tongzhi (the Chinese translation of queer in Hong Kong) and guaitai (an local term in Taiwan describing eccentricities) also had their places in the discursive landscape, in that the special section titled “Queer Nation” in the June 1994 issue of 愛福好自在報 Aifu haozizai bao [Love News] – a Taiwanese lesbian journal – was referred to respectively as 同 志國 tongzhi guo and 怪胎族 guaitai zu in Mandarin Chinese by the journal’s editor-in-chief. In 351

Wangtaolue Guo

addition to his historiographical scrutiny, Lim looks into both the translators’ preferences and the material context in Taiwan upon which the circulation of tongzhi, ku’er, and guaitai depended. Reviewing 小小酷兒百科 Xiaoxiao ku’er baike [“A Pocket Encyclopaedia of Ku’er”], co-written by 紀大偉 Chi Ta-wei, 但唐謨 Tan T’ang-mo, and 洪凌 Hung Ling who translated queer as ku’er, he argues that the translation could be seen “as a form of competition between publications for readers’ attention and thus in terms of market segmentation” (ibid., 239). Nevertheless, its emergence “had the effect of complementing, complicating, and even confounding [other terms like tongzhi and guaitai]” (ibid., 240). Lim, however, also acknowledges the limited circulation of both ku’er and guaitai in the public sphere, as both were considered academic and radically political discourses. Apart from the aforementioned nomenclatural debate, current scholars are interested in the dynamics of cultural translation and glocalized gay/lesbian/queer discourses. The 1980s AIDS crisis and the political liberalization after the lifting of martial law in Taiwan gave new local visibility to marginalized communities, such as aboriginals, homosexuals, and women. In the meantime, the influx of queer discourse from the Western/Euro-American world became amenable to such identity politics. Multiple researchers have looked into how this translational/ transcultural flow inspired a new (non-)sexual awareness. Following his own research on the development of translated non-normative sexual terminology in Taiwan, Song Hwee Lim (2009) addresses the question of translation, translatability, and postcoloniality in a later essay where he writes about the travel/translation of queer theory from the U.S. to Taiwan. Building on Edward Said’s ideas in “Traveling Theory,” Lim deals with “the translingual aspect of [such a] transcultural flow” (ibid., 257) and analyzes the “issues of cultural production and institutional practices” (ibid.) that came after queer theory’s travel to Taiwan. In the first half of his essay, Lim problematizes translatability as “a precondition of . . . travelling [queer] theory rather than as mere effects brought about by the transcultural exchange” (ibid., 258), given Taiwan’s messy historicity. By doing that, he rejects the idea of describing queer theory’s travel to Taiwan in a McDonaldization style. Instead, translation of queer theory into Taiwan allowed the host culture to appropriate the translated theory to its own purposes. In the second part, Lim is discerning to point out that multiple translations of the term queer epitomized the indeterminacy of its referents. He observes that queer theory meshed with lesbian and gay studies in Taiwan and produced a new non-normative sexual politics. Furthermore, it “joined forces with other travelling theories” (ibid., 265) to foster an oppositional, non-sexual politics that centered around nativist nationalism and transnational queer Sinophone cultures. Scholarly works that illustrate Lim’s first claim – a new non-normative sexual politics was established by translating and introducing queer discourse – can be traced back to as early as the beginning of the 21st century. Chong Kee Tan (2001), when examining the rise of gay, lesbian, and queer discourses in the 1990s Taiwan, claims that this translational movement demonstrated not a unidirectional but a mutually interacting relationship “between theory and lived experience, as well as between different cultures” (125). By analyzing three events – a public hearing on human rights for homosexuals, the publication of Taiwan’s first gay and lesbian magazine G&L, and the establishment of ku’er BBS – Tan concludes that those legal/cultural/ political exchanges exemplify a process of non-Bhabhaist hybridization, a “double resistance to American inclusiveness and indigenous hetero/homo interpellation” (ibid., 131). Such translation opened up space for creative negotiation and cultural agency, which shed a new light on the ways in which cultures hybridize. In a similar vein, Tze-lan Deborah Sang (2003), in the second half of her book The Emerging Lesbian: Female Same-Sex Desire in Modern China, reflects on the translated literature about 352

Sinicizing non-normative sexualities

lesbian and other queer desires in the 1990s and explores the gender and sexual politics within the lesbian community in post-martial law Taiwan. In the chapter titled “Lesbian Activism in the Mediated Public Sphere” (225–274), Sang examines the debate between 魚玄阿璣 Yuxuan’aji  – editor of a Taiwanese lesbian magazine – and other feminist activists over the exclusion of lesbian and gay rights in Taiwan’s feminist movement. To do so, Sang looks into five articles on the relationship between lesbian activism and feminism in the July 1995 issue of 婦女新知 Funü xinzhi [Women’s New Knowledge]. New concepts like Radicalesbianism, performance, and coming out, as Sang notes, were, for the first time in Taiwan, introduced by authors of those essays and translated respectively as 激進女同性戀 jijin nütongxinglian, 扮裝 banzhuang, and 出櫃 chugui. Furthermore, multiple voices in the Taiwanese feminist camp, including scholars-cum-activistscum-translators 胡淑雯 Hu Shu-wen, 張小虹 Chang Hsiao-hung, and 古明君 Ku Ming-chun used their localized experience and translated progressive vocabulary to confront mass media’s homophobic gaze. One of the latest additions to literature on sinicizing new non-normative sexualities is Chinese Male Homosexualities: Memba, Tongzhi and Golden Boy, whose author, Travis S. K. Kong (2011), is a sociology professor from Hong Kong. Kong’s approach in rendering complementing/competing discourses on contemporary Chinese male masculinities and homosexualities can be described as “translation sociology” (Pym 2014a, 149), an analytical paradigm that has been gaining popularity over the last few years. According to Joachim Renn, in culturally fragmented societies, translation is “the best model of the way the different groups can communicate with each other and ensure governance” (2006 cited in Pym 2014a, 151). This new modality of translation is manifested in Kong’s analysis, in which he takes on an anti-essentialist stance and scrutinizes the transnationality in the life of Chinese male homosexuals in Hong Kong, London, and China. By systematically examining the rising tongzhi movement in Hong Kong, the intersectional landscape of race and sexuality brought forward by Chinese migrant gay men in London, and the queer infrastructure of consumer venues in Beijing, he argues that “the numerous queer flows [. . .] of capital, bodies, ideas, images, commodities” (Kong 2011, 8) can be summarized by four trans- tropes: transnationality, transformation, translation, and transgression. What distinguishes him from many of his predecessors, who have also explored such transnational flows, is that he emphasises the moment when translations failed, or in his own words, “when Chinese queer identities and politics [did] not follow the same paths as those of the West” (ibid., 9). The incongruities between global gayness and Sinophone gayness open up new spaces for research. As I have demonstrated above, queer discourse has engendered multiple translations/transformations of itself due to its deconstructive nature, oppositional reaction to gay hegemony, and connection with political activism. Along with those translations, a new non-normative sexual awareness has become a critical site for scholars to reflect upon canonized issues like hybridity and diversity.

Queering Sinophone cultures through translation sociology As Kong’s project shows, recent scholarship on translation and non-normative sexual politics in the Sinophone world has joined the bandwagon of translation sociology, a paradigm of cultural translation that aims to reconstruct sexual, social, and cultural boundaries. Cultural translation, in its metaphorical sense, is associated with “the way differences are maintained and negotiated within complex societies” (Pym 2014a, 151). The hybridization of sexual, cultural, and national citizenships, as some researchers argue, mimics a translational position, or to borrow Emily Apter’s term, “translational transnationalism . . . from within” (2013, 43), in that this new discourse 353

Wangtaolue Guo

exposes the relations between sociocultural groups and multiple acts of border-crossing within a culture that was previously deemed homogeneous. One of the pioneering scholars before Kong to adopt this sociological method was Lisa Rofel. In “Qualities of Desire: Imagining Gay Identities” (85–110), a chapter in her seminal book Desiring China: Experiments in Neoliberalism, Sexuality, and Public Culture, Rofel (2007) claims that the Chinese queer culture neither represents a homogenous, global one, nor highlights a radical difference from Western/Euro-American discourses. Her definition of gay culture in China is a desexualized one, in that she argues that gay identities in China emerge “with [. . .] desires for cultural belonging” (ibid., 89). Intricately tied to the articulation of gay identities is cultural citizenship, which is delimited by a set of modes of inclusion and exclusion like “gay kinship” (ibid., 97) and “linguistic appropriations of affinity” (ibid., 102). Cultural citizenship, to some extent, replaces “legal subjectivity or theories of psychological personality” (ibid., 95) in establishing an in-between site for discussing Sinophone queer culture. Building on Rofel’s statement that same-sex identities in China are attached to cultural citizenship, Loretta Wing Wah Ho (2010) explores how non-normative sexualities have been shaped by new politico-economic discourses – state ideologies, cyberspatial articulations, and local class narratives – that arose during China’s opening up. By expounding 素質 suzhi [quality], a language of social stratification within gay and lesbian communities in China, she brings to the fore urban/rural and class divisions and enunciates how language contributes to the creation and exclusion of a communal identity. In contrast to Rofel and Ho’s approach – incorporating cultural/national citizenship into non-normative sexualities – Taiwanese researchers tend to “translate” queer awareness into national identity, in order to reconceptualize Chineseness as “multiple, contradictory and fragmented” (Martin 2015, 35). Their attempts bring into the spotlight what Fran Martin calls “transnational queer Sinophone cultures” (ibid., 36). For instance, Li-fen Chen (2011), in “Queering Taiwan: In Search of Nationalism’s Other,” does not center her analysis on delineating the shifting notion of Sinophone non-normative sexualities per se, but on characterizing an intellectual movement that relies on the translational/transnational figure of contested sexualities to highlight a cultural politics of fragmentation. Her interpretation of 孽子 Niezi [Crystal Boys], a canonical gay-themed novel by 白先勇 Pai Hsien-yung, is not confined to the traditional realm of reconceptualizing homosexuality. Instead, she focuses on “a series of linked issues that are at the centre of contemporary Taiwan’s critical debate: ethnicity, historical and spatial memory, and cultural identity” (ibid., 387). Thus, what is manifested by the rent boys in Niezi is both a contested sexuality and a non-normative national/cultural identity. More importantly, Chen’s translation sociological reading deconstructs the conventional national border, as she considers the gay cruising place, known as New Park in the novel, to be a symbolic trope for a queer post-nation, a culturally diasporic territory within Taiwan itself. In addition to Chen’s work, the latest attempts at illustrating the transformations of minoritized subjects in the Sinophone rubric can be found in Perverse Taiwan, an anthology edited by Howard Chiang and Yin Wang (2017). Topics ranging from plural representations of homosexuality in Taiwanese literature to patrilineal kinship and transgender awareness in Taiwan are explored by various scholars. The excavation of non-normative sexual/(trans-)national cultures demonstrates how established agents have been controlling inter- and intra-cultural exchanges. Translation sociology, as is manifested previously, proves to be an intersectional domain, which welcomes interdisciplinary projects that focus on social agents, ideological actors, and cultural negotiations involved in the (literal or metaphorical) translation/transformation process. Yet, as a few translation theorists have warned us, unregulated adoption of the term translation as a metaphor may result in “a sociology of translation . . . without translation” (Wolf 2007, 27). 354

Sinicizing non-normative sexualities

Therefore, researching on queer Sinophone cultures through translation sociology requires conscious reassessment.

Sinophone queer literature in translation In a world marked by increasing literary and cultural mobility, Sinophone queer literature and film have been garnering international acclaim. Consequently, another subject of interest for translation scholars is the reception and circulation of Chinese queer-themed texts in the Anglophone world. Investigations into how Sinophone literary texts are translated and brought back into the global circulation of queerness can shed new light on translation praxis issues, such as translation ethics, textual/thematic equivalence, and canon formation. Interestingly, this research stream was inaugurated not by institutional scholars but by practicing translators. Sylvia Li-chun Lin (2000), co-translator of 朱天文 Chu T’ien-wen’s canonical queer novel 荒人手記 Huangren shouji [Notes of a Desolate Man], reflects on translators’ responsibility for rendering a Chinese text that is full of cross-cultural allusions into English. Lin claims that it will be unethical if the translator fails to verify the cultural references and allusions made by the author. Drawing from her own experience of translating Huangren shouji (with Howard Goldblatt), she demonstrates that, in a novel with a plethora of Western/Euro-American cultural allusions, discrepancies between Anglophone/Francophone sources and Sinophone renditions can be found in direct quotes, excerpts of lyrics, and queer adaptation of Western mythologies. It is, therefore, necessary for the translator to first conduct extensive research on the already translated elements in the original text and then double-check with the author of his or her intention. In a similar vein, Fran Martin (2003) discusses the critical issues in translating Taiwanese tongzhi and ku’er fiction in the preface to Angelwings: Contemporary Queer Fiction from Taiwan, a collection of queer-themed stories edited and translated by herself. Martin summarizes three features that she highlighted when translating those stories into English: “metamorphosing characters” (19), “playful narrative strategies” (19), and “highly committed political critique” (19). Such characteristics, as Martin reveals, allowed her to rethink “the place and effects of queer sexualities” (22) and compelled her, in her translation, to bring to the fore the unsettling desires. Encouraged by translators’ self-reflective pieces, translation scholars have realized the potentiality of using translated Sinophone queer literature as case studies to re-examine dichotomous concepts in translation studies. For instance, Issac Ting-yan Hui (2016) compares Pai Hsienyung’s Niezi with its English translation Crystal Boys and points out that Goldblatt’s domesticating strategy fails to transmit “the image of darkness and the concept of emptiness in the Chinese text to Western readers” (34), even though the translation has a high level of readability. By studying examples like 失心瘋 shixin feng [no-heart crazy] and 把我的大腦一下子挖掉了 一般 ba wo de da’nao yixiazi wadiao le yiban [it felt like my brain was dug out], Hui insists that Pai skilfully links the sense of emptiness with emotional instability and loss of memory. Thus, Goldblatt’s translations of those two phrases as “love crazy” (Bai (Pai) 1990, 79 cited in Hui 2016, 38) and “as though I’d had a lobotomy” (Bai (Pai) 1990, 41 cited in Hui 2016, 39) may require further revision. Hui suggests, through a comparative study of Niezi and The Symposium, that if translators use foreignizing strategies appropriately, they can “create a sense of familiarity through de-familiarization” (2016, 34). In the case of Niezi, the image of emptiness, which could have been brought forward by literal translation, clearly correlates to the image of void in The Symposium. Therefore, even with the presence of a linguistic disconnection, a thematic connection can still be established. Lastly, the circulation of Sinophone queer texts has also emerged as a scholarly interest from the intersection of translation studies, comparative literature, and world literature. In her doctoral 355

Wangtaolue Guo

thesis Negotiating Culture Space and Identity: The Translation and Analysis of Tongzhi and Ku-er Fiction, Michelle Ming-chih Wu (2014) adopts the sociological concept of framing and argues that translation of queer literature from Taiwan signifies a linguistic/cultural/political (re-)framing, which transforms and brings the local expression of contested sexualities into the global landscape. Instead of focusing on the gain and loss in translation, she highlights “the cross fertilisation of ideas” (2014, 162) and new forms of creative expression of non-normative sexualities. Andrea Bachner’s observation of Sinophone queer texts in translation, however, is less optimistic than Wu’s. In “Globally Queer? Taiwanese Homotextualities in Translation,” Bachner (2017) points out that “queer-themed Sinophone texts still find their place in the very limited market of Chinese literature in English translation” (84). Nonetheless, she believes that Sinophone queer texts’ journey to a Western/Euro-American context will raise non-Sinophone awareness of “(in)visibility of certain world literary contexts” (84) and open up a transcultural queer space. As is highlighted above, various attempts at analyzing the translated Sinophone queer literary texts indicate that non-normative sexual representations can serve as a lens for understanding and evaluating individual translations. Moreover, comparative studies, which link literary productions with translation criticism and transcultural practices, give localized, minoritized expressions a new visibility.

Future directions Over the last two decades of social and cultural changes in major Sinophone places like China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan, gender and sexual diversity have become more visible and generated heated discussions. Academic and public debates about taxonomy, translingual implications, and transcultural ramifications of contested sexualities in the Sinophone world, as Tze-lan Deborah Sang (2003) notes, make sex “one of the most prominent discursive formations and commercial enterprises” (168) in the post-Mao era. As those ongoing conversations start to intersect with less studied history, textual features of queer literature, and new media, new research areas will emerge accordingly. One of the fields for future research is translation history. I am not referring to the translation of homosexuality in the May Fourth and New Culture period, which has been studied quite thoroughly by Tze-lan Deborah Sang (2003), Wenqing Kang (2009), Howard Chiang (2011, 2015), and, most recently, Ting Guo (2016). Instead, the few decades between 1949 and the 1980s, during which “public mention of homosexuality was extremely rare in mainland China” (An 1995 cited in Sang 2003, 167), need further examination. Possible research questions include: What kinds of social factors ended the burgeoning translation of European sexology? How was the public discourse of (hetero-/homo-)sexuality changed by Communist partymobilized campaigns? Which acts could be considered as gender transgression and how were they criminalized? How do we historicize or contextualize this era of non-translation in the new millennium? Other research topics may also emerge from the intersection of cultural translation and contemporary Sinophone queer activism. Primary accounts and case studies collected in Queer/Tongzhi China: New Perspectives on Research, Activism and Media Culture (Engebretsen and Schroeder 2015) – including organizing cultural events, creating new media platform, producing documentary archives – can appeal to translation scholars when they attempt to describe and comment on the very recent translation(-al) activities between the Sinophone and the Western/Euro-American world. Translated Sinophone queer literature, as Hui (2016) and Bachner (2017) have illustrated, is an arsenal for translation scholars. In addition to the traditional literary and stylistic approaches that can be used to dissect a text, verbal camp – an aesthetic and affective concept used by Keith 356

Sinicizing non-normative sexualities

Harvey (1998, 2000) when he analyzes American gay novels in French translation – can be adopted to examine the semiotic representation of queerness in Sinophone gay and lesbian literature and how it may be reproduced/distorted in English translation. Research questions include: What are some of the new connotations of queerness when it is appropriated in the East Asian context? Are there new semiotic manifestations in the Chinese-language queer writing that can be added to the repertoire of gay men’s speech, or even contribute to the establishment of a national identity? How does translation as an activity and translated texts as products operate with interlingual textual elaboration? Finally, since digital technology has considerably changed the landscape of audio-visual translation, translation activities of Sinophone LGBT fansub groups can also be an area of study for researchers. As more and more Western/Euro-American queer films – subtitled by fansub groups like QAF – appear in China’s cyberspace, the dynamics of technological democratization, activist translation, and knowledge transfer should be called into attention. Possible research questions include: What strategies are employed by Chinese activist translators in translating foreign queer films? How does translated queer cinema promote the discussions on LGBTQ rights? I have, in this chapter, mapped an intersectional and intercultural field that straddles translation and (trans-)formation of non-normative sexualities in the Sinophone world. The scholarship that I have reviewed either demonstrates the transcultural practices of sinicizing contested sexualities or explores the hybridization of queer and (trans-)national identities in China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. It is clear that translation, as a transcultural movement, an intercultural product, and a multi-functional trope, facilitates the establishment of a paradigm that aims to showcase the multiplicity of non-normative sexualities.

Further reading Baer, Brian James and Klaus Kaindl, eds. 2018. Queering Translation, Translating the Queer: Theory, Practice, Activism. New York and London: Routledge. This anthology, following Queer in Translation that came out earlier, continues to focus on the queer aspects of translation studies. Featuring chapters on queer theorization, queer translation case studies, and the interplay between translation and queer activism, it presents various attempts at scrutinizing the intersection of queer sexualities and translation. Bao, Hongwei. 2018. Queer Comrades: Gay Identity and Tongzhi Activism in Postsocialist China. Copenhagen: NIAS Press. In his latest publication, Bao explores the transformation of gay identity and queer activism in contemporary China, where the socialist spectre and the neoliberalist ideology both negotiate and compete with each other. In addition to textual analysis of queer fiction and personal narratives, the book also presents Bao’s ethnographical research on Chinese urban gay communities. Huang, Hans Tao-Ming. 2011. Queer Politics and Sexual Modernity in Taiwan. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press. In this book, Huang connects literary and social representations of contested sexualities with the politics of national/state culture in post-1949 Taiwan. Adopting Stuart Hall’s history-culture-power rubric, Huang offers an in-depth analysis of Taiwan’s homosexual oppression history, which is intertwined with prostitution and feminist movements. Leung, Helen Hok-Sze. 2008. Undercurrents: Queer Culture and Postcolonial Hong Kong. Vancouver: UBC Press. In this book, Leung demonstrates queer theory’s immense potentiality in examining complex cultural productions from Hong Kong. Embedded with discussions about Hong Kong’s queer and postcolonial spaces, cinematic representations of sexual relations, establishment of an Asian queer icon, and queer self-writing/-translation, the book expands the geopolitical contour of queer studies. Martin, Fran. 2003. Situating Sexualities: Queer Representation in Taiwanese Fiction, Film and Public Culture. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press. 357

Wangtaolue Guo

Martin’s groundbreaking monograph offers a detailed account of a transnational Taiwanese queer culture. Drawing examples from canonical Taiwanese queer novels and films, Martin demonstrates the impacts that shifting economic and political powers have had on the cultural understanding of nonnormative sexualities in Taiwan.

Related topics Translation history, translation sociology, translation and politics, queer activism, transcultural practices

Notes 1 See Jean Delisle and Judith Woodsworth, eds. 2012. Translators Through History. Rev. ed. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. 2 He was also known as Samshasha. 3 In this chapter, I use Pinyin to spell words, names, and phrases in Mandarin Chinese, except when a different conventional or preferred spelling exists, as in Cantonese and Taiwanese names (for instance, Chong Kee Tan and Chou Wah-shan) and other proper names. The ordering of Chinese names follows their conventional forms: surname/family name first, except for people who are known by their anglicized names (for instance, Tze-lan Deborah Sang) or prefer to be addressed in the anglophone tradition (for instance, Wenqing Kang). 4 It was first published in 1946. 5 The five essays all recognized female same-sex attachment. Yet, two conceptualized homogenic love as perversity; two acknowledged its crucial role in refining young female students; the remaining one was relatively neutral. 6 In the epilogue to his book, Hinsch briefly mentions that, in Hong Kong, people used to believe that homosexuality constituted a social perversion, which went against the traditional Chinese moral concepts. 7 It is also known as the Nationalist Party. 8 As Sang’s article has shown, the translated term was tongxing’ai. However, its variant – 同性戀愛 tongxinglian’ai [same-sex love] – was shared by May Fourth intellectuals as well.

References An, K’o-ch’iang. 安克強. 1995. Hong taiyang xia de hei linghun 紅太陽下的黑靈魂 [Black Souls Under the Red Sun]. Taipei: China Times Publishing Company. Apter, Emily. 2013. Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability. London and New York: Verso. Bachner, Andrea. 2017. Globally Queer? Taiwanese Homotextualities in Translation, in Brett Jocelyn Epstein and Robert Gillett, eds., Queer in Translation. London and New York: Routledge, 77–86. Baldo, Michela and Moira Inghilleri. 2018. Cultural Resistance, Female Voices: Translating Subversive and Contested Sexualities, in Sue-Ann Harding and Ovidi Carbonell Cortés, eds., The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Culture. London and New York: Routledge, 296–313. Chen, Li-fen. 2011. Queering Taiwan: In Search of Nationalism’s Other. Modern China, 37(4), 384–421. Available at: www.jstor.org/stable/23053329. Chi, Ta-wei 紀大偉, T’ang-mo Tan 但唐謨, and Ling Hung 洪凌. 1994. Xiaoxiao ku’er baike. 小小酷兒 百科 [A Pocket Encyclopaedia of Ku’er]. Daoyu bianyuan 島嶼邊緣, 10, 47–71. Chiang, Howard. 2011. Epistemic Modernity and the Emergence of Homosexuality in China, in Kevin P. Murphy and Jennifer M. Spear, eds., Historicising Gender and Sexuality. Chichester: Wiley Blackwell, 103–131. Chiang, Howard. 2015. Data of Desire: Translating (Homo)Sexology in Republican China, in Heike Bauer, ed., Sexology and Translation: Cultural and Scientific Encounters Across the Modern World. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 72–90. Chiang, Howard and Yin Wang, eds. 2017. Perverse Taiwan. London and New York: Routledge. Chou, Wah-shan. 2000/2007. Tongzhi: Politics of Same-Sex Eroticism in Chinese Societies. Reprint, New York and London: Routledge. 358

Sinicizing non-normative sexualities

Damm, Jens. 2003. Xing/bie, kuer, guaitai–Postmodernist and ‘Queer’ Approaches in Taiwanese ‘Lifestyle’ Publications of the 1990s, in Christina Neder and Ines Susanne Schilling, eds., Transformation! Innovation? Perspectives on Taiwan Culture. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 203–213. Dikötter, Frank. 1995. Sex, Culture and Modernity in China: Medical Science and the Construction of Sexual Identities in the Early Republican Period. Honolulu, HI: University of Hawaii Press. Engebretsen, Elisabeth L. and William F. Schroeder, eds. 2015. Queer/Tongzhi China: New Perspectives on Research, Activism and Media Cultures. Copenhagen: NIAS Press. Flotow, Luise. von. 2009. Gender and Sexuality, in Mona Baker and Gabriela Saldanha, eds., Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies, 2nd ed. London and New York: Routledge, 122–126. Foucault, Michel. 1978. The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction. Translated from the French by Robert Hurley. New York, NY: Pantheon Books. Furth, Charlotte. 1991. Rev. of Passions of the Cut Sleeve: The Male Homosexual Tradition in China, by Bret Hinsch. The Journal of Asian Studies, 50(4), 911–912. Available at: www.jstor.org/ stable/2058567?seq=1#metadata_info_tab_contents [Accessed 14 Nov. 2019]. Geertz, Clifford. 1973. The Interpretation of Cultures. New York, NY: Basic Books. Guo, Ting. 2016. Translating Homosexuality into Chinese: A Case Study of Pan Guangdan’s Translation of Havelock Ellis’ Psychology of Sex: A Manual for Students (1933). Asian Pacific Translation and Intercultural Studies, 3(1), 47–61. doi: 10.1080/23306343.2015.1129782. Harvey, Keith. 1998. Translating Camp Talk: Gay Identities and Cultural Transfer. The Translator, 4(2), 295–320. Harvey, Keith. 2000. Describing Camp Talk: Language/Pragmatics/Politics. Language and Literature, 9(3), 240–260. Hinsch, Bret. 1990. Passions of the Cut Sleeve: The Male Homosexual Tradition in China. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Ho, Loretta Wing Wah. 2010. Gay and Lesbian Subculture in Urban China. London and New York: Routledge. Hui, Issac Ting-yan. 2016. Re-Negotiating Domesticating and Foreignizing: Bridging The Symposium and Niezi Through the Imagery of Emptiness. Asia Pacific Translation and Intercultural Studies, 3(1), 33–46. Kang, Wenqing. 2009. Obsession: Male Same-Sex Relations in China, 1900–1950. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press. Kong, Travis S. K. 2011. Chinese Male Homosexualities: Memba, Tongzhi and Golden Boy. London and New York: Routledge. Kretschmer, Francis A. 1993. Rev. of Passions of the Cut Sleeve: The Male Homosexual Tradition in China, by Bret Hinsch. The China Quarterly, 135, 594–595. doi: 10.1017/S0305741000014090. Lim, Song Hwee. 2008. How to be Queer in Taiwan: Translation, Appropriation, and the Construction of a Queer Identity in Taiwan, in Fran Martin, Peter A. Jackson, Mark McLelland, and Audrey Yue, eds., Asia Pacific Queer: Rethinking Genders and Sexualities. Urbana and Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press, 235–250. Lim, Song Hwee. 2009. Queer Theory Goes to Taiwan, in Noreen Giffney and Michael O’Rourke, eds., The Ashgate Research Companion to Queer Theory. London: Routledge, 257–275. Lin, Sylvia Li-chun. 2000. Poetic License Vs. Translator’s Responsibility: Translating Notes of a Desolate Man. Translation Review, 59(1), 36–38 [pdf]. Available at: http://pdf.xuebalib.com:1262/xuebalib. com.38707.pdf [Accessed 15 Nov. 2019]. Liu, Lydia H. 1995. Translingual Practice: Literature, National Culture, and Translated Modernity–China, 1900– 1937. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Mackie, Vera and Mark McLelland. 2015. Introduction: Framing Sexuality Studies in East Asia, in Vera Mackie and Mark McLelland, eds., Routledge Handbook of Sexuality Studies in East Asia. Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 1–17. Martin, Fran. 2003. Angel Wings: Contemporary Queer Fiction from Taiwan. Honolulu, HI: University of Hawaii Press. Martin, Fran. 2015. Transnational Queer Sinophone Cultures, in Vera Mackie and Mark McLelland, eds., Routledge Handbook of Sexuality Studies in East Asia. London and New York: Routledge, 35–48. Pym, Anthony. 2014a. Exploring Translation Theories. London and New York: Routledge. Pym, Anthony. 2014b. Method in Translation History. London and New York: Routledge. Renn, Joachim. 2006. Indirect Access: Complex Settings of Communication and the Translation of Governance, in Arturo Parada and Oscar Diaz Fouces, eds., Sociology of Translation. Vigo: Servizo de Publicacións Universidade de Vigo. Rofel, Lisa. 2007. Desiring China: Experiments in Neoliberalism, Sexuality, and Public Culture. Durham and London: Duke University Press. 359

Wangtaolue Guo

Sang, Tze-lan Deborah. 1999. Translating Homosexuality: The Discourse of Tongxing’ai in Republican China (1912–1949), in Lydia H. Liu, ed., Tokens of Exchange: The Problem of Translation in Global Circulations. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 276–304. Sang, Tze-lan Deborah. 2003. The Emerging Lesbian: Female Same-Sex Desire in Modern China. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. Simon, Rita J. and Brooks, Alison. 2009. Gay and Lesbian Communities the World Over. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Tan, Chong Kee. 2001. Transcending Sexual Nationalism and Colonialism: Cultural Hybridization as Process of Sexual Politics in ’90s Taiwan, in John C. Hawley, ed., Postcolonial, Queer: Theoretical Intersections. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 123–137. Vitiello, Giovanni. 2011. The Libertine’s Friend: Homosexuality and Masculinity in Late Imperial China. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. Volpp, Sophie. 2001. Classifying Lust: The Seventeenth-Century Vogue for Male Love. Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, 61(1), 77–117. Wolf, Michaela. 2007. Introduction: The Emergence of a Sociology of Translation, in Michaela Wolf and Alexandra Fukari, eds., Constructing a Sociology of Translation. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1–36. Wu, Cuncun. 2004. Homoerotic Sensibilities in Late Imperial China. London and New York: Routledge Curzon. Wu, Michelle Ming-chih. 2014. Negotiating Culture Space and Identity: The Translation and Analysis of Tongzhi and Ku-er Fiction. PhD. dissertation, University of Surrey. Xiaomingxiong 小明雄. 1984. Zhongguo tongxing’ai shilu 中國同性愛史錄 [History of Homosexuality in China]. Hong Kong: Pink Triangle Press.

360

Part IV

Gender in grammar, technologies, and audiovisual translation

27 Grammatical gender and translation A cross-linguistic overview Bruna Di Sabato and Antonio Perri

Grammatical gender as an abstract system “Gender” is a polysemous term, often considered slippery and ambiguous, since it can be seen in both sociocultural terms and in terms of language as an abstract system. In this chapter, gender will be addressed as a grammatical category, diversely conceived across different languages. The traditional categorization, on the basis of descriptive linguistics, is between languages possessing grammatical gender and languages possessing natural gender. Some studies report that 56% of the world’s languages do not have grammatical gender or noun-class systems (Trudgill 2011, quoting Dahl 2004; Corbett 1991): “grammatical gender” and “noun-class system” are here used synonymously in the wake of Corbett 1991 (see Dixon 2002). This formal feature implies that any noun pertains to a certain class, generally masculine, feminine, or neuter (if present) and this determines gender agreement, i.e. parts of speech such as determiners, adjectives, and pronouns will take the same gender. In natural gender systems, like English, nouns (and related pronouns) may express the sex (or animacy) of the referent, but other parts of speech are not modified by gender agreement. Such natural gender systems display many different criteria: human/non-human, male/female (like English), animate/inanimate (like most Algonquinian languages), count/noncount (as in Caucasian languages) are some possible examples (Corbett 1991, 2014; Wagner 2005). Canonically, these two language systems are best represented by the Indo-European languages of Europe and Asia on the one hand (examples are Italian, French, German, Spanish, Russian; Hindi, and Urdu among the Asian languages), and, on the other, by those languages which do not express gender through agreement (different macro-families such as Austronesian, Finno-Ugric, Bantu, Sino-Tibetan, and others as well as English, the best known in the Indo-European family). Gender as a linguistic category is viewed either as a “marginal grammatical category” (Trudgill 2011, 162), “totally non-functional” (Trudgill 1999, 148), not marking “any real-world entity or category” nor serving “any communicative need” (McWhorter 2001, 129), or it is seen as possessing (an albeit partial) relevance in terms of meaning-making, also in those languages possessing natural gender (Deutscher 2011; McConnell Ginet 2014). The first position perceives the noun-class system as a “useless” throwback to the past which can be justified historically, since “We know that languages drag along with them a certain amount of ‘unnecessary’ historical baggage” (Trudgill 1999, 148. Also in Trudgill 2011, 162). As an example, a few instances 363

Bruna Di Sabato and Antonio Perri

of gendered nouns for inanimate objects still persist in English, as is the case of the much-cited ship, treated as a “she” in the maritime world. The second position – i.e. the view of a semantically relevant role of gender in any language – is represented by studies in the field of historical linguistics that foreground the presence of grammatical gender features in many languages now said to express gender according to “humanness” and the “biological sex of the referent” (Romaine 1999, 73); in English, for instance, some minor traces of the Old English case system survive (Curzan 2003) as in the gender concord expressed by anaphoric pronouns such as third person personal – e.g. he (m.) vs. she (f.) vs it (n.) –, possessive – his (m.) vs. her (f.) vs. its (n.) –, and reflexive pronouns – himself (m.) vs. herself (f.) vs. itself (n.). English morphology also expresses gender through the use of some feminine suffixes like -ess to form derivative nouns: binary couples of nouns, e.g. hostess (m. host), actress (m. actor), comply with the criterion of human/non-human when referring to human males and females. Feminine suffixes can also be employed in relation to certain animals (e.g. leopardess; lioness) and in some cases, the personal pronouns “he” or “she” can be used as if they were human beings. From a semantic point of view, English vocabulary hosts some masculine/feminine compound nouns, such as chairman/chairwoman, policeman/policewoman; and binary couples of lexemes whose antonymy is generally seen as related to the sex of the referent (like man/woman, bachelor/spinster, brother/sister). As in many other languages, nouns categorized as masculine in English have conventionally been used as “generic,” thus referring both to men and women, as in “The relationship between man and his dog,” where man stands generically for “human being” thus comprising women as well. Such generic or unmarked uses of masculine forms are present in many languages, and have been increasingly considered forms of sexist language. Alternatives like neutral nouns (for instance, in English humans instead of mankind, people instead of men), or reference to both pronouns as in the spelling s/he or to the unmarked plural they are increasingly preferred (more on this point will be added in the following sections of this chapter). Generic, unmarked, sex-indefinite language items – such as the preceding examples humans and people – have caused linguists to distinguish between a covert (on the basis of Whorf ’s 1956 definition) gender of nouns and an overt gender of pronouns (although these taxonomies have been criticized due to lack of clarity. See, for example, Wagner 2005 referring to Quirk et al. 1985): the English term friend is “covert,” for example, because it does not carry a gender marker while the Italian terms amico/amica, which mark gender, are not. However, if a pronoun is used to refer to the nouns friend/amico/amica, such use will necessarily be overtly gendered (e.g. “She was a good friend/Era una buona amica”). The option “notional gender” proposed by McConnell Ginet (2014), based on previous work by Nevalainen and Raumolin-Brunberg (1994), seems particularly appropriate to refer to the impact of concepts, ideas and ideologies on speakers’ choices regarding third person pronouns in languages such as English, and other personal pronouns in Japanese, for instance. McConnell-Ginet argues that in languages based on natural gender, the speaker’s choice of third person pronoun is as dependent on sex itself as it is on concepts and ideas (notions) about sex. It is, in fact, easier to understand the way gender “assignment” via pronouns shifts over time and over space (as the same language may present regional variations) if we move beyond the dichotomy of natural vs grammatical gender and look at social context. A case in point are alternative pronouns proposed precisely to overcome the gender binary, which are discussed later.

Historical perspectives This description of gender in the English language, though merely outlined, is hopefully enough to show that gender in the grammar of languages is (1) multifaceted because even in languages 364

Grammatical gender and translation

which do not possess a noun-class system it can “lurk” in a covert manner; and (2) variable from a diachronic point of view like any other aspect of a language, therefore giving rise to debate and theorization, either aimed at explaining changes from a historical perspective or trying to sketch synchronic patterns of the category, ranging from the more prescriptive to the more descriptive ones. For instance, the theoretical discussion regarding the nature and structure of gender systems in Proto-Indo-European languages (PIE) dates back to the 19th century (Luraghi 2011) – when a shift from a two-gender animacy-based system to a three-gender sex-based categorization seems to have taken place (Brugmann 1891) – ; but it is mainly in 20th-century descriptive linguistics that gender is definitively singled out when morphologically marked. However, since both the structural approaches of post-Saussurean schools in Europe and American distributionalism showed little interest in contrastive methods of language analysis and translation theory, gender long continued to be a marginal issue when describing language structures. Indeed, scant attention is paid to the issue in seminal works such as those by Leonard Bloomfield and Louis Hjelmslev. In his voluminous Language, Bloomfield (1933) treats gender in the context of selection and concordance between taxemes specifying that genders are “arbitrary classes, each of which demands different congruence-forms in certain kinds of accompanying words.” Bloomfield also briefly deals with grammatical gender in Chapter 16, “Form-classes and Lexicon” (1933, 271–272), but only to restate that “The gender-categories of most Indo-European languages [. . .] do not agree with anything in the practical world, and this is true of most such classes” (271). The Danish linguist Hjelmslev expressed an almost identical (and equally generic) view in his textbook Sproget written in the 1940s (but published in 1963): when discussing the number of elements displayed by different languages in specific categories, he noted that there are languages (Danish, for example) with up to four genders, and other languages (such as those of the Bantu family) which present up to 16 genders. Jakobson departs from the aforementioned views arguing that “even such a category as grammatical gender, often cited as merely formal, plays a great role in mythological attitudes of a speech community” ( Jakobson 1959, 237), and then quotes a number of lexical cases in which “the symbolism of gender” was particularly relevant despite the equivalence in “cognitive values” of words (237–238). His position can be attributed to his strong literary (and critical) interests, and the consequent focus on translation, which led to contrastive analyses and inevitably focus the linguist’s attention on differences between language systems. Such a broader, intercultural perspective is still present today and manifest in the crossfertilization of multiple disciplinary fields (including literature and literary criticism) prompted by postcolonial studies and translation studies, on the one hand, and the rise of the cognitive paradigm in linguistics on the other. This has modified the widespread attitude towards the topic (though, still not significantly in theoretical linguistics), finally bringing the issue of gender to the fore. For instance, in a review of contemporary literary production in Yiddish – a language usually displaying a three-gender system, and some regular patterns in gender assignment –, Katz (2004) records a transition from one standard – “The pre-war middle-of-the-road standard that encompasses many religious as well as secular publications” – to what he defines as the “literary Yiddish of mid-twenty-first century Hasidism worldwide” (389). Among the changes he detects in written production, Katz mentions a process of grammar simplification, “with a minimum of gender and cases” (389). This phenomenon may be framed within a more general process involving experimental uses of language, grammar and spelling due to the mutual exchange and intermingling between dialect and standard language, which evolved into a new standard Yiddish due to the use of the Internet by young people, as well as by members of the Hasidic 365

Bruna Di Sabato and Antonio Perri

community. Experimental uses of language, also through (and thanks to) new forms of computer mediated communication, are indeed all factors which influence gender usage.

Critical issues When investigating gender as a possible source of connotative associations, one should always take into account the multiple dimensions of language-specific categories, such as the “classical” noun classes in Bantu languages previously alluded to (Demuth 2000; Nurse 2006) and labelled by linguists with conventional class-numbers. For example, an intrinsically ‘masculine’ word such as the Swahili mboo (“penis,” plural miboo) belonging to the so-called class 3 for singular form (and class 4 for plural) is a member of a class which includes the following nouns: (1) names of trees, (2) names of plants, (3) body parts, and (4) other inanimates. It could be inferred that even if a Swahili native speaker is partly unaware of the fact that mboo has the same class prefix [m-] as, say, mtofaa “apple tree,” mmea “plant, vegetable,” mji “city,” mlango “door” ( Johnson 1955), mental associations between the various members of this class may well occur, and be exploited by speakers in discourse. The lively intercultural and interlinguistic debate within the field of feminist studies, makes connections between this overlap of concepts – formal and semantic – and the partial equivalence of forms and meanings across languages (see for example Flotow 1997). Joan Scott aptly observes that: “in many European languages the binary [sex and gender] did not exist; instead, the same word was used for sex and gender. In other instances, the biological and the social referents carried so many other connotations that feminists looking for a linguistic equivalent had to choose between unsatisfactory alternatives” (Flotow and Scott 2016, 361). Thus, the introduction of the English neologism “gender” had the consequence of confusing received notions of sex, gender and sexuality. Such issues related to biological sex and social gender are cleverly captured in the expression “sociosex” invented by Kornelia Slavova (Flotow 2019; and Slavova in this Handbook) and reported by Kathy Davis (2007) as a neologism present in the Bulgarian translation of Our Bodies, Ourselves (see also Bogic 2017). Suzanne Romaine’s view of the grammatical gender of languages like Italian as carrying “syntactic consequences throughout the grammar” (Romaine 1999, 73), while the natural gender of languages such as English has consequences only at a semantic level, may seem simplistic. However, it clearly foregrounds an aspect that is very relevant from the translator’s point of view: the passage from a grammatical gender system to a natural gender system and vice versa may have a decisive impact on the expression of meanings related to the biological sex/gender of the referent(s) and to other connotative meanings of the source text expressed through witty uses of language and the evocative power of some referents. Examples abound and will be given in the following section (for an overview of feminist attitudes towards grammatical gender and meaning across languages see Leonardi 2007, esp. chapter 4, 95–99).

Gender in translation: general issues On the basis of the preceding considerations, it is possible to agree with Bonnie McElhinny (2003) when she argues that one can consider the categories employed in a language to express gender grammatically as arbitrary and ruled by convention only if the relationship between gender and sex remains unacknowledged. But this cannot be the case in translation processes or, more generally, when languages and their gender systems are compared as they move from one language to another. The fact of being gendered or ungendered necessarily foregrounds the differences between the grammatical systems of the language pair involved and forces the 366

Grammatical gender and translation

translator to make informed gender selections: for example, the Italian translation of “My friend was late” inevitably obliges the translator to opt either for the masculine equivalent amico or the feminine equivalent amica (see also the examples in the preceding sections). This is in line with McConnell-Ginet’s preference for the concept of notional gender mentioned earlier with reference to English third person pronouns: in languages like English which possess a natural gender system, pronominal usage can be understood only considering “the ideas about sex and sexuality current at a given time” (Mc Connell-Ginet 2014, 6). Such positions are further confirmed by the current trend which views the gender pronouns conventionally referring to men and women (like the personal pronoun he/she in English) as inadequate, because unable to refer to those who don’t identify with this gender binary. In English the use of the singular they has been offered as an alternative gender neutral and/or gender inclusive pronoun (also defined as “unisex they,” “common-gender,” or “epicene” pronoun). Though criticized by grammarians because incorrect, its use has a long-established tradition dating back to 1375 (Baron 2018 provides a quick but revealing diachronic excursus on such use. For an exhaustive review of the use of “singular they” see Wales 1996, especially 5.3.). Love in The Cambridge Companion to Gay and Lesbian Writing (2011) also lists other gender-neutral alternatives such as s/he (pronounced “shuhee”), ze (pronounced “zhee”), but it is sufficient to surf the Web to discover many others. Other attempts to degenderize discourse to meet a new conception of identity are also common in languages possessing grammatical gender. For instance, the French Écriture inclusive movement proposes the use of ille, ul, ol as ungendered subject pronouns (Haddad 2017, 5), among many other changes. The example of pronoun use illustrates how languages react differently to sociocultural change, and in the case of gender the reaction depends both on the differing categorization of gender at a grammatical level and, especially, on sociocultural attitudes towards such issues. Translation particularly highlights such differences between languages. The volatility in the perception of gender due to all these connotations – be they sociocultural or linguistic – is not easy to deal with: this is why the all but neutral process of translating between languages with different gender systems might be seen as one instance of the limits of translatability. Without reaching such an extreme viewpoint, what is certain is that translation strategies must somehow also account for the presence in the source text of what Sherry Simon would define as “psychological” or “metaphorical” gender (1996, 17–18) and Luce Irigaray (1985, 281–292) as “sexuation du discours,” i.e. an intentional device through which the reader is led to infer covert meanings and implications. The perspective offered by Nadia Louar (2008) is quite intriguing: as a speaker of French, she wonders how to express the difference she feels between the English gender and the French genre. These supposedly synonymous terms refer to two different constructions: “De gender à genre, nous passons, en effet, non seulement d’une langue à une autre mais aussi d’une réalité à une autre. Le genre en français s’inscrit dans une construction linguistique; gender en anglais, nous le savons, est avant tout une construction sociale. [From English gender to French genre we move effectively not only from one language to another but also from one form of reality to another. Whereas genre in French pertains to a linguistic construction, gender in English, as we well know, is above all a social construction]” (Louar 2008, 3; our translation). This is true of many different pairs of languages engaged in translation processes. Gender markers may indeed be used to create special effects or to express hidden meanings in languages with natural gender, and it is occasionally puzzling to understand if and why an author resorts to a deliberate, particular, use of them, thus specifically recalling and/or stressing the semantic and cultural import of gender. A few examples of gender issues mostly taken from literary works, from both source and target texts, may be useful here to illustrate the significant gender choices and their outcomes in the translated text. For instance, gender may be 367

Bruna Di Sabato and Antonio Perri

foregrounded in absentia: in literary texts authors resort to a lack of gender marking to create a sense of mystery. Gender is not revealed in some first-person narratives like Edgar Poe’s The Tell-Tale Heart (1843), where the author succeeds in avoiding all gender markers (there are no revealing nouns or pronouns), thus making it impossible to establish whether the narrator is male or female. Interpretations and commentaries on the text have generally assumed that the narrator is male (artist Bill Fountain being an exception, since he features a female character as the narrator of the title story in the 1995 collection of graphic versions of Poe’s stories by Mojo Press entitled The Tell Tale Heart.) For a translator, the question of gender ambiguity cannot be ignored. Avoiding gender marking may be difficult in English, but it becomes even more difficult in a language with gender agreement; for instance, gendered participles and adjectives in Italian definitively disambiguate the gender of the narrator unless specific translation solutions are sought out. The incipit of Poe’s story and the renowned Italian translation by Elio Vittorini and Delfino Cinelli (1937), which genderizes the narrator, is enough to elicit this point: “TRUE! nervous, very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am; but why WILL you say that I am mad?”/“Sul serio! Io sono nervoso, molto nervoso, e lo sono sempre stato. Ma perché pretendete che io sia pazzo?” “Nervoso” (“nervous”), “stato” (“been”), “pazzo” (“mad”) all carry the masculine inflection, which implies that the narrator is male. The subversive and deconstructive narrative device of maintaining the indeterminacy of the narrator’s gender has been used, more recently, in several works by postmodernist British female writers, for example in Ali Smith’s Erosive (2004) and Jeanette Winterson’s Written on the Body (1992). An analysis of the latter’s Italian translation (by Giovanna Marrone) in relation to the problems posed by the need to maintain the narrator’s ambigendered nature throughout the novel, attests to the many creative solutions adopted by the translator: important among them the use of epicene adjectives and epicene nouns, nominalization, paraphrasing, impersonalizing personal forms and making passive forms active. Some pertinent examples are: “unreconstructed as I am” (97), which becomes “un essere assolutamente destrutturato” (101 in the Italian translation; thus avoiding the choice between the masculine form of the adj. destrutturato and the feminine form destrutturata); “Had I never been kissed before” (81), which becomes “Avevo mai ricevuto un bacio?” (84), thus avoiding the choice between the masculine form baciato and the feminine baciata. (Further examples can be found in Cordisco 2011; Cordisco and Di Sabato 2010, and a similar analysis of the French translation of Written on the Body is found in Fort 2008). Indeed, as gender operates at a semantic level well beyond the mere respect for grammatical rules it continues to serve as a device often exploited in narratives, especially in LGTBQ contexts. Gender throwbacks are also significant in the aforementioned case of personified animals in fables and other types of narratives. The English version of the Italian fable by Leonardo Da Vinci Il ragno e l’uva (The Spider and the Grapes) is particularly odd in this respect: the spider is personified as a ‘she’ in the English translation (“It seemed to her that she had found a most convenient spot to spread her snare, and having settled herself on it”). In Italian ragno is masculine but, of course, the use of the masculine marker in a language which possesses a gender case system does not imply the spider in question is male at all: the Italian reader is led to perceive the spider as being of indeterminate sex since its grammatical gender does not explicate the animal’s natural gender. Thus, by choosing the feminine among the three possible alternatives (the others being the masculine or the neuter), the English translator adds semantic meaning to the target text while the neutral pronouns it/its would have weakened the story’s anthropomorphic appeal for the English reader (Dawes and Di Sabato 2014). Such considerations are also relevant in the field of multimodal translation: the localization of advertisements, for instance, may also determine changes in the non-verbal component, i.e. 368

Grammatical gender and translation

requiring an intersemiotic translation indispensable to obtain the same effect on the target audience. It goes without saying that the visual component remains most frequently unchanged thus obliging translators to find appropriate solutions for the verbal component, a test of creativity for all those working in the field. A case in point is the Italian translation of the German slogan used at the end of the 1960s by the petrol company Esso for TV commercials and ads – Pack den Tiger in den Tank, ‘Put the tiger into the petrol tank’ (the UK version was Put a tiger in your tank). The masculine gender of the German der Tiger corresponds to the Italian feminine la tigre (f.). Contrary to what has been suggested by Hartwig Kalverkämper (1979), the German word was not substituted, in the target headline, by the Italian masculine il leopardo; rather, the advertisers decided to creatively switch the gender of the Italian la tigre (helped by the morphological ending of tigr-e, the suffix being devoid of any explicit gender mark). The slogan, then, became Metti un tigre nel motore, with the male determinant un before tigre taking the place of the feminine una. Now, in order to understand the rationale behind this translation one needs to take into account the visual component: both in the German and the Italian commercials the tiger is depicted in cartoon form, though it undergoes an anthropomorphic transformation in order to resemble an athletic man, standing up and flexing his muscles. The “grammatically transgressive” Italian translation was doubtless fostered by the need to preserve the ideological stance expressed by the images, whose power and distractive content is seldom touched in translation practices (Flotow and Josephy-Hernández 2019). A more recent linguistic strategy follows the direction of a “degenderized” advertising language, which often resorts to the generic, unmarked, sex-indefinite uses of English mentioned earlier: for example the catchy slogan of the 2016 Benetton campaign – Clothes for humans – is kept in English in the Italian and French versions since in Italian and French the noun form corresponding to human (umano, humain) is used less frequently and the generic formula would be gli esseri umani/les êtres humains – thus also calling into play a more formal register (as well as a masculine class noun). By using one single English slogan across all their markets, the advertisers were able to show real people of all shapes and sizes and in so doing they “queered” the binary heteronormative gender implications that would have come out of the grammatical constraints of some target languages. Indeed, any form of translation, be it from a diachronic, synchronic, interlingual or intersemiotic perspective, illustrates how the effects of a translator’s work in identifying gender aspects of a source text, and in determining the ideological impact of gender connotations in both the source and target text, are all but neutral. Gender switching along a timeline is exemplified by Nissen 2002 with the emblematic example of secretary, denoting an occupation which would have been perceived as male in the 19th century but which today is widely perceived as female. In grammatically gendered languages, a masculine/feminine alternative may exist (for instance, secretary corresponds to the Italian masculine segretario or feminine segretaria): the translation of nouns denoting occupations and/or institutional roles is another instance of the semantic and ideological consequences of a translator’s choices when passing from one linguacultural scenario to another. Sociocultural biases have always influenced gender-related language production and nowadays provide fertile ground for debate at a social and political level in many national and international contexts.

Gender in translation: future directions Hopefully, the aforementioned considerations have illustrated that any occasion of language contact – in translation or any other type of communicative event – will inevitably increase awareness of the many gender-bound associations in actual language use: the phenomenon of “genderization,” which emerges both in languages with grammatical gender and in those 369

Bruna Di Sabato and Antonio Perri

without, therefore necessarily calls for a deliberate expressive choice. The following points illustrate some of the possible future trends of studies in the field of gender as a grammatical category in combination with translation theory and practice: 1

Research in the field of grammatical gender and/in translation will benefit from a closer attention to constructivist and anthropological approaches to gender, thus going beyond the basic overlap between gender as a linguistic category and “biological gender,” namely the referential assignment of a gendered identity to anatomically sexuated beings on the basis of their physical morphology (Bucholz 2001). 2 Assuming that both in non-gendered languages and in gendered languages ‘natural/biological’ or referential gender is a social construct (also perceived as ‘psychological’ or ‘metaphorical,’ Simon 1996; cf. also Schiller 2014), contrastive translation studies may shed new light upon different ways of conceptualizing gender across languages and therefore cultures. For instance, the debate on the use of nouns denoting occupations and/or professional or institutional roles in institutional and official documents has recently re-emerged in many countries, with different outcomes. One of the most eloquent examples is the aforementioned French movement “Écriture inclusive” which promotes changes in the orthography of French (Haddad 2017, 5). Language generally “resists” any imposed change, but such initiatives are evidence of an open debate which cannot be ignored: all over the AngloAmerican/European world, professionals working in a plurilingual dimension are having to make choices related to gender agreement on the basis of sociocultural contextual features. In this contemporary and multilingual environment most speakers know more than one language. In some cases, bilingual speakers operate between languages with different gender systems, which doubtless increases their awareness of sex and gender as language categories. 3 Therefore, investigations from the perspective of bilingualism could complement research work on translation and gender seen as an abstract system of language. This is already the case with a number of studies on the “gender interference effect” of L1 on L2 in the field of picture naming and comprehension tasks when the gender of nouns or noun phrases do not match (see Bordag 2004; Bordag and Pechmann 2007 and the unpublished works quoted therein). Further studies (Bordag and Pechmann 2008) illustrate, however, that interference factors affecting gender retrieval are not present in the field of translation thus advocating the need for further experiments on processes occurring when moving from one language to another. Extensive future investigation is thus required in this field through an interdisciplinary lens.

Related Topics Feminist translation, gender and language, translation and gender, feminist linguistics, gender and grammar, intersemiotic translation, morphology and semantics.

Further readings Hellinger, Marlis and Hadumod Bußmann, eds. 2001/2002/2003. Gender Across Languages: The Linguistic Representation of Women and Men, vol. 1, 2, 3. Amsterdam: Johns Benjamins. Hellinger, Marlis and Heiko Motschembacher, eds. 2015. Gender Across Languages: The Linguistic Representation of Women and Men, vol. 4. Amsterdam: Johns Benjamins. This four-volume reference work (the first three published between 2001 and 2003, and a fourth volume added in 2015) provides systematic descriptions of various categories of gender (grammatical, lexical, referential, social) in 42 languages of diverse genetic, typological, and sociocultural backgrounds. 370

Grammatical gender and translation

Corbett, Greville G., ed. 2014. The Expression of Gender. Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter Mouton. An edited volume by an expert and prolific author in the field of gender which shows the many different perspectives of this issue, from the morphosyntactic to the psycholinguistic; from the main to minority languages. Deutscher, Guy. 2011. Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages. London: Arrow Books and Random House. Cross-linguistic issues related to gender are lightly presented in Part 2 of this witty volume. Titjen, Felicity. 2018. Language and Gender. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. One of the many possible readings on gender in English: Titjen aptly shows how English can mark words for gender in ways other than the use of pronouns – i.e. by adding suffixes, by asymmetry or by associating job roles with a particular gender. Audring, Jenny. 2016. Gender, in Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Linguistics. Available at: http://linguistics. oxfordre.com/view/10.1093/acrefore/9780199384655.001.0001/acrefore-9780199384655-e-43? mediaType=Article Online Publication Date [Accessed Jul. 2016]. The entry ‘Gender’ in the Oxford Encyclopedia represents an exhaustive first reference easy to consult, accessible online.

Note Antonio Perri is the author of the first section of this text, up to the segment entitled “Gender in Translation: General Issues” and Bruna Di Sabato is responsible for the second half of the chapter. (LvF).

References Baron, Dennis. 2018. A Brief History of Singular “They”. Oxford English Dictionary. Available at: https:// public.oed.com/blog/a-brief-history-of-singular-they/. Bloomfield, Leonard. 1933. Language. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Bogic, Anna. 2017. Translating into Democracy: The Politics of Translation, Our Bodies, Ourselves, and the “Other Europe”, in Luise von Flotow and Farzaneh Farahzad, eds., Translating Women: Different Voices and New Horizons. New York: Routledge, 56–75. Bordag, Denisa. 2004. Interaction of L1 and L2 Systems at the Level of Grammatical Encoding: Evidence from Picture Naming, in Susan Foster-Cohen, Michael Sharwood Smith, Antonella Sorace, and Mitsuhiko Ota, eds., EUROSLA Yearbook 4. Amsterdam: Benjamins, 203–230. Bordag, Denisa and Thomas Pechmann. 2007. Factors Influencing L2 Gender Processing. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 10, 299–314. Bordag, Denisa and Thomas Pechmann. 2008. Grammatical Gender in Translation. Second Language Research, 24(2), 139–166. Available at: www.jstor.org/stable/43103759 [Accessed 10 Jan. 2018]. Brugmann, Karl. 1891. Zur Frage der Entstehung des grammatischen Geschlechtes. Beiträge zur Geschichte der deutschen Sprache und Literatur (PBB), 15, 523–531. Bucholz, Mary. 2001. Gender, in Alessandro Duranti, ed., Key Terms in Language and Culture. Malden: Blackwell, 75–78. Corbett, Greville G. 1991. Gender. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Corbett, Greville G. 2014. Gender Typology, in Greville Corbett ed., The Expression of Gender. Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter Mouton, 87–130. Cordisco, Mikaela. 2011. Translating Gender Ambiguity in Narrative: Jeanette Winterson’s Written on the Body, in Oriana Palusci, ed., Traduttrici: Female Voices Across Languages. Trento: Tangram, 279–288. Cordisco, Mikaela and Bruna Di Sabato. 2010. Questioni di genere: difficoltà e soluzioni traduttive nel passaggio dalla lingua inglese alla lingua italiana, in Bruna Di Sabato and Flora de Giovanni, eds., Tradurre in pratica. Napoli-Roma: Edizioni Scientifiche Italiane, 141–162. Curzan, Anne. 2003. Gender Shifts in the History of English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dahl, Östen. 2004. The Growth and Maintenance of Linguistic Complexity. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: Benjamins. Davis, Kathy. 2007. The Making of “Our Bodies, Ourselves”: How Feminism Travels Across Borders. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. 371

Bruna Di Sabato and Antonio Perri

Dawes, Barbara and Bruna Di Sabato. 2014. His . . . tory, Her . . . story: Translation as a Clue to Enhance Gender Competence in Foreign Language Learning. Rassegna Italiana di Linguistica Applicata, 46(3), 205–224. Demuth, Katherine. 2000. Bantu Noun Class Systems: Loan Word and Acquisition Evidence of Semantic Productivity, in Gunter Senft, ed., Classification Systems. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 270–292. Deutscher, Guy. 2011. Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages. London: Arrow Books and Random House. Dixon, Robert M. W. 2002. Australian Languages: Their Nature and Development. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Flotow, Luise Von. 1997. Translation and Gender: Translating in the “era of Feminism”. London and New York: Routledge. Flotow, Luise Von. 2019. Translation, in Robin Truth Goodman, ed., The Bloomsbury Handbook of 21stCentury Feminist Theory. London and New York: Bloomsbury, 229–243. Flotow, Luise Von and Daniel E. Josephy-Hernández. 2019. Gender in audiovisual Translation Studies: Advocating for Gender Awareness, in Luis Perez-Gonzalez, ed., The Routledge Handbook of Visual Translation Studies, Chap. 19. London and New York: Routledge, 296–311. Flotow, Luise Von and Joan Scott. 2016. Gender Studies and Translation Studies “Entre braguette” – Connecting the Transdisciplines, in Yves Gambier and Luc van Doorslaer, eds., Border Crossings: Translation Studies and Other Disciplines. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: Benjamins, 349–374. Fort, Camille. 2008. Traduire le neutre sans neutraliser le littéraire: Written on the Body de Jeanette Winterson et In Transit de Brigid Brophy. Palimpsestes, 21. Available at: http://palimpsestes.revues.org/72 [Accessed 19 Mar. 2018]. Haddad, Raphaël. 2017. Manuel d’écriture inclusive–Édité par l’Agence de communication d’influence Mots-Clés. Paris: Épices and Chocolat. Available at: www.haut-conseil-egalite.gouv.fr/ [Accessed 19 Mar. 2018]. Hjelmslev, Louis. 1963. Sproget. En introduktion. Charlottenlund: The Nature Method Center. Irigaray, Luce. 1985. Parler n’est jamais neutre. Paris: Ed. de Minuit. Jakobson, Roman. 1959. Linguistic Aspects of Translation, in Reuben A. Brower, ed., On Translation. Harvard: Harvard University Press, 232–239. Johnson, Frederick. 1939/1955. A Standard Swahili-English Dictionary. Inter-Territorial Language Committee for the East African Dependencies. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kalverkämper, Hartwig. 1979. Quo Vadis Linguistica? – Oder: Der feministische Mumpsismus in der Linguistik. Linguistische Berichte, 63, 84–102. Katz, Dovid. 2004. Words on File. The Unfinished Story of Yiddish. Cambridge, MA: Basic Books. Leonardi, Vanessa. 2007. Gender and Ideology in Translation: Do Women and Men Translate Differently? Bern: Peter Lang. Louar, Nadia. 2008. Notre Dame du Queer ou du Mauvais Genre en Traduction. Palimpsestes, 21. Available at: http://palimpsestes.revues.org/72 [Accessed 19 Mar. 2018]. Love, Heather. 2011. Transgender Fiction and Politics, in Hugh Stevens, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Gay and Lesbian Writing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 148–164. Luraghi, Silvia. 2011. The Origin of the Proto-Indoeuropean Gender System: Typological Considerations. Folia Linguistica, 45(2), 435–464. McConnell-Ginet, Sally. 2014. Gender and Its Relation to Sex: The Myth of Natural Gender, in Greville G. Corbett, ed., The Expression of Gender. Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter Mouton, 3–38. McElhinny, Bonnie. 2003. Theorizing Gender in Sociolinguistics and Linguistic Anthropology, in Janet Holmes and Miriam Meyerhoff, eds., The Handbook of Language and Gender. Oxford: Blackwell, 21–43. McWhorter, John H. 2001. The Power of Babel: A Natural History of Language. New York: Times Books. Nevalainen, Terttu and Helena Raumolin-Brunberg. 1994. Its Strength and the Beauty of It: The Standardization of the Third Person Neuter Possessive in Early Modern English, in Dieter Stein and Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade, eds., Towards a Standard English, 1600–1800. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 171–216. Nissen, Uwe K. 2002. Aspects of Translating Gender. Linguistik Online, 11, 25–37. Available at: https://bop. unibe.ch/linguistik-online/article/view/914/1592 [Accessed 10 Jan. 2019]. Nurse, Derek. 2006. Bantu Languages, in Keith Brown, ed., Encyclopaedia of Language and Linguistics, 2nd ed., vol. 1. Oxford: Elsevier, 679–685.

372

Grammatical gender and translation

Poe, Edgar A. 1843/2006. The Tell-Tale Heart, in J. Gerald Kennedy, ed., The Portable Edgar Allan Poe. London: Penguin Classics. It. ed. 1937. Il cuore rivelatore, in Edgar A. Poe, Racconti e arabeschi. Translated by Elio Vittorini and Delfino Cinelli. Milano: Mondadori. Quirk, Randolph, Sidney Greenbaum, Geoffrey Leech, and Jan Svartvik. 1985. A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language. London: Longman. Romaine, Suzanne. 1999. Communicating Gender. Mahwah: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Schiller, Niels O. 2014. Psycholinguistic Approaches to the Investigation of Grammatical Gender, in Greville G. Corbett, ed., The Expression of Gender. Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter Mouton, 161–190. Simon, Sherry. 1996. Gender in Translation. New York and London: Routledge. Smith, Ali. 2004. Erosive, in The Whole Story and Other Stories, New York: Anchor Books, 99–106. Slavova, Kornelia. Forthcoming. Feminism in the Post-Communist World in/as Translation, in Hala Kamal and Luise Von Flotow, eds., Routledge Handbook on Translation, Feminism and Gender. London and New York: Routledge. Trudgill, Peter. 1999. Language Contact and the Function of Linguistic Gender. Poznań Studies in Contemporary Linguistics, 35, 133–152. Trudgill, Peter. 2011. Sociolinguistic Typology: Social Determinants of Linguistic Complexity. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wagner, Susanne. 2005. Gender in English Pronouns, in Bernd Kortmann, Tanja Herrmann, Lukas Pietsch, and Susanne Wagner, eds., Agreement, Gender, Relative Clauses. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 211–352. Wales, Katie. 1996. Personal Pronouns in Present-Day English. Cambridge, New York and Melbourne: Cambridge University Press. Whorf, Benjamin L. 1956. Language, Thought, and Reality. Cambridge: MIT Press. Winterson, Jeanette. 1992. Written on the Body. London: Jonathan Cape. It., ed. 1995. Scritto sul corpo. Translated by Giovanna Marrone. Milano: Mondadori.

373

28 Le président est une femme The challenges of translating gender in UN texts Enora Lessinger

Introduction Feminist thought and translation studies both emerged in the 1970s and became recognized research fields in the 1980s, at a time that “gave strong prominence to language” (Simon 1996, 8), a factor that is likely to have contributed to the overlap between the two. A central argument in the fight against linguistic androcentrism from the 1970s onwards was the belief that language influenced thoughts, and therefore formed part of the problem of discrimination against women (Lomotey 2015, 168), an idea reflected in Judith Butler’s denouncing “[t]he power of language to subordinate and exclude women” (1990, 26). The potentially performative dimension of language described by John Langshaw Austin (1975) informed Butler’s (1990) argument that gender itself is brought into being through the performance of activities perceived as gendered. For instance, Robin Lakoff ’s study of ‘woman’s speech’ (1975) – characterized by insecurity, powerlessness and triviality – shows how speech forms part of the process of acquiring a gender. With the advent of third-wave feminism came a shift towards a more discursive analysis of gender in language through third-wave feminist linguistics (Mills 2003). Third-wave feminist translation “encourages the examination of not only literary texts (as has been the case almost exclusively up till now both from the Canadian school and from later approaches) but also all kinds of text types” (Castro 2009, 13). As a consequence, the focus of feminist translation studies is no longer limited to literary texts but extends to pragmatic ones as well. There is still no consensus today on the exact nature of the link between language and gender and on whether, or to what extent, the former influences the latter. However, feminist scholars agree that language at the very least reflects the power dynamics between men and women, and that “conventional and prescriptive ‘patriarchal language’ [has] to be undone in order for women’s words to develop, find a space and be heard” (Flotow 1991, 6). The “inherently sociopolitical connections between gender and language” (Flotow 2009, 122) are particularly relevant to pragmatic texts such as legal and institutional texts, in which language is a doubly political matter: for example, ambiguity deriving from the use of the generic masculine can lead to juridical loopholes. Moreover, since the beginning of research on gender and language, one key aspect of it has been the role of language in the marginalization of women in the public 374

Le président est une femme

sphere and institutions (Cameron 2005). Sylvia Shaw’s study investigates the influence of 100 new female MPs entering the British Parliament in 1997, in order to determine whether this had any effect on the infamously aggressive style of parliamentary debates (2000). Her results showed that the rules designed to guarantee equal participation were frequently violated, and that women’s interventions only amounted to two-thirds of men’s in relation to the respective numbers of the two groups. The corpus of this study similarly explores pragmatic texts from the public sphere: it is composed of eight texts in English and their Spanish and French translations, all related to the United Nations’ four World Conferences on Women. The specificity of these texts is that they are aimed at fighting sexism, which one would expect to entail a greater awareness of linguistic sexism and a conscious effort to avoid using sexist language. The goal of this article is to explore whether and to what extent these texts testify to such a writing and translating strategy, and to determine how the use of gender-related language evolved between 1975 and 2015. While the results do show an increasing awareness of the centrality and sensitivity of the linguistic dimension of gender issues, they also point to the lack of a coherent strategy both across languages and within individual ones.

Linguistic sexism Although the question of whether languages in themselves can be sexist is a highly debated one, there is no doubt that the use of sexist language can and does reflect, and probably feeds, the existence of a metalinguistic sexism. Sexist language has traditionally been described as language that makes invisible, stereotypes and/or denigrates one sex, typically women (Henley 1987). Within sexist language, Álvaro García Meseguer (1994) distinguishes between lexical sexism at the word level, and grammatical sexism at the syntactic level. According to him, grammatical sexism is the most resistant form of linguistic sexism, being the expression of a sexism deeply rooted in society. As pointed out by Elena Teso, “most studies have focused on lexical sexism as it has been argued that sexism at the word level can be eliminated” (2010, 15). Moreover, “three potentially responsible agents of linguistic sexism have been identified: speakers and their mental context, listeners and their mental context and the language as a system” (García Meseguer 1994). This last point is particularly relevant to the translation of natural versus grammatical gender. As Sherry Simon points out,“[w]hile grammarians have insisted on gender-marking in language as purely conventional, feminist theoreticians follow Jakobson in re-investing gender-markers with meaning” (1996, 17). Thus, Deborah Cameron speaks of “metaphorical gender” (1992, 82) for words that are apparently neutral but carry a gender-specific connotation. Similarly, Pierre Zoberman makes a strong case against the “fallacy of inclusiveness,” and unlike Cameron who advocates total feminization (generic feminine) he claims that “[t]he translation process renders the underlying focus on man explicit – or should do so” (2014, 244). Choosing to keep the sexist language of a text in its translation can indeed serve the purpose of exposing and thus implicitly denouncing the original text’s linguistic sexism. Anti-sexist or gender-inclusive language, conversely, involves using language in a way that avoids gender bias, usually through a conscious effort, and/or serves a feminist agenda. There are two main strategies of gender-inclusivity. Gender-neutralization, or degendering, involves “the use of one term to refer to both sexes” and “reducing or abolishing terms that connote one sex to the exclusion of the other” (Teso 2010, 41). Gender-specification, or feminization, is “a strategy used to achieve linguistic equality by making the ‘invisible sex’ (in most cases, women) visible in language through systematic and symmetrical marking of gender” (Pauwels 2000, 141). 375

Enora Lessinger

The former strategy is often better suited to languages that only have natural gender, while the latter is often used in the case of languages with grammatical gender.

Language reforms Anne Pauwels underlines the fact that in terms of language change, women have traditionally derived a form of authority from their role as norm-enforcers (2003, 550). However, it is men that have played the central role of norm-makers and language planners, particularly through typically male-dominated language academies. Thus, the insistence of the Académie française (French Academy) that the masculine being the unmarked form in French is a purely grammatical matter, and that the masculine must prevail over the feminine in word agreement, has played a key role in the strong resistance to reforms promoting inclusive writing in France.1 Anne-Marie Houdebine (1998) claims that the difficulty of feminizing the French language is a social and ideological problem rather than a linguistic one. This view is supported by Marie-Marthe Gervais-Le Garff ’s comparative study (2007), which shows that feminizing reforms were implemented earlier and more successfully in Canada and Belgium – where no institution plays a role equivalent to that of the Académie française – than in France. Similarly, the Real Academia Española (Spanish Royal Academy) continues to champion the generic value of the masculine, in spite of ongoing debates since the 1990s. It has also spoken both against the use of abstract nouns such as ‘ciudadanía’ (citizenry) to avoid gender-marking, and against more informal and innovative forms such as the symbol @, which is being increasingly used as a way to represent both the ‘o’ of the masculine and the ‘a’ of the feminine, especially on social media. A 2013 study by Uwe Kjær Nissen showed that the use of anti-sexist language in the Spanish press remained sporadic and inconsistent, and that its most widespread manifestations were split-forms such as ‘él o ella’ [he or she], abstract nouns and unmarked forms such as ‘persona.’ Even in the absence of such influential and prescriptive language institutions, the likes of editors and grammarians – such as Fowler in the English language – can play a similarly prescriptive role. However, phenomena such as the now widespread use of ‘they’ as a gender-neutral pronoun for a singular referent, or the existence of the title ‘Ms,’ which does not give away the marital status of the referent, point towards a greater flexibility in English than in both French and Spanish. As pointed out by Pauwels, the studies on the use of non-sexist nouns and pronouns in English led, among others, by Robert Cooper (1984), Susan Ehrlich and Ruth King (1994) and Pauwels (1997, 2000), all report “a decrease in use of masculine generic nouns and pronouns in favour of non-sexist alternatives both in forms of written discourse and in public speech” (Pauwels 2003, 563). The greater flexibility of the English language, as opposed to the version of French spoken in France for instance, testifies among other things to the lower prevalence of linguistic purism among English speakers. Teso’s (2010) study on four European countries aims to ascertain the extent to which national and international recommendations for gender-inclusive writing were being applied, through comparison of a natural gender language (English) and three grammatical gender one (Spanish, French and German) in institutional texts. The results show only a limited attempt at genderinclusivity, with for instance two occurrences of the word ‘chairperson’ in English, against 60 for ‘chairman’ in Spanish, all the occupational terms were in the masculine, even those with a generic meaning, presumably to improve readability. Languages’ natural preference for linguistic economy is indeed a recurring argument in the opposition to inclusive writing.

376

Le président est une femme

Case study Context: the UN and gender equality The 1945 Founding Charter of the United Nations is known for being the first global treaty for gender equality, defining “the equal rights of men and women” as a “fundamental human right” in its very first paragraph. However, this founding text already contains the germs of the gender-related translation issues that occupy us here: the French and Spanish translations mention respectively “les droits fondamentaux de l’homme” and “los derechos fundamentales del hombre,” which both translate literally as “man’s fundamental rights.” In that pre-feminist era, such was the accepted wording, but more surprising is the fact that it still largely is the case in French, as shown later. The United Nations reaffirmed the principle of equal rights in the 1979 Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), which encourages member states to take measures to fight stereotypes and prejudice against women. This marked the beginning of the use of inclusive language in text drafting. The UN’s ambition to fight gender discrimination also manifested itself in the choice to make the 1975–1985 years the Decade for Women. This decade was marked by three major World Conferences on Women in 1975, 1980, and 1985, which led in turn to a fourth one: the landmark 1995 Beijing Conference. The corpus of this study comprises the texts of these four conferences and of the four reports issued between 2000 and 2015 on the outcome of the Beijing Conference. It covers a period of 40 years, from the first conference in 1975 to the last report in 2015.

Methodology Between the English, French, and Spanish versions, the corpus is comprised of 24 texts. Originally, the Arabic translations were also meant to form part of the corpus. However, two of the earlier texts turned out to be unavailable despite repeated attempts to secure them, to the point that one may wonder if the translations exist at all. This might reflect “the cultural authority of language, and of the position of the speakers within dominant codes” (Simon 1996, 127), and brings to mind what Lynn Penrod describes as “the most fundamental decision of all: whether or not to translate a given text at a given time” (1993, 39). It is all the more unfortunate as the existing literature on gender and translation already focuses largely on European languages. It is worth pointing out that the different texts of the corpus do not officially follow the traditional original/translation divide. Multilingualism is defined as a core value of the United Nations, and in theory every UN text is issued in the organization’s six official languages, with all six texts enjoying the status of authentic, original text2. Although the English version was written first in the texts under study (and in the majority of cases), as is clearly perceptible in some passages3, there is no hierarchy between source language and target language. This raises interesting questions in terms of translation studies, by giving every translator – or team of translators –, at least in principle, full responsibility for the text. Therefore, according to this particular approach to translation within the UN, the translators/authors of all three versions of the texts under study are to be held equally accountable for the use of both sexist and nonsexist language. A quantitative study was carried out on the English, French and Spanish texts to determine the extent to which both sexist language and gender-inclusive language were used. A discursive

377

Enora Lessinger

analysis of the use of about 60 key words and expressions was then conducted. The choice of these words and expressions was made both on the basis of the UNESCO guidelines, described later, and on an ad hoc basis – i.e. including any expression of sexist or anti-sexist language in the texts that were deemed to be significant. The goal of this study was to answer two questions. What is the prevalence of sexist and antisexist language in the corpus for each of the three languages? And is there a writing/translating strategy for the expression and translation of gender? For both questions, the diachronic dimension was considered in the analysis. It must be noted that in general, translational choices made within an institution are not solely the work of individual translators. Even in the absence of an institution-wide policy across languages, or within individual languages – as suggested by the present study – standardizing translation tools are increasingly at the heart of translation practice within most major organizations, including the United Nations. In the last decade in particular, computer-assisted translation (CAT) tools have become a central component of translation within the UN. In particular, the translation interface eLUNa was developed in-house specifically for this purpose and has been used systematically since 2014. Among other functionalities, it identifies terms in the source text and links them to equivalents from a terminology database, the UN TermPortal, also dating back to 2014. eLUNa also matches up segments in the source text with previously translated segments in the target language, a process that is bound to foster homogeneity across translations. However, at the beginning of the time period under study – and probably during most of it – these tools were still largely underdeveloped, so that in 1980 there was still no computerized terminology bank in the organization. It is unclear to what extent CAT tools were used between 1980 and 2014, but the very absence of information on the subject tends to suggest that their use was at least limited. In the absence of any conclusive data, however, the existence of an institution-wide policy cannot be excluded. It is therefore difficult to determine to what extent responsibility for sexist and anti-sexist language lies with the institution as opposed to the sum of the individual translators’ voices.

UNESCO guidelines In 1989, at a time when linguistic sexism had already emerged as a central feminist concern, UNESCO – United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, one of the UN’s main agencies – published the first edition of a booklet entitled ‘Guidelines on ­Gender-Neutral Language.’ Its aim was to tackle “the issue of sexist language,” in the context of “a growing awareness that language does not merely reflect the way we think: it also shapes our thinking” (1999, 3–4). This line of thinking, sometimes described as a milder version of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (1929), denotes a bold stance on the part of the institution. The guidelines, which were published in English, French and Spanish, give definitions of the main terms involved and examples of sexist language, as well as alternative non-sexist expressions. Because each language poses a different set of problems, the examples and strategies provided differ. These recommendations were meant to lead to a revision of formerly published texts and to serve as guidelines for the avoidance of sexist language in the United Nations systems in general. The three sets of guidelines show different overall strategies for English on the one hand, in which gender-neutralization prevails, and the two Romance languages on the other, in which gender-specification is dominant. However, the three sets have in common the importance given to an empowering strategy in the use of occupational titles.

378

Le président est une femme

Analysis and results Sexist language Generic masculine: general use Generic masculine corresponds to the first kind of sexist language described by Henley: making one sex invisible. In the corpus, outside of occupational titles and words related to ‘man’ – which will be treated separately – generic masculine is relatively rare. It happens most in Spanish, with a total of 41 occurrences, and least in French, with only three occurrences. In example 1, drawn from the 1995 Beijing Conference, the speaker uses the word ‘citizen,’ which is an unmarked form in English but must be translated either as a masculine or feminine noun in both French and Spanish (emphasis mine throughout the examples): 1.a. We now need a sea change: women will no longer accept the role of second-rate citizens (1995, 213). 1.b. Necesitamos un cambio inmediato y definitivo: las mujeres no aceptarán más el papel de ciudadanas de segundo orden (227). 1.c. Ce qu’il faut maintenant, c’est un changement radical, car les femmes n’accepteront plus le rôle de citoyen de deuxième classe (234). The more logical choice here would be to use the feminine form in the translations, since the referent is ‘women’ (‘femmes’ – ‘mujeres’), and it is indeed the case in Spanish with ‘ciudadanas’ [­citizens-female]. However, the French translation resorts to the masculine form of the noun (‘citoyen’ as opposed to ‘citoyenne’ or ‘citoyennes’), presumably regarding ‘citoyen’ [citizen-male] as the generic, default form. The fact that the noun is also in the singular, in spite of having a plural referent, is consistent with this hypothesis. This choice reveals that the generic value of the masculine form was, at least for the French translators of the 1995 conference, strong enough to trump semantic gender agreement.

Occupational terms: generic masculine Within occupational terms, generic masculine is widely used in the earlier texts in all three languages. Although it does decrease over time, the use of generic masculine for job titles persists in all four conferences, particularly in French, as seen in example 2, from the 1975 Mexico Conference: 2.a. “The Conference shall elect the following officers: a President, 46 Vice-Presidents and a Rapporteur-General as well as a Chairman for each of the main committees provided for in rule” (1975, 42). 2.b. “La Conferencia elegirá a las siguientes autoridades: un Presidente, 46 Vicepresidentes y un Relator General, así como a un presidente para cada una de las comisiones principales a que se refiere el artículo 42” (148). 2.c.“La Conférence élit les membres des bureaux suivants: un président, 46 vice-­présidents et un rapporteur général, ainsi qu’un président pour chacune des grandes commissions prévues à l’article 42” (148). The indefinite singular masculine pronoun ‘un’, common to French and Spanish, leaves no doubt as to the gender used in these two versions, and neither does the term ‘chairman’ in English. The use of generic masculine is thus consistent in this example.

379

Enora Lessinger

By 1995, however, the lack of a unified language policy had become apparent, as shown in example 3: 3.a “Opening of the Conference and election of the President” (1995, 138). 3.b. “Apertura de la Conferencia y elección de la Presidenta” (149). 3.c. “Ouverture de la Conférence et élection du président” (147). Here we are presented with a problem typical of the translation of gender, which Olga Castro describes as “the translational [problem] produced by words that, depending on the discourse, can have women and/or men as their referents” (2009, 14). However, the following paragraph makes a clear reference to the election of a woman: “[T]he Conference elected, by acclamation, as President of the Conference, Her Excellency Madame Chen Muhua, Vice-Chairperson of the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress of the People’s Republic of China” (1995, 138). The ambiguity of the English word is therefore not enough to explain why the French text should refer to a male president and the Spanish text to a female one. Furthermore, while English uses the gender-neutral ‘president’ and ‘chairperson’ and Spanish the gender-specific ‘presidenta’ [president-female] and ‘vice-presidenta’ [vice-president-female], the French translation mixes masculine and feminine in a surprising way, using respectively ‘président’ [president-male] and ‘vice-présidente’ [vice-president-female]: “À la 1re séance plénière, le 4 septembre, la Conférence a élu président, par acclamation, S.E. Mme Chen Muhua, Vice-Présidente du Comité permanent de l’Assemblée populaire nationale de la République populaire de Chine” (146). With the masculine and feminine form of the word co-existing in the same sentence for one and the same referent, it is unclear whether the former is meant as a generic masculine or reflects the conservative approach that recommends using the masculine form of such job titles for women. In any case, such an awkward combination of masculine and feminine is certainly more damaging to the text’s readability than any version of inclusive writing might be.

Occupational terms: masculine form for female referent This phenomenon occurs in all three languages, but most commonly in French. In the 1990s, the election of the first (and to date only) female Prime Minister of France, Edith Cresson, sparked a debate in the national press. It pitted supporters of the conservative ‘Madame le premier ministre’ [Madam the prime minister-male] against advocates of the feminized version, ‘Madame la première ministre’ [Madam the prime minister-female], and was eventually resolved in favour of the latter (Teso 2010). As far as occupational terms go, the English texts only comprise two occurrences of a masculine form (‘chairman’) for a female referent, in the 1980 and 1985 texts. The Spanish translations contain five instances, also occurring between 1980 and 1985. The French texts, on the other hand, present no less than 96 occurrences, including words that can easily be feminized, such as ‘président’ [president-male], ‘secrétaire general’ [general secretary-male] or ‘administrateur’ [administrator-male]. Moreover, the feminine forms of these words (‘présidente’, ‘secrétaire générale, ‘administratrice’) are all used at other places of the corpus, including in the earlier texts. There seems to be no significant evolution towards avoidance of the masculine generic. In the last two reports from 2010 and 2015, however, this phenomenon is limited to the words ‘chef ’ [chief] and ‘professeur’ [professor], whose feminized forms (‘cheffe,’ ‘professeure’) remain controversial even today. According to Patricia Niedzwiecki (1993), the resistance to the adoption of feminine forms for women holders is partly due to women’s awareness of the association of the masculine form with prestige, and to their fear that a feminine form might devalue their title. 380

Le président est une femme

A particularly striking example of the use of a male-for-female title can be found in the 1995 Beijing conference: 4.a.“priority should be given to the creation of a new post of Deputy Secretary-General in charge of women’s affairs. Needless to say, this post must be occupied by a woman” (1995, 203). 4.b. “dar prioridad a la creación de un nuevo puesto de Secretaria General Adjunta encargada de los asuntos de la mujer. Ni qué decir que ese puesto debería ser ocupado por una mujer” (216). 4.c.“il conviendrait d’envisager en priorité la création d’un nouveau poste de secrétaire général adjoint aux affaires féminines. Il va sans dire que ce poste devrait être occupé par une femme” (220). Beyond the fact that both French and Spanish translate the assertive ‘must be’ rather timidly (‘devrait être occupé,’ ‘debería ser ocupado’ [should be occupied]), it is interesting that French, unlike Spanish, chooses to translate ‘Deputy Secretary-General’ with a masculine form instead of the expected ‘secrétaire générale adjointe.’ This is all the more perplexing as the feminine form ‘secrétaire générale’ [general secretary-female] appears as early as the text of the 1985 conference, ten years prior to Beijing.

Occupational terms: asymmetry The third form of sexist language analyzed here is the use of asymmetrical linguistic forms for male and female referents, in which the term designating women typically evokes a more vulnerable or powerless position than that designating men. Asymmetrical forms occur in all three languages of the corpus – 17 times in English, 8 in Spanish, and 43 in French. Examples of such asymmetrical pairs include ‘girls’ – ‘men’; ‘las jóvenes’ – ‘los hombres’ [young women] – [men]; ‘jeunes filles’ – ‘hommes’ [young women] – [men], or the androcentric pair ‘jeunes filles’ – ‘jeunes gens’ [young women]– [young folk]. Their distribution across the texts shows no sign of diminution, and in fact peaks in the 2005 report for English and French. The 2010 report, however, shows an interesting case of correction of the asymmetry of the English text in both Spanish and French: 5.a.“Young women are more susceptible to HIV infection and in many countries they have a higher HIV prevalence rate than men” (2010, 39). 5.b. “Les jeunes femmes sont davantage susceptibles d’être infectées par le VIH et dans de nombreux pays le taux de prévalence du VIH est plus élevé chez les femmes que chez les hommes” (44). 5.c. “Las mujeres jóvenes son más propensas a la infección por el VIH, y en muchos países la tasa de prevalencia de este virus es superior entre las mujeres que entre los hombres” (45). By inserting in the second part of the sentence a new subject (‘les femmes’, ‘las mujeres’ [women]) that is the equivalent of the masculine referent, the two translations erase the sexism of the English wording. This case remains exceptional, however, and although Spanish generally stays clear of asymmetrical turns of phrase, they abound in French – particularly through the pair ‘garçons’ – ‘fillettes’ [‘boys’ – ‘little girls], in which the ‘-ette’ diminutive suffix is a clear illustration of the vulnerability associated with females.

Anti-sexist language Gender specification The strategy of gender specification is mostly represented in the French and Spanish texts – respectively 266 and 354, against a total of 12 in English. This can be explained by the fact that 381

Enora Lessinger

French and Spanish are grammatical gender languages, and it is therefore morphologically easier to decline a given word both in its masculine and feminine forms. A first form of gender specification is the avoidance of generic masculine in general, in words such as ‘worker’ or ‘citizen.’ This phenomenon turned out not to be relevant in English apart from a few words including ‘-man’ in their morphology. In French and Spanish, it represents a fairly small proportion of all occurrences of gender-specification but is very present in the earlier conferences. Arguably, the feminine forms of ‘worker’, for instance, (‘travailleuse,’ ‘trabajadora’) are bound to be less controversial and meet less social resistance than the feminine forms of ‘president’ or ‘general secretary.’ Strikingly, the French translators of the 1980 conference explain in a note their alleged decision to use a generic feminine throughout the text for the translation of the words ‘representatives’ and ‘participants’: 6. “* Faute de précisions à cet égard, on a utilisé, pour plus de commodité, dans tout le texte français du rapport, le substantif féminin (représentante, participante) pour désigner les orateurs” (1980b, 149). [For lack of instructions on this matter, for greater ease, throughout the French text of the report the feminine substantive (representative-female; participant-female) was used to refer to the speakers.] This note, which appears twice in the report, serves as a justification for the use of feminine as the default gender in the translation of the English gender-neutral ‘representatives’ and ‘participants,’ the translators being presumably not in a position to determine the gender of the referents. This use of generic feminine forms, also called visibility strategy, can be related to the “total feminization” advocated by some feminists such as Cameron, who uses it systematically in her books and sees it as “positive discrimination through positive language” (1985, 88). As a translation strategy, the use of the generic feminine to translate gender-neutral words corresponds with what Luise Von Flotow calls ‘hijacking’, or a work of ‘correction’ through “the translator’s deliberate feminizing of the target text” (1991, 79). However, in the present case this translation choice seems to be an isolated phenomenon rather than a deliberate translation strategy. Unlike what is announced in the note, the French text uses the form ‘participante’ as a generic feminine only in the two passages that bear the note in question, and makes inconsistent use of the feminine and masculine forms of the French for ‘representative’ throughout the rest of the text. Overall, the main manifestation of gender specification in the corpus lies in occupational titles in French and Spanish. English has no instance of gender-specification for job titles: the word ‘chairwoman,’ for example, is totally absent from the corpus. In the two Romance languages however, in spite of some inconsistencies, there does appear to be a diachronic evolution of the translation of job titles in respect to gender. The 1995 conference appears to be a turning point in Spanish, with the apparition of the feminised forms ‘profesora’ [teacher-female], ‘ministra’ [minister-female], ‘investigadora’ [investigator-female] and ‘jefa’ [chief-female]. However, some generic masculine forms continue to co-exist with these until the end of the period under study. The same goes for French, although there is no clear turning point in this language. Interestingly, in the 2005 report, the masculine form ‘rapporteur’ is used in the generic masculine 12 times, and even once for a female referent, but the rather daring feminine form ‘rapporteure’ also features once. In the following two reports, though, the generic masculine has disappeared and female referents are consistently referred to as ‘rapporteuse.’ This choice is also a bold one, this time from a semantic point of view: the term ‘rapporteuse’ brings to mind another, informal and pejorative meaning of ‘rapporteur’ – tell-tale. This tendency of feminine words to acquire a derogatory connotation over time corresponds to Henley’s third type of linguistic sexism: the 382

Le président est une femme

semantic derogation of women. Francine Frank (1985) argues that the difficult acceptance of feminine forms, making them seem unsuitable for new social titles, is linked to this phenomenon. However, the use of words this type of as ‘rapporteuse’ could contribute over time to fighting this type of negative associations.

Gender-neutralization The gender-neutralization strategy is, conversely, difficult to implement in languages with a grammatical gender. In the corpus, gender-neutralization is a scant phenomenon in Spanish, and even more so in French. It mainly appears through the use of abstract nouns – a strategy also called gender abstraction – such as ‘administration’/‘administración’ [administration], or ‘présidence’/‘presidencia’ [presidency]. Towards the end of the 2010 report, for instance, the gender-neutral ‘Chair’ is translated in Spanish as ‘el Presidente’ [the President-male], but the French translation uses the abstract noun meaning ‘presidency’, ‘présidence’: ‘La présidence a formulé des observations finales’ (67). In the English texts, gender-neutralization is mainly relevant to occupational titles. For instance, the term ‘chairperson’ first appears in the 1995 Beijing Conference, and co-exists with ‘chairman’ in later texts. However, its distribution in the corpus seems to endorse the suggestion made by feminists such as Cameron (1992) that the term ‘chairperson’ is in practice used exclusively for female referents. Throughout the 2005 report for instance, ‘chairperson’ systematically refers to females and ‘chairman’ to males: 7. “[I]ntroductory statements were made by the . . . Chairperson of the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women and the Chairman of the Commission on Human Rights” (2005, 32). The question does not arise in the French and Spanish translations, which use the feminine form in the first instance (‘présidente,’ ‘presidenta’) and the masculine form in the second (‘président,’ ‘presidente’).

Key gender-related words and expressions Gender The term ‘gender’ itself appears in 1985 but becomes widely used only in the 1995 Beijing conference, which is likely to be connected with the development of a certain type of feminist thought and theory in the early 1990s. Its adoption in English was met with a degree of resistance, with some countries expressing the fear that differentiating between a natural sex and a constructed gender might endanger the institution of marriage and implicitly condone homosexuality and other sexual practices perceived as deviant (Adolphe 2012). Conversely, some feminist participants feared that too vague a definition of the word might lead to a mistaken assimilation of ‘gender’ and ‘sex’ (ibid., 19). Sure enough, the definition that was settled on was imprecise enough to explain the confusion perceptible in the subsequent translations. It was worded as follows: “the word ‘gender’ as used in the Platform for Action was intended to be interpreted and understood as it was in ordinary, generally accepted usage” (1995, 218). In Spanish, the systematic translation of ‘gender’ with ‘género’ starts in the first 2000 report, but the French texts betray a greater reluctance. At first, the French translators use ad hoc paraphrases, with for example “rôles dévolus par la société aux hommes et aux femmes” (1995, 21) [roles attributed to men and women by society] for ‘gender roles.’ In some cases, the word is even left out of the translation altogether, with for instance “la division du travail” [labour division] (1995, 14) 383

Enora Lessinger

for “the gender division of labour” (12). In the following French reports, however, ‘gender’ is almost systematically translated with ‘sexe’ [sex], which bears witness to a confusion between sex and gender. Similarly, while the expression ‘gender mainstreaming’ coined at the 1985 conference is translated as ‘perspectiva de género’ [gender perspective] in Spanish, the French translation again reflects a perceived equivalence between sex and gender by using ‘perspective sexospécifique’ [sex-specific perspective]. It must be noted, however, that the French translators’ inclination to use terms derived from the word ‘sex’ also extends to the words ‘sexisme’ [sexism] and ‘sexiste’ [sexist], which appear a total of 59 times in French against six in English and eight in Spanish. The French reports even use the neologism ‘antisexiste’ [antisexist] in their translation of ‘gender,’ a surprisingly bold choice given the otherwise conservative tendency of the French translation. The translators’ reluctance to adopt the direct French translation ‘genre,’ which appears only four times in the whole corpus (in 2005 and 2015), is most obvious in the translation of the English definition of gender at the Beijing conference (see above). The French translators chose to borrow the English word ‘gender,’ but only in the paragraph containing this definition, thereby making the explanation obscure as well as pointless for French readers: “le terme ‘gender’ [est] couramment employé dans son sens ordinaire, conformément à l’usage généralement admis dans de nombreuses autres instances et conférences des Nations Unies” (1995, 239). On top of being rather confusing for the reader, this translation strategy is bound to undermine the alleged equality of status between the source and target languages.

Empowerment Similarly, the term ‘empowerment’ starts being used at the Beijing conference and subsequently becomes a key concept, but here again the French and Spanish translations take longer to adjust to its innovatory aspect and to accept its centrality. Spanish uses paraphrases on a case by case basis until 2005, when it starts using the straightforward translation ‘empoderamiento.’ The French texts, on the other hand, keep alternating between a few options such as ‘autonomisation’ or the paraphrastic ‘renforcement du pouvoir d’action’ [reinforcement of the power of action], without ever settling on a systematic translation.

Ms. The use of the terms ‘Miss’ or ‘Mrs,’ which specify the marital status of the referent and have no masculine equivalent, corresponds to Henley’s second type of linguistic sexism: a narrow definition of women, here in terms of their relationship to men. The English texts give precedence to the appellation ‘Ms.’ rather than ‘Miss’ or ‘Mrs.’ The term ‘Miss’ appears in the 1985 Conference only, and both the French and Spanish translators use equivalent terms: ‘Mlle’ and ‘Srta.,’ short for ‘mademoiselle’ and ‘señorita’ [miss]. Overall, the French and Spanish translations also follow a similar pattern to English in later texts: even though there is no exact equivalent to ‘Ms’ in those languages, the terms used – ‘madame,’ ‘señora’ – are usually regarded as the default option rather than the indication of a marital status. As such, they are not analyzed here as sexist language.

Man At the heart of the debate on inclusive writing is the ‘Male-As-Norm Principle,’ also known as MAN (Friederike Braun 1997, 3), which Castro sums up as the fact that “if the sex of the referent is not known, the masculine will be chosen for the translation unless there are stereotypes to the contrary” (2009, 13). As pointed out by Zoberman in his study of the translation of ‘man’ 384

Le président est une femme

(‘homme’) in Pascal’s work, the definition of the word in the 1694 dictionary of the Académie française is a clear illustration of this phenomenon: “An animal endowed with reason. In this sense, it comprises the whole human species, and is used for both sexes” (2014, 235). Similarly, Simon claims that “the apparent gender neutrality of English is constantly belied by the identification of the species (mankind) with the male of the species” (1996, 18). This implicit identification is often more explicit in translation, especially in languages with a grammatical gender. In the present case, however, the use of ‘man’ as a generic noun is almost completely avoided in all three languages. In English, derived words such as ‘mankind’, ‘manpower’ or ‘man-made’ feature only a handful of times in the conferences. The Spanish and French texts also use the generic masculine ‘man’ (‘homme,’ ‘hombre’) very sparingly, but not always in the same places as in the English text, which goes towards confirming the absence of a well-defined policy on the subject. The French and Spanish equivalents of nouns such as ‘human beings’ or the abstract noun ‘humanity’ are widely-used alternatives to generic masculine. A noteworthy exception is the French expression ‘droits de l’homme’ [man’s rights]. Its being a set phrase presumably makes it more difficult for the gender-inclusive alternative ‘droits humains’ [human rights] to become accepted, but there is no sign of any shift taking place over time: in spite of the growing social acceptability of ‘droits humains’, this phrase and close variations on it, such as ‘droits de la personne humaine’ [rights of the human person], only appear a total of 34 times, against 390 ‘droits de l’homme.’ This insistence on using a blatantly androcentric expression forms a stark contrast with the English texts, which exclusively use the gender-neutral ‘human rights’ or gender-specific alternatives such as ‘women’s rights,’ as well as with the Spanish texts, in which ‘derechos del hombre’ [man’s rights] features only four times, and exclusively in the first three texts. Given the norm-creating potential of the UN as an influential institution, it is regrettable that this opportunity to further spread the gender-inclusive alternative was not seized.

Latest developments With the overall growing visibility of gender-related issues and the systematization of CAT tools within the United Nations, the translation of gender has already evolved since 2015 within the organization and is likely to change even more in the coming years. Even though it was not in use for most of the timeframe of this study, the terminology bank UN TermPortal gives a good overview of the difficulties and latest evolutions linked to the translation of gender. At the entry for ‘gender,’ under the heading ‘UNHQ [United Nations Headquarters] Human rights (general) Gender issues’ we can read the following definition: “Refers to the attributes and opportunities associated with being male and female and the relationships between women and men and girls and boys, as well as the relations between women and those between men.” The non-committal dimension of this definition, and in particular the vagueness of the term ‘attributes,’ brings to mind the definition adopted at the Beijing conference. The remark that follows this definition denotes at first sight a firmer stance on the difference between sex and gender than in the texts of the corpus: “These attributes, opportunities and relationships are socially constructed and are learned through socialization processes. They are context-specific and changeable.” The absence of reference to biology seems to imply that the more feminist approach has prevailed. However, this remark is followed by another one further down that shows that the blurring of the distinction between ‘gender’ and ‘women’ (Adolphe 2012, 4) is still topical: “there may be situations in which a proper translation of ‘gender’ would be an equivalent of the English ‘women’ (e.g. femmes).” Interestingly, the corresponding Spanish entry only gives ‘género,’ a straightforward translation of ‘gender.’ This unique option and the absence of any comments tends to underpin the 385

Enora Lessinger

notion that the translation of ‘gender’ was not as controversial in this language as it was in the other two. By contrast, the corresponding French entry shows a clear ambivalence on the subject. Thirteen different translations are listed for ‘gender’ that have been used over time and in different contexts by the UN: genre condition de la femme condition féminine problématique femmes-hommes identité de genre sexe culturel sexe social égalité des genres problématique hommes-femmes égalité des sexes identité sexuelle sexe sexospécificités The crossed-out translations, several of which are used in the corpus of this study, appear as such on the website and are the ones that are described as ‘superseded.’ A note next to the first one, ‘genre’ [gender], specifies that this translation must be used whenever possible. Nevertheless, the definition provided under the translations shows that the equivalence between ‘genre’ and ‘gender’ is still not taken for granted: “Le terme anglais ‘gender’ ne renvoie pas normalement aux catégories biologiques (homme et femme, mâle et femelle) mais plus souvent aux catégories sociales ‘masculin’ et ‘féminin’. [. . .] Pour traduire ce terme, il existe donc plusieurs solutions, en fonction du contexte, du point de vue, des connotations etc.”4 By defining the English word ‘gender’ rather than the French ‘genre’, the translators appear once again to be taking refuge behind the English language. The reference to ‘several solutions’ shows a reluctance to adopt ‘genre’ as a systematic translation, while the mention of biological categories perpetuates the traditional confusion between gender, women and biological sex. From this example we can see that despite undeniable progress, the meaning of ‘gender’ is still not quite fixed within the context of the UN, and that its translation into French continues to be problematic.

Conclusions In total I identified 53, 96, and 198 occurrences of sexist language in the English, Spanish and French texts respectively. This excludes the specific terms discussed in the previous section. Overall there appears to be a real effort towards gender-neutralization, and even more so towards the feminization of occupational titles and forms of address. However, the generic masculine in job titles keeps appearing alongside gender-inclusive alternatives. This is consistent with the fact that throughout the period under study, the use of sexist language does not decrease in the same proportion as the use of gender-inclusive language increases, so that both co-exist in the texts. Overall, the French translation is the most problematic one when it comes to the translation of gender. However, determining whether this simply reflects a persistent social and institutional resistance to gender-inclusive writing or also contributes to the problem of sexist language in French is beyond the scope of this study. In the case of sexist language, the divide between a natural gender language (English) and grammatical gender languages (Spanish and French) appears to be less significant than that 386

Le président est une femme

between English and Spanish on the one hand and French on the other. However, the divide between grammatical and natural gender is more perceptible in antisexist language. According to my analysis, there are only 123 occurrences of antisexist language in English, for 506 in Spanish and 413 in French. Unsurprisingly, English is the language that most resorts to gender-neutralization in the corpus. The French and Spanish translations tend to use genderspecification instead. As for gender-related terms, the 1995 Beijing Conference seems to be the turning point for the introduction of new, key concepts in relation to gender. However, Spanish and French both appear to be lagging behind, often favouring paraphrase over straightforward translations. This strategy reveals the translators’ interpretation of the concepts at hand, as seen in the French translations’ absence of discrimination between sex and gender. It also shows the translators’ reluctance to make the necessary adjustments that would ensure that these new concepts enter their language. The most striking difference between Spanish and French is that the Spanish translators, once they begin to adopt a direct translation, tend to use it systematically. The French translators, however, tend to keep using different translations, even when they are not using paraphrase. There seems to be limited diachronic evolution in the use of sexist and/or anti-sexist language, and the pattern of evolution of each language does not appear to be correlated to the other two in any consistent way. Rather than a global, institution-wide policy on the use of sexist and anti-sexist language, there seem to be mainly text- and language-bound strategies. Further research on a more recent corpus could help to determine whether the recent boom of CAT tools, such as eLUNa and the UN TermPortal in the UN, has resulted in a more coherent strategy.

Further readings Cameron, Deborah. 2005. Language, Gender, and Sexuality: Current Issues and New Directions. Applied Linguistics, 26(4), 482–502. This article introduces the changes in sociolinguistic research on gender and sexuality at the turn of the century, and in particular the shift from a binary concept to a focus on diversity. It describes the ‘postmodern turn’ and outlines the main differences between second- and third-wave feminism. Castro, Olga. 2009. (Re-)examining Horizons in Feminist Translation Studies: Towards a Third Wave. Translated by Mark Andrew. Monografías de Traducción e Interpretación, 1, 1–17. The aim of this article is to acquaint the reader with the relationships between the fields of translation studies and gender studies, and to discuss new translation practices within third-wave feminism. The article exists both in Spanish and English. Zoberman, Pierre. 2014. “Homme” peut-il vouloir dire “Femme”? Gender and Translation in SeventeenthCentury French Moral Literature. Comparative Literature Studies, 51(2), 231–252. This article explores the translation of the word ‘homme’ in texts by 17th-century French philosophers, and the presuppositions and consequences of the translators’ choice. It denounces the “fallacy of inclusiveness” as hiding the original text’s violence against women rather than mending it.

Notes 1 The Académie française eventually decided to condone the feminization of a number of job titles such as ‘docteure’ [female doctor] or ‘écrivaine’ [female writer] instead of insisting on the generic masculine. This long-awaited decision was made public on 28 February 2019. 2 Article 111 of the founding text of the UN Charter specifies that “The present Charter, of which the Chinese, French, Russian, English, and Spanish texts are equally authentic, shall remain deposited in the archives of the Government of the United States of America.” This statement, or close variations on it, is a staple of UN conventions. Available at: www.un.org/sg/en/multilingualism/index.shtml 387

Enora Lessinger

3 See section on the translation of the word ‘gender,’ in “Key gender-related words and expressions.” 4 “The English word ‘gender’ does not normally refer to biological categories (man and woman) but rather, in general, to social categories: ‘male,’ ‘female’ [. . .]. It follows that there are several options for the translation of this word, depending on the context, point of view, connotations etc.” (my translation).

References Adolphe, Jane. 2012. “Gender” Wars at the United Nations. Ave Maria Law Review, 11(1), 1–31. Austin, John Langshaw, James Urmson, and Marina Sbisà. 1975. How to Do Things with Words. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Braun, Friederike. 1997. Kommunikation von Geschlecht. Pfaffenweiler: Centaurus-Verl-Ges. Butler, Judith. 1990. Gender Trouble. New York: Routledge. Cameron, Deborah. 1985. Feminism and Linguistic Theory. Houndmills and Basingstoke: Macmillan Press. Cameron, Deborah. 1992. Feminism and Linguistic Theory. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Cameron, Deborah. 2005. Language, Gender, and Sexuality: Current Issues and New Directions. Applied Linguistics, 26(4), 482–502. Castro, Olga. 2009. (Re-)examining Horizons in Feminist Translation Studies: Towards a Third Wave. Translated by Mark Andrew. Monografías de Traducción e Interpretación, 1, 1–17. Cooper, Robert L. 1984. The Avoidance of Androcentric Generics. International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 50, 5–20. Ehrlich, Susan and Ruth King. 1994. Feminist Meanings and the (de)politicization of the Lexicon. Language in Society, 23(1), 59–76. Flotow, Luise Von. 1991. Feminist Translation: Contexts, Practices and Theories. TTR: traduction, terminologie, rédaction, 4(2), 69–84. Flotow, Luise Von. 2009. Gender and Sexuality, in Mona Baker, ed., Encyclopedia of Translation Studies. London and New York: Routledge. Frank, Francine W. 1985. Language Planning and Sexual Equality: Guidelines for Non-Sexist Usage, in Marlis Hellinger, ed., Sprachwandel und feministische Sprachpolitik: Internationale Perspektiven. Openladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 231–254. García Meseguer, Álvaro. 1994. Es sexista la lengua española? Una investigación sobre el género gramatical. Barcelona: Paidós Iberica. Gervais-Le Garff, Marie-Marthe. 2007. Le triomphe de l’usage en matière de féminisation, in Annick Farina and Rachele Raus, eds., Des mots et des femmes: rencontres linguistiques. Firenze: University Press, 27–40. Henley, Nancy. 1987. This New Species That Seeks a New Language, in Joyce Penfield, ed., Women and Language in Transition. Albany: State University of New York Press, 3–27. Houdebine, Anne-Marie. 1998. La féminisation des noms de métiers en France. Paris L’Harmattan. Lakoff, Robin. 1975. Language and Woman’s Place. New York: Harper & Row. Lomotey, Benedicta. 2015. On Sexism in Language and Language Change–The Case of Peninsular Spanish. Linguistik Online, 70(1/15), 167–183. Mills, Sara. 2003. Third Wave Linguistic Feminism and the Analysis of Sexism. Discourse Analysis Online, 2(1). Available at: http://extra.shu.ac.uk/daol/articles/open/2003/001/mills2003001-paper.html. Niedzwiecki, Patricia. 1993. Women and Language. Women of Europe, 40. European Commission. Nissen, Uwe Kjær. 2013. Aspects of Translating Gender. Linguistik Online, 11(2), 25–37. Pauwels, Anne. 1997. Of Handymen and Waitpersons: A Linguistic Evaluation of Job Classifieds. Australian Journal of Communication, 24(1), 58–69. Pauwels, Anne. 2000. Inclusive Language Is Good Business: Gender, Language and Equality in the Workplace, in Janet Holmes, ed., Gendered Speech in Social Context: Perspectives from Gown and Town. Wellington: Victoria University Press, 134–151. Pauwels, Anne. 2003. Linguistic Sexism and Feminist Linguistic Activism, in Janet Holmes and Miriam Meyerhoff, eds., The Handbook of Language and Gender. Oxford: Blackwell, 550–570. Penrod, Lynn. 1993. Translating Hélène Cixous: French Feminism(s) and Anglo-American Feminist Theory. TTR: traduction, terminologie, rédaction, 6(2), 39–54. Shaw, Sylvia. 2000. Language, Gender and Floor Apportionment in Political Debates. Discourse & Society, 11, 401–418. Simon, Sherry. 1996. Gender in Translation: Cultural Identity and the Politics of Transmission. New York: Routledge. Teso, Elena. 2010. A Comparative Study of Gender-Based Linguistic Reform Across Four European Countries. PhD. dissertation, Liverpool John Moores University. 388

Le président est une femme

United Nations. 1975. Report on the World Conference of the International Women’s Year. Mexico City. E/ CONF.66/34. United Nations. 1980a. Evaluation of the Translation Process in the United Nations System. Geneva. JIU/REP/80/7. United Nations. 1980b. Report on the World Conference of the United Nations Decade for Women: Equality, Development and Peace. Copenhagen. A/CONF.94/35. United Nations. 1985. Report on the World Conference to Review and Appraise the Achievements of the United Nations Decade for Women: Equality, Development and Peace. Nairobi. A/CONF.116/28/Rev.1. United Nations. 1995. Report of the Fourth World Conference on Women. Beijing. A/CONF.177/20/Rev.1. United Nations. 2000. Implementation of the Outcome of the Fourth World Conference on Women and of the Special Session of the General Assembly Entitled “Women 2000: Gender Equality, Development and Peace for the Twenty-First Century”. Report of the Secretary-General. A/55/341. United Nations. 2005. Commission on the Status of Women. Report on the Forty-Ninth Session, Economic and Social Council. New York: E/CN.6/2005/11. United Nations. 2010. Commission on the Status of Women. Report on the Fifty-Fourth Session, Economic and Social Council. New York. E/2010/27. United Nations. 2015. Commission on the Status of Women. Report on the Fifty-Ninth Session, Economic and Social Council. New York. E/2015/2. UNESCO. 1999. Guidelines on Gender-Neutral Language. Recomendaciones para un uso no sexista del lenguaje. 3rd ed. Available at: https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000114950. Zoberman, Pierre. 2014. “Homme” peut-il vouloir dire “Femme”? Gender and Translation in SeventeenthCentury French Moral Literature. Comparative Literature Studies, 51(2), 231–252.

389

29 Identifying and countering sexist labels in Arabic translation The politics of language in cleaning products Sama Dawood

Introduction The interaction between feminism, critical discourse analysis (CDA), and translation studies has given rise to new lines of thought in the two disciplines: feminist critical discourse analysis (FCDA) and feminist translation (FT). These two young fields share the same objective of making women seen and heard in and through language, but the number of studies that have tried to open a dialogue between them is still limited, especially beyond the Anglo-American purview. In Arab society, for example, where Arab women may be making advances when it comes to rights and equality, certain aspects of the culture rarely reflect any kind of change in the linguistic stereotyping of women. In many social environments, women are still labelled as either attractive objects or housewives. In this chapter, we study a very pragmatic form of translation where this perspective becomes clearly visible – the translation from English to Arabic of household cleaners. These instructions gender the cleaning products, implying that cleaning and laundry are strictly the domains of women, while safety precautions are the domain of men. This chapter lays out an interdisciplinary framework between feminist critical discourse analysis and feminist translation to analyze the sexist Arabic translations of English labels on household cleaning products available in the Arab market; it challenges the feminization strategies used in the translations and suggests other translation strategies that would liberate women from this cliché. The proposed combination between feminist critical discourse analysis and feminist translation makes the discourse analysis more dynamic and political, and provides feminist translation with a framework of analysis that is a point of departure for further theory-based practices. The chapter postulates that changing the way language works is a very effective means of leading to a different reality.

Critical issues The convergence between language, thought and women The relation between language and thought has long attracted the attention of linguists. The controversy over whether thought determines language or vice versa has resulted in the 390

Sexist labels in Arabic translation

emergence of two opposing hypotheses. The first one is termed linguistic determinism: its proponents believe that language determines the way we speak and act in the real world. Edward Sapir describes users of a language as victims “at the mercy” of their language as it forces them to see social reality in a certain way (1929, 209). This premise is still favoured by some modern linguists such as Lera Boroditsky (2001, 1) who thinks that speakers of a language that uses different linguistic forms for males and females take for granted the existence of such a distinction in the real world. In the same vein, Efrén Pérez and Margit Tavits (2016, 1) hold the view that languages determine the way societies perceive gender equality. By contrast, other linguists believe in so-called linguistic relativism. Those in favour of this concept say that language affects, rather than determines, the way we see the world. Wouter Beek (2004, 5), for instance, thinks that language influences only some limited aspects of our way of thinking. A relevant dichotomy in the relationship between language and women is highlighted by Luise von Flotow. She distinguishes between two feminist schools: the reformist and the radical. The reformist school considers language a manifestation of society and it is, therefore, corrigible. The radical approach, on the other hand, sees language as the reason behind gender discrimination in the real world, and argues that, therefore, changing sexist language is a necessity that will improve the social status of women (2016, 8). This polarization, with the determinist-radical approach on one end and the relativistreformist approach on the other end, has a strong theoretical basis, but may not be of immediate practical help to feminist translators. Hiroko Furukawa (2017) points out that although the determinist-radical approach is espoused by certain feminist translators, it may backfire in societies that are not yet ready for it (81). Therefore, these binary viewpoints need to be conceived not as absolute positions, but rather as two ends of a continuum along which feminist translators move according to the target context and the expected response of the target audience.

Critical discourse analysis and translation studies: common goals The relation between critical discourse analysis and translation studies can be traced back to 1985 when the feminist linguist Deborah Cameron published her Feminism and Linguistic Theory in which she argued that language could be used as a tool either to oppress women or to liberate them (227). A few years later, the feminist translator Barbara Godard noted that the translations of feminist theorists needed to be analyzed within the framework of the theories of both discourse and translation (1989, 43). It is this belief in the power of words that has motivated scholars and practitioners of critical discourse analysis and translation studies to criticize and resist sexist use of language in order to achieve social change. This has led to the emergence of two parallel feminist approaches in the two disciplines, namely feminist critical discourse analysis (FCDA) and feminist translation (FT), and they meet at more than one point in their pursuit to make women visible in and through language. Michelle Lazar, who discusses feminist critical discourse analysis in her 2005 article “Feminist critical discourse analysis: Articulating a feminist discourse praxis” underlines five principles that constitute the basis of this approach to text analysis. These same principles can be described as the foundation by which feminist translators justify the use of feminizing strategies in translation. The first principle that Lazar suggests is feminist analytical activism, where feminist critical discourse analysis is concerned with exploring the types of gendered discourse that sustain current social injustice towards women. It is part of academic feminists’ duty to raise public awareness of such biased practices (Lazar, 146). This same objective is what feminist translators try to achieve, though it is not always declared. Further, Emek Ergun (2010, 315) holds the view that feminist translators sometimes leave sexist discourse in place in order to raise the awareness of the readers. 391

Sama Dawood

The second principle of feminist critical discourse analysis is that gender discourse is an ideological structure that establishes and reinforces social discrimination between men and women. Lazar maintains that the role of feminist critical discourse analysis is to criticize forms of gender asymmetry where men are represented as the dominant group while women are relegated to the subordinate one (147). It could be argued that feminist translation has emerged as a response to this asymmetry, and feminist translated works provide a criticism of the hidden ideology that favours men as the controlling group. Godard asserts that the power of feminist translation lies in its ability to change “a form of subordination into an affirmation” in order to re-structure society (1989, 46). The third concern elaborated by Lazar is the need to analyze our daily written and spoken discourse that implicitly promotes unequal power relations between men and women. Such relations can take the form of using biased language or following conversation etiquette that enhances the dominance of men over women (Lazar, 149). Feminist critical discourse analysis can help feminist translators trace biased language contextually without making overgeneralizations. That is, as Olga Castro (2009, 120) mentions, the context of discourse can make it clear whether or not a given word is being used deliberately to discriminate between men and women. The fourth tenet of feminist critical discourse analysis is its focus not only on analyzing daily gendered language, but also on finding a way to counter and change that language in an attempt to transform the unjust social order it represents (Lazar, 150). This is exactly the aim of feminist translators and the strategies they adopt are intended to offer alternatives to patriarchal language (Ergun 2010, 310). The last principle of feminist critical discourse analysis is that of critical reflexivity on the question of how current social practices shape the future ones. Lazar asserts that it is the responsibility of the researchers in this sub-discipline to get engaged in social and academic endeavours to change the status quo (152). The same idea has been expressed earlier by Luise von Flotow (1991, 81) who states that feminist translation has “revolutionary potential” and a continuing impact on changing traditional stereotypes. To sum up, feminist translators need feminist critical discourse analysis to analyze and counter the hidden ideologies of the biased texts they translate, and feminist critical discourse analysis needs feminist translators to create the social change it seeks to achieve. On the one hand, feminist translation can benefit from the solid theoretical framework of analysis provided by feminist critical discourse analysis, and on the other hand, it can help expand the impact beyond merely criticizing sexist use of language. It can take practical steps to change language both intra- and inter-lingually. This study attempts to find answers to the following research questions: How far can feminist critical discourse analysis and feminist translation complement each other to counter patriarchal language use? Is feminizing a text always the best translation strategy to deal with a sexist discourse? What are the translation strategies that can be listed under feminist translation other than feminizing a text? The study is concerned with the connections between feminist critical discourse analysis and feminist translation as evident in the English and Arabic instruction labels present on a number of household cleaners available in the Egyptian market.

Feminist translation in Arabic context: visible voices Arab researchers have tried to examine the applicability of feminist translation from and into Arabic, but the number of studies, as Hala Kamal (2016, 72) points out, is still limited. A review 392

Sexist labels in Arabic translation

of some relevant contributions in this regard mainly in the context of translation between Arabic and English follows. To begin with, Arabic has been criticized by Arab scholars for being a sexist language. Hassan Abd El-Jawad (1989) believes that gender inequality in the Arab world has greatly affected Arabs’ linguistic behaviour, turning Arabic into a biased language. In Women, Gender, and Language in Morocco, Fatima Sadiqi (2003) argues that the everyday linguistic behaviour of the Moroccan people reflects the subordinate role assigned to women there. In regard to the Quran and its influence on perceptions of women in Arabic, Rim Hassen has examined four English translations of the Quran by four women (2011), and detected the reproduction of patriarchal language in their work. She discusses whether or not female translators prefer a feminist translation approach in their work on the Quran. The results of Hassen’s study show a huge discrepancy between the language used by female translators living in Muslim countries compared to the language of those living in the United States. Miramar Damanhouri (2013) explores the relationship between women and language in Saudi society. She specifically criticizes the generic use of masculine forms as this marginalizes women theoretically and practically. She recommends equal and explicit reference to men and women in all kinds of documents (145). Heba Nayef and Mohamed El Nashar (2014) reveal how Arabic humour is manipulated on the Internet to sustain the subordinate status of women in Egyptian society. They show that the spread of sexist jokes through the Internet can further reinforce the patriarchal nature of Arab society (83). Abdunasir Sideeg (2015) analyses the English translation of selected verses of the Quran using critical discourse analysis where he is mainly concerned with the way pronouns are used in various contexts to refer to Allah. In her article “Translating feminist literary theory into Arabic,” Hala Kamal (2016) reflects on her experience of translating a number of English academic articles of feminist literary criticism into Arabic, discussing the issues that came up during the process; these include the use of feminization strategies. Kamal stresses the active role that feminist translators can play to raise awareness and empower women (72). Raidah AlRamadan in her PhD thesis (2017) analyses the language used in ten Arabic novels and their English translations. The findings of her study show that the translators adopt the same linguistic pattern that the source texts use to portray Arab women as victims. It may be true that, as Angeles Vicente (2009, 25) points out, the current changes in the social status of women in Arab countries have positively affected the linguistic aspect, but there is still need for much more to be done, and feminist translators are key players who can make a positive difference.

Translation: a tool to ‘clean up’ language and society This section analyses some examples from a typical Arabic gendered discourse to illustrate how the principles underlying feminist critical discourse analysis can help feminist translators decide on a feminist translation strategy. But first some key issues pertinent to the grammatical forms used in Arabic and English languages to express gender need to be highlighted. When it comes to gender structure, three types of languages can be identified: grammatical gender languages, natural gender languages, and genderless languages. The first type refers to those languages where there are masculine and feminine forms for nouns; Arabic is one such language. Other parts of speech (e.g. verbs and adjectives) have gender markers (i.e. prefixes or suffixes) that agree with the gender of the noun (such as ‫‘ قال‬he said’ vs. ‫‘ قالت‬she said’ and ‫‘ طالب ذكي‬intelligent male student’ vs. ‫‘ طالبة ذكية‬intelligent female students’). In natural gender languages, like English, males and females are referred to with the same nouns (such as friend, or lover) and gender is expressed by the use of pronouns. Genderless languages use the same 393

Sama Dawood

noun and pronoun forms to refer to both sexes (Stahlberg et al. 2007, 164–166). This chapter is concerned with the first two kinds of languages–Arabic and English. Arabic and English differ in the use of verbs to refer to gender. In Arabic, verbs agree with the gender of the subject whether masculine or feminine. This agreement is expressed by prefixes and/or suffixes that are used with the root (masculine) verb (as shown in the preceding example ‫ قال‬vs. ‫)قالت‬. In English, by contrast, no verb conjugation is required to refer to different sexes. The same verb form is used to refer to both males and females. However, both Arabic and English, as Muayad Shamsan and Abdul Majeed Attayib (2015, 148) point out, use the masculine form generically to refer to all humankind, and they have passive forms that are gender-neutral. Arabic passive voice is conjugated by changing the pattern of vowels (such as ‫‘ قال‬he said’, ‫قالت‬ ‘she said’ vs. ‫‘ يُقال‬it is said’, whereas the passive voice in English is formed by a combination of an auxiliary and the past participle form of the verb. The set of data selected to show the interrelationship between feminist critical discourse analysis and feminist translation consists of English and Arabic instruction labels on a number of household cleaners available in the Egyptian market. Instructions on detergent labels are usually written in English and Arabic using the imperative form of the verb. But while this verb mood is used in English to address men and women alike, in Arabic it has two different forms depending on the gender addressed. User instructions written on most of the household cleaning products, including Clorox, Tide, Downy, Vanish, Mr. Muscle and Pledge, are written in English using the imperative, genderless verb mood, but are translated into Arabic using the feminine form of the verb. Cautions and warnings about using some of these same products, however, are translated into Arabic using either the masculine or the passive form! That is, when instructions about how to use the cleaning products are expressly addressed to women, the assumption is that women are cleaners. When the cautions and warnings are addressed to men, it implies that men are the ‘saviours’. This biased language is thought to be the result of ingrained stereotypes about the role of men and women in Arab society. Following are some examples to further illustrate the argument presented.

English text: Apply Clorox Colors directly to stain, rub gently, let stand for five minutes and wash normally.

Arabic translation: .‫ دقائق ثم اغسليه‬5 ‫ اتركيه لمدة‬.‫ ادعكي برفق‬.‫ضعي كلوركس لأللوان مباشرة على البقع‬ da‘ ī Clorox lil alwān mubāšaratan ‘alā al-bu‘qa, id‘akī bi-rifq, ȗ trukīh li-muddat 5 daqāʾiq tumma iʾg¯silīh. la tatrukī al-muntaj yajif ‘alā al-aqmiša. The English instructions on Clorox stain remover include four verbs: apply, rub, let, and wash. They are all in the imperative form and address either men or women. The Arabic translation, however, addresses only women by attaching the feminine marker (‫ )ي‬to the verb which is used for the second person feminine singular. Such translation conforms to the social order that is dominant in most Arab countries where women are the ones responsible for laundry. A similar translation strategy can be found on the instruction label of Tide detergent.

English text: Sort. Dose. Load. 394

Sexist labels in Arabic translation

Arabic translation: .‫ ضعي المالبس في الغسالة‬.‫ ضعي المسحوق في الغسالة‬.‫صنفي المالبس‬ sanifī al-malābis. da‘ ī al-mashuq fī al-g¯assāla. da‘ ī al-malābis fī al-g¯assāla ˘ The English label uses a very brief format with only three genderless verbs: sort, dose, and load. The drawings on the product pack clarify what is meant. By contrast, the Arabic translation is detailed and uses three imperative verbs with the suffix (‫ )ي‬to address females only. The translation instructs women to sort out the dirty clothes, put the detergent in the washing machine, and then put the clothes in the washing machine. One may wonder whether such redundant translation is due to the verbose nature of Arabic language, or to the fact that women are widely stereotyped in the Arab world as inherently less intelligent and careful than men, and, therefore, they need detailed directions. The following two examples further reinforce the image of women in Arab society as a weak and careless group.

English text: Add Downy to the final rinsing water.

Arabic translation: .‫أضيفي داوني لماء الشطف‬ aʾdīfī Downy li māʾ āš-šatf

English text: Do not use this product on garments labelled as flame resistant.

Arabic translation: .‫ال يُستخدم هذا المنتج على المالبس المصنفة كمقاومة لالشتعال‬ lā yustakdam hāda al-muntaj ‘alā al-malābis al-musannafa ka-muqāwima lil išti‘āl ¯ ¯ ˙ These two sentences appear on the label of Downy fabric softener. The first one tells the user when the softener should be added, while the other is a caution at the bottom of the bottle. In both places the genderless imperative form is used in English. In the Arabic translation, on the other hand, two different verb forms are used. Add is translated into the feminine verb form (‫ )أضيفي‬in the instructions part, whereas use is translated into the genderless passive form (‫)يُستخدم‬ in the warning. Such translation strategy promotes the image that women are inattentive and absent-minded, while men are cautious and alert to potential harms. Arab females are expected to clean, whereas males are the ones who direct and guide them. The same goes for the following translation of the label on Vanish stain remover.

English text: Pour Vanish with detergent into washing machine. 395

Sama Dawood

Arabic translation: .‫اسكبي فانيش مع مسحوق الغسيل الذي تستخدمينه في العادة في الغسيل‬ uʾskubī Vanish ma‘a mashuq al-g¯asīl alladī tastakdminahu fī al-‘āda fī al-g¯asīl ˘ ¯ ¯

English text: In case of contact with eyes, rinse immediately with plenty of water and seek medical advice.

Arabic translation: .‫في حالة مالمسته للعين يجب غسل العين فورا ً بالكثير من الماء وطلب المساعدة الطبية‬ fī hal mulāmasathu lil ‘ain, yajib g¯asl al-‘ain fauran bi-al-kat īr min al-ma‘a wa talab al-musā‘da ˙ ˙ ¯ al-tibbïīya ˙ The verb pour in the instruction part is translated into the Arabic verb (‫ )اسكبي‬with the feminine marker. Rinse and seek in the caution, on the other hand, are translated neutrally using the modal verb (‫ يجب‬literally means ‘must’) and the genderless infinitive forms of the verb (‫ غسل‬and ‫ طلب‬literally means ‘washing’ and ‘seeking’). Adopting two different translation strategies here emphasizes the ideology of what women should be like in Arab society. Another point that needs to be raised here is that the translator in the instruction part added a phrase that is not there in the English text, namely, ‫( الذي تستخدمينه في العادة في الغسيل‬which literally means the detergent that you usually use in washing clothes). This addition implies that women in Arab society are expected to do the laundry, and rules out the possibility of men being responsible for it. A more interesting example is found next where the feminine-marked verb is used for instructions, while the male-marked verb is used for warnings.

English text: Place a capsule to dispenser drawer and close immediately.

Arabic translation: .‫ضعي كبسولة داخل درج الموزع واغلقيه على الفور‬ da‘ ī kabsȗ la dākil durj al-muwazzi‘ wa ig¯liqīh ‘alla al-faur ¯

English text: If in eyes: Rinse with water for several minutes. Remove contact lenses, if present.

Arabic translation: .‫ إغسلهما بالماء لعدة دقائق وانزع العدسات الالصقة إن كنت تضعها‬،‫إذا دخل المنتج في العينين‬ idā dakal al-muntaj fī al-‘ainain ig¯slhumā bi-al-ma‘a li-‘ iddat daqāʾiq wa inzi‘ al-‘adasat al-lāsiqa ¯ ¯ ˙ in kunta tada‘hā This translation appears on the label of Finish dishwashing capsules. The translator followed two different translation techniques: feminizing the instructions and masculinizing the warning. 396

Sexist labels in Arabic translation

The verbs place and close in the instructions are translated into (‫ ضعي‬and ‫ )اغلقي‬in Arabic with the feminine marker (‫)ي‬, whereas the rinse and remove in the warning are translated into the root verbs (‫ إغسل‬and ‫ )انزع‬which address males. It is worth mentioning here that the Arabic translation of removing contact lenses is directed to men although lenses are worn by both sexes. Laundry and dish washing products are not the only place where sexist translation can be found. Here is an example from the label on Mr. Muscle toilet cleaner. Again, the translation reflects the society’s bias.

English text: Lift toilet seat. Simply direct Mr. Muscle Liquid under the rim and squeeze evenly around the bowl.

Arabic translation: .‫ وجهي مستر ماسلز تحت الحافة واضغطي بانتظام حول التواليت‬،‫ارفعي غطاء التواليت ببساطة‬ irfa‘ ī g¯ita al-tuwālēt bi-basāta wajhī Mr. Muscles taht al-hāffa wa id g¯atī bi-intizām hawl al-tuwālēt ˙ ˙ ˙ ˙ ˙ ˙ The three verbs lift, direct, and squeeze are all translated into gender-marked Arabic verbs with the suffix (‫ )ي‬to address only women. The same translation strategy is followed by the translator of the instructions label on Pledge marble and ceramic cleaner in the following example.

English text: Pour two cupfuls of Pledge in half a bucket of water. Apply using a cloth or a sponge.

Arabic translation: .‫ إستعملي قطعة قماش أو إسفنجة‬.‫أضيفي مقدار غطائين من بليدج في نصف دلو من المياه‬ aʾdīfī miqdār g¯itaʾain min Pledge fī nisf dalw min al-myāh. ʾista‘milī qit‘at qimāš au isfanja. ˙ The feminine marker is again attached to the Arabic verbs (‫ أضيفي‬and ‫ )استعملي‬as equivalents to the English ones pour and apply. Now, referring to the first principle of feminist critical discourse analysis, which is analytical activism, the Arabic translation could be classified as a biased discourse that represents a deformed social order where women are viewed as a group whose main task is to take care of/ clean for the privileged group (i.e. men). The role of feminist translation, therefore, is to look for a translation strategy that can re-arrange the relationship between the two groups to mirror a just social reality. In other words, if the task of feminist critical discourse analysis is to critique gendered discourse (Lazar 2005, 146), it is the task of feminist translation to un-gender such discourse through proper translation strategies. Ideology is at the core of critical discourse analysis and, of course, its feminist branch. It evaluates gendered discourse from a feminist perspective as a representation of an ideology that classifies men and women according to their physical qualities and assigns them certain types of work (Lazar 2005, 146). Translating English genderless imperative verbs into gendered Arabic ones promotes the ideology of having dominant and subordinate classes in the Arab world represented by men and women. Avoiding the use of the gender-neutral form (i.e. passive voice) or 397

Sama Dawood

even masculine verbs (i.e. the passive form) in Arabic when translating instructions on cleaning products meets the gendered expectations of Arab men that cleaning is the duty of women only. The selection of lexical items and sentence structure is among the fundamental levels of analysis in feminist critical discourse analysis. Language is essential to maintain and also to change social order (Lazar, 150). The sexist language used in Arabic translations reflects the type of power relationships among members of most Arab families. The linguistic representation in Arabic of ‘cleaning’ as a social practice done only by women fosters long-held stereotypes about Arab women as submissive housewives. Feminizing the translation of the instructions on household cleaners explicitly shows that these products are tailored to women only, and strengthens an outdated labor division: women are responsible for taking care of the house, while men are the breadwinners. Therefore, using the passive voice in Arabic would be a more desirable translation strategy here as it is genderfree. Masculinizing the translation by using the masculine form of the imperative verb generically could also be considered since it is quite common and mainstreamed in Arabic, though it implies marginalizing women. Of course, these two de-feminizing translation techniques alone will not erase the outdated gendered stereotypes that are engraved in Arab society, but they may help inform men that they are expected as much as women to play domestic roles.

Conclusion and future direction This chapter has discussed the interrelationship between feminist thought and recent trends in critical discourse analysis and translation studies. It has argued that feminist critical discourse analysis and feminist translation have much in common and can benefit from each other. Through criticizing and changing gendered discourse, an integrated approach has the power to reshape perceptions and attitudes and change backward, fixed views, thus helping to create a women-friendly social environment by rejecting the use of biased language. Analyzing biased discourse within the framework of feminist critical discourse analysis helps feminist translators decide on the most adequate feminist translation strategy. As has been shown in the examples discussed, the feminization of detergent label instructions through translation unfortunately contributes to reinforcing gendered discrimination. The study argues that feminist translation does not necessarily mean feminizing the original text; in some grammatical gender languages, such as Arabic, neutralizing or masculinizing can also be effective translation strategies that can enhance women’s status in society. This approach has also shown that the Arabic language, and perhaps all other languages, cannot be described wholly as a sexist language. Arabic has both gender-marked and unmarked grammatical forms, and Arabic speakers themselves prefer using one over the other. This is quite evident in the language used on detergent labels. Therefore, and in this case, de-feminization (i.e. using the passive voice or the generic masculine form) can be seen as an effective translation strategy that can help erase gendered stereotypes in Arab society. It can serve to establish new social expectations that challenge the outdated division of household labor. Thus, the role played by detergents can reach well beyond cleaning surfaces and clothes to also ‘clean’ minds of sexist thoughts. Strategies of feminist translation differ across languages and across contexts for any given language. Feminist translation therefore, needs to expand to include feminizing, masculinizing, and neutralizing. The underlying principle that is common to these approaches is that language should be giving women their own voice in order to break down stereotypes and move the river off its traditional course. 398

Sexist labels in Arabic translation

This research is a contribution to existing research that investigates the relationship between language, women and translation in the context of English to Arabic translation. This is still an under-researched area; however, with growing academic interest to explore this field, and with more Arab universities offering gender studies courses to encourage relevant dissertations and research, the intersection between the three elements is expected to yield new, innovative lines of thought challenging the subordinate status of women in Arab countries. There are high future possibilities for interdisciplinary research and projects that will allow feminist translation to play a more effective role in promoting radical social change towards gender equality. The practices of feminist translation should be expanded and applied to other non-literary texts. The language of media is a rich area in this regard especially since it nowadays affects a larger audience than literary texts do. Therefore, interdisciplinary academic projects in collaboration with industry and social institutions are necessary and recommended to limit the use of patriarchal language and drop deeply rooted portrayals of gender in different contexts, thus painting a picture of a new social order.

Further reading Bassiouney, Reem. 2009. Arabic Sociolinguistics. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. The author tackles key gender-related aspects in the linguistic behaviour of Arabs, including diglossia, code switching, and use of biased language. The author resorts to various sociolinguistics theories to analyze these phenomena. The book is a much-needed source for researchers who would like to gain deeper insights into the societal implications of Arabic usage. Castro, Olga and Emek Ergun, eds. 2017. Feminist Translation Studies: Local and Transnational Perspectives, vol. 20. New York: Routledge. The authors challenge the traditional, narrow definition of feminism by linking it to various other disciplines and cultures. With its special focus on feminist politics, this volume is a rich source for researchers in translation studies. Ringrow, Helen. 2016. The Language of Cosmetics Advertising. New York: Springer. To date, this is the only book that extensively applies feminist critical discourse analysis in a crosscultural context. The author argues that the main principles of this sub-discipline could be effectively used to analyze the way women are discursively represented in advertisements and media. The book is useful for researchers who are interested to know more about the applications of feminist critical discourse analysis.

References Abd El-Jawad, Hassan. 1989. Language and Women’s Place with Special Reference to Arabic. Language Sciences, 11(3), 305–324. Al-Ramadan, Raidah. 2017. Arab Women’s Representation in Arab Women’s Writing and Their Translation. Doctoral dissertation, Kent State University. Beek, Wouter. 2004. Linguistic Relativism Variants and Misconceptions [online]. Available at: https://pdfs. semanticscholar.org/82d7/1b38b1faddfee77a81e4b6ba64c0514f6752.pdf [Accessed 7 May 2018]. Boroditsky, Lera. 2001. Does Language Shape Thought? Mandarin and English Speakers’ Conceptions of Time. Cognitive Psychology, 43(1), 1–22. Cameron, Deborah. 1985. Feminism and Linguistic Theory. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Castro, Olga. 2009. Re-Examining Horizons in Feminist Translation Studies: Towards a Third Wave? MonTI, 1, 59–86. Damanhouri, Miramar. 2013. Saudi Perceptions of Linguistic Representation of Women in Use of Arabic Language. Doctoral dissertation, Newcastle University. Ergun, Emek. 2010. Bridging Across Feminist Translation and Sociolinguistics. Language and Linguistics Compass, 4(5), 307–318. Flotow, Luise von. 1991. Feminist Translation: Contexts, Practices and Theories. TTR: traduction, terminologie, rédaction, 4(2), 69–84. 399

Sama Dawood

Flotow, Luise von. 1997/2016. Translation and Gender: Translating in the ‘era of Feminism’. New York: Routledge. Furukawa, Hiroko. 2017. De-Feminizing Translation: To Make Women Visible in Japanese Translation, in Luise von Flotow and Farzaneh Farahzad, eds., Translating Women. New York and London: Routledge, 76–89. Godard, Barbara. 1989. Theorizing Feminist Discourse/Translation. Tessera, 42–53. Hassen, Rim. 2011. English Translation of the Quran by Women: The Challenges of ‘Gender Balance’ in and Through Language. MonTI. Monografías de Traducción e Interpretación, 3, 211–230. Kamal, Hala. 2016. Translating Feminist Literary Theory into Arabic. Studia filologiczne: uniwersytet Jana Kochanowskiego, 29(2), 57–73. Lazar, Michelle. 2005. Feminist Critical Discourse Analysis: Articulating a Feminist Discourse Praxis. Critical Discourse Studies, 4(2), 141–164. Nayef, Heba and Mohamed El-Nashar. 2014. Promoting Masculine Hegemony Through Humour: A Linguistic Analysis of Gender Stereotyping in Egyptian Sexist Internet Jokes. International Journal, 2(4), 69–84. Pérez, Efrénand and Margit Tavits. 2016. Language Shapes Public Attitudes Toward Gender Equality [online]. Available at: https://pages.wustl.edu/files/pages/imce/tavits/perez_tavits_gender_for_posting.pdf [Accessed 4 June 2018]. Sadiqi, Fatima. 2003. Women, Gender, and Language in Morocco, vol. 1. Boston: Brill. Sapir, Edward. 1929. The Status of Linguistics as a Science. Language, 207–214. Shamsan, Muayad and Abdul-majeed Attayib. 2015. Inflectional Morphology in Arabic and English: A Contrastive Study. International Journal of English Linguistics, 5(2), 139–150. Sideeg, Abdunasir. 2015. Traces of Ideology and the ‘Gender-Neutral’ Controversy in Translating the Qurān: A Critical Discourse Analysis of Three Cases. Arab World English Journal, 4, 167–181. Stahlberg, Dagmar, Friederike Braun, Lisa Irmen, and Sabine Sczesny. 2007. Representation of the Sexes in Language, in Social Communication. New York: Psychology Press, 163–187. Vicente, Angeles. 2009. Gender and Language Boundaries in the Arab World: Current Issues and Perspectives. Estudios de Dialectología Norteafricana y Andalusí (EDNA), 13, 7–30.

Disclaimer: The author declares that this research is conducted objectively in the absence of any commercial purposes or financial benefits. The names of the household cleaning products are mentioned; however, no explicit reference is made to the manufacturing companies. The researcher could not get an official consent from the representatives of these companies despite the several attempts made to contact them.

400

30 Egypt Arab women’s feminist activism in volunteer subtitled social media Nihad Mansour

Introduction Academic work on feminism and audiovisual translation (AVT) dates from the early years of the 21st century (Flotow and Josephy-Hernandez 2018), and progress in this field has been slow in contrast to the proliferation of feminist and gender-aware ideas in media and communication studies since the 1970s (Carter 2012; cited in von Flotow and Josephy-Hernandez 2018, 296). In their recent overview of the situation, Luise von Flotow and Daniel JosephyHernandez recommend several avenues for further development in the field, and state that “translation beyond institutional control could provide a foil for the more official versions of gender in AVT” (307). In other words, more research into the field of non-professional/volunteer translators – who escape institutional control – might render more insights into the field of feminism and AVT. While translation and AVT have been shown to play a role in emerging activist movements, the impact of translation, and of AVT in particular, as a tool of group solidarity remains under-explored in the Arab context. A recently published collection of essays, Translating Dissent: Voices from and with the Egyptian Revolution (Baker 2016) engages with translation and how it shapes the space of protest from the concrete experiences of activists during the Egyptian Revolution 2011, and while some of the contributors refer to subtitling in their accounts of translation forging global networks of solidarity and building blocks of collaborative protest movements, most do not address subtitling practices or discursive intervention in the language of subtitling. Leil-Zahra Mortada’s contribution does focus on the interactions between subtitlers and activist film-makers in the collective media project “Words of Women from the Egyptian Revolution” which was conceived as a space of women’s empowerment in which Arab women narrators voice their protest against the marginalization and the submissive status of women in the Arab world. But questions about feminist subtitling strategies that volunteer subtitlers might use in shaping an emerging movement of women’s activism in the Arab world are not addressed. The present chapter thus introduces a new aspect in regard to feminism and subtitling in the Arab world. It contributes to a broader understanding of feminist subtitling practices as rendered by non-professional/volunteer1 translators for new emerging modes of Arab women’s activism. Feminist aspects of translation have not had much exposure in the Arab world and so 401

Nihad Mansour

this examination of the English subtitles produced for video clips of Arab feminism on social network spaces may improve matters. It is conceivable that the nature of audiovisual translation puts more constraints on feminist strategies such as those identified by Flotow (1991, 74–84), namely, supplementing, footnoting, prefacing and hijacking. Nevertheless, analyses of language in subtitling can reveal strategies such as linguistic ‘intensification’ and meaningful interplay between verbal and non-verbal content in certain instances where the feminist perspective is intensely constructed and projected. The discussion towards the end of the chapter addresses questions such as: do non-professional subtitlers adopt a feminist approach in their linguistic renderings in order to intensify the content? And how has language that is manipulated by translators affected an emerging movement of women’s activism by making language ‘speak for women’?

Feminism in the Arab world: the case of Egypt Many scholars have contributed to an understanding of the women’s movement in Egypt (Amal Sobki 1986; Beth Baron 1994; Nadia Abdel-Wahab 1995; Nadje Al-Ali 2000; Hoda Elsadda and Emad Abu-Ghazi 2001; Hala Kamal 2016). However, a brief overview of the history of women’s movements in Egypt is pertinent here. Women’s struggle for their rights culminated in the late 19th century when Qassim Amin published his book tāhrir all Mār’h (1899) [The Liberation of Women] calling for women’s rights and equality with Western women, based on turn of the century pioneering feminist voices heard in the press and among the intellectual circles of the Egyptian national movement. The first women’s demonstration took place in 1919 against the British occupation of Egypt. However, the central point in women’s issues at that time, as Hoda Elsadda (2011) argues, was to build an “imagined national community” and women’s rights were part of the political and ideological struggles against colonization. During the 20th century, women’s issues remained in the frontline of the nation’s agenda of development especially after liberation from colonization. Since then, Elsadda (2011) explains, women have achieved considerable gains on the political and economic levels, but remained subservient to male dominance in the private spheres, a situation which seems to be continuing in the 21st century. In her discussion of the Egyptian feminist movement, Hala Kamal (2016) outlines four waves of women’s movements in Egypt; the first wave, from the late 19th century to the early 1950s, addressed women’s right to education and representation; the second wave, from the 1950s into the 1970s, focused on constitutional and legal rights leading towards sociocultural change; the third wave, from the 1980s to 2011, sought to enhance women’s conditions of life in society and activism in the context of civil society. During this recent period, various women’s initiatives emerged: women’s committees in political parties, independent feminist projects, the establishment of independent focus groups of women activists (among them Nazra For Feminist Studies Center), and a considerable number of diverse feminist groups and NGOs calling for women’s rights and focused on issues of women’s sexual rights. They targeted the legal system, cultural representation, and traditional practices such as honour-killing, female genital mutilation, virginity tests, and under-age marriage, and paid attention to domestic violence and sexual harassment. The fourth wave, from 2011 onward, addresses issues such as violence and harassment related to women’s bodies and sexuality. For the purposes of this chapter the third and fourth waves of women’s activism in the context of civil society are more pertinent. Rana Magdy (2017) argues that women in Egypt have long used informal activist networks to make their voices heard: examples include Huda Sha‘rawi’s Egyptian Feminist Union in 1923, Zaynab al-Ghazali’s Muslim Women’s Society in 1936, and Doria Shafik’s Daughter of the Nile 402

Egypt

Union (Bint al-Nil) in 1948. However, the end of the last century marked a clear shift towards women’s rights voiced by a group of Egyptian non-governmental and independent entities influenced by global interests in women’s rights, in an attempt to develop more influential modes of operation than the outmoded ones of long-established women’s organizations. These organizations developed international reputations, and include the Alliance of Arab Woman AAW (1987), the New Woman Research Center NWRC (1984), the Center of Egyptian Woman’s Legal Assistance CEWLA (1995), and the Women and Memory Forum WMF (1997). To align with the progressive movement of the civil society organizations which championed women’s rights, the National Council for Women (NCW) in Egypt was established in 2000 under the auspices of the First Lady at that time, the first state organism to support women’s rights. However, this organism was criticized as being part of the privileged ruling regime, and therefore considered not to represent free women’s voices. Gradually, independent women’s societies and organizations replaced state-run women’s organizations. One factor which led to an increase in independent societies was the state’s attempt to limit women’s political space (Al-Ali 2000). With women’s active participation in the ‘Arab Spring,’ women’s roles in their communities became more visible, and more non-governmental organizations and a new generation of social media initiatives emerged. United in their endeavours, a good deal of networking took place amongst feminist communities. A good example is the Egyptian Feminist Union (EFU) which was established in Egypt in 2011 (reviving the legacy of the Egyptian Feminist Union founded in 1923) with the help of the Alliance for Arab Women (AAW) to bring together many different NGOs and enable women to practice their human rights and take part in societal responsibilities (www.efuegypt.org).

Arab feminism and digital media Worldwide, feminism has been accelerated and promoted through media and amplified through the language of women activists. According to Sherry Simon, in feminist work over the last 20 to 30 years, “there has emerged a clear sense of language as a site of contested meanings, as an arena in which subjects test and prove themselves” (1996, 7). Currently, in Egypt, a new generation of individual and collective groups of Internet activists are using language in their singleissue campaigns and initiatives to project more revolt and promote change. They are adding to the informative language and professional subtitling of news and activities on women’s issues propagated by institutional websites such as UN Women, and despite the fact that their abilities to promote change have been questioned by long-established women’s organizations, their struggles are receiving extensive responses and interaction on social networks. Furthermore, the subtitles created in many different languages by volunteer translators for audiovisual material that is made by and about Arab women’s activism is making contact with global activism networks. The new virtual women’s movement championed by grass-roots feminist activism now represents Egyptian women at the international level, mainstreaming change and connecting with global feminism through subtitled videos on social network sites such as those uploaded by The New Woman Research Center and The Women and Memory Forum in Egypt. Over the last two decades the shift to digital media and the instantaneity of media flows have had significant implications for the production of knowledge and connectivity among interest groups. Aristea Fotopoulou (2016) uses the term “networked feminism” to describe the decentralized structures that allow women’s groups to connect in an inclusive way. In the same vein, Arab feminists have generated and circulated media content on created and co-created interactive virtual communities and social aggregations on the web. Many of these virtual activist 403

Nihad Mansour

movements have the advantage of Creative Commons License which allows free distribution of their media content. Other groups – locally and globally – have simply made available the right to share and use the media content on their websites. This maximizes the activist groups’ sense of connectedness with global women’s movements and fosters global solidarity. Feminist social media and virtual communities in the Arab world, especially after the ‘Arab Spring’ revolutions, were initiated by small feminist groups who share the same positioning to mobilize women’s collective action and power and challenge the negative portrayal of women in the Arab media (Allam 2008). In Egypt, for instance, Internet initiatives that document crimes of sexual harassment against women marked post ‘Arab Spring’ activism: HarassMap Egypt, the “I saw Harassment” initiative, Anti-harassment Movement, and many others. The independent platform for research on women and gender in Egypt, the “Women and Memory Forum” (WMF) launched the project of an oral history archive to document women’s narratives of the 2011 revolution and women’s participation in public life in times of change in Egypt. The project attempts to “create an archive of hope for the future” (Elsadda 2016, 153). Wiki al-gender (Wiki Gender) is another example of feminist online networking. It is an Arabic participatory virtual platform, with English translation, that provides knowledge and information about gender and feminism in Egypt (https://genderation.xyz/wiki/). Wiki Gender serves as a comprehensive directory of institutions and active groups working on gender and women’s issues in the Arab world. Recently, social media has come to the forefront of struggles in the Arab world. Information disseminated on the Internet and activists campaigns that went viral have contributed to many substantial actions such as criminalizing sexual harassment in the Egyptian national law, granting Saudi women the right to drive a car, allowing Iraqi women to participate in drafting the new constitution with a larger quota of women in the parliament, and making the Algerian People’s National Assembly the most gender-balanced in the region with almost 33% of the seats filled by women, and many others (Odine 2013). Feminist activism in the field of subtitling materials disseminated in social networks has also contributed to the West acknowledging the societal and political transformations of Arab feminism. A drastic change has taken place in how the ‘West’ now sees Arab women as equal partners in social change; a case in point is Tawakkol Karman, the Yemeni political activist, being awarded the Noble Peace Prize in 2011. However, Arab feminism continues to be engaged in processes of change and there will doubtless be more gains in the future.

Non-professional/volunteering subtitling Subtitling has become the preferred mode of AVT in this age of globalization and advanced technologies, allowing for the “emergence of new voices – voices of dissent” (Diaz-Cintas 2012, 284). Hence, subtitling practices, and non-professional/volunteer subtitling in particular, are worth investigation in terms of the subtle messages they convey,“[subtitles] are sometimes unnoticed but nevertheless carriers of meaning and messages. They may reset for a period, remain inactive, but they slowly work their way into the consciousness of the viewers/hearers/readers” (Diaz-Cintas 2008, 4). The subtlety of messages/ideologies disseminated through words, photographs, video clips, and sound tracks can contribute to re-constructing social stereotypes but can also serve as tools to help new values emerge. Seen from this angle, AVT has many implications. Jorge Diaz Cintas (2009, 8) further elaborates “It is not an exaggeration to state that AVT is the means through which not only information but also the assumptions and values of a society are filtered and transferred to other cultures.” Besides being purveyors of information, the

404

Egypt

translators of audiovisual material (mostly volunteers in the case discussed in this chapter) can be viewed as activists or dissidents who want to bring their cause to global attention and gain international solidarity, Further, free online subtitling programs are allowing bilingual volunteers to contribute to this work that disseminates the textual content of audiovisual material to wider foreign audiences. These forces are coming together in non-professional subtitling that, as Luis Perez-Gonzalez explains, is produced “by individuals without any formal training in translation (let alone subtitling) whose work is not informed by professional standards . . . but by intuition and a desire to effect change” (2012a, 343). Such subtitling is a cheaper alternative to professional subtitling, and involves non-professional subtitlers in the causes and the agenda of the media content they are working with, allowing them to contribute to “the emergence of new forms of civic engagement in public life” (PerezGonzalez and Susam-Saraeva 2012, 152). The fact that they are “ordinary citizens [who] become increasingly involved in the ‘co-creation’ of media content” underlines their leading role in social relations (Perez-Gonzalez 2013b, 4) and accounts for the emergence of new paradigms of linguistic and cultural mediation in new sites of cross-cultural contact and interaction (PerezGonzalez and Susam-Saraeva 2012). In this sense, non-professional subtitlers in our contemporary digitized world are “agents contributing to the stability or subversion of social structures through their capacity to re-define the context in which they mediate” (Perez-Gonzalez 2012b, 172). They also create “forms of co-creational or participatory linguistic mediation” (Perez Gonzalez and Saraeva 2012, 154). Subtitling in such cases has become a ‘user-generated translation’, i.e. subtitlers are consumers of the audiovisual content in the first place and they then use the online activist space to project/share their beliefs to a wider foreign audience by creating subtitles. While it might be possible to divide non-professional translators into those who are guided by standards of translation accuracy and language policies and those who are free and working as volunteers (Perez-Gonzalez 2013a), translation scholars have so far shown little interest in the forms of professional or guided non-professional practices. Primacy in the literature is given to free participatory and co-creational practices of non-professional translators who seek to mediate their own profiles through the subtitling of interactive social platforms. More focus is given to how non-professional/volunteer subtitlers use language to circulate a wide selection of ideologies without clear expression of their own position. In this sense, current academic literature explores how subtitling practices have assumed different roles in the broader expression of political/social struggles. To maximize a sense of connectedness with the global women’s movement, subtitles in different languages are regularly added to the productions of virtual social interactive networks promoting Arab feminism on spaces such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and others. Due to the lack of funding, translation and subtitling are rendered by bilingual volunteers who subscribe to the same causes as the activist groups. As non-professionals, these volunteers are engaged in promoting the new-identity formation of these communities of women activists for wider foreign audiences. Arab feminist communities upload their video clips onto online channels, and produce media clips for TV shows or other venues in order to visually project their thoughts and their revolt. A good example of such work carried out in the context of Arab women’s activism is the message of women’s empowerment expressed in the subtitled Egyptian women’s interviews in the media collective “Words of Women from the Egyptian Revolution.” In this case, the subtitles are positioned to “make local political struggles visible to other protest movements, and further foster international networking and solidarity” (Mortada 2016, 127).

405

Nihad Mansour

Non-professional subtitling as ‘voluntarist action’ In the previous sections, I have articulated some of the significant issues that inform the analysis here. In this section, I explore language mediation that integrates Arab feminist values and ideologies into a global context. The ‘intensification’ of language through explicitation, addition or emphasis in translation might come under Flotow’s strategy of supplementing, which “compensates for the differences between languages, or constitutes voluntarist action on the text” (Flotow 1991, 75; emphasis added). The discursive intervention of subtitlers may thus be considered voluntarist action for as Salma El Tarzi (2016) insists,“it is crucial for subtitlers to [. . .] add whatever they deem necessary to enhance the foreign audience’s understanding of the issue at hand” (2016, 91). In the following examples, questions are raised about how language encodes attitudes to gender, and analyses provide insights into the volunteer subtitlers’ linguistic decisions.

Analytical discussion The following examples are extracted from the Egyptian independent NGO Nazra for Feminist Studies2 which was founded in 2005 and registered as an association in December 2007. Since its inception, Nazra has advocated for women’s rights and contributed to the continuity and development of the Egyptian and regional feminist movements in the Middle East and North Africa. Connected to global women’s activist movements, Nazra has explicitly expressed its objectives, feminist values, activities and initiatives in English on its website. Amongst its various activities such as documentation, research, analysis on women’s and gender rights accompanied by work on developing Arabic terminology in relation to feminist causes and advocacy of women’s political participation, Nazra has given priority to ending sexual violence against women and providing legal, psychological, and medical support to women survivors of sexual violence. Following a court ruling in 2017 that froze the assets of both the association and its founder and executive director Mozn Hassan in the legal process known as the “Foreign Funding Case,” Nazra had to close down its office in Cairo in March 2018. On its website it announced that its activities would continue through volunteers, a hotline and services provided to women survivors of violence. Mozn Hassan acknowledged the genuine role played by younger groups of activists operating through initiatives and hashtags on social media (Hanan Haggag 2018). The following discussion addresses the direct intervention of volunteer subtitlers in rendering enhanced linguistic versions of certain text excerpts. Since the names of the subtitlers remain unknown, they are able to make discursive translational decisions that reconceptualize the original within a wider sociopolitical context. The analysis focuses on how volunteer subtitlers appropriate (add/intensify/explicit) the language in their renderings in order to communicate their protest against patriarchal dominance at a global level and inform the outside world of the feminist struggle in the Arab context, thus strengthening networks of solidarity. Examples are chosen from extracts of the videos entitled ‘Nashaz Law’ [Discordant Law] and ‘She and Elections’, uploaded by Nazra for Feminist Studies. The four examples that follow were selected because of the popular themes they address in the discourse on Arab women’s rights, namely legal reform to stop violence against women and women’s continuous struggle against patriarchal dominance. Predominant social misconceptions in the Arab countries have long conceptualized the roles assigned to women as ‘natural’ and associated with reproductive processes (Said-Foqahaa 2011), and so their duties and rights in Islamic Sharia have long been misinterpreted accordingly. In the absence of a just legal framework, such misconceptions have given men the power to control women, “normalizing discrimination, especially within the realm of family law” (Said-Foqahaa 2011, 236). A case in 406

Egypt

point is men’s impunity in cases of domestic violence. Women activists have long fought for the criminalization of these cases and voiced cries for freedom from men’s dominance. The first three examples are drawn from the 12.22 minute video entitled ‘Nashaz Law’ [Discordant Law] which was part of a 16-day campaign launched by Nazra in 2014 on the legal issues associated with violence against women. The two interviewed feminist activists criticize the Egyptian Penal Law, which does not consider domestic violence against women a crime and describes the law as Nashaz. The Arabic word nashaz has its origin in the Islamic tradition where zawja nashiz means ‘disobedient wife,’ i.e. a wife who disobeys her husband in Islamic duties. However, the word ‘nashaz’ is usually used ironically in Arabic to refer to anything contradictory or incongruent. The choice of the title merges the incongruity of the Egyptian Penal Law with the recent shift in women’s struggle for their rights in Egypt. The decision of the subtitler to intensify the narrator’s criticism of the Egyptian Penal Law is apparent in her/his deliberate language intensification by describing the law as being “out of order.” In Arabic the narrator says (min 1.30–1.37): .‫ ينتهي بيها الحال يعني إنها ما تنصفش المرأة‬. . . ‫قانون العقوبات الجديد فيه حاجات كتيرة لألسف‬ [The New Penal Law has many things, that sorrowfully . . . do not do justice to women (my translation)] English subtitles The Egyptian Penal Code is out of order [In the sense that many articles are unfair to women] By labeling the law as “out of order” the subtitler invokes an ongoing refusal to accept laws that do not do justice to women, intensifies the invalidity of the Law in terms of its mismatch with the recent sociopolitical gains of Egyptian women, and brings the activists’ revolt to global attention. It is worth adding here that Arab feminist initiatives launched to stop violence against women primarily took legal reform as a nucleus from which to build up allies and run campaigns advocating legal frameworks for gender equality. Such initiatives include the Moroccan action launched by the feminist group ‘L’Union Feministe Libre’ (UFL),3 the Lebanese NGO KAFA (Enough) Violence and Exploitation, and MohamiatMisr (Egypt’s female attorneys) initiative. Another sharp attack on the Egyptian Penal Law is manifested in an extract from the same video ‘Nashaz Law’. In a recorded interview with the woman attorney who heads the Board of Trustees of the Association of the Egyptian Women’s Issues, the attorney explicitly criticizes Article (20) of the Law pertaining to the right of the husband to ‘discipline’ his wife. .‫تسقط أي عقوبة في حالة إن دا حق تأديب للزوج‬ (min 1.53–1.56) [it [the Law] states no penalty is imposed if this is the husband’s right to discipline (my translation)] English subtitles: It states that no penalty may be imposed if the violent act is committed under the right to discipline the wife A considerable amount of information is communicated through the use of the term violent acts in the English subtitles as the translation of the colloquial Arabic pronoun dā [this]. This explicitation uncovers the fact that recurrent cases of domestic violence against women are practiced by their Moslem husbands under their alleged right to ‘discipline’ their wives 407

Nihad Mansour

according to Islamic Shariaa. The issue of wife disciplining which Moslem theologians have long argued derives from the Quran, has now become subject to subversion. Women activists are promoting a new gender-equality paradigm of the Quran and Shariaa that is formulated in accordance with the Quranic principles of justice. They are challenging patriarchal interpretations of Quranic verses that have been used to justify physical abuse of women. The attorney in the interview further explains that such ‘right to discipline through violent acts’ should not contradict Shariaa, i.e. disciplining a woman should not cause her any pain. This is a controversial issue in Islamic tradition, as many religious interpreters, over the centuries, have been trying to define the ‘acceptable’ forms of discipline (such as for instance corporal punishment without causing an injury), ignoring the fact that any form of physical violence is unacceptable in Islamic teachings (and Shariaa). In this sense, she here ironically refers to men’s resorting to ‘discipline’ according to what they interpret as ‘acceptable’: .‫تأديب ال يتعارض مع الشريعة اإلسالمية‬ (min 158–159) [Discipline that does not contradict Islamic Shariaa (my translation)]. English subtitles “Discipline” which they deem not to contradict Islamic Shariaa In the original, there is no reference to those who drafted the Law; however, by adding the perpetrator ‘they’ which refers to the judges who drafted this article and who seem not to see violent acts as contradicting the Islamic Shariaa, the subtitling intervenes discursively and alerts the foreign audience to the nodes of injustice in the Egyptian legal framework. This intervention provides information on whom to blame and reflects the subtitler’s critical view of the Egyptian laws, domestic violence, misconceived patriarchal rights in the society, and other concerns. Further, extratexual emphasis is provided with the addition of inverted commas around the word ‘discipline’ in the English subtitles, which draw the viewers’ attention to the paradox of considering violent acts as discipline. Such linguistic interventions on the part of the subtitler intensely co-create the context of legal injustice for foreign audiences. Among the gains Egyptian women made after the 2011 Revolution is effective political participation and representation as in the inclusion of five feminist women in the 2014 constitution drafting committee, the inclusion of women’s rights in the 2014 constitution, and recently the proposed amendments of the constitution in 2019, which grant women one quarter of the seats in parliament. The long activist struggle to increase the quota of women representatives and have adequate representation in parliament has topped social media discussions lately. As part of its endeavours to promote fair and effective representation of women in the parliament, Nazra launched its initiative “She and Elections” in 2012 which included a report about mentoring women candidates running for parliamentary elections and a video about the experiences of women from Upper Egypt fighting for 2011–12 parliamentary elections. This was uploaded on the channel. The screen capture (Figure 30.1) from “She and Elections” is about a female candidate who speaks to a gathering, of mostly men, expressing her enthusiasm to run in the parliamentary elections and her intentions to overcome all obstacles that might prevent her. The verbal mode: (‫[ )لما أقول حانزل دا معناه حاكسر حواجز كتير‬when I say I’ll run [for elections], this means I’ll break many obstacles] is integrated with close full face frame of two men gazing at the speaker (non-verbal mode). The synchronization between the image (non-verbal) and the speaker’s comment (verbal) contributes to the meaning-making of a direct confrontation between the speaker and the men seeking to impose obstacles and unjustified restrictions 408

Egypt

Image 30.1 Screen capture: ‘She and the Elections’, min 0.46 (.com)

on women, which the latter intend to break. Yet the subtitles further intensify the meaning by translating ‫[ حواجز‬obstacles] as “taboos.” The meaning-making of the semiotic ensemble in this subtitled screen capture, with the addition of “taboos,” creates a sharp short message about women’s revolt and magnifies women’s struggle against many generations of patriarchal oppression. It is worth adding here that the concept of taboo in the Arabic Islamic context includes the sinful actions that are forbidden by Allah. Linguistically, the word taboo is more forceful in meaning than the Arabic word ‫[ حواجز‬obstacles]; it makes women’s revolt visible to other activists worldwide to foster international solidarity.

Concluding remarks The overview offered in this chapter has been less concerned with surveying the literature on feminism and audiovisual translation in the Arab world, which is rare, than with exploring the emergence of citizens’ engaged digital media content that moves across boundaries via non-professional/volunteer subtitling with a special focus on the Arab world. While interactive social networking has provided much more connectivity and hence opportunities for solidarity amongst local activists, the language of the subtitles produced and used by these networks contributes to disseminating echoes of activism to foreign audiences. I have focused on how non-professional/ volunteer subtitlers attempt to effect change by connecting with others who fight the same battle elsewhere. Their discursive linguistic interventions work to spread global awareness of the pressing issues in the Arab world, situate Arab feminist activism within broader struggles, and build up virtual solidarity with the world’s activist networks. Translation decisions such as deliberate intensification, explicitation, and addition enhance the feminist values of the original. Where volunteer subtitlers are activists as manifested in their ‘voluntarist actions’ in the language of the subtitling, their work is part of the dynamics of global feminist activism. As discussed in this chapter, volunteer subtitling of the productions of Arab feminist activist communities creates a universal cry against societal injustice against women that is imposed through ‘taboos’ and legal discrimination. I have also touched on the anonymity of the subtitlers, a phenomenon that makes possible much of the ‘voluntarist actions’ in subtitling and opens up future 409

Nihad Mansour

research directions on the topic of volunteer work in translation. Another future challenge will be to study feminist activism in the Arab world in other genres of audiovisual translation such as dubbing. This would allow further investigation of the links between video/film productions, their translations and the effects of such translation.

Further reading Badran, Margot and Miriam Cooke. 2004. Opening the Gates: An Anthology of Arab Feminist Writing. Indiana: Indiana University Press. This book is a collection of Arab feminist writing, from the 1920s through the 1980s, which challenges the widely accepted view of Middle Eastern women as submissive non-thinkers. De Marco, Marcela. 2012. Audiovisual Translation Through a Gender Lens. Amsterdam, Netherlands: Rodopi. This book offers insights into the role of audiovisual translation in the transmission of stereotypes of gender sexuality, ethnicity, and economic status. Makdisi, Jean, Noha Bayoumi, and Rafif Rida Sidawi. 2014. Arab Feminisms: Gender and Equality in the Middle East. London: I.B. Tauris. This book gives an account of future and present directions in Arab feminism, and addresses theoretical and methodological issues in Arab feminist thought. Baker, Mona, ed. 2016. Translating Dissent: Voices from and with the Egyptian Revolution. New York: Routledge. This volume consists of a number of articles written by a group of activists who reflect on discursive and non-discursive interventions through translation in the political arena and the impact of translation in creating networks of solidarity. Diaz-Cintas, Jorge, Anna Matamala, and Joselia Neves, eds. 2010. New Insights into Audiovisual Translation and Media Accessibility, Media for All 2 series. Amsterdam, Netherlands: Brill and Radopi. This volume offers new insights into both theoretical and practical issues of audiovisual translation and media accessibility.

Related topics Audiovisual translation, non-professional subtitling, feminist virtual communities, Arab women’s activism

Notes 1 The terms ‘non-professional’ and ‘volunteer’ subtitling are used interchangeably throughout the chapter. I use ‘non-professional’ subtitling more extensively only because it can be used as a generic term that stands for practices that go beyond technical and professional codes of subtitling. 2 See http://nazra.org/en/about-us [Accessed 30 July 2019]. 3 The UFL sets out to provide legal assistance to victims of rape. Their campaign ‘How Many Women must die to change laws?’ came after the rape and death of an 18-year-old. The video UFL launched for this campaign went viral on the Internet. Available at: https://youngfeministfund.org/grantees/lunionfeministe-libre/ [Accessed 15 Mar. 2019].

References Abdel-Wahab, Nadia. 1995. ‘Al-haraka al-nisa’iya fi misr’ [The Women’s Movement in Egypt], in Nadia Abdel-Wahab and Amal Abdel-Hady, eds., Al-haraka al-nisa’iya al-arabiya [The Arab Women’s Movement]. Cairo: New Woman Research Center, 127–170. Al-Ali, Nadje. 2000. Secularism, Gender and the State in the Middle East: The Egyptian Women’s Movement. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Allam, Rasha. 2008. Countering the Negative Image of Arab Women in the Arab Media: Toward a ‘Pan Arab Eye’. Media Watch Project, The Middle East Institute: Policy Brief, no. 15. Available at: www.mei.edu/ 410

Egypt

content/countering-negative-image-arab-women-arab-media-toward-pan-arab-eye-media-watch-project [Accessed 11 May 2018]. Amin, Qassim. 1899/1996. tāhrir all Mār’h [The Liberation of Women]. Cairo: General Egyptian Book Organization. Baron, Beth. 1994. The Women’s Awakening in Egypt: Culture, Society, and the Press. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Diaz-Cintas, Jorge. 2008. Audiovisual Translation Comes of Age, in Delia Chiaro, Christine Heiss, and Chiara Bucaria, eds., Between Text and Image: Updating Research in Screen Translation. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1–9. Diaz-Cintas, Jorge. 2009. Introduction-Audiovisual translation: An Overview of Its Potential, in Jorge Diaz Cintas, ed., New Trends in Audiovisual Translation. Bristol, UK: Multilingual Matters, 1–21. Diaz-Cintas, Jorge. 2012. Clearing the Smoke to see the Screen: Ideological Manipulation in Audiovisual Translation. Meta Translators’ Journal, 57(2), 279–293. doi: 10.7202/1013945ar. El Tarzi, Salma. 2016. Ethical reflections on acitivits film-making and activist subtitling [Translated from Arabic by Robin Moger], in Mona Baker, ed., Translating Dissent: Voices from and with the Egyptian Revolution. New York: Routledge, 88–97. Elsadda, Hoda. 2011. Women’s Rights Activism in Post-Jan25 Egypt: Combating the Shadow of the First Lady Syndrome in the Arab World. Middle East Law and Governance, 3(1–2), 84–93. Elsadda, Hoda. 2016. An Archive of Hope: Translating Memories of Revolution, in Mona Baker, ed., Translating Dissent: Voices from and with the Egyptian Revolution. New York: Routledge, 148–161. Elsadda, Hoda and Emad Abu-Ghazi. 2001. Maseerat Al-Mar’a Al-Misriyya ‘Alamat wa Mawaqif [Significant Moments in the History of Egyptian Women]. Translation by Hala Kamal. Cairo: National Council for Women. Flotow, Luise von. 1991. Feminist Translation: Contexts, Practices and Theories. TTR: traduction, terminologie, rédaction, 4(2), 69–84. doi: 10.7202/037094ar. Flotow, Luise von and Daniel Josephy-Hernandez. 2018. Gender in Audiovisual Translation Studies: Advocating for Gender Awareness, in Luis Perez Gonzalez, ed., The Routledge Handbook of Audiovisual Translation. London: Routledge. Available at: www.researchgate.net/profile/Daniel_F_Josephy_Her nandez/publication/324685 [Accessed 10 June 2018]. Fotopoulou, Aristea. 2016. Digital and Networked by Default? Women’s Organisations and the Social Imaginary of Networked Feminism. New Media & Society, 18(6). Available at: https://pdfs.semanticscholar. org/014a/1a1f9b6031130203ac5384ac4cfb6b290dce.pdf?_ga=2.83691094.1166518840.1531683186618796039.1531683186 [Accessed 5 Jan. 2018]. Haggag, Hanan. 2018. 125 Years of the Egyptian Women’s Movement. Ahram Online (Sept. 25). Available at: http://english.ahram.org.eg/NewsContent/1/64/312392/Egypt/Politics-/-years-of-the-Egyptianwomen%E2%80%99s-movement.aspx [Accessed 20 Mar. 2019]. Kamal, Hala. 2016. A Century of Egyptian Women’s Demands: The Four Waves of the Egyptian Feminist Movement. Gender and Race Matter: Global Perspectives on Being a Woman, 21, 3–22, Emerald Group Publishing Ltd. Available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/S1529-212620160000021002 [Accessed 20 May 2018]. Magdy, Rana. 2017. Egyptian Feminist Movement: A Brief History. Nawa. Available at: www.opendemo cracy.net/north-africa-west-asia/rana-magdy/egyptian-feminist-movement-brief-history [Accessed 3 Apr. 2018]. Mortada, Leil-Zahra. 2016. Translation and Solidarity in Words of Women from the Egyptian Revolution, in Mona Baker, ed., Translating Dissent: Voices from and with the Egyptian Revolution. New York: Routledge, 125–136. Odine, Maurice. 2013. Role of Social Media in the Empowerment of Arab Women. Global Media Journal. Available at: www.globalmediajournal.com/open-access/role-of-social-media-in-the-empowermentof-arab-women.pdf [Accessed 10 July 2019]. Perez-Gonzalez, Luis. 2012a. Amateur Subtitling and the Pragmatics of Spectatorial Subjectivity. Language and Intercultural Communication, 12(4), 335–352. Perez-Gonzalez, Luis. 2012b. Translation, Interpreting and the Genealogy of Conflict. Journal of Language and Politics, 11(2), 169–184. doi: 10.1075/jlp.11.2.01int issn 1569-2159. Perez-Gonzalez, Luis. 2013a. Amateur Subtitling as Immaterial Labour in Digital Media Culture: An Emerging Paradigm of Civic Engagement. Convergence, 19(2), 157–175. Perez-Gonzalez, Luis. 2013b. Co-Creational Subtitling in the Digital Media: Transformative and Authorial Practices. International Journal of Cultural Studies, 16(1), 3–21. 411

Nihad Mansour

Perez-Gonzalez, Luis and Şebnem Susam-Saraeva. 2012. Non-Professionals Translating and Interpreting: Participatory and Engaged Perspectives. The Translator, 18(2), 149–165. Said-Foqahaa, Nader. 2011. Arab Women: Duality of Deprivation in Decision-Making Under Partriarical Authority. Journal of Women of the Middle East and the Islamic World, 9, 234–272. doi: 10.1163/1569 20811X578539. Simon, Sherry. 1996. Gender in Translation: Cultural Identity & the Politics Transmission. London: Routledge. Sobki, Amal. 1986. ‘Al-haraka al-nisaa’iya fi misr ma bayna al-thawratayn, 1919–1952’ [The Women’s Movement in Egypt Between the Two Revolutions 1919–1952]. Cairo: General Egyptian Book Organisation.

Internet resources: Egyptian Feminist Union. Available at: www.efuegypt.org/EN/About.aspx [Accessed 1 June 2018]. L’Union Feministe Libre (UFL). Available at: https://youngfeministfund.org/grantees/lunion-feministelibre/. Nazra for Feminist Studies. Available at: http://nazra.org/en/about-us. Nazra for Feminist Studies. 2012. She and Elections, noon wa el intxabat [online video]. Available at: www. com/watch?v=R-onVTT1WaU [Accessed 7 Dec. 2017]. Nazra for Feminist Studies. 2014. Qanun Nashaz (Nashaz Law) [online video]. Available at: www.com/ watch?v=tkhnhGmfKR0 [Accessed 15 Jan. 2018]. Wiki al-gender (Wiki Gender). Available at: https://genderation.xyz/wiki/.

412

31 The sexist translator and the feminist heroine Politically incorrect language in films and TV Irene Ranzato

Introduction In a scene from the US series Life on Mars (Graham et al. 2008–2009), policewoman Annie Norris and detective Sam Tyler exchange this conversation: Life on Mars USA, season 1 episode 14 ANNIE:  I need answers SAM:  And you’re going to get them by posing as a dead flight attendant? ANNIE:  No, I’m gonna get them by posing as a dead stewardess. SAM:  Right, same thing. Someday that word will become politically incorrect. Set in the early 1970s, this series1 narrates the story of Sam Tyler, who finds himself in the unusual and mysterious position of coming ‘from the future,’ from 2007, and is thus continuously judging the world that surrounds him from his arguably ‘extradiegetic’ standpoint. The preceding dialogue will be discussed in one of the following sections but, for the moment, it is useful to introduce the topic of this chapter, which will offer a reflection on how politically incorrect (PI) language and, most specifically, sexist language at the expense of women, is used in fictional dialogues, in conventional film and TV topoi. When the translation process is brought into the equation, it adds further layers of nuance to already charged texts. In the last section of this chapter, after a brief introduction to the way in which studies in audiovisual translation (AVT) and gender studies have intersected, I will discuss the notion of the audiovisual translator as sexist manipulator by studying some Italian adaptations for dubbing. My focus is on how these translated texts, especially those from pre-politically correct (PC) eras, filter narratives in which women attempt to come into their own by following a precise ideological pattern which models characterizations into new and sometimes dubious forms.2

Political correctness/incorrectness and sexism Political correctness can be defined as an “attempt to redress, through language, some of the negative images our culture affixes to people because of their race, religion, ethnicity, sexual orientation, 413

Irene Ranzato

age, physical disability or some other condition that separates them from the mainstream” (Miller and Swift 1995, ix–x). From a different viewpoint, it is an endeavour to mark as taboo certain areas “which previously involved prejudicial attitudes and stigmatizing language” (Hughes 2010, 46). There is a complex relationship between the terms and discourses surrounding political correctness, incorrectness and sexism (Mills 2008, 117) and no agreement on whether the term PC finds its origin within Marxism, and thus has mainly left-wing associations, or if, on the contrary, it derives from an essentially right-wing public debate which started on university campuses in the United States in the late 1980s. According to Geoffrey Hughes (2010, 7), the fundamental unspecificity of the ideology behind this concept makes “the anonymous agenda-manipulators of political correctness” difficult to identify: political correctness is not one thing and does not have a simple history. As a concept it predates the debate and is a complex, discontinuous, and protean phenomenon which has changed radically, even over the past two decades. (Ibid., 3) From a sociolinguistic point of view, the visibility of the notion of political correctness seems to prove that the Sapir-Whorf view of the relation between language and thought, espousing as it does the belief that the adoption of new terms will change society for the better, is relevant to contemporary debates (Mesthrie et al. 2005). As for the term ‘politically incorrect,’ Sara Mills (2008, 108) claims that it has acquired various associations because of its use in particular contexts and highlights that the expression does not mean just the opposite of ‘politically correct’: The first group of meanings (A) can be characterised as broadly positively evaluated: a positive association with risky humour and fun, as a term of praise for those who are doing something daring, and as an accurate, if unpalatable to some, assessment of affairs. The second group of meanings (B) can be characterised as when the phrase ‘politically incorrect’ is used to refer to a set of opinions which are considered trivial or concerned with the banning of offence. The third group of meanings (C) is when ‘political incorrectness’ is portrayed as ridiculous. Finally, there is a fourth group of meanings (D) where ‘political incorrectness’ is used as a synonym for sexism or racism. Sexism, mentioned in the last of Mills’s associations, is a term coined in the late 1960s to refer to: “social arrangements, policies, language, and practices enacted by men or women that express a systematic, often institutionalised belief that men are superior, women inferior” (Code 2000, 441). As for the way in which audiovisual texts filter these concepts, the first item of Mills’s categorization (the association with risky humour) and the last one (PI language as a synonym for sexism) appear to be particularly relevant, because of the numerous instances which reveal how this type of language is used on the screen to construct derogatory humour and denigrate women or minimise their skills. With these premises in mind, the following sections present examples of different types of sexist language found in audiovisual texts from different periods and in their translations.

The group laughs Ever since the beginning of cinema, screen representations of women as secretaries and office employees, nurses and, later on, with a different twist, policewomen, have been the butt of sexist comments, gazes and gropings. 414

Sexist translator, feminist heroine

In Billy Wilder’s The Apartment (1960), elevator operator Fran Kubelick daily endures the unwelcome attention of an office executive in a lift mostly full of men. The leading character C.C. Baxter’s explanation for her refusing such attention is that she must be “a nice respectable girl.” Almost 50 years later, in one of the first scenes of the very first episode of the TV series Mad Men (Weiner 2007–2015),3 incidentally, greatly influenced by The Apartment, the firm’s new secretary, Peggy Olsen, is introduced to the audience in a similar situation: she rides the lift to her future job surrounded by a group of men, her prospective superiors, who size her up and down and make comments on the new girl. The group laughs, as groups on screen often do. According to Mills (2008,141), a great deal of research on humour has shown that women are often the butt of jokes by males and that humour is frequently used to reinforce unequal power relations. Going back to the scholar’s categorizations cited earlier: if ‘political correctness’ is viewed as an overzealous concern with the rights of political minorities, then ‘political incorrectness’ can be seen as a positive mocking or undermining of such concerns, with a stress on the fun which ‘PC’ is trying to eliminate. (Ibid., 109) Groups of men have always shared laughs and made sexist comments at the expense of women, whether the women’s positions are subordinate or not. In policewoman narratives, for example, from Police Woman (Collins 1974–1978) to Prime Suspect (UK, La Plante 1991–2006, and USA, Cunningham and La Plante 2011–2012) to The Fall (Cubitt 2013–2016), the butt of sexist jokes can be the men’s professional superior. The group laughs, too, at the expense of women, in pseudo-historical series like Game of Thrones (Benioff and Weiss 2011–2019) and in royal shows like The Crown (Morgan 2016-in production). It is a topos which runs across genres and is a source of immediate humorous relief. Peggy, in Mad Men, who is shyer than Shirley McLaine’s Fran in The Apartment, but only because it is her first day at work, experiences sexism at every turn from both men and women, especially in the somewhat facile early episodes of the series, in which the audience is taken by the hand and guided to recognize every instance of female subordination. It is my contention that a great part of the success that ‘vintage,’ pre-PC stories enjoy today is due to the welcome, if temporary, relief from the constraints of PC language and the possibility that these shows and films allow viewers to enjoy a good laugh at the expense of women. It is true that most of these moments foretell the final ‘victory’ of the feminist heroine over the force of male evil, but the road to success is paved with obstacles and humiliations that elicit much guiltless fun. Viewers are free to laugh about topics we are otherwise not allowed to laugh about, while actually reinforcing our sense of moral righteousness. As Maurice Yacowar (2011, 87) writes in commenting on the sense of instinctive superiority that is triggered by watching the unethical behaviour of our previous selves from a not so remote past: “whatever says ‘This was them then’ connotes ‘This is us now.’ ” And the comparison with the way we were is always flattering. To sum up, the qualitative analysis of audiovisual texts containing sexist language and behaviour has revealed the recurrent presence of a few narrative devices: • •

Derogatory language at the expense of women often occurs for the benefit of a group. The laughs that the most outspoken member of the group elicits come from his peers; The closer the story is to our times, the more we, the audience, feel outraged by his uncouth behaviour; at the same time the distancing process activated by this kind of narrative encourages us to laugh freely with the user of offensive language at the expense of the victim: for a moment we become members of the group; 415

Irene Ranzato

• •

•

Sexist language and behaviour are the peculiarity of a key character but generally not of the protagonist4; The leading character himself openly criticises or looks down on this behaviour, thus acting as a moral gatekeeper (C.C. Baxter, Sam Tyler or even, despite his elegant machismo, Mad Men’s Donald Draper); Finally, after being the butt of jokes and unbounded sexist behaviour, the feminist or protofeminist heroine emerges, weary but victorious, from the din of derogatory words.

In the next section I will discuss some examples of audiovisual narratives in which this discourse is effectively displayed.

The extradiegetic onlooker In the apparently similar situations described in The Apartment and Mad Men, film and TV show from different eras, there is a fundamental difference: a shift in point of view. Unlike the original audience of The Apartment – men and women who might have thought: ‘this could happen to me’ – we (the contemporary audiences and authors) look at the characters of stories set in earlier periods as entomologists look at their insects. Every scene is meant to make the contemporary viewer shudder, as explicated in the following lines from Mad Men, in which two characters exchange derogatory comments at the expense of a group of secretaries who have been asked to try on a new brand of lipstick: Mad Men, season 1 episode 5 KEN:  Did you know that lipstick was invented to simulate the flush on a woman’s face after you treated her right? FREDDIE:  [. . .] I’ll be honest. I don’t speak moron. Do either of you speak moron? Let’s throw it to the chickens. This is only one of the many sexist comments uttered by the spokesman of a group at the expense of the secretarial pool (“the chickens” who “speak moron” while testing their lipsticks). However, this is also the scene where secretary Peggy Olson takes her first steps towards a prominent position and a high-end career. In another typical topos in today’s narratives, the feminist heroine survives the verbal and nonverbal carnage thanks to her talent, hard work and courage. Fran Kubelick and other key characters in so many pre-PC films distinguished themselves only through love. Of course, they could have skills and show a mind of their own (after all, no man likes a stupid wife, says Jane Austen’s Mr. Knightley), but these usually came in handy once married. In today’s films and shows that are set in a time far-removed from our PC-era, audiences can make an immediate and natural comparison between their contemporary situation and “the way we once were.” When Peggy endures the ordeal of her first visit to a gynecologist, the scene is constructed in such a way as to make our present-day hearts cringe: Mad Men, season 1 episode 1 GYNECOLOGIST:  I see from your chart, and your finger, that you’re not married. PEGGY: That’s right. GYNECOLOGIST:  And yet you’re interested in the contraceptive pills. PEGGY: Well, I was . . . GYNECOLOGIST:  No reason to be nervous. Joan sent you to me because I’m not here to judge you. There’s nothing wrong with a woman being practical about the possibility of sexual activity. Spread your knees. 416

Sexist translator, feminist heroine PEGGY: That’s good to hear. GYNECOLOGIST:  Although, as

a doctor, I’d like to think that putting a woman in this situation is not gonna turn her into some kind of strumpet. Slide your fanny toward me. I’m not gonna bite.

This type of dialogue has the purpose of pleasing contemporary audiences by showcasing escalating verbal abuse and the patriarchal attitude towards women. The contrast between past and present is more evident when the extradiegetic onlooker is also part of the diegesis, as in another quality TV series, Life on Mars, in which the main character, Sam Tyler, a man of today in a world of yesterday, represents us and our point of view. It is not by chance that Life on Mars, especially in its UK version, is the richest and most diversified text in terms of PI language and behaviour, a real ‘feast’ of political incorrectness: it is exactly Sam’s temporal ‘mismatch’ that gives the authors free rein to pursue this path. Sexist and derogatory language at the expense of women is the most exploited – and relished – dialogical device in the entire series, outnumbering even the frequent homophobic and racist jokes. Its US counterpart is, by comparison and as with many American remakes of British series, sanitised5. The US Life on Mars also spells out more clearly and less sophisticatedly the game of contrasts between that past PI world and our current PC world: “I don’t understand why I would be dreaming about this,” says American Sam. “Who dreams of being yelled at by a closet feminist member of the 1973 policewomen’s bureau?” an explicit line which is never uttered by the British Sam. At the same time, the emphasis on feminism in the US version, and US Annie’s deeper awareness of her potential, contrast with UK Annie and her context, and reveal the contextual influences which come into play in the production of translations (Flotow and Farahzad 2017, xiii) and adaptations. Different discourses are foregrounded in the respective cultures. Interlingual translation adds a further stratum of meaning to these already layered texts, and responds directly to the cultural zeitgeist.

Translating gender in AVT: translators as sexist manipulators Feminist thought has contributed crucially to critical reflections on translation and on processes of cultural transfer and contamination (Bracke et al. 2018). Regarding the intersection between translation studies and gender studies, Şebnem Susam-Saraeva (2014, 161–162) notes that both are interdisciplinary fields that “have been interested in similar areas and have encouraged research into a variety of neighbouring branches, such as language, society, religion, literature, anthropology, and communication.” However, the connection between gender studies and audiovisual translation, in particular, has developed only since the early 2000s and comparatively slowly, given the broad awareness of feminist and gender issues (Flotow and Josephy-Hernández 2019) and the contributions of feminist scholars in media studies since the 1960s and 1970s6. Film studies, and research that tackles gender issues in audiovisual productions more broadly, can provide inspiration for scholars interested in the still underexplored connection between gender studies and AVT. Gender bias and sexism have been found to govern the very selection and production of audiovisual material; in a 2018 study on how the sexual division of labour in scientific audiovisual productions is portrayed, Marta Cintas-Peña et al. (2018, 90) found solid evidence demonstrating that the androcentric bias with which social activities are portrayed in the audiovisual productions reviewed by us is entirely unjustified [. . .] [and that] these productions tend to transmit a completely erroneous message to the public in terms of SDL [sexual division of labour] and gender relations. 417

Irene Ranzato

Another area of research in film studies that can offer obvious inspiration to AVT (especially dubbing) scholars is that of the gendered voice in film. In Pavitra Sundar’s (2017) study on the representation of women and vocal performance in Hindi cinema, the scholar explores to what extent the inclusion of diverse vocal timbres, accents and styles of singing influences Bombay cinema’s representational logics, going beyond the almost exclusively visual notion of the body in cinema to delve into other, ‘aural’ ways of perceiving it. The role of the voice has been a subject of interest in AVT in recent years, with scholars investigating the interplay between translation issues and prosodic features (Bosseaux 2015, 2019; Sánchez Mompeán 2017, 2019). The connections with gender, however, have been touched only sparsely (Bosseaux 2008). As Luise Von Flotow and Daniel Josephy-Hernández (2019, 306) put it: The ‘aural’ aspects of dubbing and the meaning conveyed by the sound of a voice could/ should be of great interest in regard to the effects of dubbing: how are male/female/other voices made to sound not only in the scripted dialogues of the source cultures, but in the dubbed versions? Does the sound of a voice change across languages? And if so, what does this mean or indicate? Elsewhere, I have discussed how crucially the reception of a character changes when the voice chosen to represent it in a dubbed version is distant from the original (Ranzato 2018). The Italian Netflix adaptation of the TV series The Crown, for instance, arguably alters the target audience’s perception of the main character. Portrayed in the original, also through voice characterization, as a fundamentally insecure and fragile young woman, Queen Elizabeth’s dubbed voice is, on the contrary, assertive, firm and confident, thus projecting a strikingly different image of the queen in her early years. Although AVT has become important as a didactic tool and studies on gender in the translation classroom have attracted the attention of some scholars (De Marco 2011; De Marco and Toto 2019), AVT has undeniably also played “a prominent role in the creation of stereotyping and denigration” (De Marco 2011, 140), thus encouraging gender stereotypes and homophobic attitudes. As Flotow (1997, 14) remarks: Gender awareness in translation practice poses questions about the links between social stereotypes and linguistic forms, about the politics of language and cultural difference, about the ethics of translation, and about reviving inaccessible works for contemporary readers. It highlights the importance of the cultural context in which translation is done. Video games, too, have tended to propagate stereotypical gender roles (Pettini 2018; Corrado 2009; Cunningham 2012; Maxwell-Chandler and O’Malley Deming 2012; O’Hagan and Mangiron 2013; Bernal-Merino 2015; see Pettini in this volume). To conclude this brief overview of the rather scanty intersections between gender studies and AVT, it is worth mentioning a different perspective on the topic: in a recent conference presentation, Carol O’Sullivan (2019) presented her archive-based work on neglected female subtitlers of the early decades of film sound in the UK. Her analysis evaluates how the translation activity of these women influenced foreign film distribution and reception in Britain, laying the foundations of the UK’s audiovisual translation industry. Reviving the unacknowledged work of these subtitlers is part of an effort to establish the real value of neglected professionals of the film industry, whatever their gender, and translators are certainly some of the most easily forgotten. 418

Sexist translator, feminist heroine

I will summarize from Marcella De Marco (2007, 97) the issues of concern to scholars and politicians who fight sexism, because they are also relevant in translation where they appear as potential hurdles to be overcome in cross-cultural transfer: the choice of the names for professions practiced by both men and women; the replacement of the generic masculine with neutral forms; the presence of nouns which have the same form for the masculine and the feminine but which may take on very different connotations depending on whether the addressee is a man or a woman; the decision, in Romance languages, to make the adjective referring to two nouns (one masculine and the other feminine) agree with the masculine form in the plural; political correctness in the use of certain terms and expressions to avoid offence against particular cultural, ethnic and identity groups. In AVT the topic of incorrect and sexist language has blended, often implicitly, with studies on manipulation, derogatory language and gender stereotypes (De Marco 2012). In Italy, traditionally a dubbing country, manipulation and censorship of the formal aspects of film as well as its contents have a long history which predates fascism (see Ranzato 2016, 28–52, for a summary of historical vicissitudes related to film censorship in Italy, and Carla Mereu Keating 2016, for dubbing in fascist Italy). Other countries which also went through dictatorial regimes have witnessed substantially similar adaptation procedures, as in the case of Spain (Díaz Cintas 2019). Jorge Díaz Cintas (ibid.) illustrates how the Spanish dubbing translation of the 1954 film Barefoot Contessa, by Joseph Mankiewicz, ‘modelled’ the main female character on a conservative agenda, with the aim of perpetuating certain dominant values by censoring any behaviour deemed inappropriate for a woman (especially her ‘loose’ sexuality). The feminist or proto-feminist heroine is characterized through words, those that she speaks and those spoken to her, which is why even the nuances of her words in translation may have an effect on the identity that AV authors are defining for her. It is useful to go back, for example, to the Life on Mars excerpt quoted in the introduction, as it concentrates most of the sensitive issues listed by De Marco in a few lines. This is how the dialogue between Sam and the “closet feminist” Annie continues and how it was translated for the Italian dubbed version: Life on Mars USA, season 1 episode 14

Original dialogue: ANNIE: The universe is trying to tell me something? I need answers. SAM:  And you’re going to get them by posing as a dead flight attendant? ANNIE:  No, I’m gonna get them by posing as a dead stewardess. SAM:  Right, same thing. Someday that word will become politically incorrect. ANNIE: Why? SAM:  I’m not sure, I guess it’s demeaning? ANNIE:  Really? Will the same be said for “seamstress” and “princess” in this wonderful future of yours?

Italian adaptation: ANNIE:  L’universo mi manda dei messaggi? Li vorrei capire. SAM:  E fingerti un’assistente di volo morta a che serve? ANNIE:  No, quella ragazza faceva la hostess non l’assistente. SAM:  È la stessa cosa, ai miei tempi hostess non si usa più. ANNIE: Perché?

419

Irene Ranzato SAM:  Ma, non lo ANNIE:  Davvero?

so, credo sia degradante. E come si dirà “casalinga” o “puttana” nel tuo meraviglioso futuro, Sam?

Back translation: ANNIE: The universe is sending me messages? I’d like to understand them. SAM:  And pretending to be a dead flight attendant – what is the use? ANNIE:  No, that girl was a stewardess not an assistant. SAM:  It’s the same thing, in my time “stewardess” is not used any longer. ANNIE: Why? SAM: Well, I don’t know, I think it’s degrading. ANNIE:  Really? And how will one say “housewife” or “whore” in

your wonderful future, Sam?

The first problem the adapter had to face relates to the translation of the word stewardess. The Italian term to define this professional figure has always been hostess, itself a loan word from English. Even though today the expression assistente di volo (flight assistant) is considered more modern and probably more widespread (even though more formal), the two are considered virtually interchangeable, with no particular stigma attached to hostess. The Italian Wikipedia states that assistente di volo is also known as steward for men and hostess for women. In colloquial exchanges hostess is still often preferred over the more formal recent option. Sam’s comment referring to the word not being used anymore is therefore not quite true. More importantly, the translator omits (perhaps for reasons of lip-synch) the explicit reference to PI language (“Someday that word will become politically incorrect,” a phrase replaced by a reference to the term hostess being now simply old-fashioned). Finally, a literal translation of the last line would not have worked in Italian (one of the reasons being that seamstress does not have an Italian -ess ending (to go with stewardess and princess), so the adapter resorted to two equally sensitive words, though not because of their morphology. They were chosen for the roles in society to which they allude, casalinga (housewife) and puttana (whore), two words often used to diminish or denigrate women. This way a term defining a woman’s job (seamstress) is substituted by one which defines women’s traditional occupation (housewife), while a term defining a woman of power (princess) is replaced by one which is typically used as an insult against women (whore). The translator has subtly, whether consciously or (most probably) not, introduced sexist associations in a line which originally focused on a typical, ‘grammatical,’ PC topic related to the appropriateness of certain word endings. The original dialogue is also notable, however, because in line with Mills’s (2008, 108) categorization reported previously, it is clearly devised to show that political correctness is ridiculous, a procedure which is made clear by Annie’s mocking facial expression. As with other areas of gender in translation, like gayspeak (Ranzato 2012), Italian translators can face some objective difficulties in finding the right words to express the right concept, when many of the right words are in fact loans from English and have taken on slightly or substantially different meanings. The other problematic fact relates to the actual dissemination in Italy of topics which have become more mainstream in other cultures: the whole debate over political correctness, for example, permeates popular culture in English-speaking countries more so than in Italy. One of the consequences of this state of affairs is that some audiovisual translators appear to be struggling to focus on the real function that sexist dialogue performs in these texts, by either giving it a raunchier twist or simply missing the point, as in the following example: Life on Mars UK, season 2 episode 2 420

Sexist translator, feminist heroine

Original dialogue: SAM:  Look,

half of CID [Criminal Investigation Department] will be alcoholics by the time Maggie Thatcher becomes Prime Minister. WOOLF:  If Margaret Thatcher ever becomes Prime Minister, I’ll have been doing something a lot stronger than whisky.

Italian adaptation: SAM: 

Lo sa, metà degli ispettori saranno alcolisti all’epoca in cui Maggie Thatcher sarà Primo Ministro. Margaret Thatcher diventerà mai Primo Ministro, avrò bisogno di qualcosa di più forte del whisky.

WOOLF:  Se

Back translation: SAM: You know, half the inspectors will be alcoholics at the time Maggie Thatcher is Prime Minister. WOOLF: If

Margaret Thatcher ever becomes Prime Minister, I will need something much stronger than whisky.

The English source text denigrates the idea of a woman becoming Prime Minister by referring to it as an impossible and unrealistic development: to see Margaret Thatcher as Prime Minister one has to be drunk and delirious. In the translation this idea was completely overlooked by the adapters either because of a factual mistake or a deliberate simplification: to tolerate the presence of Margaret Thatcher as a Prime Minister, one needs to get drunk. In the original text a woman Prime Minister is conveyed as an impossibility, in the target text it is an unbearable reality. Missing the point of a sexist joke does not amount to rendering the text less sexist, just more banal. As in the Díaz Cintas’s case study cited previously, the instances where translators become sexist manipulators by altering contents that describe potentially ‘liberated’ women for the purposes of some conservative agenda, are even more interesting. This has been done in Italian dubbing through deliberately ‘creative’ translations and also by ‘carefree’ editing procedures. One of the ways to detect the ideological discourse underlying audiovisual texts is in fact by analyzing the editing solutions adopted in the cutting room. These practices were obviously more freely applied at a time when feminist issues were not yet as rooted as they are today. See for example the following original excerpt from Alfie (Gilbert 1966), in which the protagonist has just made love in a car with Siddie, a married woman. The lines in bold are the parts of dialogue which have been edited out of the Italian version which is clearly much shorter than the original. The heavy manipulation, evident on the DVD in which the dubbing is intercut by the English original dialogue in the places where the Italian track is missing, was achieved smoothly in the first part of the dialogue, when the couple is still in the car and the audience can only hear their voices. Then, after Siddie calls Alfie and the title of the film appears on the screen, the two are out of the car and images were montaged to allow dialogue deletion: Alfie

Original dialogue: SIDDIE:  Here, you ALFIE: What

starting all over again? about it if I am? 421

Irene Ranzato SIDDIE: Well supposing the police was to come along? ALFIE:  Let’ em come. The windows are all steamed

up, the doors are locked. It’s like a Turkish bath in ‘ere. Don’t half make you thirsty. SIDDIE:  Here. Watch your ring with my stockings. ALFIE:  Move over a bit, then. Get your knee off the steering wheel! SIDDIE:  I can’t. I’m stuck. ALFIE:  ‘ey, look. I’ll do it. SIDDIE:  That ‘urt. ALFIE:  I told you before to be careful where you put your legs. SIDDIE:  I was only trying to be helpful. ALFIE:  I can help myself. ALFIE:  Hello. They never make these cars big enough, do they? Well, you all settled in? Right. We can begin. My name is . . . SIDDIE: Alfie? ALFIE:  Alfie. I suppose you think you’re going to see the bleeding titles now. Well, you’re not, so you can all relax. SIDDIE: Alfie! ALFIE:  Here. What time did your old man say he’ll be waiting for you at the station? SIDDIE:  Oh, never mind about him ALFIE:  That’s just who I’m gonna mind. Never spoil a good thing. That’s a thing you women can’t get into your heads. Come on, now. Enough’s as good as a feast. SIDDIE:  Oh, you soon changed your tune. ALFIE:  Well, that horn put me off. I hate a noise at a time like that. Hey, mate. SIDDIE: You don’t forget your napkin. ALFIE:  I won’t. SIDDIE:  D’you know what I thought the first time I saw you put your handkerchief over your shoulder? ALFIE: Wha’? SIDDIE: Thought you were going to take out your fiddle and play. ALFIE: Well, I come from a musical family, don’t I. Here. Mind you don’t catch cold. SIDDIE:  I’ve had a lovely time, Alfie.

Italian adaptation: SIDDIE:  Ehi, che fai vuoi ricominciare? ALFIE:  Perché, ti dispiace? SIDDIE:  Be’, ma se capita qualche poliziotto? ALFIE:  E che può fare? SIDDIE:  Ma attento, non farmi rompere le calze. ALFIE:  E spostati un po’, allora. Non ti appoggiare al volante! SIDDIE:  Scusami, ma qui non ci si rigira . . . ALFIE:  Aspetta, ti aiuto io. SIDDIE:  Oh, mi hai fatto male. SIDDIE: Alfie? SIDDIE: Alfie! SIDDIE:  Ehi, non ti scordare il bavaglino. ALFIE:  Sta’ tranquilla. SIDDIE:  Lo sai che cosa ho pensato la prima volta che ti sei messo

422

il fazzoletto sulla spalla?

Sexist translator, feminist heroine ALFIE: Che? SIDDIE:  Ho pensato che avresti tirato fuori il ALFIE:  Io vengo da una famiglia di musicisti.

violino.

Back translation: SIDDIE:  Hey, what are you doing, you ALFIE: Why, would you mind? SIDDIE: Well, what if some policeman ALFIE:  And what can he do?

want to start again? happens to pass by?

SIDDIE:  Careful, don’t make me snag my stockings. ALFIE:  Move a bit then. Don’t lean on the steering wheel! SIDDIE:  Sorry, but one can’t even turn around in here . . . ALFIE: Wait, I’ll help you. SIDDIE:  Oh, you hurt me. SIDDIE: Alfie? SIDDIE: Alfie! SIDDIE:  Hey, don’t forget your bib. ALFIE:  Don’t worry. SIDDIE:  Do you know what I thought the first time you put your handkerchief on your shoulder? ALFIE: What? SIDDIE:  I thought you would take out your fiddle. ALFIE:  I come from a family of musicians.

The heavy ideological manipulation operated on this scene in the Italian version was evidently implemented to minimise the most graphic evidence of the sex act which has just taken place (It’s like a Turkish bath in ‘ere; I told you before to be careful where you put your legs; They never make these cars big enough). In the Italian dialogue there is also no reference to the woman’s husband (What time did your old man say he’ll be waiting for you at the station? Oh, never mind about him). The most revealing phrase of those eliminated, however, is: I’ve had a lovely time, Alfie, which clearly spells out the fact that the (married) woman has had just as much fun as the man. Sound and image cuts also probably serve the purpose of enhancing the comedic side of this otherwise tough and uncompromising film. Following a similar procedure as that chosen by the Spanish adapters of The Barefoot Contessa, another Mankiewicz film, Suddenly, Last Summer (1959), based on the play by Tennessee Williams, was handled in a similar fashion by Italian adapters who also adopted a censorial and moralistic attitude. The Italian version of this film was heavily manipulated and subjected to savage editing, which rendered its plot and meaning opaque to say the least. In a conversation with the doctor who is assessing her mental state, Catherine, the leading character, tells him about a traumatic experience when – as the audience slowly but clearly grasps from the original dialogue – she had an affair with a married man. Suddenly, Last Summer

Original dialogue: CATHERINE: 

I think I got out of the car before he got out of the car, and we walked through the wet grass toward the great misty oaks as if somebody were calling for help there. 423

Irene Ranzato

Italian adaptation: CATHERINE: 

Forse uscii dalla macchina prima di lui come per salvarmi, ma mi sentii spinta verso un gruppo di alberi che vedevo nella nebbia come se di là qualcuno chiedesse aiuto.

Back translation: CATHERINE: 

Perhaps I got out of the car before him as if to save myself, but I felt pushed towards a group of trees that I saw in the mist as if from there somebody were asking for help.

In the Italian version, Catherine’s act of getting out of the car is not voluntary. We are led to believe that she is the innocent victim of an act of violence, probably rape. In the dubbed dialogue, the young woman gets out of the car come per salvarsi, as if to save herself, and feels pushed towards the trees. The complex woman character, who in the original is free to determine her own sexual conduct, is altered in the target version. The episode is mentioned again at the end of the film, when Catherine’s aunt says “He was a very ordinary married man,” translated as Era un tipo molto comune di uomo (He was a very ordinary type of man). The Italian late 1950s audience was evidently not allowed to know the man’s marital status. As a result, a play that had escaped, almost unaltered, the strictures of the American Hays Code of cinematography7 in its transfer to the screen, could not be left untouched by the dubbing adapters who, acting as sexist manipulators, altered, among other important features, the characterization of a woman who did not fit into the mould of the spotless heroine.

Concluding remarks and future directions As this article has tried to demonstrate, connecting gender and translation studies with film and television studies proves to be a fertile area of research. To these domains I would add the specific field of adaptation studies, important to unveil the various layers of manipulative interventions in the intersemiotic processes that move written prose fiction or plays into film, while AVT is more concerned with what is taking place on the screen and in the dubbed or subtitled or otherwise translated dialogue lines. Further, the exploration of gender in AVT would benefit from delving more deeply into analyses of voice properties. This has been a subject of interest in AVT in recent years, but its connections with gender have as yet been only sparsely investigated. The way voices are changed across languages and through translation, and how the lack of attention to this side of adaptation can affect the reception of an audiovisual product are matters of paramount importance if we wish to grasp the whole picture of the representation of gender in AVT. Politically incorrect language at the expense of women has been exploited extensively in cinema and television dialogues for different purposes. This chapter has described some trends in the use of what is a highly offensive but at the same time liberating language (for some). And while, in today’s narratives, the verbal denigration of selected women characters may end with the ultimate ‘victory’ of the feminist heroine over the forces of male evil, the offending words still hang in the air and one wonders which of the two moments the audiences actually enjoy more, the final catharsis or the process of liberation from the constraints of politically correct language. The translation of the words uttered by and to the feminist heroine may have a crucial importance for the identity the authors are creating for her. At different times and in various cultures translators and adapters have consciously or unconsciously acted as sexist manipulators

424

Sexist translator, feminist heroine

by altering dialogue lines which described potentially liberated women in order to comply with a conservative agenda. The more translators and audiences are aware of the ideological forces that may be at play in the cross-cultural transfer, the more the heroine can be said to be truly triumphant.

Further reading Nelmes, Jill. 2007. Gender and Film, in Jill Nelmes, ed., Introduction to Film Studies. London and New York: Routledge, 220–251. A still valid introduction to gender and film, with analyses of some contemporary classics such as Fight Club (David Fincher 1999). Pérez L. de Heredia, María. 2016. Translating Gender Stereotypes: An Overview on Global Telefiction. Altre Modernità/Other Modernities: Rivista di studi letterari e culturali, Special issue edited by Jorge Díaz Cintas, Ilaria Parini and Irene Ranzato. Ideological Manipulation in Audiovisual Translation, 166–181. This article explores paratextual and textual information involving gendered features, attitudes and values in television series. Santaemilia, José, ed. 2014. Gender, Sex and Translation: The Manipulation of Identities. New York: Routledge. The text presents different aspects of manipulation in the translation of gender, and explores, among other issues, translation as a feminist practice; the importance of gender-related context in translation; the construction of national heroism and national identity as male preserve; the emergence of new reproductive technologies, which are causing fundamental changes in the perception of creativity as a male domain. White, Patricia. 1998. Feminism and Film, in John Hill and Pamela Church Gibbons, eds., The Oxford Guide to Film Studies. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 117–131. An essay which photographs the moment in which once-heated arguments in feminist film studies are both superseded and become foundational for contemporary debates on gender and popular cinema.

Related topics Dubbing, subtitling, feminist film studies, gender stereotypes, quality TV, political correctness, censorship

Notes 1 This is the US version of a qualitatively superior and widely acclaimed UK show (Life on Mars, Matthew Graham et al. 2006–2007), officially by the same authors. According to Kay Richardson (2010, 155), Life on Mars can be regarded as a quality series because it satisfies a number of the characteristics that Robert Thompson (1996) suggests are typical of this kind of TV shows, namely: a large ensemble cast; a memory; a new genre formed by mixing old ones; a tendency to be literary and writer based; textual self-consciousness; subject matter tending towards the controversial; aspiration towards realism; a quality pedigree; attracting an audience with blue-chip demographics. 2 The number of film and TV scenes quoted in this article is necessarily limited. For the purposes of this chapter, as well as the titles that are explicitly mentioned, the author has viewed and taken into account the following telecinematic texts which all prominently feature women in subordinate positions: Batman Returns (Burton 1992); the James Bond films (Young et al. 1962–2015); The Knick (Amiel and Begler 2014–2015); Masters of Sex (Ashford 2013–2016); and Vinyl ( Jagger et al. 2016). 3 Mad Men is, by popular and critical consensus, one of the best examples of quality television and one of the best series ever made. It is the subject of various academic essays; see, for example, Melissa Jane Hardie (2012, 152), who discusses the show’s own interpretation of “the contemporary place of twenty-first century ‘quality’ television and shows like Mad Men as rejuvenated forms of the pleasing bestseller.” 4 Unless, of course, the story centers on a sexy, beyond-good-and-evil antihero who is allowed a sexist joke now and then (the Sherlocks or Houses of the eponymous series).

425

Irene Ranzato

5 See also, for example, the comparatively ‘gentler,’ less-raw versions of The Office (Gervais and Merchant 2001–2003, UK; developed by Daniels 2005–2013, USA), Shameless (Abbott 2004–2013, UK; Abbott 2011-in production, USA) and the already cited Prime Suspect. 6 See Flotow and Josephy-Hernández (2019) for an overview which includes classic feminist studies such as Laura Mulvey’s (1975/1999) on the sexualization of the female body on screen, as well as more recent feminist critique of film. 7 Particularly strict censorship guidelines in vigour in the USA from 1930 to 1968, originally created by William H. Hays, President of the Motion Picture Association of America.

References Bernal-Merino, Miguel. 2015. Translation and Localization in Video Games: Making Entertainment Software Global. London and New York: Routledge. Bosseaux, Charlotte. 2008. Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Characterization in the Musical Episode of the TV Series. The Translator, 14(2), 343–372. Bosseaux, Charlotte. 2015. Dubbing, Film and Performance–Uncanny Encounters. Bern: Peter Lang. Bosseaux, Charlotte. 2019. Voice in French Dubbing: The Case of Julianne Moore. Audiovisual Translation: Intersections, Special issue edited by Irene Ranzato and Serenella Zanotti. Perspectives: Studies in Translation Theory and Practice, 27(2), 218–234. Bracke, Maud Anne, Penny Morris, and Emily Ryder. 2018. Introduction. Translating Feminism: Transfer, Transgression, Transformation (1950s–1980s). Gender & History, 30(1), 214–225. Cintas-Peña, Marta, Leonardo García Sanjuán, and Berta Morell Rovira. 2018. Gender and Prehistory: Sexual Division of Labour in Spanish Audiovisual Productions. Revista ArkeoGazte Aldizkaria, 8, 75–99. Code, Lorraine, ed. 2000. Encyclopedia of Feminist Theories. London and New York: Routledge. Corrado, Carolyn. 2009. Gender Identities and Socialization, in Jodi O’Brien, ed., Encyclopedia of Gender and Society, vol. 1. London: SAGE, 356–354. Cunningham, Carolyn. 2012. Video Gaming: Representations of Femininity, in Mary Kosut, ed., Encyclopedia of Gender in Media. London: SAGE, 407–409. De Marco, Marcella. 2007. Gender Stereotypes and Dubbing: Similarities and Differences in the Translation of Hollywood and British Films. PhD. dissertation, Universidad de Vic. De Marco, Marcella. 2011. Bringing Gender into the Subtitling Classroom, in Laura Incalcaterra McLoughlin, Marie Biscio, and Máire Áine Ní Mhainnín, eds., Audiovisual Translation: Subtitles and Subtitling– Theory and Foreign Language Practice. New York, Bern, Berlin, Bruxelles, Frankfurt am Main, Oxford and Wien: Peter Lang, 139–155. De Marco, Marcella. 2012. Audiovisual Translation Through a Gender Lens. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi. De Marco, Marcella and Piero Toto, eds. 2019. Gender Approaches in the Translation Classroom: Training the Doers. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Díaz Cintas, Jorge. 2019. Film Censorship in Franco’s Spain: The Transforming Power of Dubbing. Audiovisual Translation: Intersections, Special issue edited by Irene Ranzato and Serenella Zanotti. Perspectives: Studies in Translation Theory and Practice, 27(2), 182–200. Flotow, Luise von. 1997. Translation and Gender: Translating in the ‘Era of Feminism’. Manchester: St. Jerome Publishing and Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press. Flotow, Luise von and Farzaneh Farahzad, eds. 2017. Translating Women: Different Voices and New Horizons. London and New York: Routledge. Flotow, Luise von and Daniel Josephy-Hernández. 2019. Gender in Audiovisual Translation Studies: Advocating for Gender-Awareness, in Luis Pérez-González, ed., The Routledge Handbook of Translation. London and New York: Routledge, 296–311. Hardie, Melissa Jane. 2012. The Three Faces of Mad Men. Middlebrow Culture and Quality Television. Cultural Studies Review, 18(2), 151–168. Hughes, Geoffrey. 2010. Political Correctness: A History of Semantics and Culture. Chichester, UK: WileyBlackwell. Maxwell-Chandler, Heather and Stephanie O’Malley Deming. 2012. The Game Localization Handbook. Sudbury: Jones & Bartlett. Mereu Keating, Carla. 2016. The Politics of Dubbing: Film Censorship and State Intervention in the Translation of Foreign Cinema in Fascist Italy. Oxford: Peter Lang.

426

Sexist translator, feminist heroine

Mesthrie, Rajend, Joan Swann, Ana Deumert, and William L. Leap. 2005. Introducing Sociolinguistics. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Miller, Casey and Kate Swift. 1995. The Handbook of Non-Sexist Writing. Toronto: The Women’s Press. Mills, Sara. 2008. Language and Sexism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mulvey, Laura. 1975/1999. Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema. Screen, 16(3), 6–18. Reprinted, in Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen, eds., Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings. New York: Oxford University Press, 833–844. O’Hagan, Minako and Carmen Mangiron. 2013. Game Localization: Translating for the Global Digital Entertainment Industry. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. O’Sullivan, Carol. 2019. “Brillantly Done by Mai Harris.”: British Subtitlers in the Early Decades of Sound. Media for All 8 Conference Presentation, 17–19 June, Stockholm. Pettini, Silvia. 2018. Gender in Game Localization: The Case of Mass Effect 3’s FemShep, in Irene Ranzato and Serenella Zanotti, eds., Linguistic and Cultural Representation in Audiovisual Translation. London and New York: Routledge, 101–117. Ranzato, Irene. 2012. Gayspeak and Gay Subjects in Audiovisual Translation: Strategies in Italian Dubbing. Meta, 57(2), Special issue edited by Jorge Díaz Cintas, The Manipulation of Audiovisual Translation, 369–384. Ranzato, Irene. 2016. Translating Culture Specific References on Television: The Case of Dubbing. London and New York: Routledge. Ranzato, Irene. 2018. The British Upper Classes: Phonological Fact and Screen Fiction, in Irene Ranzato and Serenella Zanotti, eds., Linguistic and Cultural Representation in Audiovisual Translation. London and New York: Routledge, 203–227. Richardson, Kay. 2010. Television Dramatic Dialogue: A Sociolinguistic Study. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Sánchez Mompeán, Sofia. 2017. The Rendition of English Intonation in Spanish Dubbing. PhD. thesis, Universidad de Murcia. Sánchez Mompeán, Sofia. 2019. More Than Words Can Say: Exploring Prosodic Variation in Dubbing, in Irene Ranzato and Serenella Zanotti, eds., Reassessing Dubbing: Historical Approaches and Current Trends. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 191–209. Sundar, Pavitra. 2017. Gender, Bawdiness, and Bodily Voices: Bombay Cinema’s Audiovisual Contract and the ‘Ethnic’ Woman, in Tom Whittaker and Sarah Wright, eds., Locating the Voice in Film: Critical Approaches and Global Practices. New York: Oxford University Press, 63–82. Susam-Saraeva, Şebnem. 2014. A Course on “Gender and Translation” as an Indicator of Certain Gaps in the Research on the Topic, in José Santaemilia, ed., Gender, Sex and Translation: The Manipulation of Identities. London and New York: Routledge, 161–197. Thompson, Robert J. 1996. Television’s Second Golden Age: From Hill Street Blues to ER. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press. Yacowar, Maurice. 2011. Suggestive Silence in Season 1, in Gary R. Edgerton, ed., Mad Men: Dream Come True TV. London: I. B. Tauris & Co Ltd, 86–100.

Films and TV Alfie. 1966. [film] UK: Lewis Gilbert. The Apartment. 1960. [film] USA: Billy Wilder. Batman Returns. 1992. [film] USA: Tim Burton. The Crown. 2016-in production. [TV series] UK, USA: Peter Morgan. The Fall. 2013–2016. [TV series] UK, Ireland: Allan Cubitt. Fight Club. 1999. [film] USA: David Fincher. Game of Thrones. 2011-in production. [TV series] USA: David Banioff and D.B. Weiss. James Bond films. 1962–2015. [film] USA: Terence Young et al. The Knick. 2014–2015. [TV series] USA: Jack Amiel and Michael Begler, directed by Steven Soderbergh. Life on Mars. 2006–2007. [TV series] UK: Matthew Graham, Tony Jordan & Ashley Pharoah. Life on Mars. 2008–2009. [TV series] USA: Matthew Graham, Tony Jordan & Ashley Pharoah. Mad Men. 2007–2015. [TV series] USA: Matthew Weiner. Masters of Sex. 2013–2016. [TV series] USA: Michelle Ashford. The Office. 2001–2003. [TV series] UK: Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant.

427

Irene Ranzato

The Office. 2005–2013. [TV series] USA: Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant, developed by Greg Daniels. Police Woman. 1974–1978. [TV series] USA: Robert L. Collins. Prime Suspect. 1991–2006. [TV series] UK: Lynda La Plante. Prime Suspect. 2011–2012. [TV series] USA: Alexandra Cunningham and Lynda La Plante. Shameless. 2004–2013. [TV series] UK: Paul Abbott. Shameless. 2011-in production. [TV series] USA: Paul Abbott. Suddenly, Last Summer. 1959. [film] USA: Joseph Mankiewicz. Vynil. 2016. [TV series] USA: Mick Jagger, Martin Scorsese, Rich Cohen and Terence Winter.

428

32 Women in audiovisual translation The Arabic context Nada Qanbar

Introduction Feminism was institutionalized in the West long before it reached the Arab world, and the few instances of grass-roots feminist activism in the Arab World have mostly been met with denunciation and severe criticism, though they did continue to cause small ripples until the Spring Revolutions that swept large parts of the Arab world in 2011 when women’s participation came to the fore (von Rohr 2011; cf. Kamal 2016). Young activists condemned the existing women’s organizations as being “dominated by an older generation” (Care 2013, 11) and started demanding civil states based on equity and social justice. This sociopolitical movement may herald the birth of a genuine and organic Arab feminist movement where gender parity is fully bridged, and women in all spheres assume active agency in social disruption. Given that translation in the Arab world is “a political exercise of a different kind” (Spivak 1999, 406) and that translation does not happen in a vacuum, feminist translation may well play a role as feminist translators expedite the dissemination and construction of feminist ideas through the terminology they choose to use (Alsharekh 2016, 274). And their roles in audiovisual translation are crucial as television, social media and cinema have become major channels through which prejudiced views and assumptions about some social categories are transmitted and caused to proliferate (De Marco 2012). These media shape and formulate peoples’ attitudes making audiovisual mass media a potential ‘culprit’ in perpetuating women’s oppression and reinforcing discriminatory and misogynistic gender ideologies. As audiovisual translation (henceforth AVT) is one of the main ways to “transmit values from one culture to another” (De Marco 2012, 109), it is crucial to shake up and deconstruct deeply rooted patriarchal attitudes and foster the implantation and absorption of new ideas into the local culture including the elimination of sexual discrimination in language, which is the aim of feminist translation practice (Furukawa 2017). There is no doubt that Arab mass media has taken part in creating and boosting a distorted image of Arab women by depicting negative and misleading stereotypes (Allam 2008). Not only are negative images circulated through media, but also terms of address and references that are derogatory or carry sexual connotations about women have thrived (Qanbar 2016).

429

Nada Qanbar

Within this context, and following my earlier line of research on the challenges faced by women in the Arab world (Qanbar 2012, 2013), where I found that negative stereotypes and biased speech against women constitute part of the cultural repertoire of some of the Arab communities (Qanbar 2013), I have decided to take my research a step further. This time, through the lens of a researcher in the field of audiovisual translation, I examine women’s working conditions as translators, subtitlers, dubbers, and reviewers in several subtitling and dubbing companies in the Arab world. And while Luise von Flotow and Daniel Josephy-Hernández (2018) argue that the output of the translation is affected by factors such as the attitudes of translators and their perception of gender as well as the agendas of the broadcasting network, this chapter examines how working conditions have an impact on the quality of translation and on women’s role as agents of change and active members in the field of audiovisual translation, breaking the stereotypes against them. In this chapter, ‘gender awareness’ refers to the ability of women and men alike to perceive and identify certain views and expressions, which might be inherent in the society and in the language, yet demean one of the sexes. Such views and expressions are usually directed towards women, and tend to imply that men are intrinsically superior to women and thus more socially appreciated, more physically and mentally competent. A lack of gender sensitivity leads to the perpetuation and continuation of discriminatory practices against women. Therefore, one aim of this chapter is to investigate the extent to which women working in the field are aware of the sexist images and expressions contained in the audiovisual texts they translate and explore whether they take a stand towards mitigating them. These texts may not be on women or women-related issues specifically but may include any text of any type that contains as little as one derogatory word or expression or stereotype.

Historical perspectives Translation studies and gender studies are two different disciplines, each having their own theoretical considerations. However, since the entry of the concept of gender into the field of translation in the late 1980s (Flotow 2010), induced by the rise of feminism and gender awareness in the 1970s and, inter alia, the reflection on the gendered role of language (Kate James 2011), the traditional boundaries between translation and gender have been crossed and a considerable volume of academic literature and research in the field of translation began to focus on the concept of gender in translation (e.g. Flotow 1991; Chamberlain 1992). The Canadian feminist translation ‘school,’ which foregrounded the landscape of gender-sensitive translation (Godard 1990; Flotow 1997; among others), advocates that feminist ideology be integrated into translation in an attempt to deconstruct conventional meanings and ‘patriarchal language’ in order to make room for women’s words to develop and be heard (Blumenfeld-Kosinski et al. 2001, 74). This school’s proposal became “the universal paradigm of feminist translation” (Castro 2009) allowing feminist translators to confront androcentric texts ( James 2011) and, thus, to adopt various interventionist translational strategies such as “prefaces, footnotes, commentaries, omissions and substitutions” (Kamal 2018, 134). The feminist Arab translator Hala Kamal views translation as an act of “re-writing . . . representation, and . . . interpretation” (Kamal 2008, 258), and “not merely an act of transferring information, but a process of knowledge production” (254). In her work, she consciously and intentionally includes a “[N]ote on Translation to offer an explanation of the process that governed the selection of equivalents in the translation of gender-related terminology” (258). In light of this new approach, feminist translators have become conscious of the translation strategies that can help repudiate patriarchal language and make changes to traditional views on women. 430

Women in audiovisual translation

However, the active and heated discussions related to gender sensitivity in translation in the West hardly conform with or fit the Arabic scene. While Western feminism is widening its linguistic and cultural borders to include concepts like gender, queer and gynocriticism, Arabic feminist engagement with the act of translation still cannot be traced. Arab feminists are still fighting to agree on domestic equivalent terms for ‘feminism’ and ‘gender’ (Alsharekh 2016). The theoretical underpinning of mainstream feminist thought is seen to be Western-based, which makes feminist activism a target of severe criticism and denunciation. It has been claimed that the movement is not representative of the situation of most Arab women (Carol Giacomo 2012), and many of the movement’s leaders have been accused of immorality and of being neocolonial agents because they promote Western values (Care 2013,16). Given this cultural and linguistic rigidity, Arab women translators have little room to move within the field of written translation, let alone the new field of AVT. The field of AVT has been rising in scope and significance, but it largely remains a European research pursuit (Pilar Orero 2004). In the Arab world, AVT as a profession and a field of research is still rather invisible. However, the increase in the need and scope for subtitled and dubbed English programs and entertainment channels in the wake of the satellite revolution in the 1990s in the Arab World does not correspond to the continuing invisibility of AVT in the Arab world. Although translation studies as an academic domain has gained ground in the Arab world with established translators, university departments and (non)government-sponsored institutes, AVT is still not recognized as a specialization of TS (Gamal 2014), or a discipline that has its own principles, norms and theoretical underpinnings. Translation departments in Arab universities do not have units for AVT (except for an AVT Master program which was inaugurated in Qatar in 2014). There is not even an Arabic word equivalent to the word ‘subtitler.’ AVT remains a personal interest of some faculty and has not attracted academic interest or training opportunities (Gamal 2015). And those who earned their degrees in AVT from non-Arabic universities have focused largely on the linguistic or cultural issues of subtitling or dubbing, disregarding other topics at the heart of AVT such as technical considerations, other forms of AVT modes like audio description (AD), subtitling for the deaf and hard of hearing audience (SDHA), re-speaking and localization as well as the sociology of the AVT profession (the human agent, the working conditions, workplace environment, freelance work, rates, norms and conventions, assignment of work, and editing).

Current issues and topics Upon reviewing the studies conducted in the field of gender and translation, I found that the topic of women (or gender) in AVT is not only under-researched in the Arab world but also in Europe (Flotow and Josephy-Hernández 2018, 269). The direction of most AVT research in the field has been on the processes of subtitling/dubbing certain linguistic features into certain languages, or on comparing the translation of the different modes of AVT, or on the technical constraints of these modes. Flotow and Josephy-Hernández (2018) note that so far there seem to be three main trajectories for studying gender in audiovisual content. The first focuses on how the translation of Anglo-American genderlects are rendered into Romance languages; the second looks at the differences between the output of subtitled and dubbed versions of AngloAmerican texts; and the third studies queer source materials and uncovers whether translated texts match the neologisms and the flagrantly queer references of the source texts. Marcella De Marco is one of the first scholars to investigate gender in AVT in her 2006 study of three films which had been subtitled and dubbed into Spanish and Italian. She explored whether the films chosen for the study contained and displayed stereotypes through the language 431

Nada Qanbar

they used, and if such stereotypes were left unmodified or modified in the dubbed and subtitled versions. She found that these films contained clear examples of stereotypes which disclosed general discriminatory views. De Marco’s findings concerning the translations were confirmed by subsequent works of scholars such as Feral (2011) who investigated the way certain feminine elements were modified or kept neutral in AVT. She analyzed aspects of North American feminism as constructed in a US television series and their renderings into the French dubbing and subtitles, and found that the original terms were kept in the subtitles, while they were deleted or watered down in the dubbing versions. Her conclusion was to call for the incorporation of a feminist approach into AVT research so that subtle gender values would be identified and addressed. De Marco (2006) noticed, while teaching subtitling to university students, that problems of social discrimination and marginalization arise in the classroom. The classroom thus constitutes the optimal place for raising awareness of the issues around gender. To integrate gender and identity-related issues within the curriculum of the subtitling module, she assigned students tasks involving the translation of clips containing gender discussions to gauge students’ awareness of gender-biased expressions as well as their capacity to identify them and make sensible decisions about whether to reproduce them in their own language. Most of the students’ translations were literal and the students seemed unaware of gender nuances. De Marco found that the majority of her students thought gender had no bearing on subtitling practices and were hardly aware of the extent to which AVT might affect /be affected by factors related to gender. However, the question of how prejudicial views against women are transmitted via AVT is not fully explored in the literature to date. De Marco (2012) published an analysis of how AVT contributes to exporting gender stereotypes across cultures and to what extent the Spanish and Italian translations of selected exchanges “reproduced, softened, reinforced” or eliminated the strength of certain allusions to gender. The strong interdisciplinary connection between AVT and Gender Studies on which her analysis is based allowed De Marco to pinpoint gender prejudices, how they are perpetuated through dubbing and subtitling, and how challenging it is to translate an exchange containing a sexist or derogatory reference, whose meaning is strongly tied to its contextual culture. Questions related to the social force of translation in social activism and political dissent, and its link to gender have lately been raised and addressed in the Arab World post Arab Spring in 2011 (Baker 2016). Leil-Zahra Mortada (2016) came up with a film project in which women participating in the Egyptian revolution in 2011 were interviewed to voice their experiences. Their speech was subtitled into different languages and this was justified not as an issue of disseminating information but as an integral part of a postcolonial and feminist commitment, and a step towards empowering women by connecting them to networks of political movements across borders. Ideological and economic pressures that define the profession of translation are believed to create a gap between theory and practice. Olga Castro (2012), for example, attempted to assess whether feminist linguistic practices were adopted or dismissed during translation. She analyzed two translations of the same text, with one containing an inclusive translation, and the other containing gendered markers that are gender-exclusive. The publisher approved the latter on grounds of fidelity to the source and the objectivity of translator. This implies that factors other than ideology are at play during translation. Besides economic considerations, the gendered working conditions of translators also affect the outcome of translation. Fotios Karamitroglou’s work (2000) is an example of a macro-contextual research into AVT that considers the human agents, the market, the institutions involved, as well as the relationship between gender and AVT. His research focuses on the patterns found in the field of audiovisual 432

Women in audiovisual translation

translation, and how these patterns affect decisions about which type of audiovisual translation to use: subtitling or revoicing. Another study by Szu-Yu Kuo (2014) focusing on the professional reality of subtitlers in Europe and their working conditions, did not provide any discussion of women as subtitlers, though they constituted most of his data. This negligence may be attributable to gender awareness not being a part of this project. Interestingly enough, in one of his recent papers, Muhammad Gamal (2015) states that AVT in Arabic has become his primary research area and he has been devoted to comprehensively examining this field and its context in the Arab world. However, upon examining his body of research, it is evident that he has not paid any attention to women translators in the AVT industry.

Current contributions and research In this chapter, two interrelated research questions are explored to address women’s status in AVT in the Arab World: 1 2

What are the profiles and working conditions of women translators of AV products in the Arab world? Are Arab women translators aware of the biased views and stereotypes transmitted through audiovisual texts during their dubbing and subtitling processes?

To answer the first question, a total of 36 people (32 women and 4 men) responded to a questionnaire (see Appendix A) on the profiles and working conditions of AV translators, and six company managers/owners were interviewed in Jordan in 2016. The first finding was that the majority of AV translators in the six Arab companies surveyed (94.7%) are women (Figure 32.1). This was entirely unexpected before the initiation of the study as one might expect this field to be dominated by men as are most fields of work in the Arab world (Moghadam 2014).

women

men

Figure 32.1 Ratio of women to men in AVT companies surveyed in Jordan 433

Nada Qanbar

When this issue was raised with the company owners/managers, they provided a number of reasons for the much higher employment rate of women in AV translation and the lower presence of men, and almost all of them stated that translation needs saber wa ihsas bilmasouliyah (patience and responsibility) and believed women mutfaneen fi amalahom wa la yefawtu maweed altasleem (are more committed to their work and less likely to miss a deadline). The owner of one of the oldest AV companies in the Arab world thought the general attitude of male translators might explain the situation. For example, he suggested that men usually aspire to managerial work and shun the translation profession as they see no professional development in the job, thinking that a translator will remain a translator for their lifetime. Another manager clarified that while men seek full-time jobs with a stable income, women who work for her company are typically ‘mothers’ taking care of their families. This means they can work from home as freelancers, an arrangement that also proves beneficial for the company as it lessens the company’s financial burden. The company does not have to pay for vacations, for example. She thought that men do not consider AVT lucrative employment, viewing it as badly paid compared to written translation, which seems to be paid at a much higher rate, even though AVT is quite a specialized way of working and requires completely different skills. Another reason for the dominance of women translators in AVT is, I would argue, the that majority of women university graduates in Arab countries, come from university Faculties of Foreign Languages. This corresponds with Christina Schäffner (2013, 146) who states that “language and education have traditionally been ‘feminine’ subjects.” For example, at the University of Jordan, the number of graduates of the Faculty of Foreign Languages in 2015 was 155, of which 130 were women and 25 men (The University of Jordan 2016). Therefore, it makes sense that those who are most likely to join a translation career are women and such figures suggest that this is likely to continue for the foreseeable future. At first glance, this prevalence of women in the field could be interpreted as a healthy sign of women’s participation in the workforce. However, it could also be argued that the dominance of women in this profession is, in fact, an example of how women’s circumstances can be exploited. The overwhelming majority of women in my sample were young (within the age category of 25–40 years) (84%), mothers (78%), university degree holders (83%) (though quite a number of them had majored in fields other than translation), and with a minimum of three years’ work experience (80%). Their profiles should be of value to any company they work for, and indeed, their employers, as ascertained through the six interviews, unanimously see these women as hardworking, committed, flexible, punctual, and efficient. However, based on findings from the questionnaire the working conditions of these translators are disappointing: almost all of them (both freelancers and in-house) work without a written contract, which leaves them deprived of many benefits to which they should be entitled, such as a stable income, sick leave, maternity leave, paid vacation, pensions, and other benefits. As most of them are freelancers (70%), they are confined to home and work in isolation. They are underpaid when one considers the time consumed and mental effort invested in audiovisual translation when compared to written translation. Work is assigned regardless of their preferences or expertise. No extra remuneration is given when tight deadlines are imposed, or when a difficult specialized text is assigned. The women are not provided with any kind of vocational training opportunities to upgrade their skills in this growing field, nor are they given written guidelines so that consistent high-quality work may be produced; only four respondents (14.3%) had received company guidelines. The managers mentioned that the task of modifying certain expressions or softening them is yutrak lehads al-mutarjem (left to the translators’ discretion) as they are all assumed to be sensitive to the nature of Arab culture and Islamic society. These women’s work is not officially or publicly acknowledged nor given proper credit. And it is not only their 434

Women in audiovisual translation

work that is not acknowledged, but their experience and qualifications are not rewarded either. All of them, according to the managers, are paid the same regardless of the years of experience or qualifications. With these poor working conditions and a lack of a career path, it seems that these translators are relegated to a pink-collar ghetto, though the nature of their work is noteworthy, powerful in regard to communications, and carries a high level of responsibility. These results led me to question how such poor conditions affect these women’s gender awareness and sensitivity to the subtle prejudices against women prevalent in the texts they translate. I devised a tool that would help me gauge this awareness. I designed seven sample English sentences taken from natural speech (see Appendix B), three of which contained sexist expressions. The rest of the sentences included expressions and words that are considered taboos in the Arab world (religion, politics, and sex (Giles 2012, 287; Qanbar 2011). Translators usually avoid translating words or expressions related to these categories. For example, according to the guidelines of one of the most renowned Arab-based channels, only words related to sex, religion, and politics are banned. This means that sexist expressions and hate speech against women lie outside of this ‘triangle’ and are not considered discriminatory or abusive. The real purpose of the translation test was not stated so that participants would not be directed to translate in a certain way. Instead, the instructions said the study was meant to determine how certain idioms are translated from English into Arabic. I included idioms in each of the six sentences and underlined them so the respondents would be distracted from paying attention to the inclusion of taboos and sexist expressions. I intended to make the sentences short and easy to translate to facilitate the task for them. The translation test was given via email to (12) females working for different AVT companies. After receiving the completed translations, I talked with nine of them to better understand the reasons behind their choices. Their responses were interesting. All of the translators to a certain degree modified what they believed to be offensive and inappropriate, except for the sentences that contained biased views against women. When their attention was later drawn to these biased views, all the respondents claimed that they should be loyal to the source text. Therefore, even when a woman translator succeeded in spotting a discriminatory attitude or a sexist expression, she reacted passively. She prioritized adherence to the source text over changing a degrading expressions and sexist views for a non-sexist solution. Such behaviour supports my argument that women are both victims of a deep-rooted patriarchal system and agents in perpetuating and condoning this system. They are not ‘aware’ that they should be aware of their agency as a driving force for change in long-established malpractices against them. By adopting the prevalent men’s practices, they become ‘culprits’ in re-producing the bias against themselves (Qanbar 2012). After long periods of marginalization and repression, women seem to accept men’s attitudes towards them, and many defend men’s biased attitudes by providing normatively acceptable explanations for men’s attitudes and practices. Considering the poor working conditions of these women, the answer to the second question related to their gender sensitivity and awareness of derogatory and sexist terms or stereotypes against women is not completely surprising. I found that the lack of gender sensitivity understanding amongst them can, in part, be directly linked to their work conditions. It is undeniable that these working conditions, particularly underpayment is a manifestation of an asymmetrical power relationship between workers and employers where profit is the driving force behind any business and both genders can be the victim of this capitalist system, but men have other options and have more freedom of mobility (Moghadam 2014). Based on the interviews with their managers, most of the managers implied that they prefer women over men because they accept the status quo. Most of them are mothers and are juggling responsibilities between work and home. It is no wonder then that these women are deprived of the time to develop intellectual 435

Nada Qanbar

luxury to ponder upon sophisticated issues like gender sensitivity, and the poorer their work conditions, the lower their engagement. Moreover, and most importantly, these women have to be seen in the cultural and historical context of the Arab World – they are products of a deeply rooted patriarchal system, where many discriminatory practices are justified and have been normalized and codified. In this context, gender sensitivity can hardly be expected. Being loyal and true to the text means being loyal and true to what they have long been programmed and indoctrinated to believe in and do. The correlation between their poor work conditions and lack of gender awareness is subtle but established: women should be conforming to the ‘norms’. The question of women’s gender sensitivity and gender awareness in AVT will not, therefore, be truly addressed unless working conditions in this field are improved at all levels. Associations and unions for audiovisual translators that negotiate better conditions for the translators need to form and bring about change in the working conditions – for men and women alike. Furthermore, gender sensitivity needs to be brought to the attention of the managers of AVT companies as well as translators. A demeaning term or expression against women should be considered just as offensive as other taboo or face-threatening words in the Arab world and should be modified or left untranslated on screen. This may help eliminate views against women that have been instilled in the collective mindsets of Arabs and that sometimes result in undesirable practices against women. It is hoped that this research will lay foundations for the empowerment of women audiovisual translators by finding ways to improve their work conditions and encouraging their roles as agents who can contribute towards eliminating biased attitudes against themselves, thus creating a more balanced society based on equity and justice.

Future directions The scope of this chapter is limited to the Arab context. The chapter discusses the working conditions of only Arab women working in the AVT field in the Arab region and their gender sensitivity. The results are thus only representative of AVT in the Arab world. The small number of the participants in the study is due to the limited AVT companies in the Arab World which seem to be concentrated in Egypt, the Levant and the Gulf (Emirates). The number of AV translators is thus small. Furthermore, it was difficult to reach out to many translators as they are freelancers and some companies I contacted were reluctant to give their employees’ contacts. A potential future avenue of research could compare the profiles and working conditions of Arab AV women translators with those of AV women translators in other parts of the world. This would offer further insight into the social and cultural factors controlling women’s work. Further research could use the same methodology and tools with other AV companies in different Arab countries that are not included in this survey in order to increase the sample. Ethnographic field work involving a researcher observing the companies and the women at work, developing more refined tools, and speaking to the people involved about sexism, unions, the role of women in society and the work force, would be helpful in yielding more conclusive results. Other research could also focus on analyzing subtitled or dubbed texts translated by women, in the light of Critical Discourse Analysis and multimodality, for example, in order to see real examples of translation. A study could be taken further by having graduates reflect on their roles in perpetuating stereotypes and raising awareness of the transformative power of translation. It would also be valuable if this research could be extended to a comparison between men and women translators in terms of their profiles as well as awareness towards gender-related issues and examine any difference in the way they address these issues. Finally, it is wise to acknowledge that changing mentalities is a long process requiring a commitment that should be taken up by educational systems. In the understanding that it is 436

Women in audiovisual translation

difficult to change ingrained beliefs and entrenched social orders, it may be the role of research to call attention to delicate matters such as those addressed in this chapter. Feminist awareness, “involves knowledge and activism through intellectual realization, solidarity and resistance, and action towards social change” (Kamal 2016, 6). If children are exposed to questions about gender inclusive language from an early age, and if translator training at university level makes a point of demonstrating the political and social power of the trade, then, there may be hope that new professionals with a new degree of awareness may become agents of change, thus contributing to a more balanced society that will respect men and women alike, allowing both to give more of themselves towards greater equality and progress.

Related topics Arab women, audiovisual translation, gender awareness, feminist translation

Further reading Alsharek, Alanoud. 2016. Instigating Social Change: Translating Feminism in the Arab World and India. QScience Connect, Special issue on Translating the Gulf: Beyond Fault Lines. http://dx.doi.org/10.5339/ connect.2016.tii.2 This paper looks at the importance of translation in gender studies and the hurdles and triumphs that were experienced by translators working in India and Arab World. De Marco, Marcella. 2016. The ‘Engendering’ Approach in Audiovisual Translation. Target, 28(6), 314–325. The article discusses the extent to which such interdisciplinary area as gender studies, film studies and translation and an ‘engendering’ approach may contribute to building a valid methodological framework within which AVT can be explored. It highlights the limitations imposed by the difficulty of applying the same approach to the study of AVT in which gender priorities are not perceived as important as other professional priorities. Furukawa, Hiroko. 2017. De-Feminizing Translation: To Make Women Visible in Japanese Translation, in Luise von Flotow and Farzaneh Farahzad, eds., Translating Women. Different Voices and New Horizons. London and New York: Routledge, 76–89. Gaines, Jane. n.d. Deviant Eyes, Deviant Bodies: Queering Feminist Film Theory. Available at: www.ejumpcut. org/archive/onlinessays/JC41folder/DeviantEyesBodiesRev.html [Accessed 20 Dec. 2017]. Furukawa argues that while Western feminist translation seeks to make the feminine visible in language, Japanese translation conventions have ‘over-feminized’ certain types of text by deploying a romanticized language (for women characters only). The ‘Western’ impetus thus requires reconsideration. Flotow, Luise von and Daniel Josephy-Hernández. 2018. Gender in Audiovisual Translation Studies: Advocating for Gender Awareness, in Luis Perez-Gonzalez, ed., The Routledge Handbook of Audiovisual Translation. London and New York: Routledge, 296–311. This chapter discusses gender in feminist film studies and as a topic in AVT studies and shows that research so far has demonstrated how sensitive and political gendered language is in every culture, and that researchers are advocating the importance of ‘gender awareness’ in AVT.

References Allam, Rasha. 2008. Countering the Negative Image of Arab Women in the Arab Media: Toward a ‘Pan Arab Eye’ Media Watch Project. The Middle East Institute Policy Brief, 15. Available at: www.mei.edu/ content/countering-negative-image-arab-women-arab-media-toward-pan-arab-eye-media-watchproject [Accessed 13 Mar. 2016]. Alsharek, Alanoud. 2016. Instigating Social Change: Translating Feminism in the Arab World and India. QScience Connect, Special issue on Translating the Gulf: Beyond Fault Lines. http://dx.doi.org/10.5339/ connect.2016.tii.2 Baker, Mona, ed. 2016. Translation Dissent: Voices from and with the Egyptian Revolution. New York: Routledge. 437

Nada Qanbar

Blumenfeld-Kosinski, Renate Luise von Flotow, and Daniel Russell, eds. 2001. The Politics of Translation in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press. Care International Policy Report. 2013. Arab Spring or Arab Autumn? Women’s Political Participation in the Uprisings and Beyond: Implications for International Donor Policy. Available at: www.care.org/sites/default/ files/documents/report_women-arab-spring_english-2013.pdf [Accessed 28 Jan. 2016]. Castro, Olga. 2009. (Re-) examining Horizons in Feminist Translation Studies: Towards a Third Wave? Revistas–MonTI, 1, 59–86. Available at: https://rua.ua.es/dspace/bitstream/10045/13037/1/ MonTI_01_08_trans.pdf. Castro, Olga. 2012. Talking at Cross-Purposes? The Missing Link Between Feminist Linguistics and Translation Studies. Gender and Language, 7(1), 35–58. Chamberlain, Lori. 1992. Gender and the Metaphorics of Translation. Signs, 13(3), 454–472. Available at: www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/3174168?uid=2&uid=4&sid=21104643081671 [Accessed 18 Oct. 2014]. De Marco, Marcella. 2006. Audiovisual Translation from a Gender Perspective. The Journal of Specialized Translation, 6, 167–184. De Marco, Marecella. 2012. Audiovisual Translation through a Gender Lens. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Feral, Anne-Lise. 2011. Gender in audiovisual translation: Naturalizing feminine voices in the French Sex and the City. European Journal of Women’s Studies, 18(4), 391–407. Accessed October 6, 2014. http://ejw. sagepub.com/content/18/4/391. Flotow, Luise Von. 1991. Feminist Translation: Contexts, Practices and Theories. TTR: traduction, terminologie, rédaction, 4(2), 69–84. http://dx.doi.org/10.7202/037094ar. Flotow, Luise Von. 1997. Translation and Gender: Translating in the ‘Era of Feminism’. Manchester: St. Jerome Pub. Available at: http://muse.jhu.edu/books/9780776617350?auth=0 [Accessed 15 Oct. 2014]. Flotow, Luise Von. 2010. Gender in Translation. Handbook of Translation Studies, 1, 129–133. Available at: http://itquancorp.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/Handbook-of-Translation-Studies-2010-vol-I. pdf#page=139 [Accessed 15 Dec. 2014]. Furukawa, Hiroko. 2017. De-Feminizing Translation: To Make Women Visible in Japanese Translation, in Luise von Flotow and Farzaneh Farahzad, eds., Translating Women. Different Voices and New Horizons. London and New York: Routledge, 76–89. Gamal, Muhammad. 2014. Audio Visual Translation in the Arab World v.04: Mapping the Field. Arab Media & Society, 19, 1–12. Accessed 3 Dec. 2017. Gamal, Muhammad. 2015. Omar’s Eleven: Challenges in Subtitling Classic Egyptian Films. Translation Journal. Available at: www.translationjournal.net/January-2015/omar-s-eleven-challenges-in-subtitlingclassic-egyptian-films.html [Accessed 16 Feb. 2016]. Giacomo, Carol. 2012. Women Fight to Define the Arab Spring. The New York Times. Available at: www.nytimes.com/2012/11/11/opinion/sunday/women-fight-to-define-the-arab-spring.html?_r=0 [Accessed 18 Oct. 2017]. Giles, Howard, ed. 2012. The Handbook of Intergroup Communication. New York: Routledge. Godard, Barbara. 1990. Theorizing Feminist Discourse/Translation, in Susan Bassnett and Andre Lefevere, eds., Translation, History and Culture. London: Pinter, 87–96. James, Kate. 2011. Speaking in the Feminine: Considerations for Gender-Sensitive Translation. Translation Journal, 16(2). Available at: http://translationjournal.net/journal/56feminine.htm.pdf [Accessed 12 Jan. 2017]. Kamal, Hala. 2008. Translating Women and Gender: The Experience of Translating the Encyclopedia of Women and Islamic Cultures into Arabic. WSQ: Women’s Studies Quarterly 36(3–4), 245–268. Available at: http://scholar.cu.edu.eg/?q=halakamal/files/halakamal.pdf. Kamal, Hala. 2016. A Century of Egyptian Women’s Demands: The Four Waves of the Egyptian Feminist Movement, in Gender and Race Matter: Global Perspectives on Being a Woman, 3–22. Available at: http:// dx.doi.org/10.1108/S1529-212620160000021002 [. Accessed 25 Aug. 2016]. Kamal, Hala. 2018. Travelling Concepts in Translation: Feminism and Gender in the Egyptian Context. Literary and Translation Studies, 14(1), 131–145. Karamitroglou, Fotios. 2000. Towards a Methodology for the Investigation of Norms in Audiovisual Translation: The Choice Between Subtitling and Revoicing in Greece. Amsterdam and Atlanta, GA: Rodopi. Kuo, Szu-Yu. 2014. Quality in Subtitling: Theory and Professional Reality. PhD. dissertation, Imperial College London. Moghadam, Valentine M. 2014. Women, Work and Family in the Arab Region: Toward Economic Citizenship. Prepared for Expert Group Meeting on Protecting the Arab Family from Poverty: Employment, Social

438

Women in audiovisual translation

Integration and Intergenerational Solidarity as part of 20th Doha International Institute for Family Studies and Development, 2–3 June 2013 anniversary of the International Year of the Family. Mortada, Leil-Zahra. 2016. Translation and Solidarity in Words of Women from the Egyptian Revolution, in Mona Baker, ed., Translation Dissent: Voices from and with the Egyptian Revolution. London: Routledge. Qanbar, Nada. 2011. A Sociolinguistic Study of Linguistic Taboos in the Yemeni Society. Modern Journal of Applied Linguistics, 3(2), 86–104. Qanbar, Nada. 2012. The Image of Women in the Yemeni Proverbs. Arab Journal for Humanities, 30, 178–210. Qanbar, Nada. 2013. “Linguistic Violence against Women in the Yemeni Society”. Paper presented at the conference on Violence & Society, Center of Economic and Social Studies, Tunisia, October 2013. Qanbar, Nada. 2016. Women in AVT: A Preliminary Exploration into the Context of the Arab World. Unpublished MA thesis, HBKU, Doha, Qatar. Orero, Pilar, ed. 2004. Topics in Audiovisual Translation. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Rohr, Mathieu Von. 2011. Freedoms at Risk: Arab Women Fight to Defend Their Rights. Der Spiegel, 29. Available at: www.spiegel.de/international/world/freedoms-at-risk-arab-women-fight-to-defendtheir-rights-a-800447.html [Accessed 29 Nov. 2014]. Schäffner, Christina. 2013. Women as Translators, as Translation Trainers, and as Translation Scholars. Women’s Studies International Forum, 40, 144–151. Spivak, Gayatri. 1999. Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Towards a History of the Vanishing Present. Boston: Harvard University Press. University of Jordan. 2016. ‫[ خريجي الجامعة األردنية‬The Graduates of the University of Jordan]. Available at: http://ju.edu.jo/Applications/Alumni.aspx [Accessed 15 Feb. 2016].

439

APPENDIX A

QUESTIONNAIRE

Good Day! I am examining the status of audiovisual translation in the Arab world for research purposes. Your responses and the information you will provide are of crucial importance to my research. You will need five minutes to fill out this questionnaire. Your responses will only be used for survey purposes, and will not be marked in any way that would identify you. Thank you very much for your time and suggestions.   1 Sex:   2 Marital status:   3 Language combinations you translate from/into:   4 Age: • • • • • • •

Below 25 years old Between 25–30 Between 31–35 Between 36–40 Between 41–45 Between 46–50 Over 51 years old

  5 Highest educational attainment: • Diploma • University Degree • Master • PhD • Other (Please specify)   6 Specializations: • Translation • Audio-visual translation • Other (please specify) 440

Women in audiovisual translation

  7 Experience: • • • • • • •

Below 1 year 1 year and under 3 years 3 years and under 5 years 5 years and under 10 years 10 years and under 15 years 15 years and under 20 years 20 years or more

  8 Type of work: • (In-house) full time • Part time • Freelancing   9 Type of contract: • •

Verbal agreement Signed-up contract

10 Nature of work: • Translation • Script Writing • Dubbing • Editing/Proofreading • Timecoding • Other (Please specify) 11 Genre/nature of text: • Soap Operas • Movies • Shows • Documentaries • Adventure Shows • Other (Please specify) 12 Assignment of work: • Self • Company • Client 13 Working hours: • • •

Less than 10 hours a day 10 hours a day More than 10 hours a day

14 Frequency of work: • •

On a daily basis On a weekly basis 441

Nada Qanbar

• •

On a monthly basis Other (please specify)

15 Way of payment: • • • •

Per minute Per hour A day A month

16 Payment date: • • • • •

On the delivery of the work Within 30 days Within 60 days Within 90 days More than 90 days

17 Who sets the Rate? • You • Company • Client 18 In cases of short notices and tight deadlines, are you awarded: • •

Extra payment Regular payment

19 Software/manner of translation: • • •

Pen and paper Professional software (please specify) Free online downloadable software (please specify)

20 Are you given any of the following supporting materials: • Glossary • Script • No thing • Other (please specify) 21 Are you provided with professional training? • Always • Sometimes • Rarely • Never 22 Is your name acknowledged in the work? • Always • Sometimes • Rarely • Never

442

APPENDIX B

TRANSLATION TEST

1 2 3

Jesus Christ! A killer still on the loose. Kenny, tell me I’m dreaming. Bring your little sexy ass over here again. Last time, it made my day. “She is an excellent manager, for a woman. The women on our staff – those who haven’t left to become stay-at-home mothers – are hard-working and loyal” (Heaps n.d). Getting them into the firm is like the icing on the cake. 4 This ham sandwich is the best thing since sliced bread. 5 I don’t believe all this shit coming from the government. What we need is people who are really on the ball. These guys know nothing about what’s going on. 6 Don’t blame it on me. This disaster was all your fault. Who, on earth, trusts women anyway? They never think sensibly. They are all half-minded. 7 Karen. Give it up. It’s not nice to play football. You must start behaving like a proper woman.

443

33 Gender in war video games The linguacultural representation and localization of female roles between reality and fictionality Silvia Pettini

1 Introduction Video games are expressive computational media which service representational goals akin to literature, art, and film. Through the unique persuasive power of “procedural rhetoric,” they make claims about the cultural, social, or material aspects of human experience, which influence players’ conceptions of the world (Bogost 2007). For example, they “are important symbolic sites for conveying messages about appropriate gender roles and perceptions of social reality” (Cunningham 2012, 407). Through engaging with specifically gendered game worlds, players “gain substantial knowledge of gender attributes [. . .] and extract rules as to what types of behaviour are considered appropriate for their gender” (Bussey and Bandura 1999, 696) or, one might add, for any other gender. War video games offer players entertaining experiences of “gendered militarism” (Robinson 2016), whose aesthetic and narrative dimensions are framed in strongly androcentric terms. Virtual armed conflict is a predominantly masculine setting, combat is a masculine act, military heroism is a masculine trait, and significant emphasis is placed on the links between militaristic values and manhood. Gendered militarism is played out on very simulated battlefields and takes shape in the more or less realistic representations of warfare. As Matthew Payne explains, military-themed video games may indeed represent real, near-real or fantastic conflicts but they are all overly militarized worlds: players eliminate human threats on behalf of their country, usually the USA, or alien foes in an imaginary world and “these are not mere cosmetic distinctions. Rather, these differences determine how games are understood as relating to reality or not” (2016, 5). Indeed, according to Payne (2016, 46), these differences affect players’ expectations concerning the relationship between war games’ experiences and the reality of war, or between games’ representations of war and their understanding of it, because they determine whether and how players can make connections between the game world and the real world to meaningfully interpret the political, social, and cultural content that war games implicitly or explicitly transmit through procedural representations (Bogost 2007). More notably, wargaming is a commercial and cultural phenomenon globally. No video game genre has been more popular or more lucrative in recent years than the military shooter. 444

Gender in war video games

According to the Entertainment Software Association (ESA 2018, 12), it was the best-selling genre of 2017, accounting for 26% of all video game sales in the USA. Given the market-driven nature of the game industry, as Payne underlines (2016, 153), this genre’s popularity is closely connected with the male hardcore consumer base. Indeed, 61% of US game purchasers are male (ESA 2018, 13). In other words, it seems to be the (stereo)typical target gamer, as often presented in popular media, who makes military shooters an almost exclusively male space, with only 7% of players being female (Yee 2017). War has been an integral theme of multimedia interactive entertainment since the very beginning. Gerald A. Voorhees states that the shooting genre is “one of the most notorious, and certainly the oldest, type of video games” (2014, 251). After all, “Spacewar!, developed in 1961 by Steve Russell et al. [. . .], was the first [shooting] video game” (ibid.). Moreover, as Voorhees remarks, shooters, in Bob Rehak’s words “feature prominently” (2007, 193) also among the most controversial areas of gaming, generating much discussion in both public and scholarly circles concerned with the medium’s impact on society (Voorhees 2014, 253). As vehicles of militarism, war video games have attracted considerable interdisciplinary academic attention (Halter 2006; Huntemann and Payne 2010; Mead 2013; Voorhees et al. 2012, among others). Of special interest is the way their contents affect an audience of “virtual citizensoldier[s]” (Stahl 2010, 21), the militaristic messages male players internalize, and the extent to which these games impact on social values and relations of power, such as race, ethnicity, and gender (Robinson 2016, 271), the latter being surprisingly understudied. Similarly, the linguacultural dimension of gender in war games is a neglected area of investigation and, more generally, little scholarly attention has been given to gender from a linguistic or translational viewpoint. Apart from a few case studies (Czech 2013; Maxwell-Chandler and O’Malley-Deming 2012, 315–326; Pettini 2018; Šiaučiūnė and Liubinienė 2011), no systematic and large-scale research has been performed so far. In this light, from the perspective of game localization (Bernal-Merino 2015; O’Hagan and Mangiron 2013), this chapter aims to stimulate academic debate on the topic by investigating the relationship between the biological concept and sociocultural construct known as ‘gender,’ as well as language and translation in international mainstream wargaming. It examines the narrative weight and the linguacultural representation of female characters in a corpus of three story-driven military-themed games, namely Medal of Honor Warfighter (Danger Close, Electronic Arts 2012), Battlefield 4 (DICE, Electronic Arts 2013) and Mass Effect 3 (BioWare, Electronic Arts 2012), which have been selected to simulate a reality-fictionality spectrum of war games, as will be discussed in Section 3. For these purposes, this study offers a background content analysis of female roles in the games’ storylines, based on a working taxonomy adapted from Edward Downs and Stacy L. Smith (2010, 724–725) and Teresa Lynch et al. (2016), which classifies the female cast into ‘primary’, i.e. player-controlled, ‘secondary’, and ‘background’ characters, depending first, on their playable nature, and second, on their either active or passive role in virtual warfare. Due to the importance of this text-type in narrative-driven games (Christou et al. 2011, 40), the study focuses on parallel excerpts of in-game dialogues involving female characters and compares the original US English version with the Italian and Spanish localizations by adopting a corpusdriven descriptive analytical approach to translation. Thus, the final objective is to provide a quantitative and qualitative account of the female linguacultural dimension in typically malegendered militarized game worlds. Section 2 briefly outlines this chapter’s theoretical framework and discusses the main genderrelated challenges and issues in game localization. Section 3 illustrates the most important features of the corpus under investigation, with special attention to methodological aspects. 445

Silvia Pettini

Section 4 explores the roles female characters play in the three games’ storylines and serves as the background content analysis for Section 5, which quantitatively and qualitatively examines their linguacultural representation in the corpus.

2  Gender in game localization Game localization is a specialized translation area combining elements of audiovisual translation and software localization, which presents remarkable medium-specific challenges and constraints. The multimedia nature of video games, the limited access to the original game, to reference material and extratextual information concerning game contents, the multi-textual variety of game assets, and textual non-linearity to allow interactivity are only some of the unique issues translators deal with in this realm. In regard to gender, its cross-linguistic representation in game texts proves to be especially difficult in the translation from English into Romance languages. The transfer from a language where gender is mainly a semantic category into languages where gender is also a grammatical category (Hellinger and Bußmann 2001) means complying with the TL mandatory agreement that establishes a morpho-syntactic relation between one gendered referent and all associated elements, such as articles, adjectives, pronouns, and verbs, through grammatical marking or inflection. Without adequate co-textual and contextual information, translating gender in game texts may be a blindfolded task, potentially causing inconsistencies and incorrect sentences across different languages (Bernal-Merino 2015, 147–152; Heimburg 2006, 142–151; O’Hagan and Mangiron 2013, 132–134). Consequently, a number of developers and localization agencies have started to use a programming metalanguage consisting of variables, a set of codes and characters that mark gender-variable strings with tags, generally ‘M’ for male and ‘F’ for female between brackets, serving as computing instructions that allow the game engine to display genderspecific strings correctly. This system is fundamental when translating gender-customizable games, which enable players to select either a male or female avatar, since their choice theoretically affects all linguistic items referring to the playable character. For example, as the dialogue line in (2) shows in Section 5.3, the translation of the adjective ‘proud’ in ‘I’m proud of all of you’ is contained within gender variables in the two localizations. Accordingly, it will be displayed as either ‘fiero’ if male or ‘fiera’ if female in Italian, and as either ‘orgulloso’ if male and ‘orgullosa’ if female in Spanish. However, although variables pose the most evident and medium-specific challenge, they represent only one example of the gender-related phenomena worth exploring in game localization research. Indeed, in translation, as Sections 5.2 and 5.3 evidence, other issues emerge from linguacultural-specific approaches to gender equality, exhibited in the use or non-use of “gender-inclusive language” or “gender-fair language.” The latter concept, in particular, is borrowed from psycholinguistics (see Sczesny et al. 2016) as a working definition to mean a tool aimed at reducing gender stereotyping and discrimination and able to influence people’s gendered perception of reality. The objective of gender-fair language is the symmetric representation of women and men through language, and especially in regard to female characters, the use of feminine forms that make female referents visible.

3  The reality-fictionality corpus of war video games This chapter examines a reality-fictionality spectrum of three war video games, purposefully selected according to the following three major criteria: (1) local distribution, i.e. all games were officially released in Italy and Spain; (2) time proximity, i.e. all games were published in a two-year period (2012–2013), in order to limit the implications of constant technological 446

Gender in war video games

advancement on localization and, consequently, on this research; (3) genre and subgenre-related characteristics with respect to the degree of reality or fictionality of game contents. As regards genre, all titles belong to the ‘action’ macrogenre and in terms of gameplay subgenre they fall into the category of shooters. Nevertheless, while Medal of Honor Warfighter (MoHW hereafter) and Battlefield 4 (BF4 hereafter) are ‘first-person shooters’ proper, Mass Effect 3 (ME3 hereafter) is a mixed genre game combining the typical elements of role-playing with those of shooters in a third-person perspective (Patterson 2015). With reference to narrative genre and to the degree of reality or fictionality of their game worlds, they all depict war settings. These range from conflicts based on actual events like in MoHW, which represents the topical global war on terror, to near-future conflicts based on believable international tensions like in BF4, whose theme is a political-fiction 2020 war between the USA, Russia and China, to fantastical conflicts set in the distant future, as in ME3, which presents a science-fiction 2186 war to save the Galaxy from alien invasion. The degree of reality or fictionality of game contents was evaluated on the basis of working criteria adapted from what Andrew Rollings and Ernest Adams (2003, 60–75) describe as the most important dimensions of a game world: (1) the physical dimension that represents the places where the story-driven action unfolds and where the player moves her/his avatar; (2) the temporal dimension that indicates the time of the story-driven action; and (3) the cultural dimension that refers to “the beliefs, attitudes, and values that the people in the game world hold, as well as their political and religious institutions, social organisation, and so on” (Rollings and Adams 2003, 69). Accordingly, as Figure 33.1 shows, depending on the relationship between the real world and the game world, the three titles can be positioned on the spectrum axis as follows: MoHW and ME3 represent the realistic left-hand edge and the fictional right-hand edge of the axis respectively, while the political-fiction BF4 occupies the central position. Moreover, the games in the corpus share the following features: seriality, they all belong to popular long-running game franchises, namely Medal of Honor (1999–2012), Battlefield (2002– Present), Mass Effect (2007–Present); as for target audience or age rating, they are all labelled ‘Mature’ according to the US Entertainment Software Rating Board and, more relevantly, ‘18’ according to the Pan-European Game Information system; in regard to the platform, they are all multiplatform titles but this paper examines their console versions; they all present single-player mode of play, as opposed to online multiplayer; they boast high production value and global sales (VGChartz 2019); and they were all released by Electronic Arts, the US publishing giant which provided the researcher with the three games’ localization databases. In terms of localization levels (Maxwell-Chandler and O’Malley-Deming 2012, 8–10), MoHW and BF4 are fully localized into Italian and Spanish, i.e. all game assets are translated, and the original audio is dubbed, while ME3 is fully localized into Italian and partially localized into Spanish, i.e. all game assets are translated, but the audio is subtitled. With respect to methodology, as Mike Schmierbach (2009, 148) notes, the interactive nature of video games introduces several challenges to the analyses of their content. This is particularly true in game translation research because, as mentioned in Section 2, in order to give players authorial agency in the storytelling process, game texts are non-linear: they consist of separate and independent strings, that are displayed in different locations of the product in response MoHW

BF4

reality

ME3 fictionality

Figure 33.1 The reality-fictionality spectrum axis 447

Silvia Pettini

to the player’s actions and which often do not have a clear meaning outside the context of the game (Bernal-Merino 2015, 141–146). Text fragmentation manifests itself in the Excel spreadsheets or databases translators usually work on, with little or no recourse to co-textual or contextual information about game contents. This non-linearity also represents a challenge for researchers, especially when dealing with story-driven games and focusing on dialogues as text type, as in this chapter. Consequently, for the purposes of this study, three walkthroughs of the games were selected to create the corpus: one per game, played by three different Italian gamers and uploaded as videos on their personal YouTube channels.1 Since the players remained independent of the research, this technique also involved avoiding bias in content capture (Schmierbach 2009). The overall duration of each of these online resources, accounting for a total of 1,241 minutes (20:41:02 in the format hh:mm:ss), was divided into four parts, necessary adjustments were made and 40% of each walkthrough was analyzed, namely the first 10%, the fourth 10%, the seventh 10%, and the final 10%. The objective was to include fundamental components of the storytelling process, i.e. the beginning and the end, together with middle sections. Thus, the overall playtime of the corpus is 484 minutes (08:04:00 in the format hh:mm:ss). In order to make dialogues linear and meaningful, thanks to the original databases provided by Electronic Arts, the strings uttered by game characters during the four sections selected were chronologically arranged in English, Italian and Spanish by adopting the Italian version as the point of reference. Given the authenticity of the database, double-checking the accuracy of the dialogue script in English and Spanish was not necessary. Moreover, due to the very interactive nature of video games, unless gamers are commissioned by the researcher and asked to play the game by performing exactly the same actions, it is highly unlikely to find three identical walkthroughs across languages. For this reason, the Italian localized version was used as a guideline to make texts, and consequently narratives, linear and meaningful. The result was a parallel corpus including official aligned texts in the three languages. The total size of the corpus is 117,504 words consisting of 1151 strings and 20,475 words in MoHW; 1002 strings and 18,934 words in BF4; 3389 strings and 78,131 words in ME3. As mentioned in the Introduction, the analytical approach of this study is corpus-driven and descriptive, it entails a quantitative and qualitative analysis of parallel excerpts of in-game dialogues involving female characters as speaker, listener, or referent.

4  Female roles in wargaming between reality and fictionality This section explores the narrative weight of female characters in the reality-fictionality corpus and describes the roles they play in the three games’ storylines.

4.1  Medal of Honor Warfighter Co-written by active US Navy SEAL operators and inspired by real world Islamic terrorism, MoHW offers players a realistic experience in the topical war on terror, aimed to prevent a series of bomb attacks that Jihadist networks have planned at global level. Simultaneously, it tells the story of one of these US Special Forces soldier, call-signed ‘Preacher’, at the crossroads between family and duty after years of deployment overseas. Indeed, in Nick Robinson’s words, the MoHW “counter-terrorist storyline centres on the consequences which military service has for family life in the homeland, emphasising that US Special Forces (and troops more generally) make huge sacrifices for their country that resonate within their families” and, more interestingly, this “sacrifice is given a profoundly personal and gendered perspective” (2016, 265). Much of the gameplay is linked by non-interactive conversations between Preacher and his wife Lena, 448

Gender in war video games

“which explore the incompatibility of his lifestyle [. . .] with maintaining his marriage” (ibid.) and the relationship with his daughter, Isabella. However, when Preacher considers leaving the military to devote himself to his family life, it is precisely Lena who persuades him to set aside self-interest for the greater good. Moreover, according to Robinson, the death of another character call-signed ‘Mother’ (Preacher’s comrade and best friend) literally brings sacrifice home as the game ends with his military funeral, where Preacher, Lena, Isabella and Mother’s wife (whose name is never revealed) are at the grave side to commemorate Mother’s heroism (ibid.). Preacher’s wife, his daughter and Mother’s wife are the only three female characters in MoHW game world cast, representing 10% of the total population (28 characters in the whole game, out of which 23 appear in the walkthrough analyzed). They are non-playable and background characters, who play a minor part only during some non-interactive sequences interrupting game missions. Lena is the most frequently occurring female role in the game and she is also the only one present in the sections under scrutiny: her voice is heard during a tense phone conversation with Preacher following the game prologue, which is discussed in Section 5.1. Thus, the realistic and modern representation of warfare clearly demarcates gender boundaries and confines almost invisible and passive women to the traditional role of wife and mother, entailing the maintenance of family life, while awaiting their men’s return and, even, self-sacrifice for the sake of the higher ideal only men are fighting for.

4.2  Battlefield 4 In BF4, the player is Sergeant Daniel Recker, a US Marine leading an elite team of militarily skilled commandos to prevent a 2020 global-scale war between the USA, Russia and China. As such, as Marcus Schulzke explains, BF4 exemplifies those video games which “are not set in or based on real conflicts” but which “tend to create new conflicts that involve real political actors and that mirror existing international tensions” and these political-fiction wars “reflect and reinforce conceptions of hostility and risk” revolving around the Americans-versus-communists plot (2014). The BF4 game world cast includes a total of 26 characters, five of whom are women, thus representing 19% of BF4 population. Only 21 characters appear in the walkthrough selected, out of which three are women. More importantly, all these secondary female characters are more or less actively involved in warfare: Lieutenant Jennifer Hawkins, call-signed ‘Firebird’, is a US Marine providing air support during the first game mission, when she eventually dies under enemy fire; Lieutenant Marion Duncan is also a US Marine serving as a doctor aboard the main US Navy ship; and, lastly, Huang ‘Hannah’ Shuyi is a Chinese intelligence officer who joins the US squad and enters the battlefield to protect the Chinese pacifist and future political leader, whose safety is threatened by a military coup. As opposed to the two US female soldiers, who play a limited role and about whom little is known, Hannah is a well-developed character. She is an idealist, patriotic, and brave woman who feels the burden of saving her country from dictatorship so that her family’s death and the destruction of her village are not in vain. She plays a supportive role throughout the story and, more importantly, she becomes playable in the final game mission when she sacrifices herself for the sake of world peace. As a result, it is true that the political-fiction representation of warfare more actively involves women in fighting near-future battles but only eventually offers players a real female-gendered engagement to contain the outbreak of modern-day fears. Moreover, in positioning the US female Marine call-signed ‘Firebird’ in the non-playable role of helicopter pilot, who is never visible and simply takes the form of tactical interaction, the game seems to suggest that the battlefield is a predominantly male space. 449

Silvia Pettini

4.3  Mass Effect 3 ME3 involves players fighting a 2186 science-fiction war to save the Galaxy from the invasion of the Reapers, an alien race dedicated to destroying all organic life. An elite human soldier named Commander Shepard is the game’s protagonist and, since the avatar’s gender is customizable, gamers can play as either a male or a female Shepard. In the latter case, she is commonly referred to as ‘FemShep’ and is considered to be one of the most popular heroines or even first true feminist protagonist in gaming history (Blüml 2014). The fate of the universe, however, is not entirely in her/his hands but rather it depends on the cooperation between humans that s/he leads, and dozens of different fictional species which populate ME3 galaxy-sized game world. Thus, it comes as no surprise that the total number of characters in the game amounts to 556, out of which 236 are female (62 and 35 respectively in the walkthrough selected), meaning 42% of the ME3 game world population. Their roles vary widely, ranging from simple extras to FemShep, and a multitude of more or less developed and narratively instrumental female roles. Based on their engagement in dialogues and their relevance to gender analysis, as Section 5.3 illustrates, two of the four female members of Shepard’s squad, out of a total of six selectable comrades, are significant. They are the human Lieutenant-Commander ‘Ashley Williams’, an elite and merciless soldier with a promising military career but also a sensitive, poetry-loving woman, and doctor ‘Liara T’Soni’, a scientist with extraordinary combat skills and a representative of the asari race, a fictional mono-gender species of human-like beautiful, blue, alien girls. Accordingly, it is in the futuristic representation of warfare that women come into play. First, ME3 lead, playable character can be female from the very beginning and, although this reinforces the binary notion of gender, it is an important point challenging the norm in war games. Moreover, secondary and background female characters increase considerably in number and their narrative roles can be so varied that a more in-depth analysis, which is beyond the scope of this study, would be necessary to address them in a comprehensive manner.

5  The linguacultural representation of female characters This section provides a quantitative and qualitative analysis of the linguacultural representation of female characters in the corpus and examines parallel excerpts of in-game dialogues involving them as speaker, listener, or referent.

5.1  Medal of Honor Warfighter As mentioned in Section 4.1, after the game prologue, a brief cutscene introduces Preacher’s personal side of the story. He is in a hotel room in Madrid and talks on the phone with Lena, his wife. Their conversation is tense; they argue because the nature of his job and the frequency of his deployments are leading to their marriage and family breakdown. In the corpus, this conversation is the only instance of Lena’s linguacultural representation, including a total of 15 dialogue strings out of which seven involve her as speaker character. As regards translation, no gender-related phenomena are detected. This absence of results is noteworthy because it seems to depend exactly on the quantitatively limited and qualitatively stereotypical portrayal of female characters in the game’s verisimilar narrative, which offers a linguistic insight reinforcing the notion of “gendered militarism” (Robinson 2016) in realistic war video games.

5.2  Battlefield 4 In the BF4 story, three female characters play an active part and, more relevantly, their roles in dialogues provide pertinent data. From a quantitative viewpoint, as speaker characters, the 450

Gender in war video games

US Navy doctor Marion Duncan has two dialogue lines, the US pilot call-signed Firebird has 38, and the Chinese secret agent nicknamed Hannah has 115. From a qualitative perspective, no issues emerge except for the Italian gender-biased rendition of ‘doctor’ (two instances), used as a label to identify doctor Duncan when she is the speaker character. As example (1) shows, only Spanish translators correctly provided a gender-specific equivalent form, while in Italian ‘dottore’ is masculine and ‘dottoressa’ its feminine counterpart.

Example 1 Doctor: Easy. You’ve been unconscious for several days.

Dottore: Piano. È rimasto incosciente per giorni.

Doctora: Tranquilo. Has estado inconsciente varios días.

5.3  Mass Effect 3 The following paragraphs examine the gender-related phenomena and issues emerging in the linguacultural representation of the three major female characters in ME3: Commander Shepard and her/his squad members, namely Ashley Williams and Liara T’Soni. Acting as the playable heroine/hero of ME3 galactic war, Commander Shepard plays a leading role in the game storyline. Indeed, dialogue strings casting her/him as speaker or listener represent almost 95% of the corpus (3217 strings). More importantly, their translation from English into Italian and Spanish exemplifies the use of variables to comply with players’ gender choices. In the ME3 corpus, the female/male gender option has produced 183 and 49 gendertagged dialogue lines in Italian and Spanish respectively, but to fully understand these figures, it is important to consider that ME3 was fully localized into Italian and that 139 instances depend on the different approaches to translated texts adopted by male Shepard’s voice actor and FemShep’s voice actress during audio localization (Pettini 2018, 111–114). Indeed, while the former decided to substantially modify texts to make dialogues fit into his personal interpretation of the character’s way of speaking, FemShep’s voice actress did not change the wording of translated dialogue lines (Pettini 2018, 108–109). These in-studio changes required editors to add gender tags in any strings presenting variation in order to make audio match verbatim subtitles. Consequently, while in Spanish, all gender-tagged strings result from the mandatory gender agreement of this TL grammatical system, in Italian only 44 lines (24%) belong to this category and, interestingly enough, from a contrastive perspective, there are only 19 instances of correspondence between the two Romance languages. In detail, if we compare gender-marked strings in the two localizations, we find: (1) symmetries, like example 2; (2) asymmetries, like examples 3 and 4, where language-specific structures perfectly render the ST but do not require tags because they are not variable gender-marked expressions; and (3) gender-biased solutions, as in 5–8.

Example 2 I’m proud of all of you.

Sono [{M}fiero] [{F}fiera] di tutti voi.

Estoy[{M}orgulloso] [{F}orgullosa] de vosotros.

Example 3 Glad that worked out.

[{M}Lieto][{F}Lieta] che abbia funzionato.

Me alegra que haya funcionado. 451

Silvia Pettini

Example 4 We’ll stop them, Liara. Together.

Li fermeremo, Liara. Insieme.

Los detendremos, Liara. [{M}Juntos.] [{F}Juntas.]

Example 5 I’m Commander Shepard with the Alliance. (. . .)

Sono il comandante Shepard dell’Alleanza. (. . .)

Soy [{M}el] [{F}la] comandante Shepard, de la Alianza. (. . .)

You know the Commander?

Conosci il comandante?

I used to.

Lo conoscevo.

¿Conoces [{M}al] [{F}a la] comandante? Antes sí.

Example 6

Example 7 Because you’re the only soldier (. . .) who knows how to kill Reapers.

Perché sei l’unico soldato (. . .) che sa come uccidere i Razziatori.

Porque eres [{M}el único] [{F}la única] soldado (. . .) que sabe matar segadores.

Example 8 You are the first human Spectre, Commander. (. . .)

Lei è il primo Spettro umano, comandante. (. . .)

Eres [{M}el primer espectro humano] [{F}la primera espectro humana], comandante. (. . .)

As regards ‘commander’ in 5 and 6, whose equivalent is ‘comandante’ in both TLs, while in Spanish the gender variable is maintained thanks to the gender-marked definite article ‘el’ or ‘la’, Italian translators used the masculine definite article ‘il’ only, although it is possible to refer to a female commander as ‘la comandante’ since the word ending letter ‘e’ makes this noun gender-neutral. Similarly, in 6, ‘lo’ is the masculine object pronoun, meaning ‘I used to know him’, which unreasonably adopts the masculine form to be congruous with the question in 5. Concerning ‘soldier’ in 7, since the Spanish equivalent ‘soldado’ refers to both male and female members of the army (DRAE 2018), translators used gender-marked satellite elements to refer to Commander Shepard’s gender, such as articles and adjectives. Conversely, in Italian, the masculine equivalent form ‘soldato’ determines the presence of masculine-marked elements, even if feminine counterparts such as ‘donna soldato’ and ‘soldatessa’ exist. Nevertheless, in everyday language, ‘soldatessa’ has an ironic and derogatory figurative meaning, referring to a soldier-like woman with brusque and authoritative manners. Lastly, even the transfer of a futuristic game-specific military title like ‘Spectre’ in 8 disregards Commander Shepard’s gender. This rank is translated into its masculine equivalent ‘spettro’ and ‘espectro’ in Italian and Spanish respectively, both representing invariable masculine forms meaning ‘ghost’. However, given the science-fictional nature of this title, actually representing a creative blending of “Special Tactics and Reconnaissance” (Mass Effect Wiki 2019), the imaginary sociopolitical institution it refers to in ME3 universe, translators might have opted for a gender-fair inventive solution since the morphology of both languages allows for the creation of a feminine form by simply changing 452

Gender in war video games

the word ending letter from ‘o’ into ‘a’. But again, Spanish translators used gender-marked articles and adjectives while Italian satellite elements are all masculine. The other two major female characters in ME3 are Lieutenant-Commander Ashley Williams and doctor Liara T’Soni. Dialogue strings casting them as speaker or listener, mostly in conversations with Shepard, are 206 (6%) and 169 (5%) respectively. As regards Liara, her relevance to gender analysis depends on her mono-gender race of female aliens which, for the purposes of linguacultural representation, are always referred to with feminine forms like ‘she’ and ‘her,’ and they bear feminine titles like ‘matron,’ ‘huntress,’ and ‘matriarch.’ Going back to humans, Italian gender-biased solutions re-emerge when Ashley Williams is the listener or referent of some dialogue strings, as seen in examples 9 and 10. While Spanish articles and adjectives co-occurring with ‘soldado’ and ‘teniente comandante’ are all feminine, Italian translators opted for masculine forms only, which ignore her womanhood.

Example 9 You’re a fine soldier with an impressive record.

Sei un ottimo soldato, con uno stato di servizio impeccabile.

Eres una buena soldado con un historial impresionante.

Example 10 And Lieutenant-Commander Williams?

E il tenente Williams?

¿Y la teniente comandante Williams?

6 Conclusions Given the ideological impact male-gendered war video games may exert on a global army of virtual soldiers, and given the influence the degree of reality or fictionality of the militarized worlds may have on players’ understanding of the political, social and cultural messages they convey (Cunningham 2012; Payne 2016), this chapter has focused on female gender in simulated conflicts by examining a reality-fictionality spectrum of three internationally mainstream military shooters. As the content analysis in Section 4 shows, the number and the importance of women seems to be inversely proportional to the degree of verisimilitude of game content. Indeed, the more the game is realistic, the more limited is the number of females, the more passive and socioculturally stereotyped are their narrative roles. Women in MoHW are few (10%), non-playable and act as the wives and daughters of male heroes, thus representing the families who have been left behind in the fight against global terrorism. In political-fiction BF4, women are still few (19%) and secondary, but they are all actively involved in warfare, though to a lesser extent than men. Furthermore, gamers can select one of them and play as the female world saviour in the final game mission. In science-fiction ME3, the number of women increases (42%) and, more importantly, the protagonist of this galactic war can be a human heroine fighting against alien invasion together with other well-developed female secondary characters. As regards their linguacultural representation, findings in Section 5 indicate that gender deserves special attention in game localization research, since it presents linguistic and translational phenomena worthy of further investigation in the transfer from English into Romance languages and doubtless other languages. First, the medium-specific challenge of gender variables, due to games’ interactivity and customization, requires translators to use computing 453

Silvia Pettini

metalanguage to comply with the mandatory grammatical gender agreement of the TLs. This exemplifies how digital technology affects language professionals’ work and underlines the need for translational specialization. Secondly, the use or non-use of gender-fair language and the underlying approach to gender equality might provide ample opportunities to investigate ­linguacultural-specific tendencies: in this study Italian and Spanish present remarkable asymmetries in the representation of female characters and, particularly in Italian, these irregularities seem to disclose gender-biased values and assumptions that mirror and reinforce sexist clichés and stereotypes through language.

7  Future directions A complex and multifaceted relationship emerges when examining the interface between gender and video games. This is particularly true in regard to the female gender, because the general perception of gaming as a male territory inevitably tends to direct attention to the variety of gender issues concerning the status and role of girls and women in this realm. Many aspects of this relationship should be explored: the positions women occupy within the whole cycle, from development to reception, represent interesting future directions for interdisciplinary research. Moreover, considering the market-driven nature of the game sector, it is possible to hypothesize that the increasing number of female gamers may considerably influence female representation in video games, which is of special relevance from the perspective of game localization. Research in this subfield of translation studies is gaining ground, but specific studies on the topic are still limited. As this demographic expands and creates more demand, the face of gaming and game contents may be altered. This seems to be confirmed by the constant rise in the number of gendercustomizable titles casting either male or female lead playable characters, which increased from 46% in 2015 to 55% in 2018, at least, as far as the games presented at the electronic entertainment expo are concerned (Feminist Frequency 2019). Since gender customization so deeply affects game texts and translation, further research providing insights into the linguistic and cultural dimension of female representation is required to shed light on how gender is dealt with across game genres and, more relevantly, across different languages and cultures.

Further reading Czech, Dawid. 2013. Challenges in Video Game Localization: An Integrated Perspective. Explorations: A Journal of Language and Literature. [pdf] 1, 3–25. Available at: http://explorations.uni.opole.pl/wpcontent/uploads/CzechDawidText_Vol1_Lang.pdf [Accessed 2 July 2018]. This article explores some of the characteristics of video game localization and, with regard to gender, it demonstrates how the lack of situational context in game translation can lead to several complications related to sociolinguistic aspects such as proper gender marking in Polish. Maxwell-Chandler, Heather and Stephanie O’Malley-Deming. 2012. The Game Localization Handbook. 2nd ed. Sudbury: Jones & Bartlett, 315–326. Written by two experts, this book offers a detailed and well-organized industry-oriented guide to the practice of video game localization. In particular, the authors provide an interesting case study which illustrate the difficulties professionals deal with in translating a gender-customizable video game. Pettini, Silvia. 2018. Gender in Game Localization: The Case of Mass Effect 3’s FemShep, in Irene Ranzato and Serenella Zanotti, eds., Linguistic and Cultural Representation in Audiovisual Translation. London: Routledge, 101–117. This chapter presents a corpus-driven case study focusing on the linguistic and textual dimension of gender-related issues in the localization of a science fiction role-playing game. It shows how gender ultimately determines the form of target texts and provides players with a gender-specific gaming experience thanks to localization. 454

Gender in war video games

Related topics Gender in gaming, women in video games, game localization, game translation, war video games, gendered militarism

Note 1 At the time of the research, these online resources were the only complete walkthroughs of the three games available on YouTube, satisfying the selection criteria of console platform and single-player mode of play for each of them. Since these factors may considerably affect the quantity and quality of game texts, their adoption as selection criteria aimed to guarantee a certain degree of homogeneity across the three games.

References Bernal-Merino, Miguel Á. 2015. Translation and Localisation in Video Games: Making Entertainment Software Global. New York and London: Routledge. Blüml, Andreas. 2014. Gender and Racial Roles in Computer Role-Playing Games, in Gerold Sedlmayr and Nicole Waller, eds., Politics in Fantasy Media: Essays on Ideology and Gender in Fiction, Film, Television and Games. Jefferson: McFarland & Company, 31–41. Bogost, Ian. 2007. Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames. Cambridge: MIT Press. Bussey, Kay and Albert Bandura. 1999. Social Cognitive Theory of Gender Development and Differentiation. Psychological Review, 106(4), 676–713. Christou, Chris, Jenny McKearney and Ryan Warden. 2011. Enabling the Localization of Large RolePlaying Games. Trans. Revista de Traductología, 15, 39–51. Available at: www.trans.uma.es/pdf/Trans_ 15/39-51.pdf [Accessed July 2018]. Cunningham, Carolyn. 2012. Video Gaming: Representations of Femininity, in Mary Kosut, ed., Encyclopedia of Gender in Media. London: SAGE, 407–409. Downs, Edward and Smith, Stacy L. 2010. Keeping Abreast of Hypersexuality: A Video Game Character Content Analysis. Sex Roles, 62(11–12), 721–733. ESA (Entertainment Software Association). 2018. Essential Facts About the Computer and Video Game Industry [pdf]. Available at: www.theesa.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/ESA_EssentialFacts_2018.pdf [Accessed 2 July 2018]. Feminist Frequency. 2015–2018. Gender Breakdown of Games Showcased at E3 [online]. Available at: https:// feministfrequency.com/?s=gender+breakdown [Accessed 20 Feb. 2019]. Halter, E., ed. 2006. From Sun Tzu to XBox: War and Video Games. New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press. Heimburg, Eric. 2006. Localizing MMORPGs, in Keiran J. Dunne, ed., Perspectives on Localization. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 135–151. Hellinger, Marlis and Hadumod Bußmann. 2001. Gender Across Languages: The Linguistic Representation of Women and Men. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Huntemann, Nina B. and Matthew Thomas Payne, eds. 2010. Joystick Soldiers: The Politics of Play in Military Video Games. London: Routledge. Lynch, Teresa, Jessica E. Tompkins, Irene I. van Driel, and Niki Fritz. 2016. Sexy, Strong, and Secondary: A Content Analysis of Female Characters in Video Games Across 31 Years. Journal of Communication, 66(4), 564–584. Mass Effect Wiki. 2019. Spectres [online]. Available at: https://masseffect.fandom.com/wiki/Spectres [Accessed 12 Apr. 2019]. Maxwell-Chandler, Heather and Stephanie O’Malley-Deming. 2012. The Game Localization Handbook (2nd ed.). Sudbury, MA: Jones & Bartlett Learning. Mead, Corey. 2013. War Play: Video Games and the Future of Armed Conflict. Boston: Eamon Dolan and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. O’Hagan, Minako and Carmen Mangiron. 2013. Game Localization: Translating for the Global Digital Entertainment Industry. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Patterson, Christopher B. 2015. Role-Playing the Multiculturalist Umpire: Loyalty and War in BioWare’s Mass Effect Series. Games and Culture, 10(3), 207–228. Pettini, Silvia. 2018. Gender Representation in Video Games: The case of Mass Effect 3’s FemShep, in Irene Ranzato and Serenella Zanotti, eds., Linguistic and Cultural Representation in Audiovisual Translation. London: Routledge, 101–117. 455

Silvia Pettini

Payne, Matthew Thomas. 2016. Playing War: Military Video Games After 9/11. New York: New York University Press. Rehak, Bob. 2007. Genre Profile: First Person Shooting Game, in Mark J. P. Wolf, ed., The Video Game Explosion: A History from PONG to PlayStation and Beyond. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 187–195. Robinson, Nick. 2016. Militarism and Opposition in the Living Room: The Case of Military Videogames. Critical Studies on Security, 4(3), 255–275. Rollings, Andrew and Ernest Adams. 2003. On Game Design. Indianapolis: New Riders. Schmierbach, Mike. 2009. Content Analysis of Video Games: Challenges and Potential Solutions. Communication Methods and Measures, 3(3), 147–172. Schulzke, Marcus. 2014. Video Games and the Simulation of International Conflict. E-International Relations [online]. Available at: www.e-ir.info/2014/08/01/video-games-and-the-simulation-of-interna tional-conflict/ [Accessed 2 July 2018]. Sczesny, Sabine, Magda Formanowicz and Franziska Moser. 2016. Can Gender-Fair Language Reduce Gender Stereotyping and Discrimination? Frontiers in Psychology, 7(25). Available at: www.ncbi.nlm.nih. gov/pmc/articles/PMC4735429/ [Accessed 2 July 2018]. Šiaučiūnė, Vaida and Vilmante Liubinienė. 2011. Video Game Localization: The Analysis of In-Game Texts. Kalbų Studijos/Studies About Languages, 19, 46–55. Available at: http://kalbos.ktu.lt/index.php/ KStud/article/view/945/1045 [Accessed 2 July 2018]. Soldado. 2018. DRAE (Dictionary of the Royal Academy of Spanish Language) [online]. Available at: https:// dle.rae.es/?w=diccionario [Accessed 20 Feb. 2019]. Stahl, Roger. 2010. Militainment, Inc.: War, Media, and Popular Culture. New York and London: Routledge. VGChartz. 2019. VGChartz [online]. Available at: www.vgchartz.com/. Voorhees, Gerald A. 2014. Shooting, in Mark J. P. Wolf and Bernard Perron, eds., The Routledge Companion to Video Game Studies. New York: Routledge, 251–258. Voorhees, Gerald A., Joshua Call, and Katie Whitlock. 2012. Guns, Grenades, and Grunts: First-Person Shooter Games. London: Bloomsbury. Yee, Nick. 2017. Beyond 50/50: Breaking Down the Percentage of Female Gamers by Genre [online]. Available at: https://quanticfoundry.com/2017/01/19/female-gamers-by-genre/ [Accessed 12 Apr. 2019].

Gameography Battlefield 4. DICE, Electronic Arts, 2013. Mass Effect 3. BioWare, Electronic Arts, 2012. Medal of Honor Warfighter. Danger Close, Electronic Arts, 2012. Spacewar!. Steve Russell, 1962.

456

34 Gender issues in machine translation An unsolved problem? Johanna Monti

Introduction Machine Translation (MT) is one of most widely used Artificial Intelligence (AI) applications on the Internet: it is so widespread in online services of various types that sometimes users do not realize that they are using the results of an automatic translation process. From social networks, like Facebook or Twitter, to online selling platforms, like eBay or TripAdvisor, search engines like Google and video chat software as well as instant messaging systems like Skype, machine translation can break down linguistic barriers in various ways and for a number of different purposes: translating texts or websites, doing online searches and communicating in real time with people who speak different languages. In spite of the remarkable progress achieved in this field over the last 20 years thanks to the enhanced capacity of computers and advanced technologies in the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP), the machine translation systems, even the most widely used ones on the Internet such as Google Translate, still present some critical areas. Many challenges are linked to the complexity and ambiguity of natural language and the obstacles posed by the translation process itself. One of the most frequent problems in the state-of-the-art MT systems, such as Systran Pure Neural MT, Google Translate and DeepL, is that the translation of gender represents a recurrent source of mistranslation: incorrect gender attribution to proforms (personal pronouns, relative pronouns, etc.), the reproduction of gender stereotypes and the overuse of masculine pronouns are among the most frequent problems. When dealing with the concept of gender, linguistic and cultural aspects both need to be taken into account. From a linguistic point of view, the concept of gender refers to a grammatical category and is therefore defined as grammatical gender (masculine, feminine and neutral) based on the distribution of nouns in nominal classes according to a certain number of formal properties which are implemented by means of the pronominal reference, the agreement between the adjective (or the verb) and the nominal affixes (prefixes, suffixes or case endings). The grammatical gender is not always coherent with the semantic categorization of the word, namely its natural gender (generally intended as the gender of a person or an animal within the male/female polarity), and can vary from language to language since it depends on the representation of objects in the world according to specific properties which are assigned to them in a 457

Johanna Monti

specific cultural context. An example of this is the Italian word morte (death) which is feminine, whereas in other languages it is masculine; for example, the corresponding word Tod in German. A further distinction has to be made between languages such as Italian and German on the one hand, which present the grammatical gender for nouns, adjectives as well as determiners, and languages such as English on the other, which present only the pronominal gender, i.e. when the gender is marked only on the pronominal system (Corbett 1991): masculine pronouns are used for male human referents (he is used for John, man, etc), feminine pronouns for human female referents (she is used for girl, Joan, etc.), whereas neuter is used for all other entities (it is used for table, window, etc.). The variation of grammatical gender in translation not only has linguistic implications but also cultural ones, especially for words that have a marked metaphorical and mythological valence as Roman Jakobson reminds us in his famous essay On linguistic aspects of translation (1959, 237): The Russian painter Repin was baffled as to why Sin had been depicted as a woman by German artists; he did not realize that “sin” is feminine in German (die Sünde), but masculine in Russian (грex). Likewise, a Russian child, while reading a translation of German tales, was astounded to find that Death, obviously a woman (Russian смертъ, fem.) was pictured as an old man (German der Tod, masc.). My sister Life, the title of a book of poems by Boris Pasternak, is quite natural in Russian, where “life” is feminine (жизнъ), but was enough to reduce to despair the Czech poet Josef Hora in his attempt to translate these poems, since in Czech this noun is masculine (život). The grammatical gender is a meaning bearer and plays an important role in the construction of male power, especially in Romance languages. An example is the inclusive use of the masculine gender in Italian for the agreement of adjectives and past participle forms if the reference is to several masculine and feminine nouns such as in I ragazzi e le ragazze sono veloci (transl. Boys and girls are fast (+ masculine marker)). The same applies to French and Spanish. The issues which arise from the interrelationship of language, gender, culture and translation have been extensively studied by Sherry Simon (1996) and Luise von Flotow (1997) who contributed significantly to focusing the discussion concerning gender not only on linguistic aspects, but also on cultural and ideological ones. In the name of the Derridean “différance,” feminist translators subvert the concept of the original text and work on meaning by proposing experimental texts which present critical discussions of a text’s linguistic aspects and by paying special attention to textual and linguistic aspects which let the feminine emerge. For instance, in the translation of L’Interloquée (1988) by Michèle Causse, Susanne De Lotbinière-Harwood (1991) uses the ‘e’ in bold to mark the feminine gender in English as in “no one ignores that everything is language,” the translation of “nulle ne l’ignore, tout est langage.” It would take too long here to include the rich debate on this subject, but I would like to underline how these reflections have helped to highlight the way gender issues affect the different levels of the construction of a text and therefore require particular attention from the translator. Gender issues not only concern textual cohesion but also coherence. The logicalsemantic texture of a text requires encyclopaedic knowledge from the receiver which is shared with other speakers to elaborate and therefore understand the text. If we consider, for example, the aspects of knowledge on this level, especially typical knowledge, that is, the specific knowledge or judgments about a given situation elaborated and actualized in the textual world, particular attention must be paid to social gender, that is to say, the gender associated with particular nouns because of social stereotypes as with the English noun doctor, generally associated with a male, or nurse referring to a female rather than to a male. 458

Gender issues in machine translation

The translator must pay particular attention to the correct identification of the natural gender of the person referred to by the noun since it may not correspond to stereotypical ideas in a given cultural context. This topic deserves more articulated discussion but it is only mentioned here to underline how the issue of gender in translation is not negligible or of secondary importance, but is a complex topic that deserves careful consideration, whether the translator is a professional or an automatic system. In this chapter we will cover one of the most common problems in MT: after briefly outlining the different approaches to MT, we address historical perspectives and recent developments concerning gender issues in MT and we end with a brief discussion of outstanding issues in this field.

Definitions We define Machine Translation as a computer program that is able to translate from a source language to a target language automatically, i.e. without any human intervention in the translation process performed by the machine.

Approaches to Machine Translation Rule-based Machine Translation (RBMT) historically represents the first approach to MT and in 1954 the first prototype was built by IBM in cooperation with Georgetown University. RBMT systems are based on linguistic resources, namely (1) bilingual dictionaries providing the morpho-syntactic and semantic information, and (2) a set of morpho-syntactic and sometimes also semantic rules for both the source and target languages. The first-generation RBMT was based on a direct translation approach, where bilingual dictionaries were used to provide a word-for-word translation, and on a set of rules that reordered the words according to the target language. Later, transfer systems became the most widespread paradigm in RBMT, and there are some systems that still use it, such as Apertium.1 It is based on a three-stage architecture, namely analysis of the source language, transfer, and finally generation of the target language: in the analysis phase the source text is parsed and transformed into an intermediate source-language abstract representation which during the transfer phase is transformed into the corresponding representation in the target language, used in the last stage to generate the target text. A third type of RBMT is based on an interlingua approach, i.e. an abstract representation used to encode deep structures and knowledge common to all languages, which can be used to translate from any source language to any target language without recurring to a language-pair specific representation (transfer). These three approaches are illustrated in the Vauquois triangle (see Figure 34.1). In the 1980s the RBMT approach was progressively replaced by statistical approaches, based on the distribution probability p(e| f ) whereby e in the target language is the translation that is statistically more frequent for a string f in the source language (Koehn 2009). This typology evolved from a word-based approach to a phrase-based one and relies on the availability of large parallel and monolingual corpora that are produced by human translators. Corpora are collections of monolingual or bilingual electronic texts used as a valuable source for this MT approach. Parallel corpora or bi-texts are sets of pairs of texts composed of sentences in the source language aligned with the corresponding sentences in the target language and are used as translation models, i.e. to compute the most frequent translation for a word or a phrase. Monolingual corpora are sets of texts in one language and represent the language model used to measure 459

Johanna Monti interlingua

aly sis

ion

an

rat ne ge

transfer

direct translation

source text

target text

Figure 34.1 Vauquois triangle (Vauquois 1968)2

the probability that a given word or phrase, the word order, and the grammatical constructs will correspond to real use in the target language. A new model based on neural networks has recently been developed (Klein et al. 2017) and is rapidly becoming the dominant approach: the underlying principle is that the translation process consists of finding sentence y in the target language that maximizes the conditional probability of y given a sentence x in the source language, namely arg maxy p (y | x). This approach also uses parallel corpora as a translation model to train the system: once the neural network has learnt the translation model from the parallel reference corpus and a sentence x has been received in the source language, a translation can be generated by selecting the sentence y in the target language which maximizes the conditional probability.

Historical perspectives and recent developments Although translation problems connected with gender have been widely discussed in feminist approaches to translation (Godard 1990; Bassnett and Lefevere 1990; Flotow and Farahzad 2017, 2010, among others) from different perspectives and in a comprehensive way, in MT they have been studied mainly with reference to grammatical and pronominal gender in the following research areas: •

•

•

460

Anaphora resolution whereby NLP systems and also MT try to handle the complex linguistic phenomenon of pointing back to a previously mentioned item in the text (Mitkov 1999; Hardmeier 2012, and more recently, Luong and Popescu-Belis 2016; Voita et al. 2018) Named entities recognition, i.e. the location, identification, and classification of names of persons, organizations, locations, expressions of times, etc. Research in this field highlights how MT systems in general are not able to correctly recognize named entities and how the incorrect recognition of proforms such as personal pronouns, possessive adjectives, and pronouns may lead to distortions of the meaning of the source text (Babych and Hartley 2003). Agreement problems mainly concerning adjective-noun and verb-noun agreements. Incorrect agreements are also a source of frequent mistranslations in MT and arise when translating between morphologically rich languages, such as Italian or German, and morphologically poor ones, such as English.

Gender issues in machine translation

Natural or social gender issues, on the other hand, have not been sufficiently addressed even though they present considerable obstacles to any MT approach adopted, from RBMT systems to the most recent neural approaches. Even the most comprehensive collection of studies on MT, i.e. John Hutchins’s website (www.hutchinsweb.me.uk/) does not record a specific entry for natural and social gender issues. There is no holistic approach to gender biases in MT which takes into account the linguistic, social and cultural aspects linked to this topic. The reason for underestimating this problem lies in the fact that in the current dominant paradigms in MT, namely phrase-based MT and neural MT, the results for specific linguistic problems cannot be specifically addressed and improved since translations are obtained by means of statistical computations which calculate the most probable translations for a word or a phrase in parallel corpora. Therefore, the outputs obtained using these MT systems offer the most frequent translation solutions for a given linguistic phenomenon, identified and chosen on a probabilistic basis from the corpora they are based on: if the corpora selected to train the system statistically reflect a prevalence of choices that favour the use of the masculine gender for some concepts or linguistic constructs and the feminine gender in other cases, the system inherits these with no or little possibility of regulatory intervention on the results. For these types of system, it is difficult to intervene and modify specific translation and linguistic problems. Recent contributions are mainly devoted to comparative studies which take into account different commercial systems, different MT approaches and different language pairs. Anke Frank et al. present a first study concerning gender issues in MT by comparing different commercial MT systems for the English-German language pair (2004). They discuss specific linguistic phenomena such as anaphoric references and the treatment of noun phrases as well as aspects concerning productivity, lexicalization, scope and coverage of dictionaries, morphological rules, grammar and transfer. Different contexts are provided where there is the need to transform a gender-neutral English word, such as the word manager, to a gender-marked German word such as Managerin. Interesting examples are provided for different constructions such as adpositions, noun and object predicates. Londa Schiebinger (2014), who supervises the Gendered Innovations Project at Stanford University, carried out a study on the performance of Google Translate. In her contribution to gender issues in MT entitled Machine Translation: Analyzing Gender (https://genderedinnovations. stanford.edu/case-studies/nlp.html), she demonstrates that the algorithms used by the wellknown MT system lead to a sexist language. She has highlighted two different trends: 1

2

The use of masculine nouns to translate gender-neutral English words in which it is necessary to specify gender when translating to strongly gender-inflected languages such as, for instance, the English word defendant translated as ein Angeklagter, masculine in German. The use of feminine nouns to translate English words referring to traditional women’s jobs, such as the word nurse in languages where this type of specification is required, thus making them correspond to gender stereotypes (as an example nurse translated as eine Krankenschwester in German).

A comparative study which took into account not only Google Translate but also other commercial systems such as Bing by Microsoft and Systran confirmed these trends on the basis of the translation into English of an article published in El País on Schiebinger’s research. In the article, Schiebinger not only raises the need for a more correct linguistic use of gender in MT but through her research project, she also seeks to foster a search for possible solutions, highlighting the need for MT research to take into account a more inclusive use of language if it wants to avoid discrimination and inequality. 461

Johanna Monti

After all, MT does not perform any differently than any other Artificial Intelligence (AI) application that learns from the training data, as was recently pointed out by Aylin Caliskan et al. (2017). The study analyzes how cultural stereotypes are present in all AI applications, and consequently also in MT, reproducing in this way the prejudices, hostilities and nastiness that sometimes characterize human discourse. James Zou and Londa Schiebinger also highlight the role of skewed training data in AI but at the same time state that the source of bias can be traced to the algorithms themselves (2018, 325): A typical machine-learning program will try to maximize overall prediction accuracy for the training data. If a specific group of individuals appears more frequently than others in the training data, the program will optimize for those individuals because this boosts overall accuracy. Computer scientists evaluate algorithms on ‘test’ data sets, but usually these are random sub-samples of the original training set and so are likely to contain the same biases. A promising solution proposed in the paper is the use of de-biasing approaches, but according to the authors, these need to be refined and evaluated in the real world. Lastly, researchers in the MT field evaluate their systems mainly on the basis of quantitative metrics such as BLEU, METEOR and the like which can hardly detect problems related to the correct transposition of gender or, in general, the correct translation of meaning. They are obtained by comparing translations done automatically for a given body of texts with those done by humans. All these metrics are based on the similarity principle, i.e. how much MT output is similar to a corpus of human translations used as reference: the less automatic translations record deviations in relation to the reference corpus, the higher their score. One of the most used automatic metrics is BLEU which is based on the idea that “the closer a machine translation is to a professional human translation, the better it is” (Papineni et al. 2002, 311). Other measurements of this type include NIST, WDR, and METEOR. Although they are widely used in the MT community, they present several shortcomings since they produce results which are not always relatable to each other or to human judgment as has emerged from a number of evaluation campaigns in which various automatic metrics were compared with each other and also with human judgments (Federmann et al. 2012; Labaka et al. 2014). The shortcomings of these quantitative metrics in evaluating systems performance with reference to specific linguistic problems (Wang and Merlo 2016) in some way hinders the desirable development of research areas that address specific translation problems, including gender biases. Current trends in MT research as we will discuss in the next section try to overcome some of these problems.

Current contributions and research The evaluation of different approaches to gender in translation is one of the current contributions to research in this field. Some studies have been devoted to the evaluation of different MT systems such as Johanna Monti (2017) who provides a contrastive analysis for the English-Italian and German-Italian language pairs in three different MT systems: Google Translate and Microsoft Translator, which adopt a neural approach, Lucy KWIK Translator, a RBMT system, and finally SYSTRANet which tries to combine a linguistic and a statistical approach. The study takes into account several types of gender translation problems such as (1) subject-predicate adjective|noun agreement, (2) subject|object agreement – subject|object complement, (3) Noun – apposition agreement, (4) Noun – anaphora|cataphora agreement, (5) Noun – past

462

Gender issues in machine translation

participle agreement, (6) social gender. It highlights how mistranslations concerning gender are present in all approaches. A similar study was conducted by Abu-Ayyash (2017) who examines the translation of gender-based structures in English and Arabic by three MT systems: Systran’s Pure Neural Machine Translation (PNMT), Google translate (GT) and Microsoft Bing (MB). Unfortunately, so far, the evaluation mainly concerns language pairs that include the English language and no comprehensive studies have been carried out for wider sets of language pairs. A few papers have been devoted to the study of contextual aspects which might help to debias MT outputs, such as Ronan Le Nagard and Philip Koehn (2010) and Guillou and Hardmeier (2016), which address the co-reference and translation of pronouns, particularly between languages that do not have the same system of grammatical gender. Further studies in this area have been devoted to the integration of contextual information to produce gender-aware unbiased translation by introducing new approaches which consist in modelling the speaker/listener gender information (Elaraby et al. 2018) for Spoken Language Translation. This information enables, for instance, “I am happy” to be translated into French “Je suis heureuse” if the speaker is female or “Je suis heureux” if the speaker is male. Another interesting approach consists in handling gender-related biases in Statistical MT (SMT) systems as a domain-adaptation task as suggested by Mirkin et al. (2015) where female and male genders are treated as two different domains by using (1) gender-specific phrase-tables and language models, and (2) a gender-specific tuning set. Pronominal translation is probably one of the most studied areas in regard to gender shortcomings in MT and a shared task has been organized in recent years in order to foster research on this specific topic (Guillou et al. 2016). The task consists of a cross-lingual pronoun prediction task in which participating classification systems aim to correctly predict target pronoun forms in the target sentence, based on contextual information in the source and target sentences. Prates et al. (2018) used a list of job positions from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) to build sentences such as “He/She is an Engineer” in 12 different gender-neutral languages such as Hungarian, Chinese, Yoruba, and several others. The sentences were translated into English using Google Translate. On the basis of this experiment, they assessed a strong tendency by the MT system to adopt male defaults, in particular for the STEM fields (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics). Vanmassenhove et al. (2018) describe the attempt of building a speaker-informed NMT system by incorporating gender information for multiple language pairs and show that providing tags that indicate the gender of the speaker can lead to significant improvements over state-ofthe-art systems, especially for languages that express grammatical gender agreement. When looking for solutions for de-biasing data, MT research has recently taken advantage of research carried out in other NLP areas such as word embeddings, a language modelling technique related to semantic similarities between words on the basis of their distributional properties in large amounts of data. For instance, Tolga Bolukbasi et al. recognize the need to address gender stereotypes and try to remove this linguistic bias without altering the meaning of words (2016). The method consists of two different stages: the first one aims to identify gender stereotypical analogies learned by the algorithm from the data such as “man is to computer programmer as woman is to homemaker,” and then neutralizes and equalizes or softens the relationship between those words. Following Bolukbasi (2016) and Jieyu Zhao (2018), who try to generate gender neutral word embeddings, Joel Font and Marta Costa-jussà (2019) define a framework to experiment, detect and evaluate gender bias in neural MT for specific occupations (in the same way as Prates et al. 2018) for the English-Spanish language pair and propose to use a de-biased word embeddings technique to reduce the detected bias.

463

Johanna Monti

Figure 34.2 Example of translation of the single gender-neutral word ‘nurse’ from English into Italian

Finally, at this time of writing, the discussion about gender bias in MT on the media and social networks has been fuelled by Google’s announcement3 that it has been attempting to address gender bias in translations: they provide the masculine and feminine form of single gender-neutral words from English into four different languages (French, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish), and when translating phrases and sentences from Turkish into English. For the first option they updated their dictionaries with gender attributes, such as for the English word nurse (see Figure 34.2), translated into Italian with infermiera (feminine) and infermiere (masculine). For the second option, instead, the solution required significant changes to their translation framework with the addition of a state-of-the-art text classification algorithm to build a system that is able to detect when a given Turkish query is gender-neutral and to offer translations for both the masculine and the feminine forms when translating phrases or sentences: for example, for the sentence “o bir doktor” in Turkish, where the pronoun o is gender-neutral, now the user gets both “she is a doctor” and “he is a doctor” as gender-specific translations. Even if it is only a very first step towards more gender-balanced MT approaches, it represents a positive approach to this topic which we hope will be taken by other MT companies and researchers in the field.

Outstanding issues and topics In recent years, thanks to the emergence of the new paradigm of neural MT and the increasing data available for linguistic processing such as monolingual, comparable and parallel corpora, dramatic improvements have been made in the quality of MT. However, there are still a number of outstanding issues that need further attention and consequently represent major challenges for the mitigation of gender biases in MT. These include the need for the MT research community to pay more attention to ethical questions and the social impact of the technology, and to improve the MT evaluation process and metrics.

464

Gender issues in machine translation

Ethics and social impact With regard to ethical aspects, much of the discussion in data sciences so far has centred on privacy concerns (Tse et al. 2015; Kamocki and O’Regan 2016 specifically for MT), but with the emergence and diffusion of AI and NLP applications, attention should also be paid to their social impact, as highlighted by Dirk Hovy and Shannon Spruit (2016) who introduce an interesting set of terminology to classify different types of bias, namely exclusion, overgeneralization, bias confirmation, topic overexposure, and dual use. AI and NLP systems make inferences on the basis of their training corpus and therefore model their output assuming that all language instances are identical to what they find in the corpus. A lack of attention to this fundamental aspect may lead to serious consequences such as exclusion or demographic misrepresentation. The exclusion and misrepresentation of gender may lead in turn to an overexposure of certain demographic groups such as men compared to women. The social and ethical impact of an unbalanced representation of gender in MT output cannot be overlooked and researchers in the field should pay more attention to this aspect since the tools they create and the linguistic resources they use may perpetuate biases and even amplify them by producing more and more biased output. Possible countermeasures include the development of benchmark datasets specifically devoted to gender bias, i.e. corpora annotated with gender information (natural, social and grammatical gender) to be used for developing, evaluating and comparing different approaches. The adoption of more fine-grained evaluation metrics would also help improve the way that gender biases are addressed: indeed, current metrics, even if based on qualitative approaches such as the Multidimensional Quality Metrics (MQM), do not specifically take into account this issue, with the exception of agreement mistakes detected in the target text. In addition to different types of agreement mistakes related to gender identification, the desirable metrics should also include mistakes related to natural gender identification as well as mistakes related to social gender.

Evaluation As mentioned in the previous paragraph, improvements to gender bias in the MT field can be obtained by developing more fine-grained evaluation metrics which help focus on specific critical areas and benchmark datasets specifically devoted to this issue. To the best of our knowledge, there are no specific evaluation campaigns devoted to this type of bias, probably because it is not clear how to address this issue in a more comprehensive way. Nevertheless, it is important to identify the different types of gender bias in MT according to different approaches and language pairs and measure their impact on MT systems. There are no simple solutions, but the availability of benchmark corpora, i.e. corpora annotated with gender information to be used as reference corpus in evaluating MT systems, could be a first step towards a more careful consideration of the issue. Although a number of evaluation campaigns, usually competitions devoted to evaluating new methods of addressing specific critical issues in MT, have taken place concerning some of the areas related to gender mentioned in Section 3 such as the 2016 WMT Shared Task on Cross-lingual Pronoun Prediction (Guillou et al. 2016) for the English–French and English–German language pairs, in both translation directions, there is no comprehensive evaluation task that addresses the problem in all its complexity. Such a task and the availability of corpora annotated with genderspecific phenomena could help evaluate the fairness of MT systems with regard to this issue.

465

Johanna Monti

Conclusion and future directions Gender issues represent an important and still open problem in the field of Machine Translation. Regardless of the approach that is adopted, MT systems still suffer from biases in the areas of grammatical and social gender. Current approaches to MT need to address this problem not only in order to improve the output of the systems, but also because of their social impact. Researchers who aim to produce high quality MT systems will have to pay more attention to problems regarding gender translation. More focused and intensive research on this topic and the development of specific benchmark data sets may lead to substantial advances over the next few years.

Further reading and relevant resources In addition to the sources cited in the text of the chapter, we would recommend as a primer looking at the Gendered Innovations project website (http://genderedinnovations.stanford.edu/ case-studies/nlp.html) which addresses the problem of gender biases in Machine Translation and also gives a number of possible solutions such as detecting the gender of entities to improve translation algorithms and integrating gender analysis into the engineering curriculum. For an accessible and concise overview of MT which does not require prerequisites in computer science refer to Thierry Poibeau (2017) Machine translation. MIT Press. Further useful sources on specific gender translation problems are the Cross-lingual Pronoun Prediction shared task www.statmt.org/wmt16/pronoun-task.html) and the DiscoMT Shared Task on Cross-lingual Pronoun Prediction (https://aclweb.org/portal/content/discomt-2017shared-task-cross-lingual-pronoun-prediction) where participants are asked to predict a targetlanguage pronoun given a source-language pronoun in the context of a sentence for a few language pairs. Test data and gold test sets for these tasks are also available.

Related topics Machine translation (MT), computer-aided machine translation (CAT), artificial intelligence (AI), translation studies, feminist approach to translation studies

Notes 1 www.apertium.org/index.eng.html?dir=eng=spa#translation 2 Figure licensed under CC BY-SA3.0 via Wikimedia Commons 3 www.blog.google/products/translate/reducing-gender-bias-google-translate/

References Abu-Ayyash, Emad A. 2017. Errors and Non-Errors in English-Arabic Machine Translation of GenderBound Constructs in Technical Texts. Procedia Computer Science, 117, 73–80. Available at: www.science direct.com/science/article/pii/S187705091732152X [Accessed 14 Feb. 2019]. Babych, Bogdan and Anthony Hartley. 2003. Improving Machine Translation Quality with Automatic Named Entity Recognition, in Proceedings of the 7th International EAMT Workshop on MT and Other Language Technology Tools, Improving MT Through Other Language Technology Tools: Resources and Tools for Building MT. Stroudsburg: Association for Computational Linguistics, 1–8. Bassnett, Susan and André Lefevere, eds. 1990. Translation, History and Culture. London and New York: Routledge. Bolukbasi, Tolga, Kai-Wei Chang, James Zou, Venkatesh Saligrama, and Adam Kalai. 2016. Man is to Computer Programmer as Woman is to Homemaker? Debiasing word Embeddings, in Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, 4349–4357. Available at: http://arxiv.org/abs/1607.06520 [Accessed 14 Feb. 2019]. 466

Gender issues in machine translation

Caliskan, Aylin, Joanna J. Bryson, and Arvind Narayanan. 2017. Semantics Derived Automatically from Language Corpora Contain Human-Like Biases. Science, 356(6334), 183–186. Available at: http://opus. bath.ac.uk/55288/ [Accessed 14 Feb. 2019]. Causse, Michèle. 1988. L’Interloquée. Trivia: Voices of Feminism, 4, 89. Corbett, Greville G. 1991. Gender. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. De Lotbinière-Harwood, Susanne. 1991. Re-belle et infidèle. La traduction comme pratique de réécriture au féminin/The Body Bilingual: Translation as a Rewriting in the Feminine. Montreal and Toronto: Les Éditions du remue-ménage and Women’s Press. Elaraby, Mostafa, Ahmed Y. Tawfik, Mahmoud Khaled, Hany Hassan, and Ali Osama. 2018. Gender Aware Spoken Language Translation Applied to English-Arabic, in Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Natural Language and Speech Processing (ICNLSP), IEEE, 1–6. Available at: https://arxiv.org/ pdf/1802.09287.pdf [Accessed: 14 Feb. 2019]. Federmann, Christian, Tsuyoshi Okita, Maite Melero, Marta Costa-Jussà, Toni Badia, Josef Van Genabith. 2012. Results from the ML4HMT-12 Shared Task on Applying Machine Learning Techniques to Optimise the Division of Labour in Hybrid Machine Translation, in Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Applying Machine Learning Techniques to Optimise the Division of Labour in Hybrid MT, The COLING 2012 Organizing Committee, 85–90. Flotow, Luise von. 1997. Translation and Gender: Translating in the ‘Era of Feminism’. Manchester: St. Jerome Publishing and Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press. Flotow, Luise von. 2010. Gender in Translation, in Yves Gambier, ed., Handbook of Translation Studies. Amsterdam: Benjamins, 129–133. Flotow, Luise von and Farzaneh Farahzad, eds. 2017. Translating Women, Different Voices and New Horizons. London: Routledge Publishers. Font, Joel Escude and Marta R. Costa-jussà. 2019. Equalizing Gender Biases in Neural Machine Translation with Word Embeddings Techniques. arXiv preprint arXiv. Available at: https://arxiv.org/abs/ 1901.03116. Frank, Anke, Christiane Hoffmann, and Maria Strobel. 2004. Gender Issues in Machine Translation. Heidelberg: Lingenio Gmbh. Godard, Barbara. 1990. Theorizing Feminist Discourse/Translation, in Susan Bassnett and André Lefevere, eds., Translation, History and Culture. New York: Routledge, 87–96. Guillou, Liane, and Christian Hardmeier. 2016. Protest: A test suite for evaluating pronouns in machine translation, in Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC’16), European Language Resources Association (ELRA), 636–643. Guillou, Liane, Christian Hardmeier, Preslav Nakov, Sara Stymne, Jörg Tiedemann, Yannick Versley, and Andrei Popescu-Belis. 2016. Findings of the 2016 WMT Shared Task on Cross-Lingual Pronoun Prediction, in Proceedings of the First Conference on Machine Translation: Volume 2, Shared Task Papers, Association for Computational Linguistics, 525–542. Hardmeier, Christian. 2012. Discourse in Statistical Machine Translation, Discours. Revue de linguistique, psycholinguistique et informatique. A Journal of Linguistics, Psycholinguistics and Computational Linguistics, (11). Presses universitaires de Caen, [online], URL: http://journals.openedition.org/discours/8726 Hovy, Dirk and Shannon Spruit. 2016. The Social Impact of Natural Language Processing, in The 54th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Volume 2, Short Papers, Association for Computational Linguistics, 591–598. Jakobson, Roman. 1959. On Linguistic Aspects of Translation, in Reuben A. Brower, ed., On Translation. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 232–239. Kamocki, Pawel and Jim O’Regan. 2016. Privacy Issues in Online Machine Translation Services–European Perspective, in Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2016). Portorož, Slovenia: European Language Resources Association (ELRA), 4458–4462. Available at: http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2016/index.html [Accessed 14 Feb. 2019] Klein, Guillaume, Yoon Kim, Yuntian Deng, Jean Senellart, and Alexander Rush. 2017. OpenNMT: Open-Source Toolkit for Neural Machine Translation. arXiv preprint arXiv. Available at: https://arxiv. org/abs/1701.02810. Koehn, Philipp. 2009. Statistical Machine Translation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Labaka, Gorga, Cristina España-Bonet, Lluis Màrquez, and Kepa Sarasola. 2014. A Hybrid Machine Translation Architecture Guided by Syntax. Machine Translation, 28(2), 91–125. Le Nagard Ronan and Philip Koehn. 2010. Aiding Pronoun Translation with Co-reference Resolution, in Proceedings of the Joint Fifth Workshop on Statistical Machine Translation and Metrics MATR. Stroudsburg, 467

Johanna Monti

PA: Association for Computational Linguistics, 252–261. USA Available at: https://www.aclweb.org/ anthology/W10-1737 [Accessed 14 Feb. 2019]. Luong, Ngoc Quang and Andrei Popescu-Belis. 2016. Improving Pronoun Translation by Modeling Coreference Uncertainty, in First Conference on Machine Translation: Volume 1, Research Papers, Association for Computational Linguistics, 12–20. Mirkin, Shachar, Scott Nowson, Caroline Brun, and Julien Perez. 2015. Motivating Personality-Aware Machine Translation, in Proceedings of the 2015 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, Association for Computational Linguistics, 1102–1108. Mitkov, Ruslan. 1999. Introduction: Special Issue on Anaphora Resolution in Machine Translation and Multilingual NLP. Machine Translation, 14(3–4), 159–161. Available at: www.jstor.org/stable/40006919 [Accessed 14 Feb. 2019]. Monti, Johanna. 2017. Questioni di genere in traduzione automatica, in Anna De Meo, Lucia di Pace, Alberto Manco, Johanna Monti, and Rossella Pannain, eds., Al femminile. Scritti linguistici in onore di Cristina Vallini–Quaderni della Rassegna. Firenze: Franco Cesati Editore, 139, 411–431. Papineni, Kishore, Salim Roukos, Todd Ward, and Wei-Jing Zhu. 2002. BLEU: A Method for Automatic Evaluation of Machine Translation, in Proceedings of the 40th Annual Meeting on the Association for Computational Linguistics, Association for Computational Linguistics. Association for Computational Linguistics, 311–318. Poibeau, Thierry. 2017. Machine Translation. Boston: MIT Press. Prates, Marcela O. R., Pedro H. C. Avelar, and Luis Lamb. 2018. Assessing Gender Bias in Machine Translation–A Case Study with Google Translate. arXiv preprint arXiv. Available at: https://arxiv.org/ abs/1809.02208. Schiebinger, Londa. 2014. Gendered Innovations: Harnessing the Creative Power of Sex and Gender Analysis to Discover New Ideas and Develop New Technologies. Triple Helix: A Journal of UniversityIndustry-Government Innovation and Entrepreneurship, 1(9), 1–17. Simon, Sherry. 1996. Gender in Translation: Cultural Identity and Politics of Transmission. London: Routledge. Tse, Jonathan, Dawn E. Schrader, Dipayan Ghosh, Tony Liao, and David Lundie. 2015. A Bibliometric Analysis of Privacy and Ethics in IEEE Security and Privacy. Ethics and Information Technology, 17(2), 153–163. Vanmassenhove, Eva, Christian Hardmeier, and Andy Way. 2018. Getting Gender Right in Neural Machine Translation, in The 2018 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, Association for Computational Linguistics, 3003–3008. Vauquois, Bernard. 1968. A Survey of Formal Grammars and Algorithms for Recognition and Transformation in Mechanical Translation. Ifip Congress, 68(2), 1114–1122. Voita, Elena, Pavel Serdyukov, Rico Sennrich, and Ivan Titov. 2018. Context-Aware Neural Machine Translation Learns Anaphora Resolution. arXiv preprint arXiv. Available at: https://arxiv.org/abs/1805.10163. Wang, Haozhou and Paola Merlo. 2016. Modifications of Machine Translation Evaluation Metrics by Using Word Embeddings, in Proceedings of the Sixth Workshop on Hybrid Approaches to Translation (HyTra6), The COLING 2016 Organizing Committee, 33–41. Zhao, Jieyu, Yichao Zhou, Zeyu Li, Wei Wang, and Kai-Wei Chang. 2018. Learning gender-neutral Word Embeddings. arXiv preprint arXiv. Available at: https://arxiv.org/abs/1809.01496. Zou, James and Londa Schiebinger. 2018. AI Can Be Sexist and Racist – it’s Time to Make it fair. Nature, 559, 324–326. Available at: www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-05707-8 [Accessed 22 Feb. 2019].

468

Part V

Discourses in translation

35 Translating the Bible into English How translations transformed gendered meanings and relations Mathilde Michaud

Introduction On the 28th of March 2001, the Vatican published the Liturgiam authenticam, an “instruction by the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments in virtue of the mandate of the Supreme Pontiff.” In this publication, the Vatican argued for the maintenance of what it sees as the traditional gender forms found in the ancient texts. It stated that traditional terms such as the Hebrew term adam or the Greek anthropos should be directly translated into the English equivalent ‘man.’ The Vatican further suggested that not to do so “would compromise a clear notion of man as a unitary, inclusive and corporate yet truly personal figure”: The traditional grammatical gender of the persons of the Trinity should be maintained. Expressions such as Filius hominis (Son of Man) and Patres (fathers) are to be translated with exactitude wherever found in biblical or liturgical texts. The feminine pronoun must be retained in referring to the Church. Kinship terms and the grammatical gender of angels, demons and pagan deities should be translated, and their gender retained, in light of the usage of the original text and of the traditional usage of the modern language in question. (Liturgiam authenticam 2001) Luise von Flotow argued in 2007 that these rules on translation reflect the masculinist language of the Church  –  overtly using language to maintain the dominant status of men within the discourse of Christianity. Indeed, the broader message of the publication was to reaffirm the faultlessness of the biblical texts in which nothing could allow sexist or racial discrimination, the entire responsibility for such interpretation depending on catechists and homilists (Flotow 2007, 99). This appears to have been a direct reaction to the critical attacks made by feminist scholars of the Bible over the past 40 years. Since the 1970s, feminist and other scholars have been reinterpreting the scriptures, commenting on early translations, and suggesting new ways of including women in biblical narratives, namely through gender neutral or inclusive language in translations. This late 20th-century work is a response to centuries of patriarchal translations deemed to have both altered the text and reinforced the male bias of the Bible. 471

Mathilde Michaud

In this chapter, I will investigate the ways in which patriarchal biases have been consolidated if not fully introduced by translators throughout the history of the Bible’s transmission. This is an area of both biblical and translation scholarship on which research has only just begun. Most feminist scholars have indeed focused on contemporary issues, rehabilitating women within biblical discourse so as to make them feel included. When historical translations have been discussed, it has mainly been through case studies used as comparisons with new feminist translations or as additional support for their interpretations.1 There is, however, much to say and to research on the impact of Bible translations on the construction of popular gender script  –  as introduced by Joan W. Scott (1986), the social expectations imposed on an individual based on their perceived sex  –  and this is what we shall attend to here. What role did translators play in transforming or reinforcing gendered meanings and relations in the Bible? What impacts did they have on wider cultural constructs regarding femininity and masculinity? Why were such translations undertaken and for whom? Using examples taken from the Book of Genesis, I will, in the first instance, situate the translations that have had wide and long felt repercussions on the interpretation of discourses of sexuality, and map out their impact on the diffusion of Christian ideology. In the second instance, I will discuss methods deployed by historians and Bible scholars to analyze and understand the variations of meanings in translations. Finally, I shall investigate a few examples of such changes effected by translation and identify their implications for gender scripts. To do so, I will draw on short portions of analyses made by various Bible scholars. Indeed, research on the gendered impact of translations upon the creation of identities, especially with regard to biblical texts, is extremely fragmented. This chapter will thus attempt to string together the pieces of this complex puzzle we have recently started to uncover.

Historical perspective: Bible translations Christian translations of the Bible can be separated into three major waves: the patristic translations (3rd – 4th century AD), the reformation translations (15th – 16th century AD), and the missionary – or colonial – era of translation (18th century AD). However, the first known written translation predates the Christian era and was undertaken by Jewish scholars: The Septuagint. Although the conditions of production of this translation from Hebrew to Greek are still unknown, it is believed to be the work of 72 scholars  –  from which its name is derived  –  around Alexandria in the 3rd or 2nd century BCE (Zogbo 2011, 21). Initially meant as a Jewish text, the Septuagint had an immense impact on the Christian Scriptures. Indeed, translated into Greek, the language spoken by the early Christians who authored the New Testament (NT), it is believed to have been the principal version of the texts known to them and it is the source of most Old Testament (OT) citations in the NT (Moore 2014, 79). The NT as we know it today was assembled in 367 AD. Scholars have counted up to 17 major translation projects undertaken in the decades that followed and directed towards three different continents. This is what is known as the patristic era of translation. The most important piece of work produced in this era is Jerome’s Latin translation completed at the request of the Pope Damascus I in 406 AD: The Vulgate (Zogbo 2011, 21–22). After this date, translation activities in the West slowed for almost 1100 years (4th–16th centuries), and for centuries, the Latin Vulgate was the only version distributed by the Roman Catholic Church (Moore 2014, 79–80). This translation thus held both cultural and political power over the diffusion of spiritual norms. Rabbi Yehuda wrote in the 2nd century AD that “whoever translates a biblical verse literally is a fool, while one who adds [to it] is a reviler and a blasphemer” (De Troyer 1997, 328), and Jerome also acknowledged changing his style when working with the Scriptures, translating “sense for sense and not word for word.” According to De Troyer, “Jerome was influenced by 472

Translating the Bible into English

various theological considerations” and by adapting the metaphors to suit his language, he may also have adapted them to fit the ideology of the 4th century Christian Church (De Troyer 1997, 328–329). Sherry Simon asserts that the Bible was always recognized as carrying both “the dangers and the promise of interpretation” (Simon 1996, 5). As such, it provides a rich terrain in which to study the connection between gender and Christian ideology over time. Both the Reformation and the missionary movement of the late 18th and 19th centuries provided further incentive to engage with the biblical texts and produce a growing variety of translations. Each version had its own political and spiritual objectives. The reformers, as expressed by Erasmus of Rotterdam, aimed to widen access to the Scriptures so that the farmer could “sing parts of them at his plough and the weaver at his shuttle, and the traveller might beguile with their narration the weariness of the way” (Erasmus, in Moore 2014, 81). Arthur Skevington Wood has argued that these translations, initiated with Luther’s German Bible (1521–1532), were “the single greatest factor in spreading the message of the reform,” thus greatly enhancing the reach of Christianity (Skevington Wood 1969, 95–96). For the Protestant missionary movement, translations started as a tool in taking the Gospel to ‘remote’ peoples and making it accessible in ‘unknown tongues’. Many Bible societies followed the example of the Baptist Missionary Society founded in 1792 by William Carey, which produced and disseminated multiple early colonial translations of the Bible.2 Rapidly, translation in itself came to be regarded as “part of mission activity” (Moore 2014, 84–86). Translations have now become the work of worldwide organizations such as the Summer Institute of Linguistics or the United Bible Society, enacting ‘quality control’ and creating official translations (Zogbo 2011, 22–23).

Critical issues and topics However diversified the translations have become, one aspect still proves difficult. One constant factor in the translations of the Bible is that the process has been controlled by men. For example, in his analysis of Bible translations in Poland, Aleksander Gomola reports that most translations were still done by members of the Catholic clergy, thus excluding women translators (Gomola 2016, 626). Similarly, of the 70 scholars involved in the 500th anniversary re-edition of the Luther Bible published in 2017, none were women. Nevertheless, for a little more than a century now, there has been a new group of contenders involved in the translation of the Bible: women theologians and feminists. However, as highlighted by the Liturgiam Authenticam they still have many detractors and the Roman Catholic institutions continue to give interpretation rights to catechists and ordained priests, once again pushing women out (Spender, in Stanton 1985, i–v). This exclusion of women from formal religious rites and discussions can partly be traced through choices made by translators and commentators. Scholars such as Letty Russel have argued that returning to the original texts and retracing these decisions can help rehabilitate women as legitimate participants in Christian practices (Russel 1974). A few methodological avenues have been suggested in order to retrieve translators’ re-signification of biblical texts. In the Introduction to the Gender & History Forum on ‘Translating Feminism,’ a working definition of translation was proposed: “Translation can be seen as a process of cultural transfer, carried out by socially situated agents, involving the transformation of a text from one language into another, and both embedded in, and contributing to, a broader process of re-signification and locally meaningful re-contextualisation” (Bracke et al. 2018, 218). This approach forces us to consider translators as ‘social actors’ with the ability to destabilise but also create new conventions of language and ideology. We can draw a close parallel between the translators and the grammarians identified by Dale Spender as agents in the consolidation of patriarchal language. In both cases, it is impossible to go back to the origins of linguistic norms 473

Mathilde Michaud

and practices and deconstruct them as such. However, it is possible to find sexist translations that introduce or reinforce gendered inequities and work backward to find “records which could pinpoint the introduction by males of specific sexist usages, structures and meanings” (Spender 1980, 144). To Spender, bible translations are records in which we can, for example, locate the ‘politics of naming’3 through which “the English patriarchs added their reinforcement to the negative names of women in the Bible” (Spender 1980, 170). One crucial question thus is: “how are social, sexual and historical differences expressed in language and how can these differences be transformed across languages?” (Simon 1996, 8–9). Following Mary Phil Korsak’s line of inquiry, I would like to investigate the extent to which male translators have reinforced the androcentric bias already present in the source texts and what impact it may have had on gender relations in Christian societies (Korsak 2002, 132).

Current contribution and research: translating genesis For the purpose of this chapter, I will draw examples of translation debates from the first three chapters of Genesis as discussed by feminist scholars of the Bible. For feminists, the Book of Genesis is particularly noteworthy, not only because it can be considered as offering an important image and example of how sexual difference is to be treated in Christianity, but also for being the mythical foundation of both Judaism and Christianity. This has allowed its analysis from various socio-religious perspectives and its transformation and adaptation to multiple sociocultural contexts (Shulman 1974; Russel 1974). Primeval history addresses questions about the origins of humanity: where do human beings come from? What determines human destiny? Why is there evil if God created a good world? For Helen Schüngel-Straumann this explains the prominent role the first chapters of Genesis have always played in biblical commentary, and thus, the importance these texts hold in feminist scholarship of the Bible (Schüngel-Straumann 2012, 2). Furthermore, this is where one of the biggest marks against women stems from: original sin. In addition to introducing sexual difference and gendered social roles, Genesis has marked women as flesh and temptation. For the Patristic Fathers, sexuality represented the gravest of dangers, and although modern Catholic theology has finally separated concupiscence from sex, the structure of ‘original sin’ remains unchallenged: as Eve sinned, sex and death entered the world, that is the dogma (Warner 2000, 50). Nonetheless, in feminist work, the analysis of Genesis ends in an almost unilateral conclusion: from the reading of the Hebrew text alone, one cannot conclude that women are inferior or evil. To Schüngel-Straumann, the fact that Genesis 3 is not mentioned anywhere else in the OT should make us reflect upon the identification of women with sin: this idea “did not originate in the Genesis texts at all” (2012, 3). It is rather the result of “tendentious interpretations” adopted and expanded by early Christians and further complicated by the juxtaposition of Eve and Mary in the 2nd century (3). Her claim is shared by many, pointing to early commentators and translators as the source of most of the gender inequality in Christianity (Warner 2000; Spender 1980; Blake, Stanton in Stanton 1985). Similar discussions have been raised in the Greek NT. Indeed, while the Hebrew ādām has been the source of debates in Genesis, so has the Greek Anthropos in the New Testament. A few additional cases will thus complement the critical analysis of the translation of primeval history. Genesis 2  nd Adam gave names to all cattle, and to the fowl of the air, and to every beast of the A field; but for Adam there was not found a help meet for him.

20

474

Translating the Bible into English

And the  Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon Adam, and he slept: and he took one of his ribs, and closed up the flesh instead thereof; 22 And the rib, which the Lord God had taken from man, made he a woman, and brought her unto the man. 23 And Adam said, This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh: she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man. Gen 2:20–13 King James Version (KJV), 1769 21

The creation of woman in the second chapter of the Book of Genesis presents in itself quite a translation conundrum: the term for man or humankind. ādām, which has been translated as a proper noun and the name of the first man in Hebrew in fact refers to the ‘earthling’ or ‘groundling,’ derived from the earth, the adāma (Korsak 1992, 196). Scholars such as SchüngelStraumann, going back to the Hebrew text, have thus insisted on the need to understand ādām as humankind, as the species, woman being constructed out of an androgynous (incomplete) species (Schüngel-Straumann 2012, 4). Additionally, there already exists a specific word for man as ‘male’ in Hebrew, ish, from which isha/woman is derived by sound (Gen: 2:23). The importance of this popular etymology of ‘woman’ (isha) is emphasised by Mary Phil Korsak. Throughout the biblical narrative, nouns are repeatedly justified by wordplay referring either to events, landmarks or character traits, and so, with each new geographical location, the relevant character was named accordingly to support the divine story (Korsak 1992, 196–197). For example, in the story of the Tower of Babel, meant to explain the presence of multiple languages in a world created by a single God, the choice of the name ‘Babel’ is not random: “Therefore is the name of it called Babel; because the Lord did there confound the language of all the earth” (Gen: 11:9). While the English version does reveal the etymological choices behind the name, Babel is in fact derived from the Hebrew verb ‘‫( ‘בָ ּלַל‬bālal), which means ‘to confuse’, a choice that reflects the impact of the introduction of multiple languages on human society (Mckenzie 1995, 73). The usual translation of Hawwāh, the name assigned to the first gendered human, a woman, as ˙ Eve/Eva instead of ‘Life’ (which is the translation suggested by Stanton based on the etymology provided in Gen 3:20, and relies on Julia Smith’s 1876 translation of Hawwāh as ‘Life’ (1876, 6)) is ˙ equally significant. This translation removes both the importance and the meaningfulness from the first woman, Hawwāh, “Mother of all that lives” (Gen 3:20) (Blake, in Stanton 1985, 27), and ˙ turns Hawwāh /Life into a mere first name. ˙ An additional issue arises with the translation of ādām. Indeed, we need to consider that it has not only been translated from Hebrew into English but also, and primarily, from Hebrew to Greek. Whereas we may agree ādām means ‘humankind’ this does not mean that ‘humankind’ was always constructed in a way to encompass both male and female. Already in the late OT period (approximately 500 BCE – 50 AD), commentators had begun to narrow interpretations of ādām to signify ‘male’. However, these re-conceptions played a particular role in the translation into Greek in which the popular Hellenistic view was that ‘human’ in its fullest sense really only meant man as male. Therefore, even if we take the first account of Genesis in which God is said to have made humankind in its own image (Gen 1:26–27), the term ‘image’, in its fullest, can only apply to ‘human’ (male) in its fullest, leaving women out of the script of mankind (Schüngel-Straumann 2012, 12). This interpretation doubtless had a huge impact on the NT considering the authors based themselves and their understanding of the OT on the Greek Septuagint. A debate parallel to that around ādām can be found in the Septuagint and the NT when working with anglicised translations of anthropos. Gomola, however, suggests that the exclusion of women found in English translations and the use of generic ‘man’ cannot be generalised 475

Mathilde Michaud

to all languages. Indeed, the case of anthropos and its translation in a gender-inclusive way did not raise any debates in Poland, since Polish  –  which, like French or German has grammatical genders  –  possesses an inclusive word to signify humankind: człowiek (Gomola 2016, 627). This reasserts the importance of studying socio-linguistic norms and contexts of production of both source and target languages to understand where new concepts may have been introduced (Gomola 2016, 622). In Genesis 2:21–22, anglicised translations tell us that the first woman was made out of Adam’s rib. However, as we have just argued, the assertion that she came out of the ‘male’ is undermined by the language which refers to the androgynous humankind species ādām. Furthermore, there are also debates about the use of the word ‘rib’. Indeed, tsela, used in the Hebrew Bible, is commonly translated as ‘side’ (hill-side), but, in Gen 2:21–22, tsela has traditionally been translated as ‘rib’. Although the majority of translations have opted for ‘rib’, the use of side is not unsupported as a substantial number of rabbinical commentaries refer to ‘Adam’s side’ instead of ‘rib’ (Korsak 1992, 196). Schüngel-Straumann argues the ‘rib’ translation was specifically introduced in Christian tradition to document woman’s second-class status of inferiority in the same way ezer was translated into ‘helper’ or ‘helpmate’ (Schüngel-Straumann 2012, 5). Letty M. Russell suggests that in English ‘helper’ implies “someone who is a servant or subordinate” (Russel 1974, 54). In Hebrew, however, and in the 20 times ezer appears in the OT, it never evokes subordination and, in 16 occurrences it refers to a superior form of help: God, “a very present help [ezrah] in trouble” (Ps 46:01). Again in Genesis, Israel is chosen by God to be “an instrument for making God’s love known to all nations.” Being an ezer should therefore be understood as the privilege of having been selected for service, as “an instrument of divine help or assistance to one in need” (Russel 1974, 54). Translating it as ‘help’ in the case of the creation of woman in Gen. 2:20 hence not only contradicts the systematic use of the word ezer in other sections of the OT, it also deliberately diminishes the status and role of women. In the face of these issues, Korsak suggests an alternative literal translation of Gen 2:20–23: The groundling called names for all the cattle for all the fowl of the skies, for all the beasts of the field But for the groundling it found no help as its counterpart

20

YHWH Elohim made a swoon fall upon the groundling it slept He took one of its sides and closed up the flesh in its place

21

YHWH Elohim built the side he had taken from the groundling into woman He brought her to the groundling

22

The groundling said This one this time is bone from my bone flesh from my flesh This one shall be called wo-man for from man she has been taken this one. Gen 2:20–23 (Korsak 1992, 7)

23

476

Translating the Bible into English

Whilst putting forward a word-for-word translation, Korsak’s contextualization of ‘help’ as a counterpart suggests a more equal relationship than was previously professed in more traditional English translations of the OT. The NT also has a loaded history when it comes to assigning the status of ‘helper’ to women in anglicised translations. The case that has attracted much interest from academics is that of Phoebe in Romans. Her figure has been disputed in regard to many aspects, one being her status within the early Christian Church. Indeed, in Rom 16:1, Paul mentions Phoebe as διὰκονος or diakonos, an ordained function in the Early Church also used for male counterparts and “trusted co-workers such as Timothy” (Punt 2014, 4; Gomola 2016, 633). Although historians of the Bible have concluded that such a position existed, it contrasts with the absence of ordained women in most denominations today. Gomola suggests that the way translators have chosen to translate Rom 16:1 may “indicate the position of their denomination on the issue.” For example, Polish Catholic translations have avoided direct translations of diakonos and favoured paraphrases, reflecting  –  to some extent  –  “the role still assigned in many aspects of the official teachings of the Catholic Church of Poland” (Gomola 2016, 633–634). In Romans, Phoebe was assigned a role closer to that of a patroness: προστάτις, which can also be translated as a protector, or female guardian. Just as for the Hebrew ezer, its translation to the English ‘helper’ greatly weakens the position represented. Indeed, according to Jeremy Punt, the English ‘helper’ completely ignores the patronage system of the 1st century AD in which “social relations were governed in a sophisticated reciprocal relationship where honour, prestige and power dynamics governed behaviours” (Punt 2014, 5). To not understand this is to overlook an important aspect of the social relations one has to translate. For example, Punt argues that one should not translate προστάτις as ‘helper’ to describe Phoebe when she is identified by Paul as both a minister and a patron  –  most probably his. Not only does it not fit the story established in the Pauline letters, but also strips women of their social status in the early church. Phoebe had a “coveted social status, a public role of patronage, protection and authority” that is not translated by the English ‘helper’ (Punt 2014, 6). Punt suggests that one of the surest ways to identify the translation choices and the societal norms from which they stem is to use cultural studies. Although it will neither guarantee a ‘proper translation’ nor break the sexist symbolism that has become embedded into the text, it provides an accountable point of departure for translating and understanding previous translations (Punt 2014, 9). Genesis 3 And the  Lord God said unto the serpent, Because thou hast done this, thou art cursed above all cattle, and above every beast of the field; upon thy belly shalt thou go, and dust shalt thou eat all the days of thy life: 15 And I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed; it shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel. 16 Unto the woman he said, I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children; and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee. 17 And unto Adam he said, Because thou hast hearkened unto the voice of thy wife, and hast eaten of the tree, of which I commanded thee, saying, Thou shalt not eat of it: cursed is the ground for thy sake; in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life; Gen 3:14–17 (KJV) 14

The third chapter of the Book of Genesis also holds its share of controversy and has been disputed by feminist translators and scholars. Gen 3:16 is at the centre of most debates as the verse defining 477

Mathilde Michaud

the role of women within society. In this case, however, word translations are not the only subjects contested; the formulation of the verse itself is key to the translation debate. Schüngel-Straumann suggests that this verse as well as Gen 3:14–17 should not be understood as a set of commands or instructions but rather as an “aetiological description of a status of being” (2012, 6). Indeed, it is argued that Gen 3 should not be read alone, as God’s will, but rather as a description of reality and its flaws compared to God’s desire for a good world as presented in Gen 2. As Hebrew fails to distinguish between present and future tense, Schüngel-Straumann thus proposes we should choose to translate Gen 3:14–17 in the present tense: “he rules over you” rather than “he shall rule over you” (Schüngel-Straumann 2012, 6), as factual description of the future. This would drastically change the tone of the verses and, had they been translated in this way in the first place, it might have made it more difficult to present women’s inferiority as god-made. The use of ‘sorrow’ or ‘pain’ in childbirth in the anglicised versions has also caused debates as it appears to significantly modify the script of femininity, rooting women’s experience within the painful punishment of bearing life through the sinful act of reproduction. Indeed, feminist scholars contend that ‘toil’ should have been used instead, just as it was to describe human labour and the ‘toil’ associated with it. Schüngel-Straumann argues that “to translate it with “pain” is to read unwarranted meaning into the text” which still influences women today to internalise sexual humiliation as punishment for the fall, a script that is “totally inexistent in the text” (Schüngel-Straumann 2012, 6).

Future directions If we have been able to identify some of the translation choices made in specific parts of the Bible, their repercussions on both secular and religious discourses on gender in a variety of contexts still remain only vaguely drawn. Korsak has shown how Gen 3:16, more precisely the last segment as translated in the King James Version –  “thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee”  –  was used to justify the abuse of women in 19th-century American jurisprudence (Korsak 2002, 142). This idea, deeply rooted in our cultural construct of femininity, presents Eve/ woman, as ‘man’s subservient helpmate’ whose shameful sexuality is at his service and whose actions he may judge and punish at will (Korsak 2002, 143). The American juridical system is not the only one to have been affected by these two simple lines. Catholic priests in Québec also used this idea in their sermons to justify the use of physical force by men on their wives in the late 19th century, constructing obedience as the central task of a woman (Cloutier 1891). In parallel, there remains a need to historicise the motives and discourses that pushed translators to become, willingly or not, patriarchal agents and reinforce unequal gender relations in biblical texts. Some general linguistic and philosophical hypotheses have been put forward regarding the context in which the first Greek translations were made, but most translations have yet to be analyzed in this way. Reformation translations, especially, will need thorough exploration  –  something that has barely begun  –  as they are the ones whose diffusion has had the greatest repercussion. As suggested by Gomola’s comparative analysis of English and Polish Bible translations, these first vernacular translations will have to be studied comparatively if we wish to understand their impact on cultural norms of gender within a geolinguistic context (Gomola 2016, 634). Moreover, such comparative studies will help uncover the socio-linguistic norms that created these versions of the Bible and moved cultured translators into participating in the patriarchal construction of biblical scripts. The analysis of Genesis 2–3 has enabled us to identify the traces left by translators over the years and through multiple layers of translations of the Bible, and has opened a door to more research of this kind. If we can trace the significant impact of translations on scripts of femininity 478

Translating the Bible into English

and masculinity, there is now a need for scholars in the social sciences and humanities to disentangle the network of signification woven into the fabric of our societies and identify the constricted identities that still prevail today in order to better deconstruct them.

Further reading Gomola, Aleksander. 2016. Aspects of Gender Neutral Language in Selected English and Polish Translations of the New Testament. Open Theology, 2(1), 621–635. Gomola’s article is one of the few that has developed a comparative study of multiple translations in a single sociocultural context with gender as its central focus of analysis. Investigating the methods and issues encountered by translators in introducing gender-neutral languages, this article makes a strong argument for the need for more context-based research on gender in Bible translation. Korsak, Mary Phil. 1992. At the Start . . . Genesis Made New. Louvain: Leuvense Schrijversaktie. This book is both a scholarly critique of previous translations of Genesis, and an example of a more neutral – word for word – translation and interpretation of the Hebrew Bible. Kraus, Helen. 2011. Gender Issues in Ancient and Reformation Translations of Genesis 1–4. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kraus’s monograph is a remarkable in-depth analysis of translations of Genesis through five of the most ‘authoritative’ translation projects undertaken up until the Reformation. With a special focus on malefemale relations, this work compares the various interpretations of femininity and masculinity as well as femaleness and maleness against the background of the Hebrew text. Schottroff, L. and M. T. Wacker, eds. 2012. Feminist Biblical Interpretation: A Compendium of Critical Commentary on the Books of the Bible and Related Literature. Cambridge: W. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co. Whilst the book is not entirely dedicated to discussing translations, numerous chapters undertake the analysis of translations of passages of the Bible. Written by a very diverse group of scholars, the compendium provides a well-documented point of entry for those looking for an introduction to specific sections of the Scriptures. Stanton, Elizabeth Cady. 1985 [1895]. The Woman’s Bible. Reprint, Edinburgh: Polygon Books. Written in the late 19th century by a group of educated women in response to the orthodoxy and traditionalism of translations offered by all-male groups of translators at the time, The Woman’s Bible – the first widely read commentary made by women about the Scriptures – offers a good overview of the primary points of contention found in Bible translation.

Related topics History of translation, inclusive language and translation, gender construct and identity, religion and translation

Notes 1 See Warner 2000; Nord 2003; von Flotow 2000; Stanton 1985; Daly 1986. See full references in bibliography. 2 Colonial issues in translations of the Bible are not covered in this chapter. There however exists a vast literature. See Kinyua 2015; Naudé 2011; Dube 2002. 3 The political action of naming things and concepts through which we “impose a pattern and a meaning which allows us to manipulate the world.” According to Spender, males being in control of most of the linguistic process, it has been used to consolidate their superiority in a way detrimental to women (Spender 1980, 163).

References Bracke, Maud Anne, Penelope Morris and Emily Ryder. 2018. Introduction. Translating Feminism: Transfer, Transgression, Transformation (1950s–1980s). Gender & History, 30(1), 214–225. 479

Mathilde Michaud

Daly, Mary. 1986. Beyond God the Father. London: The Women’s Press. De Troyer, Kristin. 1997. Septuagint and Gender Studies: The Very Beginning of a Promising Liaison, in Athalya Brenner and Carole R. Fontaine, eds., A Feminist Companion at Reading the Bible: Approaches, Methods and Strategies. London: Taylor & Francis, 326–343. Dube, Saurabh. 2002. Conversion to Translation: Colonial Registers of a Vernacular Christianity. The South Atlantic Quarterly, 101(4), 807–837. Flotow, Luise von. 2000. Women, Bibles, Ideologies, in TTR. Traduction, Terminologie, Redaction, 13(1), 9–19. Flotow, Luise von. 2007. Gender and Translation, in Piotre Kuhiwczak and Karin Littau, eds., Companion to Translation Studies. Bristol: Multilingual Matter, 92–105. Kinyua, Johnson Kiriaku. 2015. A Postcolonial Analysis of Bible Translation and its Effectiveness in Shaping and Enhancing the Discourse of Colonialism and the Discourse of Resistance. Black Theology, 11(1), 58–95. Korsak, Mary Phil. 1992. At the Start . . . Genesis Made New. Louvain: Leuvense Schrijversaktie. Korsak, Mary Phil. 2002. Translating the Bible: Bible Translations and Gender Issues, in Athalya Brenner and Jan Willem van Henten, eds., Bible Translation on the Threshold of the Twenty-First Century: Authority, Reception, Culture and Religion. London: Sheffield Academic Press, 132–146. Liturgiam Authenticam, on the Use of Vernacular Languages in the Publication of the Books of the Roman Liturgy. Available at: www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/ccdds/documents/rc_con_ccdds_doc_ 20010507_liturgiam-authenticam_en.html [Accessed 5 Apr. 2017]. Mckenzie, John L. 1995. The Dictionary of the Bible. New York: Simon & Schuster. Moore, Richard K. 2014. The Case for Bible Translation, Viewed in Historical Perspective. The Bible Translator, 65(1), 77–87. Naudé, Jacobus A. 2011. Colonial and Postcolonial Encounters with the Indigenous: The Case of Religious Translation in Africa. Southern African Linguistics and Applied Language Studies, 29(3), 313–326. Nord, Christiane. 2003. Function and Loyalty in Bible Translation, in Maria Calzada Pérez, ed., Apropos of Ideology: Translation Studies on Ideology  –  Ideology in Translation Studies. Manchester: St-Jerome, 89–112. Punt, Jeremy. 2014. (Con)figuring Gender in Bible Translation: Cultural, Translational and Gender Critical Intersections. HTS Teologiese Studies/Theological Studies, 70(1). doi: 10.4102/hts.v70i1.2051. Russel, Letty M. 1974. Women and Ministry, in Alice L. Hageman, ed., Sexist Religion and Women in the Church: No More Silence! Boston: Association Press, 17–62. Schüngel-Straumann, Helen. 2012. Genesis 1–11: The Primordial History, in Luise Schottroff and MarieTherese Wacker, eds., Feminist Biblical Interpretation: A Compendium of Critical Commentary on the Books of the Bible and Related Literature. Cambridge: W. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1–14. Scott, Joan W. 1986. Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis. The American Historical Review, 91(5), 1053–1075. Shulman, Gail B. 1974. View from the Back of the Synagogue: Women in Judaism, in Alice L. Hageman, ed., Sexist Religion and Women in the Church: No More Silence! Boston: Association Press, 143–166. Simon, Sherry. 1996. Gender in Translation: Cultural Identity and the Politics of Transmission. New York: Routledge. Skevington Wood, Arthur. 1969. Captive to the Word: Martin Luther, Doctor of Sacred Scripture. Exeter: Paternoster Press. Smith, Julia E. 1876. The Holy Bible: Containing the Old and New Testaments; Translated Literally from the Original Tongues. Hartford, CT: American Publishing Company. Spender, Dale. 1980. Man Made Language. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Spender, Dale.1985. Introduction, in Stanton, Elizabeth C. et al. [1895]. The Woman’s Bible: The Original Feminist Attack on the Bible. Abridged Ed. Introduced by Dale Spender. Edinburgh: Polygon Books, i–v. Stanton, Elizabeth C. et al. 1985[1895]. The Woman’s Bible: The Original Feminist Attack on the Bible. Abridged Ed. Introduced by Dale Spender. Edinburgh: Polygon Books. Warner, Marina. 2000. Alone of All her Sex: The Myth and Cult of the Virgin Mary. London: Vintage. Zogbo, Lynell. 2011. Bible, Jewish and Christian, in Mona Baker and Gabriela Saldanha, eds., Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies. London and New York: Routledge, 21–27.

Primary sources Archives de l’Évêché de Trois-Rivières (AETR). 1891. Collection de recueils de sermons, François-Xavier Cloutier.

480

36 Negotiation of meaning in translating ‘Islamic feminist’ texts into Arabic Mapping the terrain Doaa Embabi

The relevance of feminism to current world affairs is quite significant, especially in the context of rapid technological changes that enable instantaneous cultural exchanges, which in turn influence the travel of feminist concepts and ideas. With this relevance and speed of communication comes the growing diversity and diversification of approaches within the larger paradigm; hence, the discipline most commonly known as Islamic Feminism (IF). So far there is no agreement on a final definition of the term and some of the pioneers of the scholarship in the field shy away from being termed Islamic feminist writers (Amina Wadud and Asma Barlas, for example). However, it can be said with some degree of certainty that research and studies classified as Islamic feminism share a faith-based (i.e. Islamic/Muslim) perspective on the discussion of feminist texts. In this regard, their work crosscuts with that of feminists working with the Bible and other feminists working from within other faiths. In terms of substance, the arguments provided by faith-oriented feminists are usually propelled by the central text of their faith, such as the Quran or the Bible, in the case of Muslims and Christians. Engagement takes different forms and levels: theological, philosophical, exegetic, translational, activist, and otherwise. Islamic feminists also engage with the body of Prophetic traditions (hadith)1 and the large body of Quranic interpretation, jurisprudence, and Sharia (laws and regulations drawn from the Quran and Prophetic traditions). Moreover, the scholars’ engagement with texts of Islam covers a very broad spectrum ranging from extreme hostility towards all that is traditional, from Ayaan Hirsi Ali to others who believe in the possibility of engaging with the discourse of Islam about women by providing an alternative reading of the core texts – the Quran, Prophetic traditions, and jurisprudence scholarship. These women thinkers include Amina Wadud, Asma Barlas, Kecia Ali, Nevin Reda, Ziba Mir-Husseini, Omaima Abou-Bakr, Asma Lamrabet, Amani Saleh, to name only some. Despite the diversity of scholarship adopted by each, they all agree on a reformist approach and explicitly declare they are working constructively to provide an alternative voice on the injustices experienced by Muslim women in the Muslim world. Much of this Islamic feminist research involves translation on many different levels. Works originally produced in English or any language other than Arabic for that matter, inherently deal

481

Doaa Embabi

with translation because they enter into an interlocutory relationship with the Quran and with other traditional texts of Islam originally written in Arabic. Translation underlies all the texts produced in languages other than Arabic. It is directly relevant in the case of women’s/ feminist translations of the Quran into English and other languages (See Rim Hassen 2017, 17–38). Translation is also always present because Arabic is inextricable from the jurisprudence and ethical concepts in Islam; this means that any project produced in languages other than Arabic involves translation of direct quotes or of concepts and ideas. This chapter, however, is concerned with translations from English/French into Arabic of works that either profess to be Islamic feminist texts or are read as such. The aim is, therefore, to map such translations produced/sponsored both by individuals and institutions; examine the ways in which they are positioned within the larger context of Islamic feminist knowledge in Arabic; and consider the potential difference between individual and institutional translation projects in terms of framing. Moreover, the interplay between the visibility and ethics of the translator of such ideologically fraught texts is discussed: i.e. to what extent do translators make visible interventions whether by commenting, prefacing, footnoting and glossing, or refraining from interventions. Thus, while surveying the translations into Arabic, this chapter also aims to highlight the non-traditional linguistic and conceptual actions by the translators and to examine to what extent translators are conscious of the translational decisions they are making.

The scene of Islamic feminist translation The translation into Arabic of Islamic feminist texts is relevant to scholarly endeavours because, for the most part, the translations are seen to be contributing to the existing body of Islamic feminist works in Arabic, and providing – in their own right – interventions that challenge the traditional body of knowledge on women’s position and women’s issues in Islam. Translators and institutions producing such translations do not see their work of translation as ‘secondary’ or ‘subsidiary’ to the source texts. On the contrary, the translators speak in the prefaces about creating an alternative knowledge. Equally important is the role the translator envisages herself enacting when she produces such translations. Thus, one of the well-known translators from French into Arabic based in Morocco, Bouchra Laghzali, who is the translator of Asma Lamrabet, the renowned IF scholar writing in French, states that through her translation of such works she is helping introduce the writer to her Arab constituency in Morocco, which is not necessarily able to read in a foreign language. Laghzali regards her work as particularly relevant to women who only read Arabic and who are ‘affected’ by the ideas discussed in such works (Laghzali, Personal Interview).2 Therefore, such translations are seen to enlarge the body of works in Arabic and contribute to building knowledge in this field by enabling the travel of ideas between Arabic and non-Arabic speakers and writers. Arabic translations of IF make the field in Arab cultures more sophisticated. The claim by Arabic translators of IF texts, particularly when writers of these texts accept the label of Islamic feminist, that they are helping build new knowledge, means that another class of disseminators of Islamic feminist ideas enters the playing field. Indeed, in most cases, the translators of such texts are also invested in the concepts and ideology of the works they translate. Their linguistic and cultural strategies and choices, either drawing on the language used in traditional texts of Islam, or opting to borrow or coin new terms and styles, and playing with grammatical gender – to name only a few of the translational strategies – influence the existing IF discourse in Arabic, at least in the academic and activist circles that produce works seeking the reform of women’s status in Muslim communities from within the bounds of faith. Thus, their translations can be seen as gateways to broadening the discussion, introducing new lines of Quranic interpretation, 482

Translating ‘Islamic Feminist’ texts

and facilitating the understanding of new approaches to Sharia-based legal provisions concerning Muslim families. Notwithstanding the criticism leveled against IF scholarship, the body of works on the topic is growing and many perspectives and trajectories are being explored. Some scholars are working to provide new interpretations of certain Quranic verses that influence women’s lives and the husband-wife relationship; others are working on more abstract questions, such as identifying a new paradigm for interpreting gender-relations based on the concept of justice and compassion; while some are more grounded, and produce scholarship related to changing realities, particularly with respect to personal status laws and inheritance laws/practices. As will be seen, translation into Arabic in this field is very organic and engages in questions similar to those posed by the texts produced in Arabic.

Translations, translators, trends in translations Efforts to combine the perspective of faith with feminist issues existed in Arabic scholarship prior to what came to be dubbed as Islamic feminism. This study, though, does not map the evolution of the discipline of IF in Arabic and in the Arab world – as this would require a different approach and different questions. This chapter is more focused on the interventions made by translation in the form of individual and institutional projects. In examining the terrain of Arabic translations, the following trends and features were discerned: (1) Despite the fact that the field has existed as an acknowledged area of interest for at least two decades, the translations produced in Arabic are still very limited in number. This could possibly be attributed to the scholarly nature and the specialized interest of such works, and, at times, the controversial views concerning the possibility of combining feminist/gender-based concepts with the Islamic world view of gender relations. (2) A quick overview reveals that translations are mostly produced by academic/scholarly institutions, which necessarily implies a niche market for the consumption of such products – probably the academics or feminist scholars who have a particular interest in examining feminist/gender ideas from the angle of Islam. (3) Development organizations – national, regional, and international – working in the field of gender equality do not seem to have documents/platforms targeting this field, and only few of them have just recently introduced the approach of faith-oriented gender programs. (4) The field has been largely influenced by the growing digitization of knowledge; many platforms exist that are either fully dedicated to the question of feminism from the perspective of Islam or that devote ‘files’ to the topic within their larger focus which combines Islam with other disciplines. Translation plays an important role in these platforms (see for example the volume produced by Mominoun Without Borders 20163 and the articles produced on the topic on the website of Qantara in English, Arabic, and German/Deutsch4). (5) There is a visible trend associated with the ‘institutional’ nature of the field, namely ‘specialization’ by some translators as compared to single translation instances where translation is commissioned based only on professional competence. (6) Translations commissioned to this class of ‘specialized’ translators reflect a higher degree of ‘visibility’ for the translator through paratextual elements, such as prefaces where the translator discusses her interventions and the ‘ethics’ motivating them; this idea is also connected to how the translator views herself, i.e. whether she identifies as an engaged ‘feminist’ translator.

Individual translators/commercial publishers Through the examination of the very few individual translations published commercially, unlike the translations produced under a larger project with the announced objective of achieving 483

Doaa Embabi

gender justice from the viewpoint of Islam, it is possible to conclude that the individual translator assumes invisibility in the translation product by refraining from providing any additional material indicative of his/her existence. But the question remains: to what extent does this self-effacing attitude affect the position of the translation in the larger discourse on IF in Arabic language or in the Arab culture? One of the earlier translations of Islamic feminist texts into Arabic is that of Amina Wadud’s Quran and Woman: Rereading the Sacred Text from a Woman’s Perspective (1999, originally published in 1992), which was translated by Samia Adnan, under the title Al-Qur’an wal mar’ah: i‘adat qira’at al-nas al-Qur’ani min manzūr nisa’i5 (2006), an individual project published commer˙ ˙ Wadud’s early work is a thematic exegesis of the Qur’an, cially in Cairo by Madbouli publishers. and together with her remaining oeuvre is described, by Shadaab Rahemtulla, as a “liberationist and women’s gender egalitarian reading of the Qur’an” which is based on her own personal experience and struggles (2017, 232). The importance of the work in English lies also in the fact that Wadud contextualizes her experience as a woman within the reading of the sacred text of Islam by examining the “context” of revelation, the “grammatical compositions of the text,” and the text’s “world-view” (Wadud 1999, 3). Despite any criticism leveled against this translation (such as not being reviewed as indicated by some typos and mistranslations; and the fact that the translator herself ‘regrets’ it (Adnan 2017),6 this book marks one of the earliest attempts at translating one of the seminal IF works into Arabic. This private project is an interesting case. On the one hand, with the exception of a short introductory paragraph about the author, the translator does not gloss the text with any footnotes or an elaborate preface to explain her approach. When asked about the reasons for not commenting on Wadud’s use of the feminine pronoun ‘she’ in reference to Allah, or other issues in the book, Adnan states that the translation was “not a critical or analytical study” and that she believed that “the work was to copy the book exactly as it is, but in a different language” (Adnan 2017). On the other hand, Adnan’s conscious choice of ‘invisibility’ is challenged, for instance, by her ‘decision’ to remove a glossary of select Arabic terms (Wadud xxv–xxvi) from the translation, in which Wadud provides transliterated Arabic terms and her own interpretation of their meanings, despite the fact that Wadud includes in this glossary some of the key terms that have become the focus of many other IF works. Some of them are controversial, such as ‘daraba’ (which she defines as strike) and ‘qiwamah’ (which she defines as a ‘specific form of responsibility that men have for women’) (Wadud xxv–xxvi). The omission of the glossary in the Arabic version compromises the attempt made by the author to explore the possible layers of meaning in the terms defined and in her uses of them. The translator, though, decided to exclude this glossary from the translation without informing the reader of the reasons behind this choice. Another conscious decision taken by the translator is that of ‘choosing’ to translate this work – as she owned a self-publishing business at the time (Adnan 2017) which enabled her to acquire translation rights from Oxford University Press. According to Adnan, the main motivation for translating the text was the uproar in the year the book was published that came out of Wadud leading a prayer in South Africa (i.e. a woman being the Imam of the prayer); in Adnan’s view this would make the book more popular.7 However, according to Adnan, the publication process was not rapid enough and the Arabic version did not attract the attention she had hoped for. Though the Arabic version was a milestone in terms of the production of translations, introducing the then new concept of IF was not the priority motivation for undertaking the translation. Nonetheless, it can be argued that this translation – despite the issues discussed previously – can be invoked today to counteract claims contesting the validity of gender-based exegetic works produced by individuals without proper training in jurisprudence, exegesis, and Sharia. At the end of the Arabic book, a statement of approval issued by the Islamic Research Academy, 484

Translating ‘Islamic Feminist’ texts

affiliated to Al-Azhar, is published. Al-Azhar, is the highest Islamic scholarly institution (both social and educational), which could contest any texts expressing censured views regarding Islam. Interestingly, this statement shows that the project was sanctioned by the top religious authority in the country of publication – i.e. Egypt. As such, this translation sets a precedent, enabling exegetic scholarship that questions traditional unjust views on women in Islam. Another commercially published translation is also important to map for the way it brings forth to the Arab reader (and to non-Persian speakers) another perspective on Islamic feminism, namely Siddiqa Wasamgi’s work Al-Mar’ah, al-fiqh, al-Islam (Women, Jurisprudence, and Islam) translated by Raad al-Hajjaj (2018). In this work, the author argues that although equality between men and women is established in most of the Islamic rulings concerning legal and commercial interactions, worship, and even in punishments, discrimination is the norm in the realm of social and family relations. The argument is made within a larger discussion of diverse issues concerning gender roles and relations: the right of men to have multiple wives, sexual rights, the wife requiring her husband’s permission before leaving the house, the right of the mother to guardianship in the case of the death of the father or of divorce, or when this right is not contested by the original legal guardians. The topics are discussed within the context of Iran in particular. As commonly shared as those issues are, the author adds another factor to the discrimination experienced by Iranian/Persian women, which is the influence of Arab culture and the history of Islam. At the beginning of the book, Wasamgi dedicates a full chapter to the discussion of the inextricable relation between jurisprudence as currently practiced by and on Muslim family relations and women, on the one hand, and the Arab culture historically inherited from the times of Prophet Mohammad and the early community of Madina, on the other. She argues that the prevalent relations among family, tribe, and community – continued even after the advent of Islam, due to being validated by the approval of the Prophet – were imbued with a guise of authority not necessarily grounded in the Sharia as pronounced in the Qur’an (p. 18). Though the translator of this work does not ‘appear’, except in the name on the cover, the translation itself is very relevant to scholarship on the translation of Islamic feminist texts. One of the key pillars of the argument for gender justice in this book is the specificity of the experience of Iranian women and family relations, which is not a frequent argument in other IF studies that call for a re-reading of Quranic interpretations and jurisprudence in regard to women. The author is focused on deconstructing the intertwining of Arab culture and Arabic language with Islam; for instance, she interestingly questions the Sharia ruling on the prerequisites for making divorce legally effective and whether the pronouncement ‘you are divorced’ (’anti taliq) by ˙ the man should in all cultures be said in Arabic regardless of the mother tongue of the spouses (123)! The production of Arabic translations of such texts is indeed relevant to the discussion of IF because not only do they offer an interventionist path in regard to the prevalent views on women’s status in Islam as inherited in traditional authoritative texts, but they also bring the perspective of non-Arab and non-Western Muslim women into the discussion. This perspective extends beyond shared issues of gender equality, in view of the universality of the principles of justice and equity in Islam, to questions of language and reception; it highlights the fact that though the Qur’an was revealed in Arabic, its message is and should be universal.

Institutional translations Other types of projects are more institutionalized and involve the translation of edited anthologies. Two works are to be cited in this category: Windows of Faith: Muslim Women ScholarActivists in North America (2000) translated into Arabic (by a team of translators led by Ibrahim Yahia al-Shihabi) as Da‘ūnā natakallam: mufakkirāt Amrikiyāt yaftahn nawafidh al-’īmān ‘ala ‘ālam 485

Doaa Embabi

mutaghayir [Let us talk: American women thinkers open windows of faith over a changing world] (2002), published by the Syrian Dar el-Fikr within the context of an event organized on 20–25 April 2002, on the occasion of the ‘Year of the Woman’ and as part of the dialogue titled ‘The woman and transformations of the new age’.8 The second work is Gender and Equality in Muslim Family Law: Justice and Ethics in the Islamic Legal Tradition (Lena Larsen et al. 2013). Both the English source and Arabic texts were sponsored by the Oslo Coalition on Freedom of Religion or Belief (OC). The two translations were part of a larger endeavour to engage the views of the Arab/ Muslim communities concerning practical gender/women’s issues. One of the key similarities discerned, however, is the fact that the translation generally shadows the source text in style and word choice, which reminds us of Christiane Nord’s discussion of ‘documentary’ translation, defined as more source-text oriented compared to ‘instrumental’ translation, in which the target text is mainly used to communicate the source text message but where the translator exercises broader decision making (Nord 2005, 80–81, 2016, 32). The approach to the translation of the two books also raises questions about the role of the translation ‘commissioner’ and that of the ‘translation brief ’ (Nord 2016, 30) as well as the instructions the translators might have received to produce texts that reproduce the source closely. The lead translator of the Windows of Faith states in the very brief forward to the book that he was ‘commissioned’ by the publisher to do the translation (Webb 2002, 14) but is silent afterwards about the instructions given – if any. The translation reveals a rather literal approach, which makes some of the structures cumbersome; for instance, in her chapter, ‘Muslim Women’s Islamic Higher Learning as a Human Right’, Nimat Barazangi states that “The intent of this chapter . . . is to contribute toward an educational . . . interpretation of the Qur’an for women . . . and thereby to produce an action plan for the Muslim woman to regain her identification with Islam” [emphasis added]’ (Web 2000, 23). The Arabic of this emphasized part reads: ‘kay tasta‘īd howiyataha al-dhātiya ma‘a al-Islām’ (Webb 2002, 63) [back translation: “to regain her self-identity together with Islam”], which is very literal and awkward. Two other instances are also indicative of grappling with terms, namely, ‘gender’ and ‘feminism’ – reminding us of Samia Mehrz’s discussion in “Translating Gender” (2007) of the problematic nature of translating terms that are laden with social, cultural, and even religious connotations into Arabic. In Barzangi’s chapter there is reference to ‘gender justice’ (22) and the translators opt once more for the literal approach rendering the term ‘‘adālat al-jins’ (63), which is a very exotic/opaque term. In Azizah al-Hibri’s chapter discussing the Muslim woman’s human rights, the word ‘feminism’ is used on more than one occasion and the translator opts for an explanatory translation. In one case, the author was trying to differentiate between authentic feminist support for Muslim women and other condescending positions: “Western neoorientalist critiques of Islam, thinly disguised as “feminist” critiques, have managed only to complicate the task of Muslim women” (emphasis added) (Webb 2000, 67). The translator shifts the modification, making it describe the critics: ‘wa al-ladhīn yadda‘ūn annahum nuqqād yad‘ūn ila musāwāt al-rajul bil mar’ah’ [those who claim that they are critics who call for equality between men and women] (Webb 2002, 119). The author concludes this section of her chapter confirming the denunciation of the negative impact of neoorientalist critiques on the potential that “the Western feminist movement” (Webb 2000, 68) could have for supporting Muslim women. The translator renders the ‘feminist movement’ as harakat al-nisā’ [women’s movement] (Webb 2002, 120). Contrary, however, to such instances where there is much ‘uncertainty’ (Nord 2016) with respect to the translational decisions taken, the translators produce much smoother texts and structures when the source author uses words or quotes from traditional Arabic sources. This is particularly true in chapters that quote long stretches from the books of prophetic traditions, Quranic interpretation, and other sources, such 486

Translating ‘Islamic Feminist’ texts

as Muhja Kahf ’s text “Braiding Stories” (Webb 2000, 147–171) on reconstructing a literary history for women from the fragmented references in the works of classical tradition. Thus, although the translator does not speak about clear translation commission instructions, or the role of the publisher, or Arabic speaking authors in influencing the approach to translation, it can be gleaned from the translation that the translator was committed to being source-text oriented, and naturally to refraining from retranslating quotes from classical Arabic sources by using the original. The translation of Gender and Equality also reflects the dynamics between translation commissioner and translator(s)/reviser and the role of the institution – in this case the editors representing the publishing sponsor, OC – in influencing important translational decisions. A first review of the translation resulted in a retranslation of the whole manuscript9 – in my view, to bring the translation closer to the source – but it would be beyond the scope of this chapter to embark on an analysis of the differences between the two products. However, in the “Preface of the Translator” (Mir-Husseini et al. 2017, 7–9) the reviser, Mona Ibrahim, raises important issues that would naturally reflect on the product and that could explain why the translation commissioners opted for a ‘documentary’ approach to translation. This anthology was written by Arabic and non-Arabic speaking Muslim scholars and though most of the contributions were in English, two were in Persian and one was in French. These were translated into English for the purposes of the source volume. The French contribution was then self-translated into Arabic; however, those in Persian were translated from a translation. Moreover, the retranslation of the book was commissioned to two translators: Siham bint Saniya wa Abdul-Salam and Hossam Badr. The involvement of many translators and the intricacy of the linguistic encounter necessarily meant multiple layers of decision making, including the treatment of references from the Qur’an, Prophetic traditions, and traditional books and the translation of concept-laden words such as ‘patriarchal’ (translated almost consistently into ‘abawi’) or ‘gender’ (translated according to context thus appearing as al-musāwāt bayn al-jinsayn in the term ‘gender equality’ in the introductory chapter and as al-naw‘ al-ijtimā‘i when used alone); and even the linguistic styles and structures. The reviewer, though, merely pointed out the multiplicity of the translation effort leaving the invisibility of the translators to speak for itself through the decisions they made. Compared to commercially published translations, these two projects reflected different types of issues due to institutionalization. The two translations, published 15 years apart, were produced within larger projects concerned with the links between faith/religion and different aspects of life and society: the Windows of Faith translation was part of a series titled ‘Dialogues for a new century’10 which is still running (despite the disruption of the Syrian cultural scene by war); while Gender and Equality is the latest publication of the OC project ‘New directions in Islamic thought’.11 Thus, outreach has not been left to individual efforts; it is planned and executed rather systematically, mainly through bilingualism; and although Arabic is the predominant language of Dar el Fikr and English is used for the OC website and publications, both platforms offer the work in English and Arabic. In fact, the OC also produced a subsequent report translated into Arabic (May 2013) “intended for policy-makers, stakeholders and advocates of reform who are developing knowledge-based arguments for legal reform.” The report also focuses on disseminating the learning experience behind the production of the book by emphasizing “lessons . . . learned from the expert discussions and written contributions.”12 As such, the economics and politics of marketing the works (source and target) play an important role in achieving visibility for the translation, and hence attempting to influence the mainstreaming of IF translations into Islam’s scholarship about women’s status and rights. The institutionalized publishing of Arabic translations by organizations whose work is focused on gender as a core thematic thread is another important pathway for the translation and publication of IF texts. In this respect, reference is made to works published by gender-focused 487

Doaa Embabi

organizations: the Egyptian-based Women and Memory Forum (WMF),13 the Malaysia-based Mussawah,14 and the Morocco-based Center for Women’s Studies in Islam (CERFI). The common factor of such platforms is the combination of activist and scholarly interests and publications as well as the international nature of events and intended audience, which entails an extensive activity of translation and original research work in both English and Arabic, and French in the case of CERFI. These platforms are specifically cited because of the publications whose production and translation they sponsor, host on their websites, and market in print format. The Women and Memory Forum has produced two leading publications that examine feminist and gender issues from the perspective of faith. The first is a section in the Reader on Feminism and Religious Studies (Al-niswiya wa al-dirāsāt al-dīniya) (2012) with Randa Aboubakr as translator. This book was part of a series of Readers on Gender in the Humanities and Social Sciences produced in Arabic translation. The book on gender issues and religion dealt with feminism, Christianity and Islam; the selected translations of feminism in Islamic studies were either book excerpts/chapters or individual articles by leading figures in the field (Azizah alHibri, Rifaat Hassan, Asma Barlas, Amina Wadud, and Omaima Abou-Bakr and an article from the platform of Sisters in Islam). This book is purely academic in its approach to and selection of texts; the translator states that in the process of translation she mainly sought “to contribute to the production of new knowledge in the Arab culture, and consequently to the creation of a language capable of conveying this knowledge” (Aboubakr 2012, 38). One of the important features that appears in most publications/translations of IF works conscious not only of the individual project at hand but also of building a discourse in the field is the creation of a glossary. This volume ends with a glossary of the translations into Arabic of words that appeared in the translated extracts, where the glossary is preceded by the disclaimer that suggested meanings are contextualized and a single term could have different renderings (291). In the extensive preface (2012, 38–53), the translator explains and defends her rather ‘documentary’ approach, in which she favours reproducing a style and structure similar to that of the source counting on the discretion of the readers in accepting a new mode of writing about religion, which is different from what they are used to. She touches on many issues that this type of translation necessarily involves. The issues include: her own position within broader translation theories as a translator, particularly vis-à-vis ‘domestication’ and ‘foreignization’ (38–41); her own reflections on the use of gendered pronouns and ‘inclusive language’ (41–44); the question of back-translation, particularly when Arabic words are transliterated and then glossed in the source (44–46); and stylistic issues and problematic words whose literal translation could sound exotic (46–51). The second publication by WMF was a larger project with a special focus on IF under the title Feminist and Islamic Perspectives: New Horizons of Knowledge and Reform (in Arabic: Al-niswiya wa al-manzūr al-Islāmi: ’āfāq jadīda li al-ma‘rifa wa al-islāh) (2013b). It is a bilingual publication ˙ of the collection of papers delivered during a two-day conference held in Cairo in 2012. The studies in English were translated into Arabic and vice versa. The translator into Arabic was also Randa Aboubakr – but she did not provide a preface for this translation. Moreover, the translated works are not marked as such. Thus, we have the publication in English and in Arabic with the translators and revisers acknowledged only on the information page. The articles cover a broad range of topics starting from a discussion of the possible convergence between feminism and Islamic perspectives to a discussion of feminist consciousness in both the Arab and European contexts. The book also comprises a part on Islamic legal thought and new interpretations of the Quran, which are two key components of most anthologies on IF. The book closes with a bibliographic article on the most prominent publications in the field that covers both Arabic and English projects to date. The WMF is actively and consciously engaged in the production of knowledge and the incorporation of gender as a tool of analysis in their studies and activist 488

Translating ‘Islamic Feminist’ texts

works. This reflects their interest in producing translation into Arabic due to the scarcity of such works, and they use these texts to build a dialogue between works produced in English and translations into Arabic with the objective of creating a discourse on relevant feminist issues. Another significant publication in the field is the book titled, Men in Charge: Rethinking Authority in Muslim Legal Tradition (2014) translated as Al-qiwāmah fi al-turāth al-Islāmi: qirā’āt badīla [Qiwamah in Muslim Tradition: Alternative Readings] (2016). This translation is sponsored by the movement Musawah, and together with the work in English, was produced under their “Five-year Knowledge Building Initiative on Qiwamah and Wilayah”15 which focuses on reexamining the concept of the ‘authority’ of men over women from the perspective of Islam: “This initiative seeks to show how laws based on outdated interpretations of these concepts [Qiwamah and Wilayah], which place women under male authority, no longer reflect the justice of Islam. Other interpretations are both possible and more in line with human rights principles and contemporary lived realities.” This translation was also commissioned to Randa Aboubakr, whose work includes a preface where she explains some of her concerns, positions, and translation strategies. The two translations produced by WMF and that produced by Musawah share many features that place them – and other translations produced under similar circumstances – in a category of their own. They are all institutionally sponsored translations; however, the institutions commissioning the translations are fully dedicated to supporting the promotion of women’s rights in theory and in practice – compared for instance to the work of other organizations that focus on (Islamic) feminism for the purposes of a one-off project. The three works participate in the desire to discuss gender equality and justice based on the tenets and ethics of religion but from a perspective free of oppressive patriarchal readings. Because the two platforms aim to engage women and men in the Arabic-speaking and the non-Arabic speaking worlds, translation into Arabic becomes an integral activity of the larger projects in which the written works are produced. Moreover, the translator who is commissioned to do the work is selected not only because of professional competence but also her ideological leanings. It is noteworthy that the aforementioned three works were translated by the same translator–Randa Aboubakr, who wrote prefaces for the reader on gender and faith-based studies (2012, 38–53) and Men in Charge (2016, 8–16). In both prefaces Aboubakr addresses similar issues and concerns affirming the role of translation in creating alternative knowledge; she opens up the issue of language and its relationship to gender-based questions; and discusses the strategies used to bridge the gap between the heavily gendered Arabic and English, the use of ‘inclusive’ language in reference to readers, the ‘closure’ of terminological choices, and the concerns of adding phrases such as ‘peace be upon him’ after the name of Prophet Mohammad in Arabic, despite the fact that it does not exist in English. Importantly, also, the translator understands that the more she uses paratexts, the more visible she becomes; i.e. by adding “a consciously crafted threshold for a text which has the potential to influence the way(s) in which the text is received” (Batchelor 2018, 142). In fact, she argues that as a translator she prefers to remain ‘hidden’ indicating that this is rather motivated by her wish to encourage the reader to be actively involved in the ‘cultural exchange’ rather than complacently dependent on the translator for the resolution of her/his issues in understanding a text that does not lend itself to easy reading (Aboubakr 2012, 40). In the more recent publication, Aboubakr speaks about ‘vanishing’ in the translated text (2016, 15); however, in this translation, she acknowledges that the sheer fact of writing a ‘preface’ is an act of visibility committed rather out of a sense of “duty” to “highlight some of the choices” that make it easier for the reader to undertake her/his role as “another mediator of conveying meaning” (2016, 16). The arguments are rather complementary: in both cases she wants to engage the reader in an active reading 489

Doaa Embabi

process where the translation product and choices are reckoned with rather than relegated to an inferior status. Indeed, within the text itself Aboubakr does disappear, with the sole exception of adding one footnote to correct the number of a Qura’nic verse directly quoted by a writer in support of a given argument. However, in the prefaces, she asserts her voice, fulfilling exactly the function of the preface in a ‘feminist translation’ as perceived by Luise von Flotow almost three decades ago (1991) – and still valid to date. Aboubakr fits Flotow’s profile of being “more than a conventional translator; [as] she is the author’s accomplice who maintains the strangeness of the source text, and seeks at the same time to communicate its multiple meanings otherwise “lost in translation” ’ (Flotow 1991, 74). CERFI is also dedicated to the scholarly investigation of Muslim women’s issues as seen in the nature of articles published by the Center.16 The Center hosts a number of researchers and translators as the website indicates, and one of the former prominent researchers and translators is Bouchra Laghzali, who though no longer affiliated to CERFI made several contributions by way of original studies in Arabic or through translations. I would like to focus, however, on three short pieces by Laghzali published on the CERFI website where she discusses the act of translation: an earlier article titled “Importance of religion-based translation”17 in which she argues for the importance of translation for “communication,” “building bridges between cultures,” and “remedying the negative image of Islam.” In this 2012 piece, Laghzali tries to disentangle in simple terms the complexity of translating texts that ‘deal’ with religion – i.e. Islam – and situates her argument in the desire to use translation to create a better understanding among Muslims and non-Muslims. In the other two articles, Laghzali discusses the problematic nature of translating concepts, both faith-based and feminist, using two specific examples: one about the translation into English of the word ‘idrubuhun’ found in the Qur’an and the use of this term to name an act that is a disciplinary measure aimed at correcting women’s behaviour,18 and the other on the translation into Arabic of the word ‘patriarchy.’19 The three discussions on the ‘act’ and ‘process’ of translation and the underlying strategies adopted by translation reflect her ethico-ideological position. Laghzali’s three interventions, read together, show that she places great importance on situating any term in its historical, cultural, and textual contexts; she approaches the traditional sources of Quranic interpretations with reverence, albeit with a critical lens; and she accords a great weight to using translation as a vehicle for positive and open communication particularly between Muslims and non-Muslims essentially affected by Islamophobic misconceptions. Moreover, she upholds an understanding that translators/translations must be aware of preserving whatever is positive in language use. For example, she believes that the term ‘patriarchal’ should not be translated as ‘abawi’ due to the positive connotations of the word ‘ab’ (father), in Arabic, that need not be violated by attributing to it the qualities of male oppression of females. Alternatively, she suggests the use of the term ‫النظام الذكوري‬, which back-translates as the ‘male system’, based on the argument that it is male hegemony that is criticized and not compassionate fatherly care. Closely connected to this work, Laghzali published in 2018 a glossary of terms that are both complex and frequently used in Islamic feminist contexts, Dictionary of Women’s Studies from an Islamic Perspective. This work was published independent of CERFI, but it could be argued that it is the culmination of Laghzali’s long career in writing and translating feminist/gender-related works from within Islam. It is also a reflection of the close collaboration she has had with Asma Lamrabet – as both women teamed up as translator/author on a number of works that included many articles and two books from French, Les femmes et l’Islam: une vision réformiste [Al-Islām wa al-mar’ah: al-tarīq al-thālith] (2014), and Femmes et hommes dans le Coran: quelle égalité [Al-nisā’ ˙ wa al-rijāl fi al-Qur’ān: ayatu musāwāh] (2015). Lamrabet revised Laghzali’s Dictionary, and Lamrabet’s oeuvre served as the corpus from which the 80 terms covered by this work are drawn 490

Translating ‘Islamic Feminist’ texts

(Laghzali 2018, 9). In the introduction Laghzali once again confirms the position she assumed in her research/translation work at CERFI: namely, to facilitate communication by creating a glossary that is ‘accessible’ to readers, who may not be specialists, anchoring her work in the ‘ethical’ component of Islam, and tackling misconceptions about Islam arising from poor translations, lack of linguistic capabilities, and cultural misunderstanding of Arabic (Laghzali 2018, 8–9).

Pragmatic translations Another type of institutionalized translation is what could be called ‘pragmatic’ translation, where the word ‘pragmatic’ refers to translations of works that focus on the practical aspects of gender justice. These are usually translations produced or sponsored by rights-based organizations whether national or international. A few prominent examples of these translations include reports on legal reform particularly of family law, studies on the promotion of women’s rights in Muslim communities, and stories of Muslim women’s experiences asserting their rights. Such works have been mostly produced as the ‘knowledge’ component of larger projects dedicated to making interventions in the predominant gender discourse. Such translations are usually produced concurrently with the text in English; acknowledgement of the translator is often limited to the mention of the name, with no further ‘visibility’ and the reports are treated as ‘technical’ texts, hence the choice of translator is not necessarily informed by the feminist ideological leanings of the translator. Interest in addressing women and gender issues from the perspective of Islam started to make headway with the turn of the 21st century. Some reports were fully dedicated to Islamic feminist approaches to women’s rights and others included chapters on the topic. Women’s Rights in Muslim Communities: A Resource Guide for Human Rights Educators (2009)20 produced by the International Center for Human Rights Education (Equitas) was translated into Arabic in 2010. The translation was sponsored by the international organization GIZ (the German agency for International Development), operating in Egypt, and by an Egyptian Network for Women’s Rights Organizations – unfortunately dissolved once the support by the GIZ ended. This Guide juxtaposes Muslim feminist arguments on gender, interpretations of the Qur’an, provisions of national laws, and rights-based conventions to discuss urgent issues such as reproductive rights, marriage, and freedom of movement. The translators of this report are not named; however, the strategies used in the translation reflect a high level of professionalism. Though not particularly focused on highlighting feminist sympathies, for example by not using feminine pronouns in addressing the reader and by inadvertently mistaking Riffat Hassan for a man, still the translation reflects “translators acting as responsible agents in an interaction between equals” (Nord 2006, 40). Internationally, UN Women, as partner in the Men and Women Gender Equality Programme,21 has collaborated with Musawah and CERFI to produce works that “promote alternative interpretations of religious texts.” This program is funded by the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency, which covers translation costs. Several multilingual publications have come out as a result of this program. Two of them are particularly interesting for the purposes of IF studies: Women’s Stories, Women’s Lives: Male Authority in Muslim Contexts (Hikāyāt hayawāt al-nisā’: al-wilāya wa al-qiwāma fi al-waqi‘ al-ma‘īsh) (2016 and 2017) (English and Arabic) – where the translator is named, Mona Ibrahim from Egypt – and Who provides? Who cares? Changing Dynamics in Muslim Families (Man yunfiq? Man yar‘ā?) (2018) (English and Arabic) – where the translation is commissioned to a professional translator, Mustafa Othman, who does not seem to have feminist leanings in particular. Both texts are cross-presented on the UN Women and Musawah websites (with interactive links) as resources aimed at knowledge 491

Doaa Embabi

building on gender issues in Islam. Both texts are also dedicated to discussing the concepts of wilayah and qiwamah (guardianship of men) in Islam from different perspectives. The texts are technical in form and nature: they feature info-grams and country-specific statistical tables and draw on interviews with women from the countries where the project was implemented. The source and the translation are produced using the stylistic features of UN reports and attempt to be as comprehensive in coverage as the program promises; and as such, similar to UN documents, ‘visible’ intervention by the translator through notes or prefaces is nonexistent.

Conclusion This survey has pointed to milestones along the path of Arabic translations of faith-based feminist texts from foreign languages. A few observations are pertinent to the discussion: on the position and function of the translator, the medium of publication, and the intervention such translation makes in discourse originally produced in Arabic about IF. The ideological alignment with feminist tendencies varies substantially depending on the type of text and the publishing venue. Moreover, the visibility of the translator also fluctuates depending on context and nature of collaboration between author/publisher/sponsor, on the one hand, and translator, on the other. In terms of medium, most of the organizations under whose auspices Islamic feminist research is published use both print and online media, which poses the question of how far digital content might lead to a wider readership and accelerate the introduction of new terminology and knowledge? In fact, this digital content is beyond the control of official or quasi-official religious authorities – such as Al-Azhar in Egypt – contrary to the control of paper publishing (the example here is Samia Adnan’s translation of Wadud’s Quran and Woman featuring AlAzhar’s approval to publish.) To what extent is the relative ‘freedom’ afforded the publication of Islamic Arabic content in translation without the support of the prominent religious authorities in the Middle East liberating or restricting to the translator and her/his choice of strategies? In regard to reception, most of the institutionalized translations claim that one of their goals is the production of alternative knowledge; however, more research needs to be done on the textual and conceptual levels. Textually, the translators – who discuss their choices in paratextual material such as prefaces, articles, and notes – face the issue of making linguistic and stylistic choices that may not conform with the traditional approach to exegesis and jurisprudence, thus making the text on a religion-related topic ‘sound’ foreign or exotic – sometimes even intentionally so for the purposes of influencing the traditional discourse on gender and women. Conceptually, the Dictionary produced by Bouchra Laghzali and the bilingual glossary of terms produced by Randa Abu Bakr in one of the WMF translations help demystify many terms that carry complex meanings. Sophistication is a concern for translation from and into Arabic; however, in the case of translation into Arabic, ethical and responsible approaches to work in Islamic feminism entail engagement with traditional texts of Islam and the informed exploration of concepts and terms from the perspective of Arabic culture and linguistics. If such translations are to claim they produce ‘new’ or ‘alternative’ knowledge, then the long tradition with its vocabulary cannot be discarded offhandedly as outdated and oppressive of women; nor should the discussion be locked on cleansing the language of all gender-markedness – with Arabic being one of the heavily gendered languages for both animate and inanimate references. In order for the claim that this work of translation engages with the existing religious, legal, scholarly, and activist discourses on gender to be taken seriously, the translator needs to be mindful of the intended audience and to operate in a trustworthy manner – conscious of the author, publisher/organization, the discourse on IF in Arabic, and the readers.

492

Translating ‘Islamic Feminist’ texts

Further reading Anwar, Zeina. 2013. From Local to Global: Sisters in Islam and the Making of Musawah: A Global Movement for Equality in the Muslim Family, in L. Larsen, Z. Mir-Hosseini, C. Moe, and K. Vogt, eds., Family Law: Justice and Ethics in Islamic Legal Tradition. London and New York: Bloomsbury, 211–240. This chapter discusses the evolution of Musawah as a global organization concerned with women and gender issues in Muslim communities and the role of multilingualism and strategies in achieving this shift and this wider outreach through resources, initiatives, events, and networks with other international and regional organizations. Kamal, Hala. 2018. ‘Travelling Concepts’ in Translation: Feminism and Gender in the Egyptian Context. Synergy, 14(1), 130–145. This article creates connections between the notion of ‘traveling’ theory and feminism as traveling theory and gender as a traveling concept between Arab and non-Arab cultures. Also, it reflects and explores how translation is at the heart of the process. Laghzali, Bouchra. 2017. The Translation of Islamic Feminism at CERFI in Morocco, in Luise von Flotow and Farzaneh Farahzad, eds., Translating Women: Different Voices and New Horizons. New York and London: Routledge, 209–222. This chapter analyzes in detail the uses of translation from and into Arabic in CERFI to ‘champion’ Islamic feminism and address misconceptions about gender issues from the perspective of Islam.

Notes 1 Sayings of Prophet Mohammad recorded and regarded also as texts of authority for believing Muslims. Their power immediately follows that of the Quran. 2 Personal communication via email received on 13 Sept. 2018. 3 www.mominoun.com/articles/4022-‫اإلسالمية‬-‫النسوية‬ 4 https://ar.qantara.de/ 5 This chapter is using the IJMES Transliteration System for Arabic, except when using direct quotations. 6 Personal communications with Samia Adnan via email 1–12 January 2017. 7 Personal communications with Samia Adnan via email 1–12 January 2017. 8 https://darfikr.com/paidbook/‫والجندر‬-‫المرأة‬ 9 Thanks to Mir-Hosseini I was given access to an anonymized version of the first rejected translation and permission to use it for research purposes. 10 https://darfikr.com/about 11 www.jus.uio.no/smr/english/about/programmes/oslocoalition/islam/index.html 12 www.jus.uio.no/smr/english/about/programmes/oslocoalition/docs/justice-through-equality.pdf 13 For more information about the forum visit: www.wmf.org.eg/en/about-us/ 14 For the evolution of the movement from a local to a global movement for ‘equality and justice in the Muslim family’, Musawah, see Anwar 2013, 107–124. 15 www.musawah.org/knowledge-building/qiwamah-wilayah/ 16 For a detailed examination of the role of translation into Arabic, English and French in the Center, read Laghzali 2017, 208–222. 17 www.annisae.ma/Article.aspx?C=5612 18 www.annisae.ma/Article.aspx?C=6068 19 www.annisae.ma/Article.aspx?C=6050 20 https://equitas.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/research_EQUITAS_Sharia.pdf 21 http://arabstates.unwomen.org/en/what-we-do/ending-violence-against-women/men-and-womenfor-gender-equality

References Abou-Bakr, Omaima, ed. 2013a. Feminist and Islamic Perspectives: New Horizons of Knowledge and Reform. Cairo: Women and Memory Forum. Abou-Bakr, Omaima, ed. 2013b. Al-niswiya wa al-manzūr al-Islāmi: ’āfāq jadīda li al-ma‘rifa wa al-islāh. Trans˙ lations of contributions into Arabic by Randa Aboubakr. Cairo: Women and Memory Forum.

493

Doaa Embabi

Aboubakr, Randa, trans. 2012. Al-niswiya wa al-dirāsāt al-dīniya [Reader on Feminism and Religious Studies]. Edited by Omaima Abou-Bakr. Cairo: Women and Memory Forum. Aboubakr, Randa, trans. 2016. Al-qiwāmah fi al-turāth al-Islāmi: qirā’āt badīla [Qiwamah in Muslim Tradition: Alternative Readings]. Edited by Ziba Mir-Hosseini, Mulki Al-Sharmani, and Jana Rumminger. Malysiah: Mussawah. Adnan, Samia. “Re: A query about your work.” Message to Samia Adnan. 12 January 2017. Email. Anwar, Zeina. 2013. From Local to Global: Sisters in Islam and the Making of Musawah: A Global Movement for Equality in the Muslim Family, in L. Larsen, Z. Mir-Hosseini, C. Moe, and K. Vogt, eds., Family Law: Justice and Ethics in Islamic Legal Tradition. London and New York: Bloomsbury, 211–240. Batchelor, Kathryn. 2018. Translation and Paratexts. London and New York: Routledge. Flotow, Luise von. 1991. Feminist Translation: Contexts, Practices and Theories. TTR: traduction, terminologie, rédaction, 4(2), 69–84. Flotow, Luise von and Farzaneh Farahzad, eds. 2017. Translating Women: Different Voices and New Horizons. London and New York: Routledge. Hassen, Rim. 2017. Negotiating Western and Muslim Feminine Identities Through Translation: Western Female Converts Translating the Quran, in Luise Von Flotow and Farzaneh Farahzad, eds., Translating Women: Different Voices and New Horizons. London and New York: Routledge, 17–38. International Center for Human Rights Education. 2009. Women’s Rights in Muslim Communities: A Resource Guide for Human Rights Educators. Equitas. Larsen, Lena, Ziba Mir-Hosseini, Christian Moe, and Karl Vogt, eds. 2013. Gender and Equality in Muslim Family Law: Justice and Ethics in the Islamic Legal Tradition. London and New York: Bloomsbury, I.B. Tauris. Larsen, Lena, Ziba Mir-Hosseini, Christian Moe, and Karl Vogt. 2017. Qānūn al-osra al-muslima wa mu‘d ilat ˙ al-musāwāh (Muslim Family Law and the Dilemma of Equality). Translated into Arabic by Siham bint Saniya wa Abdel-Salam and Hossam Badr. Beirut: Dar el-Fikr Al-Lubnani. Laghzali, Bouchra. 2017. The Translation of Islamic Feminism at CERFI in Morocco, in Luise von Flotow and Farzaneh Farahzad, eds., Translating Women: Different Voices and New Horizons. London and New York: Routledge, 208–222. Laghzali, Bouchra. 2018. Dictionary of Women’s Studies from an Islamic Perspective. Online publication. Mehrez, Samia. 2007. Translating Gender. Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies, 3(1), 106–127. Mir-Hosseini, Ziba, Mulki Al-Sharmani, and Jana Rumminger, eds. 2014. Men in Charge: Rethinking Authority in Muslim Legal Tradition. London: Oneworld Publications. Mir-Hosseini, Ziba, Mulki Al-Sharmani, Jana Rumminger, and Sarah Marsso. 2016. Al-qiwāma fi al-turāth al-Islāmi: qirā’āt badīla [Qiwamah in Muslim Tradition: Alternative Readings]. Translated by Randa Aboubakr. Cairo: Musawah and WMF. Mir-Hosseini, Ziba, Mulki Al-Sharmani, Jana Rumminger, and Sarah Marsso, eds. 2017. Hikāyāt hayawāt al-nisā’: al-wilāya wa al-qiwāma fi al-wāqi‘ al ma’īsh [Women’s Stories, Women’s Lives: Male Authority in Muslim Contexts]. Translated into Arabic by Mona Ibrahim. Malaysia: Musawah. Mir-Hosseini, Ziba, Mulki Al-Sharmani, Jana Rumminger, and Sarah Marsso. 2018. Man yunfiq? Man yar‘ā? [Who Provides? Who Cares? Changing Dynamics in Muslim Families]. Translated by Othman Mustafa Othman. Malysia: Muswah. Nord, Christiane. 2005. Text Analysis in Translation: Theory, Methodology, and Didactic Application of a Model for Translation-Oriented Text Analysis (2nd ed.). Amesterdam: Rodopi. Nord, Christiane. 2006. Loyalty and Fidelity in Specialized Translation. Confluências: Revista de Tradução Cientifica e Técnica, 4, 29–41. Nord, Christiane. 2016. Skopos and (Un)certainty: How Functional Translators Deal with Doubt. Meta, 61, 29–41. Rahemtulla, Shadaab. 2017. Qur’an of the Oppressed: Liberation Theology and Gender Justice in Islam. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wadud, Amina. 1999. Qur’an and Woman: Rereading the Sacred Text from a Woman’s Perspective. Oxford and London: Oxford University Press. Wadud, Amina. 2006. Al-Qur’ān wa al-mar’ah: i‘ādat qirā’at al-nas al-Qur’āni min manzūr nisā’i [Quran and ˙ ˙ Woman: A Re-reading of the Quranic Text from Women’s Perspective]. Translated by Samia Adnan. Cairo: Madbouli Publishers. Wasamgi, Siddiqa. 2018. Al-mar’ah, al-fiqh, al-Islām [Women, Jurisprudence, and Islam]. Translated by Raad al-Hajjaj. Beirut: Dar Al-Kitab Al-Lubnani.

494

Translating ‘Islamic Feminist’ texts

Webb, Gisela, ed. 2000. Windows of Faith: Muslim Women Scholar-Activists in North America. New York: Syracuse University Press. Webb, Gisela. 2002. Da‘ūnā natakallam: mufakkirāt Amrikiyāt yaftahn nawafidh al-’īmān ‘ala ‘ālam mutaghayir [Let Us Talk: American Women Thinkers Open Windows of Faith Over a Changing World]. Translated by Ibrahim Y. El-Shihabi and Nimat H. Barazangi. Damascus. Syria: Dar el-Fikr.

495

37 Feminist strategies in women’s translations of the Qur’an Rim Hassen

Introduction The scarcity of reliable records and academic research about Muslim women translators has made evaluating the extent of their involvement in Qur’an translation throughout Islamic history a challenging, if not an impossible, task. Some Muslim women scholars, such as Bouthaina Shaaban (1995), have suggested that this could be the result of a deliberate strategy to silence women’s voices and to exclude them from producing Islamic knowledge. The aim of this paper is to discuss how, despite efforts to exclude, silence, and marginalize them, a number of women translators are challenging patriarchal norms and values through their translations of the Qur’an. It also aims to highlight the different feminist textual and linguistic strategies they have adopted to achieve women’s visibility, to offer a feminist perspective and to challenge patriarchal interpretations of the Qur’an. First, it is necessary to introduce the Qur’an as a source text and discuss some of the challenges it presents for translators in general and women translators in particular. Some of these challenges lie in its divine origin, as Muslims believe that their Holy Text is the direct Word of God and it is therefore immutable, inimitable, and untranslatable. Even though translation of Qur’anic verses and chapters was occurring during the life of the Prophet of Islam, early Muslim scholars, such as Imam Shatby (c. 1133–1193, cited in Mehanna 1978), opposed the idea of translating the Qur’an on the premise that the specific meanings embedded in the form and content of the Holy Text cannot be conveyed in any other language (Mehanna 1978). The debate over the translatability of the Qur’an continued to divide Muslim scholars over the centuries. It reached its peak at the beginning of the 20th century, when Islamic religious institutions such as Al-Azhar University set up guidelines for translating the Qur’an. This, in turn, had a major impact on the production, distribution, and reception of Qur’an translations, including those by women. To this date, there are six translations of the Qur’an undertaken independently by women, four into English and two into French.1 These translations present two different approaches: one approach aims to present specifically women’s perspectives and the other reflects the mainstream patriarchal norms and values2. The first approach, which is the focus of this paper, can be found in three translations, namely L’Alkoran! (Le Livre par Excellence) (1861) by Fatma-Zaïda, The Light 496

Women’s translations of the Qur’an

of Dawn (2000) by Camille Adams Helminski and The Sublime Qur’an (2007) by Laleh Bakhtiar. To illustrate the key feminist strategies adopted by the three translators, I will briefly discuss their paratexts as a space for asserting Muslim women’s visibility and the translator’s female gender. Then, I will focus on their approaches to the sacred text and highlight some of their subversive, innovative, and creative feminist strategies, such as the insertion of new feminist ideas, feminization of language and re-interpretations of key gender-related terms. For the sake of clarity, I will discuss each translator individually, following the chronological order of publication.

The Qur’an as a source text The Qur’an, the Holy Text of Islam, is believed to have been revealed to the Prophet Mohammed through the Angel Gabriel in the early 7th century (610 AD) in intervals, over a period of 23 years. The term ‘Qur’an’ is derived from the Arabic root word ‘qaraa’ meaning “to recite” or “to read,” which was the first word addressed to the Prophet of Islam. Before the complete version was compiled during the reign of Othman Ibn Affan between 644 and 656 AD, the revelations were transmitted orally or written down by different scribes. In most contemporary editions (known as the Uthmanic Recension), the Qur’an is about 600 pages in length and consists of 114 chapters (surat) which are divided into passages or verses (ayat). These chapters are organized according to their length rather than their chronological order, and they all, except one (sura 9), begin with the formulation Bismillahi ar-Rahmani ar-Raheem, often translated as “In the Name of God, the Most-Merciful, the Compassionate.” This expression has become significant in exploring the gender-egalitarian aspects of the Qur’an, as will be discussed later. In terms of content, the Qur’an deals with both universal matters and temporal and specific historical incidents. Early Muslim scholars divided the Qur’an into two types of chapters: “Meccan” (revealed in the city of Mecca) and “Medinan” (revealed in the city of Medina). Meccan chapters are considered to deal mostly with matters of faith, such as the fundamentals of Islamic dogma and the principles of ethics and religious practice. The Medinan chapters, revealed after the creation of the first Muslim community, deal mostly with the legal, political, and social organization of Muslim society. As a source text, the Qur’an presents various challenges for translation, not only because of its divine origin, but also because of its multi-layered and complex language. The sacred text of Islam was revealed in Arabic, the language of the people who lived in the Arabian Peninsula. However, its literary form is unique because it combines both metrical and non-metrical composition (Abdul-Raof 2001, 37). Unlike Modern Arabic, which has evolved over time, Qur’anic Arabic has remained a fixed language; its archaic, classic, and static nature can make the Holy Book a challenging text to read/translate even for native Arabic speakers. To help access the meaning of the Qur’an, Muslim scholars, interpreters, and translators often rely on the Sunnah and Tafsir. Both supporting texts were developed after the Prophet’s death in order to help believers access the Qur’an. The Sunnah consists of various narratives about the Prophet Mohammed’s life and of statements attributed to him (Hadith). The Tafsir is an exegesis of the Qur’an.3 Both texts were transmitted orally through many Muslim figures before being finally written down predominantly4 by male Muslim scholars. One of the key challenges that emerges here is that Islamic religious institutions such as Al-Azhar consider the Sunnah and Tafsir as paramount references in Qur’an translation. As a result, translations that are not based on these texts are rarely recognized and could even be censored. Islamic feminist scholars of the late 20th century such as Fatima Mernissi (1991a, 1991b, 1996), Amina Wadud (1992), and Asma Barlas (2002) have been very critical of the malecentred nature of medieval supporting texts including the Sunnah and Tafsir. They argue that 497

Rim Hassen

these texts were manipulated by male scholars in order to serve their own interests and they stress the need to verify their accuracy and legitimacy. This raises various questions about the possibilities and difficulties of applying feminist strategies to the sacred text of Islam. Considering the importance given to the notions of accuracy, transparency, and faithfulness in translating religious texts, how can women translators deliver their own perspectives without distorting, transforming or rewriting the source text? What strategies can they adopt in order to make women visible in/through their translations? How can they translate the Qur’an without relying on the Sunnah and Tafsir and without risking censorship?

Fatma-Zaïda: intervention and insertion of feminist ideas Fatma-Zaïda was a Muslim slave and the wife of a Turkish dignitary in the 19th-century Ottoman Empire. According to Madeline Zilfi, slaves in the Ottoman Empire were often acquired through conquest in Europe, around the Black Sea and the Mediterranean. She also points out that slavery was officially configured along religious and geographical lines, which meant that by law Muslims, regardless of their country of origin, could not be reduced to slave status (in Ágoston and Masters 2009, 531). This suggests that Fatma-Zaïda could not have been of Muslim or Turkish origin, but was probably a European captive or a Christian who was sold to be part of a harem, where she converted to Islam. This could explain her knowledge of various European languages, including French and Italian (Sheikh al-Shabab 2003, 32–34). Due to the scarcity of reliable records about Zaïda’s life, writings and other translations, we have to rely on the paratexts of her translation to build a picture of her social and religious background and, more importantly, to determine her reasons for translating the Qur’an, her position as a translator, and the strategies she adopted. The cover of Zaïda’s translation is very simple with minimal decorations. Just underneath the title, we read the translator’s name: Fatma-Zaïda, which could be a pseudonym or the name she adopted after her conversion to Islam. What is striking here is that the translator did not include a male name and chose only two highly symbolic feminine names. The first, Fatma or Fatima is an Arabic name, which means the one kept away from evil, bad character, and forbidden things. It is also the name of the Prophet’s favourite daughter, the only one to survive him. She is an important and powerful figure in Islam with whom the prophet of Islam had a very special relationship. The second name Zaïda, means the “one who adds.” It is not commonly used in Arabic and could be a misspelling of the name Zahida. It could also be a deliberate choice by the translator to distinguish herself and assert her visibility by using a unique name that reflects her role as a translator. Another interesting element about the cover can be found just under the publication details, where we read that this translation is “Propriété du traducteur” [“property of the translator.”] Grammatically correct, it should read “Propriété de la traductrice,” because the translator is a female. This is, nevertheless, a significant and interesting detail, which could have been inserted to protect the translator’s intellectual rights. It could also be a strategy of “appropriating” the text. More revealing and interesting details can be found in the preface, where Zaïda provides some information about the Qur’an and its origins, and then presents her reasons for embarking on this project: J’ai entendu en France, et j’entends au Portugal, de même qu’en Italie; que les femmes sont très malheureuses en Turquie, (O mesdames les européennes, vous nous porteriez bien envie, si vous nous voyiez dans les harems). I heard in France and I hear in Portugal as well as in Italy, that women are very unhappy in Turkey, (O European ladies, you will envy us, if you see us in the harems). (My translation) 498

Women’s translations of the Qur’an

It is interesting that Zaïda frames her translation within Western representations of Islam and uses her work to challenge orientalist perceptions of Muslim women, who are often depicted as subdued, helpless, and passive. As for the translation, Zaïda does not specify whether she translated from the original Arabic text or from other languages. She however reveals that she read, studied and compared various French and Italian translations of the Qur’an and found that they are full of mistakes, inconsistencies, and discrepancies. This presented another reason for her to translate the Qur’an. Interestingly, in her discussion of the resources she read, studied and compared, Zaïda does not refer to any medieval sources such as the Sunnah or Tafsir. In order to challenge Western representations of Muslim women, to emphasize women’s rights and to correct the inconsistencies she found in previous translations of the Qur’an, Zaïda opted to intervene freely in the text. Her interventionist approach is first noticeable in her decision not only to rearrange the Qur’anic chapters in chronological order, but also to modify the number of verses in each sura (chapter). She is in fact, one of the very few Qur’an translators who amended the order of the “Uthmanic Recension.” This interventionist approach allowed Zaïda to insert and add her own feminist thoughts, interpretations, and reforms in various areas such as marriage, divorce, and education. For instance, while the Qur’an encourages education for men and women (39:9; 35:28), Zaïda instructs families to allow young girls to be educated in free schools run and organized by the state (1861, 127–128). She also insists on education for men, as a way of protecting women and ensuring that they are well treated: Comme je ne veux point que les femmes souffrent de la brutalité des hommes, j’ordonne que tout croyant sache lire, écrire, calculer, connaisse la division et la position des pays, afin de se guider dans ses relations de commerce et dans ses voyages, et sache écrire correctement sa langue. La lecture instruit ainsi que les voyages. (1861, 128) As I do not want women to suffer from the brutality of men, I ordain that every believer should learn to read, write, calculate, know division and the position of countries, in order to conduct himself in his trade relations and in his travels and be able to write his language properly. Reading instructs as well as travels. (my translation) Zaïda inserts various other interesting rules such as forbidding men from taking money or gifts from women. Women on the other hand are allowed to accept all that is given to them including gifts and rewards (1861, 122). Another addition, which illustrates Zaïda’s interventionist approach, is the instruction to restrict the number of children men can have with each wife. L’homme est faible dans la souffrance, la femme est plus courageuse;? regardez l’enfanter, hommes! Et taisez-vous dans vos souffrances! La femme, cet être si délicat souffre par vous o hommes! Épargnez-lui le plus possible les horribles douleurs de la maternité; et lorsque vous êtes atteints d’une maladie, souvenez-vous que le plus bel ornement du monde, que le plus gracieux objet du genre humain, souffre vingt fois plus que vous, quand, pour la satisfaction d’un plaisir non modéré, vous lui imposez les tortures de l’enfantement. N’ayez, autant que possible, qu’un enfant de chaque femme. (128) Men are not good at enduring pain, women are more courageous, watch her give birth men! and keep quiet in your suffering! The woman, this highly delicate being, is made to 499

Rim Hassen

suffer by you, o men! Spare her as much as possible the horrible pain of motherhood, and when you are suffering from an illness, remember that the greatest ornament of the world, the most gracious purpose of mankind suffers twenty times more than you, when for the satisfaction of an immoderate desire, you impose on her the torture of childbirth. Do not have, if possible, more than one child with each woman. (my translation) The original Quranic text does not limit the number of children men can have with each wife; however, Zaïda inserted this measure in order to highlight the suffering that motherhood brings to the health of women and to question the view that women’s role is defined by having and raising children. Zaïda’s “one child policy” not only aims to give women more freedom, but also places all responsibility on men who are unable to control their “immoderate desire.” Perhaps one of Zaïda’s most interesting additions is the instruction to castrate those men who trade in female slaves: Exigez, la castration des marchands des femmes. Faites-le, o croyants, et suivez les préceptes du livre sacré; mes promesses sont immuables, et les parvis célestes vous sont destinés. Qui est plus vrai que Moi dans ses paroles. (1861, 140) Require the castration of merchants who deal in female slaves. Do it, O believers, and follow the precepts of the sacred book; my promises are immutable, and the celestial courts are destined to you. Who is truer than Me in his words. (my translation) In this verse, Zaïda imitates the Qur’anic style and introduces the rule of castrating traders who sell female slaves. She makes it a requirement and repeats the order twice. Then, as encouragement, she offers believers attractive rewards for their obedience. Zaïda resorted to this strategy because, in a male-dominated society, such a rule will be very difficult to implement. However, the fact that she invented, introduced and insisted on implementing such a rule illustrates her inventive and creative approach, which is aimed at protecting women from abuse.5 Finally, to achieve her goal of writing back to orientalist perceptions of Muslim women and expressing her perspective, experience, and voice, Zaïda adopted an interventionist strategy, which allowed her to be visible on the book cover, in the preface and in the content of her translation. However, in the process of transforming and appropriating the source text to fit her own feminist agenda, Zaïda may have undermined the credibility, legitimacy, and reception of her own work. The changes she brought to the sacred text were probably too unconventional, subversive and radical for her era. This could explain why her translation, which remains largely unknown, never received the same reception, recognition, and popularity as Denise Masson’s rendition. In fact, Masson is often introduced as the first woman to translate the Qur’an into French, even though Fatma-Zaïda published her version almost one century earlier.

Camille Helminski: challenging patriarchal language and imagery Camille Adams Helminski, an American convert to Islam, is the writer of several books on the history of women in Sufism and the translator of several volumes of Sufi literature into English. Her rendition of the Qur’an, The Light of Dawn: Daily Readings from the Holy Qur’an, is a partial translation, which contains 365 selected verses for daily meditation. There are various feminist 500

Women’s translations of the Qur’an

elements in Helminski’s translation, which are visible in the book cover, the preface, and the translated text. The key element in the cover is the dominant white colour, a symbol of purity, peace, and innocence in Islam. This colour is also believed to be the colour of angels and the beautiful women of Paradise, which could suggest a reference to women and femininity. In the preface, Helminski devotes a major section to discussing the issue of Muslim women’s position in Islam by emphasizing the feminine elements embedded in the Qur’anic message. She writes that: As the Qur’an, the Holy Book of Islam proclaims over and over again at the commencement of each chapter or surah, Bismillahir Rahmanir Raheem . . . in the Name of God, the infinitely Compassionate and Most Merciful . . . this message is coming to us from the compassionate womb of Creation. The root to the words Rahman and Raheem is the word for womb. (2000, x) Helminski’s reference to the expression ‘Rahman’ and ‘Raheem’ is very significant, as these particular expressions have come to represent the gender egalitarian message of the Qur’an. As the translator explains, these terms are derived from the Arabic root ‘Rhm’ meaning the womb, a body part specific to women. Moreover, a number of Muslim scholars, particularly Islamic feminists, are using the origins, the meaning, and the presence of these expressions in every chapter, to argue that gender equality is a central message of the Qur’an. Further in the preface, when discussing the supporting texts, she used in her translation, Helminski reveals that she relied on different sources including previous translations of the Qur’an by two popular translators, namely Yusuf Ali6 and Muhammad Asad. She does not, however, mention any specific classical Islamic religious sources such as the Sunnah or Tafsir. In her approach to the source text, Helminski chose not to intervene freely and to remain as close as possible to the original. She, however, focused on challenging patriarchal language and imagery by avoiding male-oriented language and by using gender-inclusive nouns and pronouns. For instance, in the following examples, in comparison to translations by Saheeh International (Umm Muhammad) (1) and Taheerah Saffarzadeh (2), Helminski (3) consistently avoids exclusionary terms and opts for the gender-inclusive terms “humankind” instead of “man,” and “parent” and “child” instead of “father” and “son”: (1)O mankind, worship your Lord, who created you and those before you, that you become righteous (Saheeh International 1995, 4). (3) O Humankind! Worship your Sustainer, who has created you (Helminski 2000, 2). (2) I swear by this [Makkah] City And you are native of this city And the Father and the Son* Verily, We created man [Adam] in The space [somewhere between the sky and the earth] Does man think that Allah the One [the Ahad] has no power over him? (Saffarzadeh 2006, 1164). (3) I call to witness this land In which you are free to dwell And the bond between parent and child Truly, we have created the human being to labor and struggle (Helminski 2000, 196). 501

Rim Hassen

In addition to disrupting patriarchal language, Helminski shows a clear sensitivity to women’s visibility by adjusting the translated text. For instance, she replaces the masculine word “Lord” by “Sustainer.” Although the Arabic text uses masculine generic nouns and pronouns, Helminski uses the combination “he/she” as well as the generic “he” to refer to human beings and to God. To make explicit to the reader that Allah is beyond gender or genderless, Helminski introduces a new pronoun Hu borrowed from Arabic and given a new gender-neutral meaning in English, as is demonstrated in the following example: Such is God, your Sustainer: there is no god but Hu, the Creator of everything: then worship Him/Her alone – for it is He/She who has everything in His/Her care. No vision can encompass Him/Her, but He/She encompasses all human vision (2000, 27). Helminski’s use of the pronoun Hu and the combination of the Arabic “Huwa” [he] and “Hiya” [she] to refer to God can be viewed as an inventive and a significant feminist strategy, which highlights the role of language in creating gender hierarchies. Her strategy also mirrors the fact that the idea of God as male is being criticized by many feminist theologians, who argue that the masculine conception of God has been created by and in the language of a male patriarchy, which has, in turn, contributed to the marginalization and subordination of women. Moreover, Helminski’s use of the pronoun Hu shares similarities with Mary Orovan and Marge Piercy’s and many other feminists’ attempts to replace the generic “he” by alternative inclusive pronouns. Similar techniques are employed in Bible translations, as Judith Plaskow points out: in order to re-establish an egalitarian image of God, many feminists have adopted an aggressive program for replacing masculine pronouns for God with gender‑neutral or even explicitly feminine forms. God is now referred to as “She,” “She/He,” “S/He,” or by alternating “He” and “She” in different paragraphs (Plaskow 1990, 141–142). Finally, Helminski’s approach demonstrates that it is possible to use feminist strategies in the sacred text without transforming or rewriting its content. Her translation is, however, incomplete and does not deal with all the content of the Qur’anic text, especially specific gender-related verses.7

Laleh Bakhtiar: re-interpretation of gender-related verses Laleh Bakhtiar is an American author and translator. Like Helminski, she has devoted much of her work to the role of women in Islam and Islamic history. In her translation of the Qur’an, her focus on women’s perspective is first noticeable in the bright and colourful flower motif of the book’s cover. It is very rare to find flower motifs on the cover of Qur’an translations, which makes Bakhtiar’s translation stand out from other Qur’an translations, including those by other women. More importantly, these motifs could be a reference to the translator’s gender and to women’s position in Islam. Even though they do not carry the same religious importance as the colour, white, flower motifs carry a religious significance, especially in Iranian culture, where flowers and roses convey ideas of both spiritual and physical refreshment and imply heaven. For instance, flowers in Iranian carpets imply abundance and an ever-blooming garden that a person might enter after death. The roses can also symbolize divine perfection and beauty, and according to some Islamic traditions, the beautiful women of paradise resemble the rose (DelPlato 2002, 138). When we read Bakhtiar’s introduction, her concern with gender issues in Islam becomes more apparent. After introducing herself and her work, she dedicates a major part to highlighting the problem of male bias in the interpretation and translation of the Qur’an and emphasizes 502

Women’s translations of the Qur’an

the lack of women’s perspectives throughout Islamic history. When she lists the various supporting materials she used in her work, Bakhtiar reveals that she relied mostly on dictionaries and previous translations, but does not show great reliance on classical religious Islamic sources. Moreover, in her approach to the text, Bakhtiar adopts a very similar strategy to Helminski’s, as she does not intervene freely and remains as close as possible to the source text. She also pays a lot of attention to the impact of patriarchal language on the reader and employs various strategies to avoid male-oriented terms. The following examples illustrate how she avoids the use of exclusionary and male-centred words such as “man,” “son,” and “father”: (4) Oh humanity! Worship your Lord Who created you And those that were before you So that perhaps you would be God-fearing (Bakhtiar 2007, 3). (4) No! I swear by this land; You are a lodger in this land; By one who was your parent, And was procreated Truly We created the human being in trouble. What? Assumes he that no one has power over him? (Bakhtiar 2007, 697). Bakhtiar does not use gender-inclusive pronouns in her translation, probably because she introduces an interesting strategy to make the feminine visible in the text by inserting the letter (f ) after feminine words and pronouns. She justifies this strategy by explaining that “when words in a verse refer directly to a woman or women or wife or wives and the corresponding pronouns such as (they, them, those), I placed an (f ) after the word to indicate that the word refers to the feminine gender specifically” (2007, xli). This technique, a form of compensation, not only allows the translator to make up for the linguistic losses between the gender-marked Arabic and the English language, but also to make the feminine visible in the text. It is worth pointing out that the strategy of inserting the letter (f ) was first used by Mohamed Ahmed and Samira Ahmed, a father and daughter team, who published their translation of the Qur’an into English in 1994.8 Perhaps, Bakhtiar’s most innovative contribution lies in her re-interpretation of verse 4:34 or the Wife Beating verse, which occurs in chapter an-Nisa (women). This verse is one of the most controversial and contested verses in the Qur’an because of its implications for women and gender roles in Islam. There are several key gender-related words in this verse, which are qawwamuna, qanitat, nushuz and idhribuhunn. Qawwamuna is the plural form of the singular word qa’im, which in Arabic can be used as an adjective or a noun. Qa’im means “in charge of,”“responsible for,”“provider,” and “carer.” Qanitat is an adjective in plural feminine form, it has no equivalent meaning in English, but it can convey the meaning of religiously obedient or devout. The term nushuz is a singular noun; it conveys the meaning of rebellion, ill will, disobedience, deliberate bad behaviour, desertion, and infidelity. Finally, idhribuhunna, a verb from the root word daraba has numerous meanings including “to travel,” “to get out,” “to strike,” “to beat,” “to set up,” and “to give examples.” The Wife Beating verse covers two main themes: gender roles and husbands’ right to discipline their wives. Concerning the first theme, conservative scholars have argued that the first half of the verse refers to male superiority over women. They interpret the word qawwamuna as a divine declaration of men’s superiority over women. Sayyid Abul A’La Maududi, a highly respected traditional commentator, explains that this verse affirms that “man is governor, director, protector, and manager of the affairs of women” (1967, 333). With regards to the second 503

Rim Hassen

theme of this verse, conservative commentators argue that women should be obedient to their husbands. They read the word qanitat as obedience to the husband. Because qanitat is understood as obedience to husbands, the word nushuz has been interpreted as a wife’s ill will and a deliberate, persistent breach of her marital obligations. Moreover, nushuz, or a wife’s disobedience, is a punishable offence. That is why conservative scholars interpret the word “daraba” as “to beat” thus giving husbands permission to physically punish their wives. This is how Bakhtiar translates this verse: Men are supporters of wives Because God has given some of them an advantage Over others And because they spend of their wealth So the ones (f ) who are in accord with morality Are the ones (f ) who are morally obligated, The ones (f ) who guard the unseen Of what God has kept safe. But those (f ) whose resistance you fear, Then admonish them (f ) And abandon them (f ) in their sleeping place Then go away from them (f ); And if they (f ) obey you Surely look not for any way against them (f ); (Bakhtiar 2007, 94) (my emphasis) Bakhtiar seems to have creatively studied and experimented with the key terms of the Wife Beating verse to produce a women-centred interpretation. She opts to translate the word qawwamuna as “supporters,” rather than “governors,” which suggests that men should provide financial and moral support instead of governing or controlling women’s lives. In the absence of an equivalent term for the word qanitat, Bakhtiar translated it as “morally obligated” to avoid the meaning of obedience and to exclude any reference to husbands. She translates the word nushuz as “resistance” rather than “arrogance” or “ill conduct.” The key and most significant contribution is the translation of the word daraba as “to go away.” This translation challenges the patriarchal view that men have the right to discipline and to punish their wives. In her article “The Sublime Quran: The misinterpretation of Chapter 4 Verse 34,” Bakhtiar elaborates further on her choices and even uses the Sunnah to justify her translation of the word daraba. She writes that: If the interpretation of 4:34 as ‘beat them (f )’ was accurate, this would mean that the Prophet did not carry out God’s command. This in itself suggests that ‘beat them’ is a misinterpretation. He clearly believed that it was not within his Sunnah to do such a thing. Therefore, he showed by his behavior that 4:34 and the use of the word daraba means ‘go away from them (f )’ and let the emotions subside, rather than ‘to beat.’ (2011, 433, emphasis by Bakhtiar) Bakhtiar’s translation divided opinions between opponents and supporters among Muslim scholars, including at Al-Azhar University. Surprisingly, her work was also criticized by female scholars such as Omima Abou-Bakr, a professor at the University of Qatar, who disagrees with Bakhtiar’s translation and even expressed her criticism in a US televised debate in Everywoman broadcast in April 2007. Perhaps, Bakhtiar’s main opponent was Dr Mohamed Abdel-Moneim, a 504

Women’s translations of the Qur’an

professor of interpretation at the Al-Azhar University and the former President of the Al-Azhar Scientific Committee, who described her new interpretation as part of a “Western conspiracy” to damage the image of Islam and an attempt to justify the stereotypes and misconceptions accusing Islam of oppressing women (Mohamed 2007).

Conclusion Fatma-Zaïda, Camille Adams Helminski, and Laleh Bakhtiar adopted various feminist strategies to challenge patriarchal readings and translations of the Qur’an. Zaïda’s interventionist strategy allowed her to insert her own vision of Muslim women’s rights and position in society. What is interesting is that Zaïda, which means the “one who adds,” made the decision to add innovative, unconventional, and sometimes radical rules, not only to challenge Western perceptions of Muslim women, but also to give her feminine voice credibility, authority, and legitimacy in a male-dominated society. In doing so, Zaïda defied conventional norms, which in turn might have undermined the reception and acceptance of her unique contribution. Helminski, on the other hand, followed a different approach and remained very close to the original. Her translation was especially concerned with the idea that women were silenced, made invisible and alienated by patriarchal language. She therefore focused on challenging malecentred language and imagery. In addition to using gender-inclusive nouns and pronouns to refer to Allah, Helminski introduced a new pronoun to stress the idea that God is genderless. These strategies allowed the translator to question conventional language by using an existing Arabic pronoun in a new way and creating a new meaning in English to reverse and downplay the male imagery associated with God. Similarly, Bakhtiar adopted innovative feminist strategies to make the feminine visible in the text and to challenge the use of male-centred words. The insertion of the letter (f ) is a very interesting strategy, which allowed the translator to solve the problem of reflecting the gendered nature of the Arabic text and to make it clear to the reader that the text concerns women. Bakhtiar’s main innovative contribution lies in her reinterpretation of gender-related terms in light of women’s experiences. Her translation of the Wife Beating verse not only discovers new meanings but also questions male-bias in the interpretation and translation of the Qur’an. Finally, the two English translations (Helminski and Bakhtiar) demonstrate that it is possible to insert feminist ideas, challenge patriarchal norms and stress women’s visibility without distorting, transforming or rewriting the source text. What is also revealing is that, even though Zaïda, Helminski, and Bakhtiar have different social, cultural and religious backgrounds, they adopted very similar strategies (1) they all included feminine elements in their book covers; (2) they all highlighted the issue of Muslim women’s position in their prefaces and introductions; (3) and in listing the various supporting materials they used, the translators did not show great reliance on classical religious Islamic sources. These shared strategies made it possible to read the Qur’an from a woman’s perspective and revealed the possibilities of social change by including women in Islamic knowledge production.

Future directions This chapter discusses how translation of the Quran could provide a space for women to explore alternative readings of the Sacred Text and to introduce various strategies to challenge malecentred interpretations. However, more research is needed to determine whether women have translated the Quran into other European and non-European languages. This will allow us to compare and contrast translations from different cultural, religious and linguistic backgrounds. 505

Rim Hassen

It will also help build a better understanding of women’s involvement in the translation of the Quran and the various strategies they employed. Another important thread would be to investigate the reception of Quran translations by women and to study their impact on audiences in different parts of the world.

Suggested reading Barlas, Asma. 2002. “Believing Women” in Islam: unreading patriarchal interpretation of the Qur’ān. Austin: University of Texas Press. Barlas discusses how interpretations of the Qur’an have, for centuries, been manipulated to serve patriarchal ideology. She therefore stresses the need for women to interpret religious texts for themselves. Shaaban, Bouthaina. 1995. The Muted Voices of Women Interpreters, in Mahnaz Afkhami, ed., Faith and Freedom: Women’s Human Rights in the Muslim World. London, New York: IB Tauris Publishers, 61–77. Shaaban gives an insight into Muslim women’s contribution to the interpretation of Islamic religious texts and discusses how their voices have been deliberately marginalized. Wadud, Amina. 1992. Qur’an and Woman. Rereading the Sacred Text from a Woman’s Perspective. Kuala Lumpur: Penerbit Fajar Bakti Sdn. Wadud presents a woman-sensitive reading of the Quranic text by challenging patriarchal interpretations of key gender-related verses.

Notes 1 I am only concerned with French and English translations for two main reasons: first, my limited knowledge of other European and non-European languages, and second, the lack of records about women’s contribution in Qur’an translations. More research is needed to determine whether there are more translations of the Qur’an by women into other languages. 2 Three out of the six translations of the Qur’an by women are not discussed in this paper because the translators seem to conform to conservative norms and do not employ any feminist strategies to challenge male-centred readings of the source text. These translations are: Denise Masson. 1967. Le Coran. Paris: La Pléiade, Gallimard; Saheeh International. 1995–1997. The Qur’an, Arabic Text with Corresponding English Meaning. Riyadh: Abul Qasim Publishing House; Taheereh Saffarzadeh. 2006. The Holy Qur’an: Translation with Commentary. Tehran: Alhoda. 3 Tafsir or exegesis according to Abdul-Raof could be divided into six main categories of exegesis: Linguistic Exegesis, which is concerned with the grammar, syntactic analysis, and rhetoric of the Qur’an. Philosophical and Rationalistic Exegesis is concerned with explaining and refuting philosophers’ views and arguments on religious matters. Historical Exegesis deals with Qur’anic parables and the history of nations and people mentioned in the Qur’an. Intertextual Exegesis attempts to interpret the Qur’an through the Qur’an or Hadith. Jurisprudence exegesis studies jurisprudence matters and the different views of Muslim theologians. Finally, Independent Judgment Exegesis which supports interpretation of the Qur’an based on one’s own judgment and personal point of view (Abdul-Raof 2001, 175). 4 Some Muslim scholars and writers such as Assia Djebar, Laleh Bakhtiar, and Fatima Mernissi are investigating the possibility that Muslim women (using pseudonyms or their real names) might have participated in collecting and writing down Qura’nic recitations and traditions. 5 For further discussion on Fatma-Zaïda’s translation see Hassen 2018, 211–223. 6 Abdullah Yusuf Ali is an Indian scholar, who lived in England, where he died in 1952. His English translation of the Qur’an is one of most widely distributed in English speaking countries. 7 For further discussion on Helminski’s translation strategies see Hassen 2011, 221–230. 8 Their translation The Koran, Complete Dictionary and Literal Translation (1994) is only available online.

References Abdul-Raof, Hussein. 2001. Qur’an Translation: Discourse, Texture and Exegesis. Surrey: Curzon. Ágoston, Gábor and Bruce Alan Masters, eds. 2009. Encyclopedia of the Ottoman Empire. New York: Facts on File. 506

Women’s translations of the Qur’an

Ahmed, Mohamed and Samira Ahmed. 1994. The Koran, Complete Dictionary and Literal Translation [pdf]. Vancouver. Available at: www.koranlitranslateandtheconspiracy.com/M.%20Ahmed%20Translation. pdf [Accessed 2 Feb. 2018]. Bakhtiar, Laleh. 2007. The Sublime Quran. Chicago: Kazi Publications. Bakhtiar, Laleh. 2011. The Sublime Quran: The Misinterpretation of Chapter 4 Verse 34. European Journal of Women’s Studies, 431–439. DelPlato, Joan. 2002. Multiple Wives, Multiple Pleasures: Representing the Harem, 1800–1875. Madison and Teaneck: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press. Fatma-Zaïda. 1861. L’Alkoran! (Le Livre par Excellence). Lisbonne: Imprimerie de la Société Typographique Franco-Portugaise. Hassen, Rim. 2011. English Translation of the Quran by Women: The Challenges of ‘Gender Balance’ in and Through Language. MonTI, 3, 221–230. Hassen, Rim. 2018. From a Slave to a Translator: Conflicts and Mediation in Fatma-Zaïda’s Translation of the Quran, in Diana Roig-Sanz and Reine Meylaerts, eds., Literary Translation and Cultural Mediators in ‘Peripheral’ Cultures. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 211–223. Helminski, Camille Adams. 2000. The Light of Dawn: Daily Readings from the Holy Qur’an. Boston: Shambhala. Masson, Denise. 1967. Le Coran. Paris: La Pléiade, Gallimard. Maududi, Sayyid Abul A’La. 1967. The Meaning of the Qur’an. Lahore: Islamic Publications. Mehanna, Ahmad Ibrahīm. 1978. Dirāsa hawl tarjamat al-Qur’ān al-Karim [On Translating the Noble Qur’ān]. Cairo: Al-Sha’b Publications. Mernissi, Fatima. 1991a. Woman and Islam: An Historical and Theological Enquiry. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Mernissi, Fatima. 1991b. The Veil and the Male Elite: A Feminist Interpretation of Women’s Rights in Islam. New York: Addison Wesley Publishing Company. Mernissi, Fatima. 1996. Women’s Rebellion & Islamic Memory. London and New Jersey: Zed Books. Mohamed, Abdel-Moneim. 2007. Tabayun ara ulama al-Azhar tujaha Tafsir ameriki be al-englizia lilQur’an bishan al-mara [Al-Azhar Scholars Differ on an American English Interpretation of the Qur’an About Women]. Asharq Al-Awsat Online. Available at: https://aawsat.com/english [Accessed 25 Jan. 2008]. Plaskow, Judith. 1990. Standing Again at Sinai: Judaism from a Feminist Perspective. San Francisco: Harper & Row. Sheikh Al-Shabab, Omar. 2003. The Evolution of Translation Culture: Translating the Holy Quran into French. Language & Translation, 15, 21–48.

507

38 Translation and women’s health in post-reform China A case study of the 1998 Chinese translation of Our Bodies, Ourselves Boya Li

Introduction This chapter aims to uncover the role translation has played in the advancement of feminist knowledge about women’s bodies and health in China after socio-economic reforms were introduced in 1978. Since the late 1960s, women’s bodies have been a site of feminist politics in North America and some European countries as part of Second Wave feminism. During the women’s health movement that emerged in the 1960s and the 1970s, women criticized the medical system’s ignorance of women’s needs, pressed for legal access to contraception and abortion, started women-centred clinics, and advocated women’s control over their bodies (Turshen 2007, 2–3). Women’s health movements focus on women’s empowerment and agency in (self-)care and emphasize the importance of praxis and activism to feminism. Literature in feminist translation studies has begun to look at the role translation plays in mainstreaming women-centred, feminist concepts of sexual and reproductive health for women in different parts of the world. This chapter presents a case study on the Chinese translation of Our Bodies, Ourselves [OBOS], a book on self-care written by American women in the early 1970s. By examining the intentionality of Chinese translators and their translation choices, this study shows how the Chinese translation can be seen as a socially engaged translation, and what translation can and cannot do for feminism.

Historical context In the late 1970s, Deng Xiaopeng implemented the Open Door Policy that encouraged foreign companies and capital to enter the Chinese market, and changed China’s planned economy to a market economy. Since then, Chinese society has been undergoing major transformations. The opening up of the market gradually led to a series of changes in Chinese people’ lives on the economic, social, and cultural levels, and Chinese feminists started to think about the problem of gender inequality that Chinese women face in a time of transition. Given the influx of translated foreign-language texts into the local book market, Western feminist classics such as The 508

Translation and women’s health in China

Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir or 第二性 – 女人 (The Second Sex–Women) (Sang and Nan 1986), 第二性 (The Second Sex) (1986 Zheng; Shu 2009), 第二性 (全译本) (The Second Sex: Complete Translation) (Tao 1998), and 第二性女人 (Women the Second Sex) in Chinese (Tang 2009), The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan or 女性的奥秘 (The Feminine Mystique) in Chinese (Cheng et al. 1988; reprint in 2005), and The Female Eunuch by Germaine Greer or 女太监 (The Female Eunuch) in Chinese (Ouyang 1990, reprint in 2011) were translated into Chinese. Women’s research institutes were established at different universities across China, and these created a space for research activities by Chinese feminist scholars. Translation activities, including workshops and seminars organized by Chinese scholars, foreign feminists in China and overseas Chinese feminists, became important to the dissemination of feminist thought in Chinese academia. The Fourth World Conference on Women (FWCW) in Beijing in 1995 was a unique opportunity for women’s rights advocates and NGOs from all over the world to come to China to exchange ideas. In order to reduce communication barriers and to bridge the terminological gap between China and the West, Chinese women organized workshops on how to translate Western feminism into China (e.g. Ge and Jolly 2001). The concept of reproductive health was first introduced into the social sciences in 1990s China, and received attention from government agencies for public health, maternal and infant health and family planning, women’s organizations, and social sciences researchers (Zheng 2011/1986, 4). Under the influence of transnational feminist movements, women’s reproductive/ sexual health, rights, and empowerment became the focus of many international conferences on women, population, development, and public health in the 1980s and 1990s. The ideas around women’s health and empowerment travelled to China through international conferences and the collaborative projects between Chinese and foreign agencies focused on women’s health, population, and development. More specifically, two international events, the International Conference on Population in Cairo (ICPC) in 1994 (see McIntoch and Finkel 1995) and the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing in 1995, had a major impact on the advocacy for individual reproductive rights and women’s health in 1990s China. All these created a good environment for translating women’s health texts, and made the travel of OBOS to China possible.

Critical issues and topics The scholarly literature on feminist translation used to focus on how feminist translators ‘take back’ literature by challenging misogynist attitudes in language (Flotow 1997). For example, when Suzanne Jill Levine translated work by Guillermo Cabrera Infante, whose writing seemed sexist and paternalistic to her, she changed the wording of the text to undermine its implication that women are willing rape victims (Flotow, 26–27). More recently, the scholarship has extended its scope and turned to the impact of gender on what gets translated, why certain texts are translated, how they are translated, and disseminated and etc. (Alvstad and López 2017, 4). Early scholarship on feminist translation has recently been seen as too narrow and even Eurocentric, for not addressing the unequal power relations between the Global North and the Global South, or how feminists in the Global South mediate feminist thought developed in the West (e.g. Slavova and Phoenix 2011; Spivak 1992/2004; Susam-Sarajeva 2006). Research on the translation and circulation of women’s health texts such as the various translations of Our Bodies, Ourselves points to the issues of localization and culturally sensitive adaptation of the book during its travels. Some translators found it hard to find a positive vocabulary in their mother tongue for translating women’s sexuality, while others deemed some of the book’s discussions to be too US-specific and thus not useful for their target readers (Davis 2007). In order to make the book accessible and useful for readers in a new cultural context, its translation 509

Boya Li

has often involved far more than finding linguistic equivalences. In the case of health feminism travelling to China, it is thus important to examine how the Chinese translators have read and adapted US discourses about women’s health and sexuality.

Current contributions and research Translation and women’s health in the Chinese context “Translation and gender” is a relatively new subject in Chinese translation studies. Academic papers in Chinese translation studies tend to be prescriptive and mainly concerned with setting up guidelines for translators, and it is not until recently that a growing body of literature – including a large number of dissertations and theses – has begun to engage with feminist translation theories (Yu 2015, 35). However, most studies of women and translation in Chinese academia focus on literary translation, and the lack of work on the translation and circulation of women’s health texts in China accounts for a sizeable gap in current literature. Only very recently has some literature in China begun to address gender politics in the production of knowledge on women’s sexual/reproductive health. Weiyi Rong (2000) criticizes the state of sexology in Chinese academia as paternalistic since it tends to exclude women and women’s sexuality from the discussion. Pei et al. (2007) looked at the development of sexology in contemporary China and found that while Chinese sexology had become more interested in the social configuration of sex-related issues, it lacked a critical feminist perspective. Compared to mainland China, there seems to be more research on body politics and women’s health in Taiwan. For instance, Hsiu-yun Wang (2007, 2017) has done work on gender politics in the production of women’s health manuals in Taiwan since the 1970s, and found that translated texts from Japan and the US had certain influences on the formation of popular discourses about women’s health and self-care in Taiwan. More specifically, these translated texts helped reconfigure sex education for women and girls in 1970s Taiwan through the lens of Western sciences and medicine (Wang 2017). However, these studies did not further explore the linguistic aspects of women’s health text translation. Nor did they pay close attention to the people who translated and disseminated these texts. We have not learnt anything about how things change and shift during the translation process or about Chinese translators as agents in the process. Given this lack of interest, it is not surprising that not much has been written on translating OBOS into Chinese. In mainland China, a paper by Xueyang Chen and Wenpei Tang (2018) refers to the history of OBOS in the US and briefly mentions three Chinese translations. But the authors do not further discuss how word choices and rhetorical strategies of the translator(s) may have changed the book. However, at the 2012 Annual Conference on Sociology in Taiwan, Hsiu-yun Wang (2012) has presented work on rhetorical strategies used by the translator in translating OBOS In this paper, Wang examined the linguistic shifts in a ‘pirated’ Chinese translation of OBOS produced in Taiwan in the 1970s, a translation that was not done by feminist or women’s health advocacy groups, but by a women’s magazine. After a close textual analysis, Wang argues that the feminist message of the translated book was ‘toned down’ by the translators’ rhetorical strategies. For example, the title of the book was changed from Our Bodies, Ourselves to “Your Body, Yourself ” (妳的身體和妳自己), from first person plural to second person singular. This kind of change also happens in the chapter on birth control. According to Wang, this type of rhetorical strategy frames the reader as a patient who is isolated and authority-abiding, and thus contradicts the American book’s intention of empowering women through organized feminism. Moreover, the American book’s discussions of rape, abortion, and pregnancy were deleted from the translation, because they ran counter to dominant narratives 510

Translation and women’s health in China

about women’s sexuality and reproduction in the local society. These changes explain why this Taiwanese book “was not a feminist success story” (2012, 9). Wang’s work shows that translator’s interference has a great impact on how well a feminist message is carried forward in the translation. It follows that the background and intentions of the translator(s) need to be studied in order to find out why they made certain translation decisions. In her monograph on the travel of OBOS, Davis (2007) acknowledges that feminist groups and women’s NGOs have played an indispensable role in translating and domesticating the book, and the American authors have ensured that only women’s groups translate this book, as a way to protect the book from being exploited and appropriated by commercial publishers. Thus, the intentions and backgrounds of translators seem to determine whether the translation carries on the feminist tone of the American book. The agents of translation also play a role in transnational feminism. For example, a study by Dongchao Min (2017) presents an analysis of a reproductive health advocacy NGO in 1990s China and its role in “translating” health feminism into China following the Open Door Policy. Min found that the NGO played a major role in mainstreaming women-centred notions of reproductive health in China at a time when there was no such notion as “reproductive health” (2017, 100). Members of the NGO carried out community-based research on women’s reproductive health in rural China. In this way, they ‘translated’ Western feminist theories into research and practice in the local Chinese context. Although Min’s research does not focus on translation as textual transfer, she suggests that translators are agents who make the passage of ideas possible.

Case study of the 1998 Chinese translation of OBOS Methods In order to find out more about how translation solutions weaken or strengthen the feminist message of the book, this chapter takes a descriptive approach to examining what has changed in the translation when compared against the American book (see Toury 1995; Hermans 1985, 1999, for more information about descriptive translation studies). However, focusing exclusively on the translation product does not offer full insight into the process or how the intentionality of translators can make a difference. Thus, in order to find out more about what happened during the translation, I reached out to people who took part in the translation and interviewed the person who initiated and coordinated the 1998 Chinese translation of OBOS. Liu Bohong is deputy director of the Women’s Studies Institute of China at Griffith University (Our Bodies Ourselves: Information Inspires Action, n.d.) and also teaches at the Chinese Women’s University in Beijing. She initiated the 1998 Chinese translation having learnt about it at a Women’s Studies conference, and she served as the coordinator of translation project. My interview with her reveals many things that are “hidden” behind the translation and her testimonial serves as an interesting complement to the findings in the textual analysis.

Findings: socially engaged feminist translation and its “power” to change perspectives on Chinese women’s health OBOS, originally published in the USA in the early 1970s, was first brought to the attention of Chinese researchers during a seminar on the history of Western feminism at the University of Tianjin in 1993. The book was recommended by overseas Chinese scholars as worth translating. For Chinese feminist scholar-activists, OBOS provided a new approach to women’s health issues by extending beyond medical studies. Its approach of empowering women by educating them 511

Boya Li

about their bodies was also refreshing to Chinese feminists. Thus, a Chinese women’s NGO called “Chinese Women’s Health Network” (中国妇女健康网络) applied for funding from the US-based Ford Foundation to translate OBOS into Chinese. A textual analysis of the translation shows that the Chinese translators used certain strategies to make the book more culturally sensitive for Chinese readers. For instance, in the chapter on Sexuality, “masturbation” is translated as “self-consolation” (自慰) rather than the more popular Chinese term “hand lewdness” (手淫). In a footnote, the translators explain that they made this decision because masturbation is not about “lewdness” but sexual autonomy, and thus invokes a sense of agency for women (Boston Women’s Health Book Collective, Liu (Chinese translation), 1998, 119). In doing so, they also de-stigmatize masturbation in the target social-cultural context. However, changes made by the translators do not always strengthen the book’s positive attitudes towards sex and women’s sexuality. For example, the chapter on homosexuality is completely deleted, along with certain excerpts in chapters on sex education and prostitution. In the section on masturbation, despite the fact that translators have added notes to de-stigmatize this notion, many details on how women have experienced masturbation and the different forms the act can take are deleted, while an instruction that cautions the reader not to over masturbate is kept as an abrupt and overpowering statement that comes at the end. Another example is the changes made to an image (see Figures 38.1 and 38.2). Figure 38.1 is the original one, demonstrating how different contraceptive methods work. Figure 38.2 is the one from the Chinese translation. The original image shows the whole bodies of a couple in sexual intercourse. What is interesting about this image is that it shows not only how contraception works, but also the affective and intimate aspects of sex, and thus is kept consistent with the book’s emphasis on viewing sexuality positively. However, in the Chinese translation, the image is cropped from the waist of the couple, so that the elements of physical intimacy are sanitized. These changes raise some doubts on how positive the Chinese translation actually is towards sex education, and seem to run counter to the way the translators try to de-stigmatize sexuality in the earlier example.

Figure 38.1 Original OBOS image in the US version 512

Translation and women’s health in China

Figure 38.2 Modified OBOS image in the 1998 Chinese translation

These paradoxes in the translation strategies foreshadow tensions that existed behind the production of the book. The interview with Liu Bohong revealed these tensions, notably power relations between editors/publishers and the translators which affected the actual translation. In the first place, the Chinese translation group had to find a publisher who was willing to produce the translation. They encountered a strong conservatism in the publishing industry towards sexually and politically sensitive texts. Publishers were generally unwilling to publish a book focused on gender politics. One publisher turned them down because they deemed the book “too political.” In 1980s–1990s China, publishers were held legally responsible for the translations they published, and thus they often acted as agents of censorship, mostly on sexually and politically explicit material (Yu 2015). Thus, even when the Chinese translators found a more open-minded publisher willing to publish the book, they had to fight for the book not to be sanitized. A variety of negotiation strategies were used, including comparing the book to birth planning brochures produced in China to justify its legitimacy as a sex education text. However, concessions had to be made, which explains the paradoxical translation strategies discussed earlier. In the interview, Liu said she had to argue with the editor about very specific little details in the book over whether they were acceptable in a published book in China at that time. She used the example of the cropped image of human anatomy to show how the translation was affected by cultural differences between China and the US. She framed the translator cropping the image as a concession to the demand of editors and publishers to sanitize erotic elements. Thus, it seems that while the Chinese translators were trying to popularize women-centred 513

Boya Li

views on sexual health, they still needed to fit into the “master narratives” of what is acceptable and not acceptable, which affected the ability of the Chinese translation to advocate positive views of women’s sexuality. Moreover, the translators were not a homogeneous group; this group consisted of people from diverse backgrounds. Some of them were literary translators, some were researchers in humanities and social sciences, and others were physicians and medical experts. At the beginning of the project they all had different understandings of how women’s health should be approached. The translation process thus created a unique space for dialogue that reflected the different ideologies of the translators. For example, the male doctors involved in the project translated the book’s references to “women” as “patients.” However, feminists in the group rejected this translation, because the use of the term “patients” in certain circumstances medicalizes women’s life experiences such as pregnancy and childbirth, and the medicalization of women’s bodies is one of the most important criticisms that OBOS has made of the medical system. Thus, translating OBOS is about vitalizing a women-centred framework of analysis on women’s health, which was absent in 1990s China. Despite the constraints under which they worked and the divergent opinions among the translators on the use of language on women’s health, the Chinese translators took action to maximize the positive effects of the book on readers. The publication of the book is not the end of story – they were also concerned with the potential impact of the book on local gender and health politics. Unhappy about the publisher’s demand to delete the chapter on lesbianism from the Chinese book, the translation group produced an underground translation that included this chapter. This underground version was not for sale in bookstores, but disseminated among Chinese universities and gay rights NGOs. The 1998 Chinese translation of OBOS was quite a socially engaged activity. The Chinese translators worked under the constraints of the local system and negotiated its parameters to make the passage of health feminism into China possible. However, the group failed to produce a second translation more focused on Chinese women’s own experiences (c.f. Plafker 1998). Besides the fact that most of the translators were volunteers and thus could not devote themselves to a second lengthy project, Liu also expressed doubts about the usefulness of continuing the translation project. While she acknowledged the importance of women’s empowerment through collective knowledge creation and sharing as in the OBOS project, she argued that it is not as useful in the Chinese context. Liu sees the realm of health research and services as a domain reserved for the Chinese government, while women’s NGOs do not have the capacities or the resources to improve women’s health conditions on the larger scale. Thus, it is more urgent to produce knowledge on gender and women’s health that can translate into policy than empowering women individually, and more useful to produce knowledge with the clear purpose of improving the delivery of social services by the government. While this is a rather simplistic explanation why a second translation of OBOS would not be useful in China, it reveals the challenges inherent in trying to apply a feminist praxis developed under one social system to another system. Liu and the China Women’s Health Network’s solution was to move away from the community-based approach of the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective, and to focus more on research-based work that produces knowledge on women and public health in the Chinese context. While an inquiry into why Chinese NGOs are not resourceful enough to spread health feminism is beyond the scope of this study, these findings reveal that the usefulness, the possibilities for dissemination, and the readability of travelling feminism must be considered in line with the structure of the social system at the receiving end. In conclusion, the 1998 Chinese translation demonstrates the gender awareness of Chinese feminists working on women’s health issues in 1990s China. It may be seen as an example of 514

Translation and women’s health in China

how translators act as activists, and how they use translation to promote changes in the Chinese society by mainstreaming women-centred notions of health (c.f. Baker 2013). However, the feminist scholar-activists who took part in the translation also claimed that there are limits to translating feminism. More specifically, the grass-roots, community-based approach of advocating women’s health did not spread on a large scale in China as it did in the US. In this sense, this particular “way of doing” health feminism seems less translatable than women-centred knowledge on health.

Future directions The “untranslatability” of community-based health feminism in OBOS into 1990s China raises questions about how useful travelling feminism can be. This has both theoretical and practical implications for feminist translation studies. It has been said that China’s sociopolitical structure is largely premised on a collectivist ideology, which reserves the round of health research for the Chinese government (Liu et al. 2009, 531). This may be why the Chinese Women’s Health Network gave up the follow-up project and opted for more collaborative projects with the government on women’s health. Thus, future research might focus on how to make translated texts more easily distributable, useful, and readable in a context such as present-day China. Moreover, although this study is focused largely on the linguistic aspects of translation, the findings suggest that translating feminism is not only about linguistic transfer. To make women-centred approaches to health useful in China, the translators themselves were transformed as some of them learnt to see women’s health differently; in the end they continued their work not through interlingual translation, but by conducting research on public health and making women-centred notions of health accessible and understandable for Chinese policymakers. This suggests that the notion of translation implies all kinds of efforts that will help move ideas and let them come to life in a new geographical, social, and cultural context. As Min’s study on the role of reproductive health NGOs indicates, agents of translation include not only translators, but also actors who facilitate intercultural exchanges and communications. Lastly, the numbers and types of health manuals have multiplied in the Chinese book market since the 1998 Chinese translation of OBOS. In the early 2000s, the SARS epidemic created a growing demand for popular health manuals (Li 2003). How the proliferation of such popular discourses on health and self-care affect the society’s conceptualization of women’s bodies and health is worth investigating. Moreover, what role translation has played in this process – e.g. the availability of other translated Western health manuals and their impact on the production of local texts – also needs to be studied and discussed.

Further reading Du, Jie. 1999. The Gender Perspective of ‘Women and Care’ and ‘Mechanisms of the Improvement of Women’s Status. Funv Yanjiu Luncong ( Journal of Chinese Women’s Studies), 2, 49–52. This article provides a comprehensive explanation of how women’s health relates to wider issues of social development and gender relations. Liu, Bohong. 1998. Translator’s Preface. Translated by Zhengping Liu, in American Women’s Self-care Classic: Our Bodies, Ourselves. Beijing: Zhishi Chubanshe, 1–4. The Translator’s Preface for the 1998 Chinese version provides useful information on the domestic social and historical context of the translation, and explains the feminist agenda of the translation group. 515

Boya Li

Liu, Bohong. 2000. Look after Our Bodies, Care for Ourselves, an Intriguing and Inspiring Book for Women–American Women’s Self-care Classic: Our Bodies, Ourselves. Kaike Zhishi (Encyclopedic Knowledge), 4, 64. This book review explains why a Chinese translation of the book is useful and necessary for Chinese women from the perspective of the translators. Min, Dongchao. 2017. Translation and Traveling Theory: Feminist Theory and Praxis in China. London and New York: Routledge. Min’s study examines the connection between translation flows and the development of Chinese feminism within the context of China’s opening up at the macro level. Wang, Hsiu-yun. 2017. Postcolonial Knowledge from Empires: The Beginnings of Menstrual Education in Taiwan, 1950s-1980s. East Asian Science, Technology and Society: An International Journal, 11(4), 519–540. Wang looks into the development of menstrual education for girls in Taiwan from 1950s to 1980s from a postcolonial perspective, and includes a fair amount of discussion about the role that translated health education and medical texts from the US and Japan have played in the process.

References Sources in Chinese Cheng, Xilin, Hui Zhu, and Xiaolu Wang, trans. 1988/2005. The Feminine Mystique. Chengdu: Sichuanrenmin Chubanshe. Chen, Xueyang and Wenpei Tang. 2018. Contemporary Evolution of Women’s Conceptualization of Health: A Case Study of Our Bodies, Ourselves. Medicine and Philosophy (Study of Medical Humanities Theories), 39(592), 58–62. Li, Jing. 2003. Alarm as SARS Epidemic Spreads, Increase in Demand for Health Books. China Post News, 008, 17 May. Liu, Zhengping, trans. 1998. American Women’s Self-care Classic–Our Bodies, Ourselves. Beijing: Zhishi Chubanshe. Ouyang, Yu, trans. 1990/2011. The Female Eunuch. Shanghai: Shanghaiyiwe Chubanshe. Rong Weiyi. 2000. Gender Perspective on Women’s Sexuality Research. Zhejiang Xuekan (Zhejiang Academic Journal), 6, 77–90. Sang, Zhuying and Nan Shan, trans. 1986. The Second Sex–Women. Changsha: Hunanwenyi Chubanshe. Shu, Xiaofei, trans. 2009. The Second Sex. Beijing: Xiyuan Chubanshe. Tang, Yi, trans. 2009. The Second Sex: Women. Beijing: Yanshan Chubanshe. Tao, Tiezhu, trans. 1998. The Second Sex: Complete Translation. Beijing: Zhongguoshuji Chubanshe. Wang, Hsiu-yun. 2007. Medical Knowledge for the Wife: Popular Health Manuals in Taiwan, 1950s-2000s. Taiwan: A Radical Quarterly in Social Studies, 67, 119–178. Zheng, Kelu, trans. 1986/2011. The Second Sex. Shanghai: Shanghaiyiwen Chubanshe.

Sources in English Alvstad, Cecilia and Herrero López. 2017. Gender and Translation: Understanding Agents in Transnational Reception. An Introduction, in Isis Herrero López, Cecilia Alvstad, Johanna Akujärvi, and Synnøve Skarsbø Lindtner, eds., Gender and Translation: Understanding Agents in Translational Reception. Montréal: Éditions québécoises de l’œuvre, 3–30. Baker, Mona. 2013. Translation as an Alternative Space for Political Action. Social Movement Studies, 12(1), 23–47. Davis, Kathy. 2007. The Making of Our Bodies, Ourselves: How Feminism Travels Across Borders. Durham: Duke University Press. Ge, Youli and Susan Jolly. 2001. East Meets West Feminist Translation Group, in Hsiung et al. eds., Chinese Women Organizing: Cadres, Feminists, Muslims, Queers. Oxford and New York: Berg, 61–78. Hermans, Theo. 1985. Introduction: Translation Studies and a New Paradigm, in Theo Hermans, ed., The Manipulation of Literature: Studies in Literary Translation. London and Sydney: Croom Helm, 7–15. Hermans, Theo. 1999. Translation in Systems: Descriptive and System-Oriented Approaches Explained. Manchester: St. Jerome Publishing. Liu, Meng, Yanghong Hu, and Minli Liao. 2009. Travelling Theory in China: Contextualization, Compromise and Combination. Global Networks, 9(4), 529–554. 516

Translation and women’s health in China

McIntoch, C. Alison and Jason L. Finkel. 1995. The Cairo Conference on Population and Development: A New Paradigm? Population and Development Review, 21(2), 223–260. Pei, Yuxin, Sik-ying Ho Petula, and Ng Man Lun. 2007. Studies on Women’s Sexuality in China Since 1980: A Critical Review. Journal of Sex Research, 44(2), 202–212. Plafker, Ted. 1998. Our Bodies, Ourselves’ Hits Shelves in China Patient Becomes Her Own Advocate. City ed. Boston Globe: A.49, 20 Dec. Slavova, Kornelia and Ann Phoenix. 2011. Living in Translation: Voicing and Inscribing Women’s Lives and Practices. European Journal of Women’s Studies, 18(4), 331–337. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. 1992/2004. The Politics of Translation, in Lawrence Venuti, ed., The Translation Studies Reader. London: Routledge, 397–417. Susam-Sarajeva, Sebnem. 2006. Theories on the Move: Translation’s Role in the Travels of Literary Theories. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi. Toury, Gideon. 1995. Descriptive Translation Studies and Beyond. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Co. Turshen, Meredeth. 2007. Women’s Health Movements: A Global Force for Change. London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Von Flotow, Luise. 1997. Translation and Gender: Translating in the ‘Era of Feminism.’ Manchester: St. Jerome Publishing. Wang Hsiu-yun. 2012. How Did Our Bodies Become Your Body? Our Bodies, Ourselves in Taiwan. Annual Meeting of the Taiwanese Sociological Association, Tunghai University [pdf]. Available at: http:// tsa2012.thu.edu.tw/20121125papers/A59.pdf [Accessed 11 Dec. 2017]. Yu, Zhongli. 2015. Translating Feminism in China: Gender, Sexuality and Censorship. London and New York: Routledge, 35.

517

39 Translating feminist texts on women’s sexual and reproductive health Nesrine Bessaïh and Anna Bogic

Introduction Women’s sexual and reproductive health is concerned with women’s reproductive life cycles, including pregnancy, menstruation, birth control, abortion, menopause, but also intimacy, relationships, sexuality, and socio-legal factors that influence women’s experiences of sexual and reproductive health. Most texts on women’s sexual and reproductive health have traditionally been written by medical doctors, usually male, and have underscored women’s roles as mothers and wives (Ehrenreich and English 1978; Kuhlmann and Babitsch 2002; Löwy 2005; Vuille et al. 2006; Salle and Vidal 2017). Thanks to a large extent to feminist movements, the last decades of the 20th century saw a significant rise in interest in the topic, and consequently a growing number of publications of feminist texts on women in general, and on women’s reproductive health, in particular. This chapter provides an overview of some of the research focusing on feminist texts about women’s sexual and reproductive health and their transnational circulation through translation. We dedicate considerable space to the translations of Our Bodies, Ourselves, which has inspired a large number of studies. While feminist texts on women’s health remain a minority compared to many popular medical manuals, their cultural and social impact has been profound, and their political message far-reaching. The chapter will briefly examine the context of women’s liberation in the United States and Western Europe and the accompanying women’s health movement out of which feminist texts on women’s sexual and reproductive health arose, and will focus on some examples of contemporary research on the role of translation in the dissemination of feminist political messages around women’s bodies: how are feminist texts on women’s health translated and by whom, and what are some of the challenges faced by feminist translation scholars studying women’s health texts?

Historical perspectives From the 17th to the 19th century, medical professions led by male doctors in Western Europe and North America, in their efforts to gain recognition and establish their authority, constructed a view of the female body as inherently flawed, and vehemently disparaged any knowledge on 518

Translating feminist texts on health

health and the body produced by healers and midwives (Ehrenreich and English 1973). It is only in the 20th century that a feminist critique of medical discourses acquired a prominent place in discussions of sexual and reproductive health. This critique was rooted in practices that questioned the very production of knowledge in the area of health. In the 1960s and 1970s, women reappropriated their bodies and their sexual health by openly sharing their experiences in consciousness-raising groups. The self-help movement that was formed at that time consisted of numerous women’s groups and collectives, and actively strove to deconstruct medical knowledge viewed as patriarchal and in many respects coercive, as well as to develop collective knowledges based on lived experiences (Morgen 2002; Norsigian et al. 1999). The so-called self-help groups were originally developed within the context of the American women’s liberation movement and were based on the notion that women should explore their own bodies and sexuality, and that liberation was to be found in a new relationship to the body (Bracke 2015, 562). Through consciousness-raising groups, women gathered and shared their deeply personal stories and experiences, producing one of the most recognizable slogans of the 1960’s American political era: “The personal is political.” In this way, the practice of sharing experiences and knowledge served as the foundation for critical analysis of social structures and medical institutions. In contrast to self-help groups, which often rejected all that was produced or proposed by biomedicine, women’s health groups developed a more pragmatic stand. Indeed, the women’s health movement articulated a bifocal position whereby technological advances and devices for improving women’s health were accepted as long as their physical, psychological, social, and ideological impacts were closely and critically examined. Both self-help groups and the women’s movement opened a path for the emergence of a feminist epistemology (Kuhlman and Babitsch 2002; Davis 2007). This epistemology is rooted in the concept of “situated knowledge” (Haraway 1988) and brings forth the idea that knowledge is never neutral because it always reflects a particular context and the particular perspectives of the subject producing it. Today, feminist critiques of medical models of knowledge continue to highlight the problems created by relying solely on supposedly “objective” knowledge production that views individuals as objects of study. They suggest that subjective knowledge produced by individuals and shared as situated knowledges about their health and well-being must be taken into account. This criticism can be seen in action, for example, in the case of oral contraception. While oral contraception has allowed many women to take back control of their fertility, it is regularly presented by the health industry as a safe option that has no consequences (so-called objective knowledge). It has taken a great deal of reporting and sharing by women on their personal and serious secondary effects of the pill (subjective/experiential knowledge) in order to push pharmaceutical companies to develop safer options such as the minipill (progestin only). Similarly to feminist literary works that set to deconstruct the “objectified, obscured, vilified or domesticated female body” (Flotow 1997, 17), texts on women’s health have tackled the notion of the body as the “object” of medical knowledge and constructed the view of women as active agents and knowledge producers. In contemporary research on feminist translation, one can glean insights into and acknowledgements of the contributions made by Canadian feminist translators in the 1980s and 1990s whose translations unapologetically incorporated feminist theory in order to “free language and society from their patriarchal burden” (Castro 2009, 3). Canadian feminist translations and translation studies from this period (Godard 1990; Lotbinière-Harwood 1991; Flotow 1991, 1997; Simon 1996) remain an important foundation for the current development of the so-called feminist translation studies of which feminist translations on women’s health are very much a part (Castro 2009; Castro and Ergun 2017). 519

Nesrine Bessaïh and Anna Bogic

Contemporary research: case studies of Our Bodies, Ourselves and the Birth Control Handbook Much like the Canadian feminist literary translations of the 1980s and 1990s, current research and feminist translations of women’s health texts also draw inspiration from women’s activism of the 1960s and 1970s. A key study on feminist translation of women’s health texts is Kathy Davis’s work on Our Bodies, Ourselves (OBOS). Arising from the second-wave women’s liberation movements in the United States, the women’s health movement produced one of the most iconic feminist texts. Focusing on women’s sexual and reproductive health, OBOS combined biomedical knowledge with personal accounts of women’s experiences to critically assess information made available to women on their health and bodies. OBOS also took a strong stance against capitalism and capitalist exploitation of biomedical and pharmaceutical knowledge. It was rooted in the American context of the 1960s marked by the Civil Rights Movement, antiwar movements against the war in Vietnam, the New Left activism, as well as the burgeoning women’s liberation movement. The Boston Women’s Health Book Collective (hereafter the Boston Collective) began as a small group of women (the membership fluctuated in the early years but eventually 12 women became the group’s official founders), who were critical of the doctors’ condescending and paternalistic treatment of women (OBOS 1979, 11). Published in 1971, OBOS quickly became a bestseller, selling 200,000 copies in the first few weeks. Since its first edition, OBOS has sold more than 4.5 million copies and carved a place for itself in American popular culture and history. More than 30 translations of OBOS have been produced since the early 1970s. Kathy Davis’s book The Making of Our Bodies Ourselves: How Feminism Travels across Borders, which appeared in 2007, marks the first major study of the OBOS translations and their significance around the world. In addition to tracing the book’s social and cultural impact as well as the history of the Boston Collective, Davis’s work is a rare examination of a non-literary text and its translations. Davis underscores the potential of translation to build feminist alliances across borders and personal differences while at the same time she situates the Boston Collective’s origin and evolution within the context of second-wave feminism and women’s health movement in the United States. Davis researches the trajectory of OBOS and argues that global translation projects had the effect of “decentring” OBOS as a Western feminist project (2007, 197–201). Feminist activists involved in these projects were not passive recipients of the American text but were actively engaged in its adaptation and revision. In the process, they became agents themselves in the production of feminist knowledge. Davis argues that OBOS is an excellent illustration of how texts can travel through translation. Through global circulation, OBOS was “decentred,” as the book “appeared (and reappeared) in new contexts, both carrying its original meanings and acquiring new ones as it was taken up and adapted” (Davis 2007, 77). However, Davis contests the claims that OBOS translations are indicative of Western imperialism. Rather than being an imposition of American feminism upon others, OBOS translations have provided a platform for activists involved in the translation to demonstrate their “creative agency” by choosing what information to include and what to omit, contingent upon the “local political and cultural climates” (Davis 2007, 78). This editorial freedom accorded to the local translation groups by the Boston Collective set OBOS apart from most other translation projects. As the scope of international translation projects expanded, and the American OBOS became submerged in countless other feminist and non-feminist publications on women’s health, its global trajectory grew in importance. As OBOS started to lose its influence domestically, it increasingly took on a new role as the “facilitator of its life outside the United States” (Davis 520

Translating feminist texts on health

2007, 79; our emphasis). OBOS and its global trajectory became an excellent example of the ways in which translations come to sustain the afterlife of the original. Although German literary and cultural critic Walter Benjamin’s influential concept of the original’s afterlife has been applied mostly to literary works, OBOS and its translations illustrate the way in which “a specific significance inherent in the original texts expresses itself in their translatability” (Rendall 1997, 153). While most translations of OBOS are adaptations sensitive to local and cultural contexts, the one constant that has travelled to all global projects – or was always translatable – was the idea “of a small group of laywomen talking about their embodied experiences and critically assembling useful information about their health needs” (Davis 2007, 79). Following in the footsteps of Davis’s The Making of Our Bodies Ourselves, a number of other studies have focused on the complex process behind the travels of OBOS to other countries and languages. As Davis outlines in her book, the first translations were published in Western Europe and Japan in the 1970s, followed by translations that appeared in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East in the 1980s and 1990s. The late 1990s and the early 2000s saw a wave of translations in post-Communist Eastern European countries. The fall of Communism and the rapid growth of feminist and women’s organizations in Eastern Europe was accompanied by a flurry of translation activity and particularly translations of feminist classics from the West (see Kornelia Slavova’s chapter in this volume). In the early 2000s, translations were published in Poland, Bulgaria, Serbia, Albania, Moldova, and Russia (Bogic 2016). A Bulgarian scholar, Kornelia Slavova, completed the Bulgarian version in 2001, together with a number of health experts, recasting “the whole book within the perspective of gender justice, providing a special chapter about Bulgarian women’s issues in the 19th and 20th centuries, as well as addressing the introduction to both men and women” (2001, 15). Slavova’s subsequent academic writing provides poignant analyses of gender and translation issues and of feminist translation as a dynamic but also contentious meeting point between Western and Eastern European feminists. Slavova asks: How can a feminist position – uniting white and black women, Hispanic-American and other hyphenated-Americans, men and women, lesbian and straight, young and old, healthy and disabled – be conveyed in a form that sounds natural and inviting enough for a Bulgarian or East-European woman reader to identify with? Where do we draw the demarcation line between individual and collective agency/ subjecthood, between the increasing globality and cultural specificities? (2001, 16) Looking at another Eastern European translation, Anna Bogic traces the story of the Serbian translation entitled Naša tela, mi (NTM) as part of her doctoral research (Bogic 2017). Against the background of the Yugoslav wars and the influence of ethno-nationalism in the 1990s, Bogic examines the development of domestic and transnational feminist networks and assesses the extent to which NTM serves as oppositional discourse to the changing politics of reproduction and pronatalist discourses around abortion and fertility in Serbia in this period. This study assesses to what extent the Serbian translation is able to contribute to local feminist knowledge on women’s reproductive health, rights, and sexuality while simultaneously acknowledging uneven translation flows across shifting and unsettling geopolitical borders and the East-West divide. In many ways, the Serbian translation spotlights the politics of translation and raises questions about the possibility of an equal exchange and knowledge production between feminists who are differently positioned on the geopolitical map. Boya Li studies the 1998 Chinese translation of OBOS (chapter in this volume) and examines the historical and socio-economic factors that influence the conditions under which the Chinese translation is produced. In her research for 521

Nesrine Bessaïh and Anna Bogic

her Master’s thesis, Li pays particular attention to the transition from a planned economy to a “socialist market economy,” a powerful moment in Chinese history that sees the return to more overtly traditional gender relations between women and men and an increased vulnerability of women in the job market (Li 2018). Simultaneously, this economic transition is accompanied by an influx of feminist literature from the West together with collaborations between Chinese women’s groups and intellectuals as well as foreign feminists. The Chinese translation of OBOS is a product of this nascent cultural encounter. Importantly, Li also shows how this translation had to deal with the problem of censorship and cultural sensitivity. Ultimately, the 1998 Chinese translation validated Chinese feminists’ attempts to criticize dominant, patriarchal, and medicalized discourses on women’s health and sexuality despite being forced to accept a certain amount of censorship. Both Bogic and Li rely on interviews with the translators and on comparative textual analysis to arrive at their conclusions, in addition to archival research and interviews with some of the women from the Boston Collective (Bogic 2017). The use of interviews as a research method has been gaining in popularity among translation studies scholars, perhaps nudged by considerable work on the importance of the translator’s agency, as it offers an opportunity to validate the experiences and insights of the translators. Esther Shapiro (2013) has been involved in the cultural adaptation of OBOS into Spanish for US Latinas, Latin American, and Caribbean women. Her involvement is the basis for her writing on the challenges and successes of feminist translation and women’s health. She examines the approaches to the cultural adaptation, Nuestros cuerpos, nuestras vidas, which ultimately create a textual “trialogue” between the OBOS founders/editors, over 30 Latin American and Caribbean feminist and women’s health groups, and the editorial team of diverse Boston Latinas (Shapiro 2013, 23). Shapiro’s work is an important contribution to feminist translation studies since it delves into the tremendously intricate and complex processes behind the making of a culturally relevant translation that crosses vast geopolitical divides. These and other works on OBOS translations and adaptations reveal the extent to which feminist translations of texts on women’s sexual and reproductive health demand a collaborative effort setting them apart from other feminist translations such as literary works. New translation and adaptation projects continue to be taken up by a wide variety of women’s groups despite the fact that OBOS as an organization ceased to exist in its original form in 2018 and is now mainly run on a volunteer basis.1 One of the most recent OBOS translation and adaptation projects, entitled Corps accord: Guide de sexualité positive and based on the 2011 edition, has recently been completed in French in Quebec. Like Shapiro, Bessaïh (forthcoming) focuses on the process of translation and adaptation led by a collective of activists, la CORPS féministe. She shows that this translation project fulfills another function: it brings together the women’s health movement in Quebec. Bessaïh, also a member of the activist collective, analyzes the process behind OBOS in Quebec and highlights the different discourses on the notion of gender that can be found in feminist circles and that render the French text more inclusive. The study of the collaborative translation process in Quebec highlights grammatical and terminological challenges brought on by the renewal of the notion of gender. Since the late 1990s, queer studies have been expanding on the idea that there are more than two genders or two sexes; rather, there is a continuum where “woman” and “man” could be located at opposite ends. In feminist circles, these issues are brought to bear by trans and non-binary folks who seek nongendered ways of writing. Some languages, such as Chinese, English or German, already have a neutral grammatical gender while other languages, such as Spanish, French or Arabic, do not: people, animals, and even inanimate objects or concepts are associated with a particular grammatical gender, feminine or masculine. Consequently, when trans or non-binary people speak in French, they are obliged to use either the feminine or the masculine or to create neologisms, 522

Translating feminist texts on health

that is, invent new grammatical and terminological forms. The activists behind the Quebec translation of OBOS are cis-gendered women who already use non-sexist forms in their writing. In accordance with their efforts to build bridges and solidarity with the most marginalized persons, the activists are seeking to strike a compromise between non-sexist writing practised by women’s groups in Quebec (and more widespread and accepted in official publications in Quebec) and neutral writing promoted by trans and non-binary feminist communities. Bessaïh (forthcoming) applies the genocritique methodology when studying translation drafts in order to analyze the writing process and the negotiations that take place between the desire to render the feminine more visible (non-sexist writing) and the project to neutralize the language (neutral writing). In another translation studies publication on OBOS, Nesrine Bessaïh and Anna Bogic (2016) trace the evolution of the usage of a popular expression “we women” (“nous les femmes”) across three versions of OBOS in French: France 1977, Senegal 2004, and Quebec 2019. Historically, this expression has served as a slogan, symbolizing the condition of oppression assumed to be common among all women. The pronoun “ ‘we’ as a discursive element hails women reading the book and invites them to join the feminist movement. It constitutes a perlocutory act [. . .], that is, a speech act that calls women readers to action” (Bessaïh and Bogic 2016, 45).2 In the French translation published in France in 1977, the expression is used, among others, as a way to gather and mobilize women. However, more than a decade later, in feminist circles, the appearance of the theory of intersectionality (Crenshaw 1989, 1991) bolsters the critique of the assumed homogeneity of women’s lived experiences and oppressions. Indeed, the use of the expression “we women” risks erasing oppressions experienced by the most marginalized women (racialized women, Aboriginal women, LBTQ women, etc.). Within the Quebec context, intersectionality is increasingly being adopted in academic feminist circles but is still facing obstacles when it comes to the practical application of its principles by feminist groups. Issues of greatest importance to the most marginalized women are still not easily recognized in feminist circles, and this remains the case in women’s health groups. For example, some issues include the institutionalized and systemic racism in health and social institutions, lack of informed consent experienced by disabled women, the misgendering of trans women, the invisibility of lesbians in the medical literature, to name just a few. Bessaïh and Bogic (2016) argue that in this context of a fractured women’s health movement, the OBOS translation and adaptation project in Quebec serves as a catalyst for a better understanding of marginalized women’s claims, and therefore, for greater cohesion and solidarity between diverse women’s groups. The feminist activists behind the translation project use OBOS as a communication and advocacy tool that allows them to create greater visibility around marginalized women’s concerns about their sexual and reproductive health. While considerable research has been conducted on OBOS and its translations, a study of the Birth Control Handbook (Feingold and Cherniak 1968), published in a field outside of translation studies, provides some fascinating insights into the predecessor to OBOS and opens the door to further studies into this important story of Canadian activism. Christabelle Sethna’s “The Evolution of the Birth Control Handbook: From Student Peer-Education Manual to Feminist Self-empowerment Text, 1968–1975” (2006) traces the roots of the wildly successful and trailblazing Handbook in student politics and activism at McGill University, and links it to the growing women’s liberation movements. Sethna’s historical study focuses on the political context that gave rise to McGill students’ contestation of repressive reproductive policies and general lack of knowledge about the body, sex, and contraception. Following her examination of the original English-language text, particularly the introduction to the Handbook that sets the tone for the rest of the text, Sethna presents the French-language translation, Pour un côntrole des naissances, that was set within the Quebec context of the 1960s and early 1970s. While the 523

Nesrine Bessaïh and Anna Bogic

editorial commentary to the English-language source text engaged with the topics of racism, population control politics, and anti-Americanism and offered a more global perspective, the French-language edition “concentrated squarely on Quebec” (108). Given the political context of the time, it dealt with the topics of nationalism, Quebec independence, language politics, and the Catholic Church, showing how women’s reproductive rights were intricately tied to the larger national project. Sethna’s research is rich in historical and contextual information and sets the stage for further examinations of this fascinating, and somewhat overlooked, translation case study.

Conclusion: current challenges in feminist translation Translation studies scholars who work on women’s health texts in translation currently face a number of different challenges. The first and more conceptual challenge touches on the very definition of translation. The idea that a translation needs to remain faithful to the source text is a largely Western approach to translation, and translation practices that deal with sexual and reproductive health texts tend to encourage translation scholars to expand their definitions. For example, Bessaïh and Bogic show that the activist translators of OBOS in Quebec integrate local research in health and social sciences into their translation (2016, 67). In an attempt to broaden the Western definition of translation, Zhongli Yu (2017) takes up the notion developed by Hu Gengshen in 2001 that treats translation as a process of selection and adaptation: “Based on oriental wisdom and occidental concepts, it [the notion of translation as adaptation and selection] has gradually developed into eco-translatology, [that] takes translation as a selection activity of the translator’s adaptation to fit the translational eco-environment” (Yu 2017, 49). For example, Yu studies the strategies of Ai, one of the translators of Eve Ensler’s Vagina Monologues in China. Ai presents the texts in her classes and integrates stories told by her students about their first menstruation experiences. She then replaces the stories in the source text written by Ensler on the experiences of American women with local women’s testimonials. In another case, Şebnem Susam-Saraeva with her case study on Turkish Mommy blogs about pregnancy and childbirth shows how these bloggers employ a translation strategy similar to that used in the Ottoman Empire. Highlighting the history of terceme, Susam-Saraeva suggests that this term may be more useful for understanding blog translations due to their “emphasis on retelling, rewriting, saying again, reinterpreting and repeating for a new audience” as well as on intertextuality and unclear boundaries (2017, 79). These bloggers supplement their text in order to integrate knowledge or elements they judge relevant: “They are more prepared to innovate, play around with the material in hand, retell it in a way that will be more interesting and intelligible for their audience” (2017, 81). The second challenge is related to the fact that women’s health is often highly politicized, a situation which encourages translation scholars to integrate activist dimensions in their work and research. Translations of women’s health texts are often completed by non-professional translators who are involved as activists in a cause they deem important. These lay translators engage in social activism as part of their translation and adaptation process. For example, the OBOS translators in Quebec, la CORPS féministe, apply knowledge mobilization and ­co-construction methods that originated in social and political activism, such as project distribution, the choice of an editorial and coordinating board, collection of personal accounts, and mobilization of social and academic knowledge (Bessaïh and Bogic 2016, 65–66). It is suggested that just like consciousness-raising groups, these translation collectives are able to share their life experiences, their impressions of the text, and their personal accounts (Baldo and Inghilleri 2018; Bessaïh and Bogic 2016). In the same vein, analyzing the ten-year long collective translation and adaptation 524

Translating feminist texts on health

process of the Spanish version of OBOS, Shapiro (2013) underscores frameworks and methods linking personal and social change, illustrating the ways in which translation and social activism can be imbricated together. Translating texts on women’s health then requires an activist engagement that consequently demands that translators dedicate even more time and energy to their translation projects. Finally, an important challenge faced by feminist translation studies scholars is that women’s health texts are increasingly made available solely online in a digital format. In the 1960s and 1970s, the women’s health movement mainly used home-made publications or self-published material to disseminate its revolutionary ideas. Those publications included pamphlets, newspapers, magazines or even zines during the 1980s and the 1990s. Today, the easiest way to selfpublish material is to post it online through blogs, videos or virtual communities. Indeed, the development of interactive communication technologies (web 2.0) allows the creation of online communities gathered around issues that stem from the members’ values, habits, and interests. In the field of sexual and reproductive health, these communities enable knowledge and experience-sharing that is at the origin of the women’s health movement. Together with the blogs on sexual and reproductive health, they deconstruct medical discourse and produce a counter discourse. For example, in her work on blogs, Susam-Saraeva underscores the way bloggers use experience-sharing to build a public narrative (Baker 2006) that challenges dominant narratives on pregnancy and birth: [T]hese personal narratives [. . .] are circulated with a view to challenge the deeply ingrained public narratives on women’s bodies and social position within the Turkish society, which limit women’s access to the maternal care they deem appropriate for themselves and their family. (Susam-Saraeva 2019, 85–86) In this context, translated narratives co-exist side by side with local narratives and contribute to a transformation of the public narrative. According to Susam-Saraeva, these online texts are mainly translated by non-professionals. This phenomenon highlights the need to develop parameters and methods of study different from those applied to texts translated by professionals. Moreover, the very nature of the web (chaotic, uncharted, and diachronic) provides a challenging environment for scholars to identify a significant and relevant corpus. Translation studies scholars thus face the challenge of developing new and creative tools to process the data stemming from blogs and online communities. For all these reasons, Susam-Saraeva reminds us that these online texts are valuable and unavoidable data in the study of the circulation and transformation of knowledge across borders. Likewise, the study of translations of feminist texts on women’s sexual and reproductive health provides a much-needed platform for new and innovative analytical methods that have the potential to enrich the field of translation studies as a whole.

Further readings Bessaïh, Nesrine and La CORPS féministe, eds. 2019. Corps Accord: Guide de Sexualité Positive. Montréal: Éditions du remue-ménage. One of the most recent translations and adaptations, Corps accord is the first translation made in Canada and speaks specifically to francophone Canadians. This 2019 publication is a product of feminist activism by a women’s health collective that adapted a section of the original Our Bodies, Ourselves. Castro, Olga and Emek Ergun, eds. 2017. Feminist Translation Studies: Local and Transnational Perspectives. New York: Routledge. This edited volume sets out to give more concrete contours to a burgeoning sub-field of feminist translation studies. 525

Nesrine Bessaïh and Anna Bogic

Davis, Kathy. 2007. The Making of Our Bodies, Ourselves: How Feminism Travels Across Borders. Durham and London: Duke University Press. The first in-depth study of the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective, its landmark book Our Bodies, Ourselves as well as its many translations since the 1970s. Flotow, Luise von and Farzaneh Farahzad, eds. 2017. Translating Women: Different Voices and New Horizons. New York: Routledge. This edited volume gathers articles that combine translation studies and feminist studies with a global perspective. The volume follows in the footsteps of the 2011 Translating Women that also called for more engagement with feminism in translation studies.

Notes 1 In 2018, the founders of the Boston Collective announced that after almost 50 years the organization was going to transition to a volunteer-based entity and will no longer update or publish further editions of OBOS. Available at: www.ourbodiesourselves.org/our-story/whats-new/ [Accessed 11 Nov. 2019]. 2 Translated from the French original: “Le ‘nous’, en tant qu’élément discursif, interpelle ainsi les lectrices et les invite à joindre les mouvements féministes. Il constitue un acte perlocutoire, c’est-à-dire un acte de parole qui provoque l’action en incitant les lectrices à agir.”

References Baker, Mona. 2006. Translation and Conflict: A Narrative Account. London and New York: Routledge. Baldo, Michela and Moira Inghilleri. 2018. Cultural Resistance, Female Voices. Translating Subversive and Contested Sexualities, in Sue-Ann Harding and Ovidi Carbonell Cortès, eds., The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Culture. London: Routledge Handbooks, 296–313. Bessaïh, Nesrine. forthcoming. Feminist Negotiations Between Non-sexist and Neutral Writing, in Michaela Baldo, Jonathan Evans, and Ting Guo, eds., Translation and Interpretation Studies: Translation and LGBTQ+ activism. Bessaïh, Nesrine and Anna Bogic. 2016. Nous les femmes de 1970 à 2017 à travers les traductions et adaptations de Our Bodies Ourselves en français. TTR: traduction, terminologie et rédaction, 29(2), 43–71. Bogic, Anna. 2016. Translating into Democracy: The Politics of Translation, Our Bodies, Ourselves, and the “Other Europe”, in Luise von Flotow and Farzaneh Farahzad, eds., Translating Women: Different Voices and New Horizons. New York: Routledge, 56–75. Bogic, Anna. 2017. Our Bodies, Our Location: The Politics of Feminist Translation and Reproduction in Postsocialist Serbia. PhD. dissertation, University of Ottawa. Boston Women’s Health Book Collective. 1971/1973/1976/1979/1984/1992/1998/2005/2011. Our Bodies, Ourselves. New York: Simon & Schuster. Bracke, Maud A. 2015. Our Bodies, Ourselves: The Transnational Connections of 1970s Italian and Roman Feminism. Journal of Contemporary History, 50(3), 560–580. Castro, Olga. 2009. (Re)Examining Horizons in Feminist Translation Studies: Towards a Third Wave? Translated by Mark Andrews. MonTi-Monographs on Translation and Interpreting, 1(1–17), 59–86. Available at: www.raco.cat/index.php/MonTI/article/view/292140/380657 [Accessed 11 Nov. 2019]. Crenshaw, Kimberle. 1989. Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics. University of Chicago Legal Forum, Article 8(1), 139–167. Available at: https://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/cgi/viewcontent. cgi?article=1052&context=uclf [Accessed 11 Nov. 2019]. Crenshaw, Kimberle. 1991. Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color. Stanford Law Review, 43(6) ( July), 1241–1299. De Lotbinière-Harwood, Susanne. 1991. Re-belle et infidèle. La traduction comme pratique de réécriture au féminin/The Body Bilingual: Translation as a Rewriting in the Feminine. Montreal and Toronto: Les Éditions du remue-ménage and Women’s Press. Ehrenreich, Barbara and Deirdre English. 1973. Witches, Midwives and Nurses: A History of Women Healers. New York: The Feminist Press. Ehrenreich, Barbara and English Deirdre. 1978. For Her Own Good: 150 Years of the Experts’ Advice to Women. Garden City, NY: Anchor Press and Doubleday.

526

Translating feminist texts on health

Feingold, Allan and Donna Cherniak. 1968. The Birth Control Handbook. Montréal: Students’ Society of McGill University. Flotow, Luise von. 1991. Feminist Translation: Concepts, Practices, Theories. TTR: traduction, terminologie, rédaction, 4(2), 69–84. Flotow, Luise von. 1997. Translation and Gender: Translating in the “Era of Feminism.” Manchester: St. Jerome Publishing. Godard, Barbara. 1990. Theorizing Feminist Discourse/Translation, in Susan Bassnett and André Lefevere, eds., Translation, History and Culture. London: Pinter, 87–97. Haraway, Donna. 1988. Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective. Feminist Studies, 14(3), 575–599. Kuhlmann, Ellen and Brigit Babitsch. 2002. Bodies, Health, Gender–Bridging Feminist Theories and Women’s Health. Women’s Studies International Forum, 25(4), 433–442. Li, Boya. 2018. Translating Feminism in ‘Systems’: The Representation of Women’s Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights in the Chinese Translation of Our Bodies, Ourselves. Ottawa: University of Ottawa. Löwy, Ilana. 2005. Le féminisme a-t-il changé la recherche biomédicale? Le Women’s Health Movement et les transformations de la médecine aux États-Unis. Travail, genre et sociétés, 2(14), 89–108. Morgen, Sandra. 2002. Into Our Own Hands: The Women’s Health Movement in the United States, 1969–1990. New Brunswick, NJ and London: Rutgers University Press. Norsigian, Judy, Vilunya Diskin, Paula Doress-Worters, Wendy Sanford, and Norma Swenson. 1999. The Boston Women’s’ Health Book Collective and Our Bodies, Ourselves: A Brief History and Reflection. JAMWA, 54(l), 35–39. Rendall, Stephen. 1997. The Translator’s Task, Walter Benjamin (Translation). TTR: traduction, terminologie, rédaction, 10(2), 151–165. Salle, Muriel and Catherine Vidal. 2017. Femmes et santé, encore une affaire d’hommes? Paris: Éditions Belin/ Humensis. Sethna, Christabelle. 2006. The Evolution of the Birth Control Handbook: From Student Peer-Education Manual to Feminist Self-empowerment Text, 1968–1975. Canadian Bulletin of Medical History, 23(1), 89–117. Shapiro, Esther. 2013. Translating Latin American/US Latina Frameworks and Methods in Gender and Health Equity: Linking Women’s Health Education and Participatory Social Change. International Quarterly of Community Health Education, 34(1), 19–36. Simon, Sherry. 1996. Gender in Translation: Cultural Identity and the Politics of Transmission. New York: Routledge. Slavova, Kornelia. 2001. Translating Gender-Related Texts/Politics in/Out of Context [Slavova’s unpublished English Translation of the Original Sporovete za roda (gender): Znachenje, Upotrebi, Prevodi], in Milena Kirova and Kornelia Slavova, eds., Teoria prez granitsite. Vuvedenie v izsledvaniata na roda. Sofia: Polis, 8–27. Susam-Saraeva, Şebnem. 2017. In Search of an “International” Translation Studies: Tracing Terceme and Tercüme in the Blogosphere. Translation Studies, 10(1), 69–86. Susam-Saraeva, Şebnem. 2019. Diversity of Translational Data in Contemporary Social Knowledge Making, in Rafael Y. Schögler, ed., Circulation of Academic Thought: Rethinking Translation in the Academic Field. Oxford and Bern: Peter Lang, 77–91. Vuille, Marilène, Séverine Rey, Catherine Fussinger, and Geneviève Cresson. 2006. La santé est politique. Nouvelles Questions Féministes, 2(25), 4–15. Yu, Zhongli. 2017. Translation as Adaptation and Selection: A Feminist Case. Perspectives, 25(1), 49–65.

527

40 Children’s literature, feminism, adaptation, and translation* Handegül Demirhan

Children’s literature is often likened to women’s writing. Taking Perry Nodelman’s statement that “children’s literature, like women’s literature, is merely a response to repression-a literature whose specific sort of femininity depends on [. . .] an alternative way of describing reality” (1988, 33) as a starting point in this chapter, I will discuss the secondary status of these two marginalized fields in conjunction with each other. I want to start by reflecting on the intersection of children’s literature, women and translation in hierarchial terms. If there is one common denominator in these three areas, it is that they are all devalued and pushed to the margins. In Simone de Beauvoir’s (1949) terms, they become ‘Other’ and end up in a secondary position in literary and social systems: adult literature over children’s literature, men’s writing over women’s writing, source text over translation. From a game-changing feminist standpoint, this chapter aims to make these three others visible, and more importantly, to elaborate on how translation and feminism can be brought into close dialogue with children’s literature. This chapter starts with a discussion of children’s literature and its relation to gender and feminism; it consists of five sections: (1) historical origins and current perspectives, reflecting on the history of feminist criticism in children’s literature; (2) feminist adaptations, shedding light on experimental feminist adaptation strategies, trends and theories on gender and translation; (3) criticisms of feminist adaptations, and feminist pedagogy, exploring the critiques of adaptations and subversions as well as the importance of feminist pedagogy; (4) current contributions and research, narrating gender and feminism in the translation of children’s literature in different contexts; (5) research methods in analyzing translations of feminist children’s literature, discussing possible research procedures in examining translations of this genre. This contribution concludes with ‘future directions’ where the trajectory of the subject is opened up for discussion. In an attempt at inclusivity and pluralism, this chapter will refer to the many shades of feminist understandings of gender in children’s literature and its translation in different contexts in the world. The aim of this section is not to give fixed and abiding definitions but instead, to reflect on the possible definitions and nature(s) of feminist children’s literature. Children’s literature is generally identified by different criteria: by categorization based on age groups and genre; by its purpose to be written ‘for’ children or ‘by’ children’ (Lesnik-Oberstein 2005, 15), or read by children (Oittinen 2000, 61), or adapted for children (O’Sullivan 2005, 13). The concepts of feminism and gender, and their relation to children’s literature are assigned different 528

Children’s literature, feminism, adaptation

interpretations by different scholars and these differences complicate any attempt at a rigid definition of feminist children’s literature. In the simplest terms, feminist children’s literature is a literature for children informed by a feminist perspective. It has been defined as a newborn literature “for free children” (McDowell 1977) or a “triumphal” one that uses a protagonist who “is empowered regardless of gender” and overcomes patriarchal oppression (Trites 1997, 3–4). It is about the feminist autonomy and ideology of the characters behind the actions, not about their female sexual identity. Feminist protagonists, like Pippi Longstocking, are not silenced characters; instead, they fulfill their inner potential: they are liberated, outspoken, and in every feminist way, they prove their woman-self: a self-awakened, self-realized, and self-made woman.

Historical origins and current perspectives A Little Pretty Pocket-Book (1744) is commonly considered to be the first British children’s book published in England. This book opens with two letters: one addressed to boys – ‘Little Master Tommy’ – and the other addressed to girls – ‘Pretty Miss Polly’. Many such books were targeted at boys or girls, with adventure stories for boys, domestic and family stories for girls. Children’s literature in the 18th and 19th centuries peddled stereotyped gender roles. Snow White (1812) and The Little Mermaid (1837) are among the best known of this kind of gendered children’s literature in which the feminine ideal is generally passive, weak and submissive. Feminist readings of children’s literature have revealed several critical issues and topics: (1) first and foremost the need to address conventional gender stereotypes; (2) the need for feminist adaptations, subversions and retellings; (3) the need to develop new forms of language, new voices and subjectivities; (4) the need to break taboos on such topics as women’s sexuality and gender-based violence; and (5) the need for feminist pedagogy in children’s literature and its translation. It all started with fairy tales, and feminist criticisms of stereotypical gender roles in such classic fairy tales as Cinderella (1697), Snow White (1812) and Sleeping Beauty (1917). Numerous scholars in different contexts (Zipes 2012a; Sezer 2010; Lieberman 2012; Rowe 2012; Dworkin 1974) have pointed out with considerable consistency that these traditional fairy tales display rigid feminine and masculine roles. Other scholars ( Jabeen and Mehmood 2014; Nilsen 1971; Scott 1981; Muhlen et al. 2012; Kortenhaus and Demarest 1993) have shown that besides fairy tales, gender clichés have also appeared in subgenres of children’s literature such as picture books. These ‘socially desirable’ gender clichés are listed in detail in John Stephens’ schema (1996, 18–19) where masculinity comes with the characteristics of being strong, aggressive, unemotional, active, protective and rational while femininity is related to being beautiful, submissive, emotional, passive, vulnerable and intuitive. Womanhood is associated with marriage, motherhood and the domestic sphere whereas manhood runs wild with autonomy and courage in the public sphere. Female characters take the back seat while male characters drive the plot of the books. Jack Zipes (2012a, 15, 33) defines these classic fairy tales as sexist works that reflect “atavistic forms and ideas.” For Marcia R. Lieberman (2012, 185), these fairy tales “serve to acculturate women to traditional social roles.” For Karen E. Rowe (2012, 209, emphasis in original) they “perpetuate the patriarchal status quo by making female subordination seem romantically desirable.”

Feminist adaptations Feminist thought began to have an effect on children’s literature in the late 20th century, with the work of Kate Millett (1970) introducing feminist criticism into the realm of Englishlanguage children’s literature. The book, The Paper Bag Princess (1980), echoes the ideas in her Sexual Politics (1970), and criticises the patriarchally defined concept of beauty and sexuality 529

Handegül Demirhan

with the main character rejecting the dress of a conventional, fancy princess, and instead, wearing an unfancy paper bag. This accelerated questions about the representation of gender in children’s literature for the patriarchal messages it incorporated and the influences these might have on the female subject. The consciousness-raising agenda of feminist groups during this period reverberated in the adaptation of children’s literature, subverting old stories, creating new versions, and rewriting on a massive scale with Jack Zipes describing this sea-change from traditional to contemporary/feminist views as a transformation from a submissive woman to an awakened and emancipated one. “Created out of dissatisfaction with the dominant male discourse of traditional fairy tales” says Zipes, the feminist fairy tale offers an “alternative aesthetic terrain for the fairy tale genre,” “conceives a different view of the world and speaks in a voice that has been customarily silenced” (Zipes 2012a, xi, my emphasis, 2012b, xi). Some feminist collections are of particular importance: Ethel Phelps’ The Maid of the North: Feminist Folk Tales from around the World (1981), Alison Lurie’s Clever Gretchen and Other Forgotten Folktales (1980) and Melek Sezer’s (2010) analysis of an Anatolian folk tale, “Müskürümü Sultan,” where female protagonists choose their partners, create their desired men in a godlike manner, and have authority over their fathers and husbands, basically over patriarchy. Zipes (2012a, 6–7) states that Cinderella was never a passive character until Charles Perrault (1977) transformed her image “into a passive and obedient young woman” in the late 17th century, and his version led to “dainty and prudish Cinderellas [including Grimm’s version] en masse in the nineteenth century.” Then he lists some of the experimental feminist fairy tales in the American and British context: Jane Yolen’s Sleeping Ugly (1981), Angela Carter’s The Donkey Prince (1970), and Transformations (1971) by Anne Sexton. Zipes reviews contemporary feminist fairy tales that revoke traditional gender roles and make readers think about gender and power from a feminist viewpoint. One of the trends in feminist approaches to children’s literature has been to make visible women authors and écriture (d’enfant) féminine lost in history. In this respect, Louisa May Alcott and Maria Edgeworth are two of the more prominent 19th-century authors who emerged from obscurity and became visible. Throughout the 20th century, gender-liberated characters in different contexts came to the fore, gradually increasing in number, and reaching a peak in the early 21st century. Morris Micklewhite and the Tangerine Dress (2014), Annie’s Plaid Shirt (2015) and Reaching the Stars: Poems about Extraordinary Women & Girls (2017) are among such remarkable feminist children’s stories and poems. As for the adaptation and translation of children’s literature, it is relevant to reflect on the main ideas revolving around gender and translation. The studies on the intersection of gender and translation have been compiled by Pilar Godayol (2013) and can be summarized briefly as viewing feminist translation and adaptation as a process that seeks to counteract conventional, institutionalised language – an instrument that serves for the oppression of women – and develop new solutions as well as “a new language for women,” (Flotow 1997, 14–15), for example, in the creation of feminist puns, neologisms and spellings. These feminist inventions are echoed in translations, particularly in translations based on patriarchal source texts and gendered languages. Experimental feminist translation strategies have also come into existence: translating the body, sexuality, puns, grammatical gendered pronouns (Flotow 1997, 17–23) and complementing source texts with prefaces, footnotes (Godard 1988) as well as personal statements, interviews and articles. All strategies have one objective: to make the feminine visible. “[M]aking women seen and heard in the real world” is “what feminism is all about” (De Lotbinière-Harwood 1989, 9). Seeking out feminist texts whether they are prominent or unknown, and translating the works of feminists, women writers and scholars is only one aspect of feminist translation. Another aspect is the translator’s feminist intervention in patriarchal and androcentric texts. Whether it is the feminist 530

Children’s literature, feminism, adaptation

translation of a feminist source text or the feminist translation of an anti-feminist source text, as long as the end product, in this case the translation, is inflected by feminism, it can be defined as a feminist translation. Thus, a feminist translator dis-covers, reveals and intervenes, using her/ his feminist lens. In Translation and Gender: Translating in the ‘Era of Feminism,’ Luise von Flotow (1997, 1) speaks of translation as “a cultural transfer.” Translation transfers and communicates feminisms. Flotow (1997, 86) states that “the effect of learning to be a woman” is felt in every society, even though “it will mean something different in every society.” She emphasises the unlikeliness of full feminist unity and labels the differences among women in terms of race, ethnic background and religion as a “truth.” This truth is revealed through translation. Similarly, the translation of children’s literature “provides a glimpse into the experiences and way of life of children from different parts of the world” (Zaghini 2005, 22). In light of these ideas and Lissa Paul’s statement that “all women once were children” (1990, 149–150), feminist children’s literature and its translation is a prolific ground upon which one can instill gender awareness in children, for them as future women and men, and also communicate feminist notions across cultures since these texts are developed in a particular feminist and cultural contexts. One of the most likely ways to apply some of these ideas to the translation and adaptation of children’s literature is by unearthing feminist children’s literature that presents unconventional female characters and making this available in other languages. However, academic research (Kwok 2016; Lathey 2015) points to the normative nature of children’s literature and its translation; it is a literature that functions within the prescribed walls of what is deemed suitable for children in a certain place at a certain time and is surrounded by gatekeepers (teachers, publishers, translators, parents) who decide on behalf of children. While Zohar Shavit (1981, 172) states that translators can take liberties if they “adjust the text in order to make it appropriate and useful to the child, in accordance to guiding principles with what society thinks is ‘good for the child’,” these liberties are still circumscribed by their own understanding of childhood and literature which is closely related to their own education, culture and values. Postmodern feminist criticisms and adaptations of children’s literature have gone a step further and begun developing a new language, voice and subjectivity in terms of gender. In Waking Sleeping Beauty: Feminist Voices in Children’s Novels (1997), Roberta Trites links the power of language, vocalization, metaphors, and narrativity to the subjectivity of the feminist protagonist. The feminist children’s Künstlerroman can be considered a good example of this link: it is a narrative that usually has a female protagonist who develops her agency in line with her writing, and therefore her subjectivity and her voice, as well as her writing and her language, are interrelated and sometimes become one. Harriet the Spy (1964) and Martha Quest (1952) are early examples of this genre. Feminist pedagogy has also had its effect on adaptations and rewritings of children’s literature, especially with regard to sexuality and gender-based violence. Historically, the moral and didactic function of children’s literature and its translation caused authors to abstain from explicit representations of women’s sexuality and gender-based violence since children’s literature is grounded on the unspoken belief that children are naive and innocent beings who should be shielded from these inappropriate representations. Nevertheless, studies show that these unlicensed areas are implicitly violated in many children’s books. In The Trials and Tribulations of Little Red Riding Hood (1994), Zipes analyzes more than 30 versions of Red Riding Hood and reveals how sexuality and violence can be subtly reflected in such popular children’s literature. Jacqueline Rose’s The Case of Peter Pan or The Impossibility of Children’s Fiction (1984) also touches on adults’ value judgments about sexuality and innocence as well as adult control over children’s fiction. Ethical questions about what is good for the child reader can hide subtle references to 531

Handegül Demirhan

sexuality and violence. The following books are of particular significance in the discussion of sexual orientation and identity: Kimberley Reynolds’ Radical Children’s Literature: Future Visions and Aesthetic Transformations in Juvenile Fiction (2007) and Kerry Mallan’s Gender Dilemmas in Children’s Fiction (2009), and Mallan (2009) speaks of the feminist Bildungsroman particularly focusing on sexual identity, desire and subjectivity. In addition, Laura Mattoon D’Amore (2017) analyzes the revisions of the American fairy tales that narrate “vigilante feminists,” a female character who has the duty to protect herself and other women against physical violence such as abduction and sexual abuse.

Criticisms of feminist adaptations and feminist pedagogy Feminist adaptations, subversions and retellings of fairy tales that reverse feminine and masculine gender roles have been subject to numerous academic studies, not all of them positive. Some criticisms (Stephens 1996; Paul 2005; Mallan 2009; Kuykendal and Sturm 2007; Trites 1997) assert that these feminist works replicate binary notions of gender by simply attributing masculine gender roles to female characters. They maintain gender normativity where androgyny and tomboyishness are just another form of genderism. Lissa Paul (2005), for example, argues that gender switching does not move texts or images beyond the conservative gender agenda but maintains the female/male hierarchy. In a similar vein, Kerry Mallan (2009) labels this gender dichotomy a “dilemma” and such replication a “failed performance.” This is viewed as a retrospective tendency: such ‘would-be’ subversions still seem to see activity, strength and rationality as masculine competencies and any strong female character just becomes a replica. Thus, they subscribe to gender tagging. However, recent work on the reception of feminist themes in children’s literature in African contexts seems to have a different view of the matter: Emily R. Zinn (2000), for example, reflects on the change in the reception of fairy tales and feminism in preand post-apartheid era in the South African context. Feminist themes and fairy tales are more positively welcomed in the new South Africa and it seems that the subversion of stereotypes and the attribution of male characteristics to female characters may work well in children’s imaginations. Pierre Canisius Ruterana (2012), also writing about the African context, argues that both female and male children respond positively to the unconventional, tomboyish female protagonist in the feminist fairy tale of Ndabaga. And finally, Fairy Tales and Feminism: New Approaches (Haase 2004) examines feminism in fairy tales in multiple cultural contexts such as Iberia, Latin America, Africa and South Asia. In the Anglo-American/European context of Cinderella, Karlyn Crowley and John Pennington (2010, 311) emphasise the importance of “thinking gender and form anew” and producing “feminist fraud” that stands on its own feet. Their argument is supported by John Stephens (1996): feminist children’s literature can offer new, positive gender images, and protagonists, freed of binary gender roles, can gain agency through their autonomy. Roberta Seelinger Trites (1997, 6, my emphasis) states that “the feminist protagonist need not squelch her individuality in order to fit into society, [i]nstead, her agency, her individuality, her choice, and her nonconformity are affirmed and even celebrated.” However, in her focus on genders and sexual orientations, Elizabeth Marshall (2004) views the feminist rewritings of Little Red Riding Hood as presenting fixed paradigms of gender that hinge on “white, Western, middle class, heterosexual notions” (Marshall 2004, 260). Children’s literature has almost always had a didactic aspect, and feminist pedagogy can be the core of feminist children’s literature and of its translation such as adaptation, rewriting and interpretation. These narratives can be training manuals for children and help raise their consciousness about multiple feminisms, sexual politics and many other issues affecting women. However, 532

Children’s literature, feminism, adaptation

such pedagogical objectives clash with the mainstream understanding of innocence in children’s literature, and are seen to compromise the so-called naive and innocent nature of children’s literature. Further, differences in sociocultural values about children’s literature and feminism can complicate but also nourish translational feminist dialogues in the context of children’s literature. When issues from other cultures are added to the mainstream ‘Western’ struggles over patriarchy, social and political questions – issues such as class/caste, religion and ethnicity, or practices such as genital mutilation – then the translation and reception of children’s literature becomes a more complicated area. Not only does every adaptation or translation involve specific views of childhood, it also mobilises issues around the politics and ideology of language, and different ethical concerns, diverse taboos and the needs of the child readers. Still, the translation of feminist children’s literature may contribute to the international dialogue between feminisms and childhoods. It may help children of the world to step out of their local circles and travel to other cultures’ realities. By virtue of the many shades of feminist translation such as adaptations, rewritings and retellings, children can surely travel across cultures and be confronted with different feminist perspectives. The question is, however, how likely such travels may be?

Current contributions and research Context-specific research on gender in the translation of children’s literature is beginning to appear. In China, Mingming Yuan (2016) analyzes the portrayal of gender in the first Chinese translation of Peter Pan (Barrie 1929) which she discusses in light of the significant role the target culture plays in translational decisions. Yuan finds that Peter Pan, the boy, becomes a genderless character in the Chinese translation. Other characters in children’s books are also gender neutralised in Chinese translation which, she explains, pertains to both the understanding of childhood and the development of feminism in China during this period. Wing Bo Tso’s study (2011) provides another complex example of this kind. It finds that the Chinese translation of Northern Lights (2002) sends mixed signals about gender: it creates both gender-free portrayals and gender stereotypes. One example refers to Buddhism, where Guan Yin is a prophet who can “take on any gender and form to save beings” (Tso 2011, 127); this implies a representation of beyondness and ever-changing perceptions of the body. On the other hand, Pan, one of the children’s daemons, is a male and has a fixed gender identity. Although the Chinese translator kept the overall genderlessness of Guan Yin as it is in the source text, s/he preferred to use different gender pronouns such as ‘he’ or ‘it’ for Pan referring to this character as a boy (he) and an object (it), which is not the case in the source text. This ambivalence, created by the translation, stems from the mixing of cultural and ideological perspectives in China that derive from both Confucian teaching and Buddhist notions of gender. In Turkey, A Game of Genders: The Development of Translated Feminist Children’s Literature in 21st Century Turkey (Demirhan 2017) is at the intersection of feminist understandings of gender, translation and children’s literature. It traces the development of translated feminist children’s literature (TFCL) imported from Swedish, Spanish and Canadian source texts into 21st-century Turkey and reflects on the sociocultural and ideological aspects of this phenomenon. It also analyzes translation policies and ideologies of relevant publishers, and explores how publishers’ activist policies and feminist ideologies have led them to seek out resources in feminist children’s literature from other cultures, eventually paving the way for the development of TFCL in the local repertoire, where Western and Middle Eastern feminisms are intertwined. Even though translations have revealed some frictions between feminisms, TFCL has contributed to the formation of local feminist children’s literature in Turkey, showing once again, how feminisms can nourish each other while maintaining a certain difference: for instance, feminism in Turkey may 533

Handegül Demirhan

be influenced by the West, but the translation of references to human bodies and their sexuality is softened in some of the translations (Demirhan 2017). Still, soon after the importation of TFCL into Turkey, independent publishers started to publish their own feminist children’s literature about extraordinary women in local history, thus holding on to local cultural values while incorporating in-coming feminisms (Demirhan 2017). “We are not there yet,” says bell hooks (2015, 9), “[b]ut this is what we must do to share feminism, to let the movement into everyone’s mind and heart”: translate every possible example of feminist children’s literature to other cultures and share feminist ideas.

Research methods in analyzing translations of feminist children’s literature There is much work to be done on the interlingual translations of feminist children’s literature, and research methods can be diverse: for instance, in The Feminine Subject in Children’s Literature, Christine Wilkie-Stibbs (2002) applies French feminist theories in analyzing the feminine in children’s literature. Textual and paratextual analyses, comparative study on cultural and sociological aspects of feminism, and evaluations/explorations of the contexts of publishing, dissemination and reception can serve in understanding translations of children’s books. Integrating macro-level research methods such as systemic frameworks and sociocultural models can also be effective in understanding why a particular feminist children’s literature is translated in a particular culture at a particular time. Some researchers (Weitzman et al. 1972; Hamilton et al. 2007; Lynch 2016) have applied quantitative methods to analyze gender in children’s literature. This method primarily focuses on the statistical and numerical analysis of appearance and frequency of gender roles as well as the analysis of gender equality. Analyzing the textual and pictoral content of award-winning children’s books is one of the most common current research techniques. Whereas Peter B. Crabb and Dawn Bielawski (1994) analyze gender-related illustrations and certain gender markers such as toys and clothing in Caldecott Award winning children’s books between 1937–1989, Stuart Oskamp et al. (1996) focus on Caldecott Children’s Books between 1986–1991. There have been many studies – in Anglo-American circles – of the books that have won awards from associations such as the Caldecott Medal Books, Newbery Medal Books, and the National Book Foundation for Children and Youth since they are widely ordered by schools and libraries as well as by adults who follow these lists closely. These research methods can also be applied to children’s books in other languages and cultures and to the translations of award-winning children’s books, by analyzing them in the light of their source texts. Qualitative research methods explore gender and feminist issues related to identity, agency and voice in children’s literature. One such technique investigates the minds of children by cognitive research methods (Connor and Serbin 1978; Jackson 2007) focusing on children’s responses to gender and feminism in the books they read, while other work (Peterson and Lach 1990) centres on the effects of gender-motivated children’s literature on psycho-affective, cognitive and gender development in children. One fruitful example is Kimberley Reynolds’ application (1990) of feminist and psychoanalytic approaches to understand the impact of Victorian children’s literature on the construction of gender. The study found that gender construction in children is closely related to the different ways in which girls and boys are addressed in children’s books as well as the gap between the expectations of adults and the needs of children in children’s literature. In more technical approaches, eye-tracking techniques can be used when the focus is on children’s responses to illustrations. Tracking eye positions and movements of children who 534

Children’s literature, feminism, adaptation

look at illustrations, and measuring the targets, duration and frequency (to see on which images and how long their eyes stop) can yield eye-opening outcomes about the reception of feminist children’s literature and its translations. And most recently, a psychoanalytic research method, employing feminist, queer approaches (Earles 2017) to analyze how young readers engage with narratives in regard to gender construction and agency has been noted in the domain of feminist children’s literature.

Future directions Starting from the ‘othering’ of children’s literature, translation, and feminism, this chapter has examined the intersection of these three areas. It can be said that examples of children’s literature based on introducing strong female characters, subverting gender stereotypes and twisting the conventional plot with its happy ending have become more inclusive and multifeminist, challenging hegemonic perceptions of femininity and sexuality, declaring war on patriarchy by questioning the notion of women’s identity in every possible way regardless of gender and independent of sex, manifesting and celebrating the empowerment of women, their agency and their independence in their own cultural backgrounds. It is splendid to see the development of this passionate literature and of relevant studies; however, there may still be much to do. More (translated) children’s books that reflect multicultural feminist thought are needed, particularly books that are informative and tell the history of feminisms, the feminism of women of colour, existential feminism and/or ecofeminism in different contexts. The difference and polyphony in feminism, the unique arguments this diverse movement presents, can be told to children in their literature and language. Besides some newly developing feminist agendas (postcolonial feminism, third world feminism, middle eastern feminism) in children’s literature and its translation, lesbian and queer feminism as well as other forms of feminism could find their way into the field and engage with it. The representation of diverse, unconventional nonnuclear families in texts could also be increased. Most importantly, it would be useful to have the local literatures travel to other destinations via translation in order to not confine children to a restricted knowledge of gender but to broaden their understanding of feminism. Apart from translating feminist children’s literature to other languages, more research on translation strategies, translation criticism and translation theory could prove fruitful for nourishing interdisciplinary and intercultural studies. Gender studies, translation studies, and children’s literature studies benefit from working together. For instance, scholars working on the subject of feminist fairy tales may be interested in examining some works in light of translation and adaptation studies, in which case the analysis of the complex production that is translation/adaptation can further broaden their work. Since second wave feminism inspired feminist literary criticism in children’s literature and its translation, the field has come a long way and is still branching out into many directions which can be organised in three lines of study: historical, intracultural and intercultural, and which includes reception and pedagogical studies. First, historical studies: even though there have been many studies on award-winning children’s books, research could also be directed at more recently listed books, offering an updated insight into the feminist as well as patriarchal content of children’s books and their translations. Apart from textual and paratextual analyses, contextual research is quintessential for the history of (translated) feminist children’s literature studies and social theorization of gender within that history. The sociocultural aspects of the emergence of these translations in a particular culture at a particular time deserve analysis. Tracing the emergence of feminist children’s literature and its 535

Handegül Demirhan

translation in specific cultural contexts may help develop more historical data in the field. The topic is relatively recent, and therefore open to much more exploration. Second, intracultural and intercultural studies: this field considers how the concepts of gender, feminism, translation and childhood relate to each other in a particular culture. Research on the interaction of these concepts in the ‘intra’ or same-language zone can be fruitful, while the intercultural relationships between these same concepts provide interesting approaches to ‘other cultures.’ The questions that may arise include: can Western feminism be transferred to other cultures and texts, and if so, how are these concepts perceived by target cultures and readers? Third, reception and pedagogical studies might examine the impact of imported gender ideas and concepts on the local literary and social contexts. More research on the reception of translated feminist children’s literature may be needed and could be carried out via questionaires, interviews, focus groups both for adults as gatekeepers and for children as readers. In a domino effect, this might raise another question: how do the translations of feminist children’s literature influence children’s behaviours and their understanding of gender? Reflections on how young readers transfer feminist notions into their social life can provide more insight on the relationship between (translated) children’s literature and feminist pedagogy. Alliances between cultures, languages and feminist thinking can be effective in raising gender awareness, like sharing a commitment to the power of translation in building the perception of gender and raising feminist consciousness. Feminist alliances and commitments may further develop from such research. The dialogue between children’s literature, feminism and translation offers infinite possibilities to make these areas visible. To provide a blueprint for the future, let the children sail in the feminist soul of children’s literature and its translation.

Further reading Clark, Beverly Lyon and Margaret R. Higonnet, eds. 1999. Girls, Boys, Books, Toys: Gender in Children’s Literature and Culture. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press. This collection brings together various scholars who write about the intersection of feminism, children’s literature and culture. With a contemporary stance, it not only offers a history of these intersecting areas, but also guides readers for future research interests. Mallan, Kerry. 2009. Gender Dilemmas in Children’s Fiction. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan. This study emphasises multiple dilemmas related to gender and sexuality in children’s literature: beauty dilemmas, identity dilemmas and other dilemmas caused by the binarised notion of gender. Referring to Judith Butler’s understanding of gender, the book emphasises numerous and unfixed ways of rethinking the concept. Simon, Sherry. 1996. Gender in Translation: Cultural Identity and the Politics of Transmission. London and New York: Routledge. This study is a fundamental work on the intersection of feminism, translation theory and practice. It also focuses on cultural studies in translation. Trites, Roberta Seelinger. 1997. Waking Sleeping Beauty: Feminist Voices in Children’s Novels. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press. This book is a good start for scholars beginning their voyage in feminist literary studies in children’s literature. It presents several examples of the feminist children’s literature and investigates feminist voices, subjectivity and narrative structures.

Related topics Gender and translation, feminism in children’s literature, feminist translation of children’s literature, translation of feminist children’s literature

536

Children’s literature, feminism, adaptation

Note * This chapter uses the word ‘translation’ as an umbrella term for different translated versions such as adaptations, subversions, retellings, and rewritings.

References Barrie, James Matthew (1929). Pan Bide. Translated by Liang Shiqiu. Shanghai: Crescent Moon Publishing. Beauvoir, Simone de. 1949. Le Deuxième Sexe. Paris: Éditions Gallimard. Connor, Jane M. and Lisa. A Serbin. 1978. Children’s Responses to Stories with Male and Female Characters. Sex Roles [Electronic], 4(5), 637–645. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1007/bf00287329 [Accessed 12 Mar. 2018]. Crabb, Peter and Dawn Bielawski. 1994. The Social Representation of Material Culture and Gender in Children’s Books. Sex Roles [Electronic], 30(1/2), 69–79. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1007/ BF01420740 [Accessed 22 Feb. 2017]. Crowley, Karlyn and John Pennington. 2010. Feminist Frauds on the Fairies? Didacticism and Liberation in Recent Retellings of ‘Cinderella’. Marvels and Tales, 24(2), 297–313. Available at: www.jstor.org/ stable/41388957 [Accessed 18 Jan. 2018]. D’Amore, Laura M. 2017. Vigilante Feminism: Revising Trauma, Abduction, and Assault in American Fairy-Tale Revisions. Marvels and Tales, 31(2), 386–405. De Lotbinière-Harwood, Susanne. 1989. About the Her in Other. Preface to Letters from an Other. Translated by Lise Gauvin. Toronto: The Women’s Press. Demirhan, Handegül. 2017. A Game of Genders: The Development of Translated Feminist Children’s Literature in 21st Century Turkey. Unpublished MA thesis, The University of Edinburgh. Dworkin, Andrea. 1974. Woman Hating. Boston: Edward Payson Dutton. Earles, Jennifer. 2017. Reading Gender: A Feminist, Queer Approach to Children’s Literature and Children’s Discursive Agency. Gender and Education, 29(3), 369–388. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/ 09540253.2016.1156062 [Accessed 16 Jan. 2018]. Fitzhugh, Louise. 1964. Harriet the Spy. San Francisco: Harper & Row Books. Flotow, Luise von. 1997. Translation and Gender: Translating in the ‘Era of Feminism’. Manchester: St. Jerome Publishing. Godard, Barbara. 1988. Preface. Translated by B. Godard, in N. Brossard, ed., Lovhers. Montreal: Guernica Press. Godayol, Pilar. 2013. Gender and Translation, in C. Millán and F. Bartrina, eds., The Routledge Handbook of Translation Studies. Abingdon: Routledge. Haase, Donald. 2004. Fairy Tales and Feminism: New Approaches. Detroit: Wayne State University Press. Hamilton, Mykol C., et al. 2007. Gender Stereotyping and Under-representations of Female Characters in 200 Popular Children’s Picture Books: A Twenty-first Century Update. Sex Roles [Electronic], 55(11–12), 757. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11199-006-9128-6 [Accessed 15 Feb. 2018]. hooks, bell. 2015. Feminism Is for Everybody: Passionate Politics. London and New York: Routledge. Jabeen, Iqra and Asad Mehmood. 2014. Children’s Literature: Shaping Gender Identities. Asia Pacific Journal of Multidisciplinary Research [Electronic], 2(1), 240–242. Available at: www.apjmr.com/apjmr-vol-2no-1/ [Accessed 5 Feb. 2017]. Jackson, Sue. 2007. ‘She Might not Have the Right Tools . . . and He Does’: Children’s Sense-Making of Gender, Work and Abilities in Early School Readers. Gender and Education, 19(1), 61–77. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/09540250601087769 [Accessed 15 Jan. 2018]. Kortenhaus, Carole M. and Jack Demarest. 1993. Gender Role Stereotyping in Children’s Literature: An Update. Sex Roles [Electronic], 28(3/4), 219–232. Available: https://doi.org/10.1007/bf00299282 [Accessed 15 Feb. 2018]. Kuykendal, Leslee F. and Brian W. Sturm. 2007. We Said Feminist Fairy Tales, Not Fractured Fairy Tales! The Construction of the Feminist Fairy Tale: Female Agency Over Role Reversal. Children and Libraries, 5(3), 38–41. Kwok, Virginia. 2016. Faithfulness in Translation of Children’s Literature: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in Chinese. Babel [Electronic], 62(2), 278–299. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1075/ babel.62.2.06kwo [Accessed 15 June 2019]. Lathey, Gillian. 2015. Translating Children’s Literature. Hoboken: Taylor & Francis. Lesnik-Oberstein, Karin. 2005. Defining Children’s Literature and Childhood, in P. Hunt, ed., International Companion Encyclopedia of Children’s Literature. London and New York: Routledge, 17–31.

537

Handegül Demirhan

Lessing, Doris. 1952. Martha Quest. London: Michael Joseph. Lieberman, Marcia R. 2012. Some Day My Prince Will Come: Female Acculturation Through the Fairy Tale, in J. Zipes, ed., Don’t Bet on the Prince: Contemporary Feminist Fairy Tales in North America and England. London and New York: Routledge, 185–200. Lurie, Alison. 1980. Clever Gretchen and Other Forgotten Folktales. New York: Crowell. Lynch, Lisa. 2016. Where Are All the Pippis? The Under-representation of Female Main and Title Characters in Children’s Literature in the Swedish Preschool. Sex Roles [Electronic], 75, 422–433. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11199-016-0637-7 [Accessed 14 Feb. 2018]. Mallan, Kerry. 2009. Gender Dilemmas in Children’s Fiction. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Marshall, Elizabeth. 2004. Stripping for the Wolf: Rethinking Representations of Gender in Children’s Literature. Reading Research Quarterly [Electronic], 39(3), 256–270. Available at: www.jstor.org/stable/ 4151769 [Accessed 27 Jan. 2018]. McDowell, Margaret B. 1977. New Didacticism: Stories for Free Children. Language Arts, 54(1), 41–47. Available at: www.jstor.org/stable/41404476 [Accessed 15 Jan. 2018]. Millett, Kate. 1970. Sexual Politics. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Muhlen, Bruna, et al. 2012. Gender Issues in Children’s Literature: Which Discourses Are Presented to Children? International Journal of Psychology [Electronic], 47 (Supplement 1), 395. Available at: https:// doi.org/10.1080/00207594.2012.709106 [Accessed 10 Mar. 2018]. Munsch, Robert. 1980. The Paper Bag Princess. Toronto: Annick Press. Nilsen, Alleen P. 1971. Women in Children’s Literature. College English, 32(8), 918–926. Available at: www. jstor.org/stable/375631 [Accessed 28 Jan. 2018]. Nodelman, Perry. 1988. Children’s Literature as Women’s Writing. Children’s Literature Association Quarterly [Electronic], 13(1), 31–34. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1353/chq.0.0264 [Accessed 12 Feb. 2018]. O’Sullivan, Emer. 2005. Translating Literature for Children. London and New York: Routledge. Oittinen, Riitta. 2000. Translating for Children. New York: Garland Publishing. Oskamp, Stuart, Karen Kaufman, and Lianna A. Wolterbeek. 1996. Gender Role Portrayals in Preschool Picture Books. Journal of Social Behaviour and Personality [Electronic], 11(5), 27–39. Paul, Lissa. 1990. Enigma Variations: What Feminist Theory Knows About Children’s Literature, in P. Hunt, ed., Children’s Literature: The Development of Criticism. London: Routledge, 148–165. Paul, Lissa. 2005. Feminism revisited, in P. Hunt, ed., Understanding Children’s Literature: Key Essays from the Second Edition of ‘The International Companion Encyclopedia of Children’s Literature’, 2nd ed. London and New York: Routledge, 114–127. Perrault, C. 1977. The Fairy Tales of Charles Perrault. Translated by A. Carter. London: Gollancz. Peterson, Sharyl B. and Mary A. Lach. 1990. Gender Stereotypes in Children’s Books: Their Prevalence and Influence on Cognitive and Affective Development. Gender and Education [Electronic], 2(2), 185–197. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/0954025900020204 [Accessed 11 Mar. 2018]. Phelps, Ethel J. 1981. The Maid of the North: Feminist Folk Tales from Around the World. New York: Holt. Pullman, Philip. (2002). Northern Lights. Translated by Wang Jing. Taiwan: Muse Publishing. Reynolds, Kimberley. 1990. Girls Only? Gender and Popular Children’s Fiction in Britain, 1880–1910. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Reynolds, Kimberley. 2007. Radical Children’s Literature: Future Visions and Aesthetic Transformations in Juvenile Fiction. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Rose, Jacqueline. 1984. The Case of Peter Pan or The Impossibility of Children’s Fiction. London and Basingstoke: The Macmillan Press. Rowe, Karen E. 2012. Feminism and Fairy Tales, in J. Zipes, ed., Don’t Bet on the Prince: Contemporary Feminist Fairy Tales in North America and England. London and New York: Routledge, 209–226. Ruterana, Pierre C. 2012. Children’s Reflections on Gender Equality in Fairy Tales: A Rwanda Case Study. The Journal of Pan African Studies, 4(9), 85–101. Scott, Kathryn. 1981. Whatever Happened to Jane and Dick? Sexism in Texts Re-Examined. Peabody Journal of Education, 58(3), 135–140. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/01619568109538325 [Accessed 12 Mar. 2018]. Sezer, Melek Ö. 2010. Masallar ve Toplumsal Cinsiyet [Fairy Tales and Gender]. 6th ed. Istanbul: Evrensel Basım Yayın. Shavit, Zohar. 1981. Translation of Children’s Literature as a Function of Its Position in the Literary Polysystem. Poetics Today, 2(4), 171–179. Available at: www.jstor.org/stable/1772495 [Accessed 14 Feb. 2018]. Stephens, John. 1996. Gender, Genre and Children’s Literature. Signal, 79 ( Jan.), 17–30.

538

Children’s literature, feminism, adaptation

Trites, Roberta S. 1997. Waking Sleeping Beauty: Feminist Voices in Children’s Novels. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press. Tso, Wing. 2011. A Comparative Study of Gender Representations in Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials and Its Chinese Translation. Unpublished Doctoral dissertation, Birmingham: University of Birmingham. Weitzman, Leonore, et al. 1972. Sex-role Socialization in Picture Books for Preschool Children. The American Journal of Sociology [Electronic], 77(6), 1125–1150. Available at: www.jstor.org/stable/2776222 [Accessed 10 Mar. 2018]. Wilkie-Stibbs, Christine. 2002. The Feminine Subject in Children’s Literature. New York and London: Routledge. Yuan, Mingming. 2016. Translating Gender in Children’s Literature in China During The 1920s–A Case Study of Peter Pan. International Journal of Comparative Literature & Translation Studies [Electronic], 4(3), 26–31. Available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.7575/aiac.ijclts.v.4n.3p.26 [Accessed 11 Feb. 2018]. Zaghini, E., ed. 2005. Babar Has Come to England: Classic European Children’s Literature in Translation, in D. Hallford and E. Zaghini, eds., Outside In: Children’s Books in Translation. Malta: Compass Press, 22–27. Zinn, Emily R. 2000. Rediscovery of the Magical: On Fairy Tales, Feminism, and the New South Africa. Modern Fiction Studies [Electronic], 46(1), 246–269. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1353/mfs.2000.0015 [Accessed 11 Feb. 2018]. Zipes, Jack. 1994. The Trials and Tribulations of Little Red Riding Hood. London and New York: Routledge. Zipes, Jack. 2012a. Introduction, in J. Zipes, ed., Don’t Bet on the Prince: Contemporary Feminist Fairy Tales in North America and England. London and New York: Routledge, 1–38. Zipes, Jack. 2012b. Preface, in J. Zipes, ed., Don’t Bet on the Prince: Contemporary Feminist Fairy Tales in North America and England. London and New York: Routledge, xi.

539

Epilogue

41 Recognition, risk, and relationships Feminism and translation as modes of embodied engagement Beverley Curran

Far from being discrete strands found within translation, feminism and gender run through every aspect. Translation, feminism and gender share complex histories that incorporate different cultural contexts and historical moments, informing and inflecting each other. In my own case, as a teacher of translation I bring an eclectic range of touchstone texts that inform my teaching of translation as a mode of embodied engagement; they include Kate Millet’s critical reading of Henry Miller in Sexual Politics (1970); Adrienne Rich’s notion of the lesbian continuum in “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence” (1981); bell hooks’ sustained belief that feminism is for everybody (2000); Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble (1990) and Eve Kosovsky Sedgewick’s “Queer Performativity” (1993); the eco-mythic feminism in the works of Ishimure Michiko; and just about anything by Nicole Brossard or Daphne Marlatt. I cultivate the enjoyment of this pulsion that gives us agency to engage with a text, and through translation imagine new relationships with memory and history; language and its meanings; and each other. Teaching translation as a process and a practice, as performative and productive, raises awareness of translation as a way to understand change in terms of relationships. The application of the critical strategies of foregrounding and recognition also draw attention to the importance of the consequences of choice, and the anticipated or unintended effects of reading, writing, and translation. Translation takes time, requiring us to slow down and spend time with a text to explore meaning and relationships; to swim with the words, as Nicole Brossard has described it, allowing sensation to be translated into emotion, and to get a sense of circulating currents. Recognition in translation is grounded in the attention paid by feminists, queer theorists, and others, to what has been relegated to the background or left off the record through occlusion, absence, and assumption. It challenges us to question our assumptions, look carefully into the context of a text and attend to what is there and what may need to be imagined. Awareness of the importance of translation as a significant cultural practice is a way to understand change. The texts we use in the translation classroom also draw attention to the value of taking risks and approaching translation as an experimental writing practice which can benefit from collaborations among translators, with readers, and multiple media in the making of meaning. In the process of cultivating translation awareness through engaged practice, we see a deepening in 543

Beverley Curran

the relationships we have with the texts we translate and the effects they can have in the world in which they circulate. This chapter discusses teaching translation awareness at an international bilingual (English and Japanese) university in Tokyo where many students are interested in the link between their linguistic and cultural identities and how they can be explored through translation practice that includes a range of texts. Translation takes place in and out of Japanese in the classroom, but this discussion will confine itself primarily to English translations of Japanese hybrid cultural productions, namely Otouto no otto [My Brother’s Husband] (2015), a manga by Tagame Gengoroh; Sora no Ito [The Thread of the Sky] (2016), Yada Eriko’s manga on environmental pollution; and Minamata umi no koe [Minamata the voices of the sea] (1982), a memory picture book by Ishimure Michiko, which all encourage students to experience translation as a mode of embodied engagement that helps us imagine change and recognize the power of performativity, “the power language has to bring about a new situation or to set into motion a set of effects” (Butler 2015, 28), both intended and unanticipated.

Choices and consequences: translation effects In L’Amèr ou le chapitre effrité (1977) [These Our Mothers, or, The disintegrating chapter (1983), translated by Barbara Godard], a work of fiction theory, Nicole Brossard wrote, “Écrire je suis une femme est plein de consequences” [To write: I am a woman is heavy with consequences] (53/45). This is perhaps a useful departure point for approaching any translation in order to recognize the politics of the practice. Attention to choices and their consequences, intended and otherwise, places weight on making informed decisions. Translators are asked to be flexible and consider translation in terms of its possibilities. In teaching translation for professional purposes, the learner is encouraged to recognize her linguistic strengths and translate into her ‘stronger’ language. In teaching translation awareness, it is important to translate in different directions to feel the power shift and the different relationships that form in representing others in our own language and ourselves in another language – or medium. Paying close attention to the words chosen in our practice of translation alerts us to the need to pay close attention to language generally, its effects and to whom it is addressed. As Clem Robyns (1994) has pointed out, the way we treat texts and their discursive migration in translation is an indication of the attitudes we bring to encounters with other people and new ideas. Translation is a chance to reassess our approaches and change them. Sometimes, we simply have to recognize that we have choices in translation; that what seems inevitable or proscribed by precedents can be resisted and affected by re-readings and responses. Feminist projects have often begun by looking for what has been left off the record or undervalued, but revisiting feminist thinking has been crucial to identifying its enduring strengths as well as addressing blind spots. The translation strategy of recognition is a self-conscious one, which makes the translator think about what she brings to the text; how the text signifies beyond the words “on the page;” and the need for collaboration in terms of discussion and research. This is not easy, because as with humour or irony, what we do not recognize isn’t there. However, in teaching translation, we can start with the material text to raise the visibility of the importance of the knowledge we must bring with us to ethically translate a text. For example, I like to use Mizumura Minae’s example of the Japanese translation of Gertrude Stein’s famous line, “A rose is a rose is a rose,” to consider translation choices and the possible effects of these choices. Mizumura is not without her own blind spots about Japanese. In “On Translation” (2003), she begins with the claim that Japanese “has no relation to Chinese,” but of course, Chinese characters are one of the multiple writing systems Japanese employs; so there is a relationship 544

Recognition, risk, and relationships

that seems to have gone unacknowledged, even though Mizumura identifies these “ideograms (Chinese characters)” and two phonetic sign systems, which “coexist within any Japanese text”: Ideograms are usually used for nouns and verbs, and may always be replaced with either of the phonetic signs. Of the two phonetic signs, the more frequently used sign, hiragana, best represents the vernacular language, whereas the other, katakana, gives the impression of being more blatantly phonetic, and is thus often reserved for imported foreign words. The word bara, meaning rose, therefore may be written three ways: 薔薇、ばら、or バラ. Mizumura proceeds to give examples of five translations of how “a famous American poem A rose is a rose is a rose” might be translated. All are phonetically identical (bara wa bara wa bara de aru) but one is rendered in predominantly kanji (Chinese characters), one in hiragana; one in katakana with hiragana markers; one entirely in katakana; and one which uses a mix of writing systems: A B C D E

薔薇は薔薇は薔薇である ばらはばらはばらである バラはバラはバラである Or, バラハバラハバラでアル  Or even, 薔薇はばらはバラである

While all these translations sound the same, they look very different and have different effects depending on how the translator chooses to render them in writing. The kanji characters are visually complex and also appear very precise and concise, containing meaning. The phonetic writing systems leave more space for the reader to imagine her own rose. The hiragana is rounded. The katakana is more angular and marks the text as an import. The mix of writing systems is an indication of the diversity of ways to translate. Mizumura prefers the hiragana translation (B) because it appears to her as “the simplest and yet, the most confounding.” The suitability of this particular translation is likely connected to the translator’s awareness of Stein’s style. Bringing this simple but confounding line to my students’ attention is often their first encounter with Gertrude Stein. I once asked if anyone in the class knew who she was without checking their phones. Someone thought she was the editor of Ms magazine. Misidentification, but in the slippage a meaningful relationship, still appears between Stein and Gloria Steinem. Deliberate misspelling, such as “grrl,” which “would overwrite the earlier feminist creation ‘womyn’ ” (Case 1997, 641), has been a way to take control of language, but inadvertent slippage can also be important by initiating unexpected associations: this is how students can experience performativity at work, even if they might be confounded by its theorization in Judith Butler when she talks about the moments that afford an opening to recognize the regulatory discourse, or destiny script, that shapes us: When that field of norms breaks open, even if provisionally, we see that the animating aims of a regulatory discourse, as it is enacted bodily, gives rise to consequences that are not always foreseen, making room for ways of living gender that challenge prevailing norms of recognition. (Butler 2015, 31) There is play at work in translation, as well, which makes space for multiple meanings to operate together. Stein was playfully and seriously suggesting the power of iteration: “A rose is a rose is 545

Beverley Curran

a rose is a rose. It continues with blooming and it fastens clearly upon excellent examples” (As Fine as Melanctha). The line continues to bloom in Japanese in different ways and with different effects. Student translations extend the line in ways that are ‘excellent examples’ of the possibilities that can become apparent in translation: バラはバラでということはつまりやっぱりバラはバラでということでバラはバラ 以外のなにものでもない。 [A] rose being a rose is called a rose, that is, as expected, a rose that is a rose is nothing but a rose. Or, ロースはバラ、バラ、バラだよ。 Rose is rose, rose, rose. One translation speaks of the specificity of the rose; the other translation suggests roses all over the place. Along with the employment of an informed, associative impulse in translation comes a willingness to nudge or more assertively womanhandle a text towards a reader in what is certainly not a domesticating operation. Choices made about writing systems in Japanese remind us that choices of font, upper- and lower-case letters, and spacing are not to be taken for granted in other languages. The visual and phonic elements of a textual translation are important to be aware of and to think about.

Otouto no otto [My Brother’s Husband]: circulating cultural knowledge in translation The reader has always been an important part of feminist writing, specifically, the woman writer reaching out to a woman reading. In translation of feminist texts, women readers have sought out women writers to translate, and collaboration among translator and writer, as well as collaborative translation has been a way to make translation an ongoing and extended dialogue. Applying this in a classroom and across texts of all kinds means that readers have the opportunity to be active and interactive with the text and its effects on their own ideas; in the engagement with Tagame Gengoroh’s Otouto no otto and My Brother’s Husband, its English translation by Anne Ishii, they can think specifically about translation, gender, and sexual diversity, and how ideas travel in translation. The story is about the intercultural encounter between the single father Yuichi and Mike, the Canadian husband of Yuichi’s deceased twin brother, who comes to Japan and winds up staying with Yuichi and his daughter, Kana. This examination looks back and forth between Tagame’s manga and Ishii’s translation to suggest that there is no singular point of entry into a conversation with cultural productions. Further, it looks at the currents of circulation and what happens when they shift directions through translation. In beginning to look at any translation it is useful to start with the paratext, a term used by Gérard Genette to describe all the ways that a text is framed; whatever form a text takes, it “rarely appears in its naked state, without the reinforcement and accompaniment of a certain number of productions” (Genette 1991, 261), such as author’s name, title, or cover illustration, which position it to persuade a potential reader to enter the text. Looking at the paratexts that frame the Tagame manga and its English translation shows us the translation choices that go beyond language to place a book in a market for consumption and remind us that cultural productions are creative works and commodities. A comparative look at the two covers of the first volume of Otouto no otto・My Brother’s Husband (Figure 41.1) gives us a sense of the complex cultural position the manga and its translation 546

Recognition, risk, and relationships

Image 41.1 Two covers of Otouto no otto – My Brother’s Husband

occupy. Except for the shift in writing systems, the front covers are identical; the translator’s name does not appear on the cover of the English translation. The cover art shows two men and a young girl; the man on the left wears a tshirt with a pink triangle on it, which may or may not be meaningful to a viewer as the designation of a male homosexual in Nazi Germany or a symbol of gay pride. Who is the brother? Who is the husband? Is the girl the two men’s daughter or one of the men’s sisters? The relationships, like the title, appear ambiguous. Recognition, what we know and what we don’t, has an important impact on how we read the cover as much as how we read a text. As Genette points out, concerning the reading of Proust’s Recherche: [F]or most readers [the knowledge of] two biographical facts which are the half-Jewish ancestry of Proust and his homosexuality [. . .] creates an inevitable paratext to the pages of his work consecrated to these two subjects. I do not say that one must know it; I only say that those who know it do not read in the same way as those who do not. (Genette 1991, 266) This is certainly true of Tagame, as well. Alison Bechdel writes in her backcover notes to the English translation, “Renowned manga artist Gengoroh Tagame turns his stunning draftsmanship to a story very different from his customary fare, to delightful and heartwarming effect.” Those readers who are fans or familiar with Tagame’s ‘customary fare’ will know that this manga for all ages is the work of a master of homoerotic art – and a bear. These readers will certainly read the manga in a different way from those who are not familiar with Tagame. Furthermore, the cognoscenti are recognized by the Japanese publisher, who provides gratuitous “bonus” images (called a “service cut”) on the inside cover for fan enjoyment (Figure 41.2). 547

Beverley Curran

Image 41.2 Bonus images provided by the Japanese publisher

There are additional images on the inside cover of the English translation, as well, but they have been replaced by bodies and play framed in a very different way (Figure 41.3). In a translation which presents Tagame’s manga as “an unprecedented and heartbreaking look at the state of a largely still-closeted Japanese gay culture” and “how it’s been affected by the West,” we see in the covered-up, domesticated images of the inside cover “how the translated text can be seen to register the influence of factors peculiar to a receiving culture” (Harvey 2000, 137). My Japanese students assumed that readers of the American English translation would be well-informed about gay culture and sexual diversity. However, the apparent censorship in the translation to keep the images of the ‘service cut’ from anglophone readers raised student awareness of social anxiety in the ‘receiving culture’ evoked by the sexually suggestive imagery and prompted the cut. In addition to the ‘service cut’ images replaced in the translation, sections of the Japanese-­ language manga called “Mike no gei karucha-kouza” [Mike’s Lecture on Gay Culture] were omitted entirely. The series of brief lectures cover such topics as the recent history of same-sex marriage laws; an explanation of the changing meaning of the pink triangle; pride flags; and the meaning of ‘coming out.’ In class, students again took for granted that the information in these lectures was already known by English speakers because of their familiarity with gay culture, making their translation into English unnecessary. Translating these lectures from Japanese to English changed their minds about the importance of including these lectures as part of the manga because ‘global’ emblems of gay culture and discourse do not circulate unchanged. The lectures then are not meant or meaningful only for Japanese readers. ‘Gay culture’ is neither monolithic nor unchanging; kamingu auto [coming out] in Japanese does not mean the same as coming out in English. Mike discusses the difficulty of translating ‘coming out’ into Japanese. What takes place when kamingu auto is translated into English from Japanese? 548

Recognition, risk, and relationships

Image 41.3 Additional images of the English translation

On the cover and in the story, we see Mike positioned as a proud and knowledgeable member of a gay community, but his lectures look at diversity within that community as he introduces the rainbow flag, along with symbols of the International Bear Brotherhood, leather, and transgender pride. In Japan, this recognition of diversity is important because it challenges the image of the cross-dressing queen installed on television as spectacle and entertainment. Mike, on the other hand, as both foreigner (new arrival in Japan) and gay, enters into the home, embodying ideas that confront Yaichi’s heteronormative assumptions of what it means to be a brother, father, and man and force him to rethink them, especially when his daughter Kana’s attitude to Mike is so different from his own. For example, when Mike explains to Kana that he is her uncle because he was married to her father Yuichi’s brother, Kana is surprised for two reasons: (1) that her father has a brother and (2) that two men can marry each other. When she asks if the latter is possible, Mike and Yuichi answer at the same time; in the English translation Mike says, ‘Yes, we can’ while Yuichi says, “No, they can’t.” When Kana asks for clarification, her father explains that in Japan it is not allowed but men can marry in other countries. Kana looks perplexed, and responds, “Hen na no,” which can be translated as “That’s strange.” Yaichi assumes that Kana thinks men marrying each other is what she thinks is ‘strange’, but he is startled to find that what she is referring to why it’s good for men to marry each other in one place and no good somewhere else. In a classroom, the texts we translate, and how we choose to translate them, draw attention to our own cultural assumptions, no matter where we position ourselves in terms of gender or politics. How do we interact with other cultures, with ideas or people that are new to us, with 549

Beverley Curran

languages we do not know? Classroom discussions of the micro-features of translated texts and how they are framed draw attention to the need for wide reading and open inquiry. As Mike’s lectures on gay culture (and their omission in translation) suggest, a text cannot begin to be explained without recourse to “larger cultural debates and to the concepts central to the (sub) cultures from which they have issued and into which they re-emerge” (Harvey 2000, 159). Translation effects are not unilateral; they affect relationships.

Risk and responsibility: extending the local through translation awareness Feminist thought and gender awareness can inflect the reading and translation of a range of texts. They can be particularly effective when they are applied in a translation classroom to texts that are not explicitly feminist or queer, but certainly are working at a skew with culturally dominant ideas about the relationship between local and global; between gender and precarity; between economic and environmental priorities; and all the versions of our bodies. Here is where translation awareness draws our attention to relationships between feminist or gendered translation practice and the texts we choose to translate; feminist translation techniques can serve in any text. Collaborative translations students undertook to translate the works of Yada Eriko and Ishimure Michiko changed how they viewed translation, and their mutual and shared engagement as translators changed their relationship to each other as well as to these stories of environmental pollution; there was recognition of how translation can operate as a form of activism.

Sora no ito [The Thread of the Sky] Sometimes a text signals its desire to be translated. In translating Yada Eriko’s manga Sora no Ito, students were, as always, encouraged to approach the translation not just as a language exercise or a classroom activity, but as a mode of engagement, which meant that they would engage physically and emotionally as well as linguistically with the text they were translating in recognition of the fact that what we bring to the text is crucial to how we understand it and how we translate it. To begin, this meant learning about where the story came from. That is, before circulating knowledge, a translator needs to know where the knowledge is coming from and how it was produced. The site of the story told in Yada’s Sora no Ito is Yokkaichi in central Japan. In 1960, a petrochemical complex was established there, which, as anticipated, brought regional prosperity. However, its operation also brought unexpected effects, including a sudden and serious increase in respiratory diseases due to the sulfuric oxides released into the atmosphere. The students did not have much prior knowledge about the history of industrial pollution in Japan. When shown a photograph of the Kombinat, the huge petrochemical plant and its multitude of chimneys that expelled the sulphuric dioxides into the air, most students could not identify the image. Again, what we do not recognize is read differently than what we do. Translation is a discovery of how we read and what we need to know. Recognition was important because the image of the Kombinat is found on the upper half of the young girl’s body that dominates the monochromatic cover of Yada’s manga. The image shows the young girl’s nose and mouth, but not her eyes, so we focus on the respiratory. The young girl’s hair is blowing; the wind makes the air “visible” – and the smoke of the Kombinat chimneys are carried by the wind, too, to the young girl’s lungs. The girl’s body, which dominates the space of the cover, is the site of the story. As Judith Butler has observed, “the body

550

Recognition, risk, and relationships

[– like translation and like theatre –] is less an entity than a living set of relations, the body cannot be fully dissociated from the infrastructural and environmental conditions of its living and acting” (2015, 64). The manga is not about ‘Yokkaichi kougai’ [industrial pollution]; it tells the story of Naoko, a little girl who dies of asthma at the age of nine. The title of the manga is 四日市公害マンガ　ソラノイト~ 少女をおそった灰色の 空〜[Yokkaichi kougai manga Sora no ito: shoujo wo osotta hai iro no sora・Yokkaichi environmental manga Sora no ito [The Thread of the Sky]: the grey sky that struck the little girl] (Figure 41.4). Students speculated on why Yada chose katakana for ソラノイト [sora no ito] and how they might translate the title into English. In discussion they noticed the specificity

Image 41.4 Cover and title of Sora no ito

551

Beverley Curran

of the kanji used in the title, and the way the use of characters established a relationship among Yokkaichi pollution [四日市公害], the little girl [少女], and the grey sky [灰色の空]. On the other hand, the phonetic script made the reader slow down to figure out what Sora no ito was; the phonetic ambiguity invited participation in the construction of meaning. “Sora” appears in katakana and in kanji. Students wondered if this told us that the manga artist was resisting a single meaning? Growing up in Yokkaichi, Yada considered the pollution problem a thing of the past because that was how it had been presented at school. The Kombinat that she saw everyday was just part of the scenery, a presence she took for granted. It was not because she lived there that Yada became interested in Yokkaichi pollution issues. Recognition of its connection to her life came through the mediation of a friend’s documentary. This role of mediation in recognizing the local has also been noted by Butler: “locality is not denied by the fact that the scene is communicated beyond itself and so constituted in global media; it depends on that mediation to take place as the event that it is” (Butler 2015, 92). How the local circulates and how we can participate in it is an important question in stories and performances of such site-specific events as industrial pollution. Sora no ito is for (young) people who are drawn to manga but do not yet realize the relationship between industrial pollution and their own lives. The student translators were part of that intended readership. Reading the manga inspired the students in a number of ways: it demonstrated the power of stories; the ethics of practice; and the importance of engagement. As one student commented, “The manga is about something serious. I want to take my translation seriously, too.” Although the manga translation project was attractive to the students, they were surprised by the challenges. Dialogue dominates the text in a manga, so attention must be paid to the range of voices. Students realized that they had to consider tone, stress, and volume, as well as what was not said. The importance of voices became even more emphatic when Yada visited the class as they began their translation work to answer questions. The manga uses Mie-ben, a local language, in order to show that the location of Yokkaichi was an important part of the story; all the sites of major industrial pollution have been situated in the background of the national consciousness. When Yada said dialect was important, students started to worry: how could they represent the Mie dialect in English? Was it possible to use a rural dialect of the American south? In fact, they came to realize that the importance of this story as local meant that the story resisted translation. The students began to look for characteristics of Mie-ben – pronouns, endings, vocabulary – that would not be translated, that would mark the story in English translation not just as a Japanese manga, but a Yokkaichi manga. At the same time, Yada’s decision to write the dialogue from left-to-right instead of vertical, as well as the katakana title were explicit signals that the manga was inviting English translation and new readers. The interlingual translation of Sora no ito was followed by an intersemiotic translation project, which had students translate the story into another medium for the purpose of performance. These were creative transformances, as conceptualized by feminist translators and scholars involved in Tessera (1989) “where various translators work with, understand and perform the same text differently” (Flotow 2011, 8). This project was not restricted by language or medium, and student collaboration took a number of different approaches. Radio plays and songs foregrounded the sonic dimensions of the manga, for example, while others looked through television and news archives for video materials documenting the pollution and its effects. The students reread the manga, translated, and performed it, and then viewed all the transformances of the “same” story, becoming performative assemblies comprised of readers, translators, creators, performers, and audience members – all at once. 552

Recognition, risk, and relationships

Minamata umi no koe [Minamata the voice of the sea] Minamata in southern Kyushu and Yokkaichi in central Japan are two of four major sites of industrial pollution in the country. The Chisso Corporation began operations in Minamata in 1909 as a carbide and fertilizer manufacturer before moving into plastics and the production of acetaldehyde. By the late 1950s, the company directly employed one-third of the residents of Minamata and accounted for more than 60% of local tax revenues; former Chisso managers and union members figured prominently in the municipal government. For decades, the company dumped mercury, a by-product of acetaldehyde manufacture, into Minamata Bay, causing serious pollution of the marine eco-system. Local residents, as well as other sentient beings, who ate contaminated fish were affected by methyl-mercury poisoning and its devastation of the central nervous system. Translation awareness and embodied engagement were brought to the collaborative translation of Ishimure Michiko’s memory picture book Minamata umi no koe [Minamata the voice of the sea], which expands the story of industrial pollution to mythic proportions. Like Yada’s manga, it uses dialect to mark the locality, but it is also a story of the ocean and generations and troubled spirits, and evokes a different kind of time. It is about Minamata, but this story of environmental pollution is a performance of kotodama (word spirit), found both in the poet’s use of local Kumamoto dialects and a non-linear narrative. Ishimure was a poet and a feminist as well as committed environmental activist. She is not explaining what happened through a detailed history or neat chronology. What the readertranslator does not know has to be imagined. This is what Daphne Marlatt has called “listening through the body,” feeling the rhythm of the text, and being inspired by the illustrations done by Maruki Toshi and Maruki Iri. In the slow process of translation, it is possible to make space for thinking about how the practice of translation can support “the development of deeper nuanced understandings of the fluid relationships between people and environments in specific places and moments, as well as over time and across spaces” (Thornber 2011, 210). The memory picture book begins and ends with the expression shuuririenen. In her afterword, Ishimure suggests that it is a word on the verge of being music, the energy of a higanbana (the flame-coloured spider lily, which is the flower of death and the afterlife), the flower’s prayer. As students worked and imagined their way through the translation they learned the names of different kinds of sea life and mountain plants, and felt the rich diversity of life before the ocean was polluted. Then they learned the names of the chemicals that were emptied into the ocean and entered the bodies of those who lived and fed there. By the end of the translation, shuuririenen was full of significance. As one student put it, “Shuuririenen means nothing but means everything. It’s about the mountains crying, [. . .] the beauty of the mountain, and about lives that die and come back again.” The writing challenges the reader; in the spirit of collaboration, this translator has no desire to corral the meaning of a word or hurry its significance, leaving it suggestive and open to associations. On 10 January 2018, while students were in the process of translating Minamata umi no koe, Ishimure died at the age of 90. There was a renewed sense of importance among the young translators to circulate a text that testified to a life of environmental engagement. They recognized that feminism, gender awareness, and the world we live in are all interactive.

Conclusion This chapter has looked at teaching translation as an embodied mode of engagement and how feminist thought and gender awareness are important components to critical and creative encounters with any cultural production. There is nothing that limits this pedagogy to a 553

Beverley Curran

translation classroom in Japan. Recognition of how we negotiate the interaction of language, images, and technologies and how these interactions affect meaning in the classroom study of translation helps us see how we tend to negotiate these complexities in our lives. Terms, such as ‘gay culture’ or ‘women’ are not homogeneous “any more than the categories ‘men’, ‘humans’, ‘citizens’, or ‘poor people’ (Harding 2015, 57). There are always other versions of a term or text and other ways to be in the world. Thinking about the directions our translations take through our choices grounds an ethical practice of translation and a process for understanding (and potentially initiating) change and shifting social relationships anywhere.

References Butler, Judith. 1990. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York and London: Routledge. Butler, Judith. 2015. Notes Towards a Performative Theory of Assembly. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Case, Sue-Ellen. 1997. Eve’s Apple, or Women’s Narrative Bytes. Modern Fiction Studies, 631–650. Flotow, Luise von. 2011. Preface, in Luise Von Flotow, ed., Translating Women. Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press. Genette, Gérard and Marie Maclean. 1991. Introduction to the Paratext. New Literary History, 22(2), 261–272. Harding, Sandra. 2015. Objectivity and Diversity: Another Logic of Scientific Research. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Harvey, Keith. 2000. Gay Community, Gay Identity and the Translated Text. TTR: Traduction, Terminologie, Rédaction, 13(1), 137–165. hooks, bell. Feminism Is for Everybody: passionate politics. Cambridge MA: South End Press. Ishimure, Michiko. 1982. Minamata umi no koe [Minamata: The Voice of the Sea]. Illustrated by Maruki Toshi and Maruki Irie. Tokyo: Komine shoten. Millet, Kate. 1970. Sexual Politics. Garden City, NY: Doubleday. Mizumura Minae. 2003. On Translation. Panel presentation at Iowa City Public Library, International Writing Program, Iowa University. Available at: http://mizumuraminae.com/pdf/OnTranslation.pdf. Rich, Adrienne. 1981. Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence. Signs, 5(4), 631–660. Robyns, Clem. 1994. Translation and Discursive Identity. Poetics Today, 15(3), 405–428. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. 1993. Queer Performativity: Henry James’s The Art of the Novel. GLQ, 1(1), 1–16. Tagame, Gengoroh. 2015. Otouto no otto. Tokyo: Action Comics. 2017. My Brother’s Husband, vol. 1. Translated by Anne Ishii. New York: Pantheon Books. Thornber, Karen. 2011. Acquiescing to Environmental Degradation: Literary Dynamics of Resignation. Pacific Coast Philology, 46(2), 210–231. Yada, Eriko. 2016. Sora no ito, in Ikeda Richiko and Itou Mitsuo, eds., Sora no aosa ha hitotsu dake: manga tsunagu Yokkaichi kougai. Tokyo: Kunpuru.

554

Index

Note: Numbers in bold indicate a table. Numbers in italics indicate a figure. Abd El-Jawad, Hassan 393 Abdo, Diya 75 – 77 Abdullah, Ibtisam 49 – 50 Abdul-Salam, Siham bint Saniya wa 487 Abou-Bakr, Omaima 481, 488, 504 Aboubakr, Randa 488 – 490 Abou Rached, Ruth 48 – 63 Abouzeid, Leila 65, 68 – 70, 70, 73, 75 – 77 Abreu, Caio Fernando 321 Abu-Ayyash, Emad A. 463 Abu-Haidar, Farida 54 – 55 Acker, Elizabeth van 164 Adamczyk-Garbowska, Monika 113 Adam Mickiewicz University (UAM) (Poland) 1 Adams, Ernest 447 Adnan, Samia 484, 492 Adorno, Theodor 113 Africa 133, 138, 521; civil war 93; North 65 – 66, 69, 71, 406; South 180, 484, 532 African-American 27 African languages 187 Afrique du nord française see Maghreb Agorni, Mirella 119 Ahmad, Hadil A. 53 Ahmadi Khorasani, Noushin 36 – 37 Ahumada, Mónica 83 – 92 Ai Xiaoming艾晓明 311 Akkawy, Rehab 209 – 211, 219 Al-Ali, Nadje 55, 402 Al-Amir, Daizy 49 – 52 Alarcón, Norma 10 Al-Azhar University 485, 492, 496 – 497, 504 – 505 Albee, Edward: Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf 34, 35 Alcott, Louisa May 34, 530; Little Women 34 Al-Dulaimi, Lutfiya 49 – 52 Algeria 64 – 74 Algerian People’s National Assembly 404 Algerian war of independence 93 al-Ghazali, Zaynab 402 al-Hajjaj, Raad 485

al-Hibri, Azizah 486, 488 Ali, Ayaan Hirsi 180, 481 Ali, Kecia 481 Allende, Isabel 93 Allen, Jeffner 225 Alliance of Arab Women (AAW) 403 Alloula, Malek 72 Al-Mala’ika, Nazik 49 Al-Mana, Samira 49 – 52 Al-Nasiri, Bouthayna 49 – 52 Al-Qazwini, Iqbal 55 Al-Qur’an wal mar’ah: i‘adat qira’at al-nas al-Qur’ani min manzūr nisa’i see Quran and Woman Al-Ramadan, Raidah 393 al-Saadawi, Nawal 212 Al-Safadi, Dalal 49 Alsharekh, Alanoud 208, 216 al-Shihabi, Ibrahim Yahia 485 Altoma, Salih 79 Alvarez, Sonia 319 Ambedkar, Bhim Rao 27 – 28, 338 Ambedkar University 187 American University in Cairo 72 Americas, the 133, 153, 240; decolonizing 342n3 Amin, Qassim 402 Amireh, Amal 76 Amortajada, La (Bombal) 85 Amrouche, Taos 66 Ananieva, E. 283 And Other Stories 127 – 128, 130, 138, 143 Angelou, Maya 37 Angles, Jeffrey 256 Anjuman, Nadia 93 Anneke, Mathilde 180 Anne of Austria 107 Anthony, Susan B. 24 Anveshi 20, 21, 27 Anzaldúa, Gloria 239 – 247, 337; Borderlands 2, 239 – 247; see also Spanish langauge; gender Appiah, Kwame 270

555

Index

Apter, Emily 353 Apukhtin, Aleksei 256 Arab Gulf region 208, 436 Arabic literature 56, 64; see also Abouzeid Arabic language: dialects 54; in the Maghreb 65 – 76 Arabic translation 2 – 3, 48, 390 – 400; and audiovisual translation (AVT) 429 – 443; of Beauvoir 205 – 223, 219; into English 51, 54 – 55; Iraqi stories in 49 – 50, 57 – 58; sexist labels in 390 – 400 ‘arabophone’ writing 65 Arab women: feminist activism of 401 – 412; Muslim 64; novelists 65; writers in Iraq 48 – 63; see also Maghreb; Mosteghanemi Archive of the Administration (AGA) (Alcalá de Henares, near Madrid) 151 Ardilli, Deborah 327 Argentina 85, 93, 95, 99, 143 – 144 Asamblea Transmaricabollo de Sol 323 Ashgate Early Modern Englishwoman Facsimile Library 117 Asia 138, 154, 181, 346, 521; East 357; languages spoken in 133, 363; South 132, 338, 532; see also China; Hong Kong; Taiwan; Orientalism Asimakoulas, Dimitris 256 Asmita 18 – 19, 20, 21, 28 Atkins, Bowman 161 Attayib, Abdul Majeed 394 Atwood, Margaret 44; Handmaid’s Tale,The 37 – 38, 41 – 44 audiovisual translation (AVT): gender in 417 – 424; and subtitling 404; studies in 413; and translation 401; and women, Arabic context 429 – 437, 433 Augustus II the Strong 110 Austen, Jane 39, 416; Emma 36 Austin, John Langshaw 374 author, modern concept of 6 – 7 authorship 2, 5 – 9, 11 – 13, 118 – 122, 268 autocracy 34 autoeroticism 262; see also eroticism autohistoria-teoría 241, 247 B (the Blogger) 338 Babloyan, Zaven 284 Bacardí, Monserrat 153 Bachner, Andrea 356 Badr, Hossam 487 Badr, Lina 208 Baer, Brian James 256 Baeta, Henrique Xavier 180 Baisantry, Kausalya 96 Baker, Armand 83, 85 Baker, Mona 322, 401, 432, 515, 525 Bakshi, Sandeep 336 – 344 Bakhtiar, Laleh 497, 502 – 505 556

Balchin, Cassandra 37 Balderston, Daniel 83, 85 Baldo, Michela 257, 320 Bandia, Paul 67, 150 Bantu 363, 365 – 366 Barazangi, Nimat 486 Barbauld, Anna Laetitia 110 Barchunova, Tatiana 276 – 290 Barlas, Asma 481, 488, 497 Barral, Carlos 151 – 152 Barrie, J. M. 533 Bartosiewicz, Edyta 296 Basaure, Rosa 83 – 92 Basile, Elena 257 Basset, Mary Clarke 120 Bassi, Serena 324, 331 Bassnett, Susan 39 Bator, Joanna 296 Battlefield 4 (video game) 445, 447, 449 – 451 Baudelaire, Charles 110 Bauer, Diann 325 Bauer, Heike 256 Bauer, Nancy 225, 231 Beaufort, Margaret 120 Beauvoir, Simone de 2, 258, 268, 296 – 299, 302; in Arabic 205 – 217, 218, 219 – 220; in China 309, 314, 509; Djmilah Boupacha 34; in English 224 – 235; Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter 186, 219, 230; and the ‘Other’ 528; Reflections on a Very Easy Death 35; in Russian 282; sang des autres, Le 230, 298; see also belles images, Les; Mémoires d’une jeune fille rangée; Sartre, Jean-Paul; Second Sex,The Bebel, August 280 Bechdel, Alison 547 Becker-Cantarino, Barbara 120 Beek, Wouter 391 Behn, Aphra 117, 119 Béji, Hélé 66 Belarus, Republic of 277 Belausteguigoitia, Marisa 243 belles images, Les (Beauvoir) 208, 220, 230; Arabic translation of 214 – 215; in Polish 298 Belli, Gioconda 95; País bajo mi piel. Memorias de amor y Guerra, El (The Country Under My Skin. A Memoir of Love and War) 95, 100 – 102 Bell, Quentin 188 Benhabib, Seyla 268 Benmessaoud, Sanaa 64 – 82 Benta-Djebel see Durand-Thiriot, Berthe Berber dialect 66, 73, 78 berehynia 8 Berque, Jacques 69 Berrada, Mohammed 65 Bessaïh, Nesrine 518 – 527 Bhagat, Manjul 193 Bhandari, Manu 193

Index

Bhumika magazine 20 Bible 471 – 279; translations of 472 – 473 Biblioteka Warszawska 111 Bichet, Marlène 224 – 238 Bielawski, Dawn 534 Biggs, Maude Ashurst 111 Billiani, Francesca 148 Bing see Microsoft Bing (MB) Birch, Eva Lennox 32 birth control 510, 513, 518; see also childbirth Birth Control Handbook 520 – 524 BLA collective 328 – 330 ‘black feminism’ 27, 269 Blair, Dorothy S. 74 Bloomfield, Leonard 356 Bogić, Anna 231, 518 – 527 Bohowitynowa, Zofia (née Czartoryska) 108 Bolukbasi, Tolga 463 Bombal, María Luisa 83 – 88 Bonn, Charles 65 book cover 7, 40, 74, 112, 115 book market 71, 77, 130, 136 book, the: as cultural artefact 71 – 74; history and materiality of 121 – 123 books: distribution of 40, 147; feminist, translations of 39; male-authored in translation 135, 137; woman-authored in translation 133 – 134, 136; see also censorship Booth, Marilyn 71 Borch, Jørgen 178 Borde, Constance 209, 230 – 235, 294 Borderlands see Anzaldúa, Gloria Borges, Jorge Luis 84, 112, 187, 294 Boroditsky, Lera 391 Bosnia, Bosnian 103, 135, 145 Bouraoui, Nina 256 Bourdieu, Pierre 37 Bour, Isabelle 178 Boy-Żeleński, Tadeusz 112 Brantenberg, Gerd 11 Bridges, Judith S. 315 Bridges of Constantine see Dhakirat al-Jassad Briet, Marguerite 121 Brontë, Charlotte: Jane Eyre 36 Broomans, Petra 72, 74 Brossard, Nicole 543 – 544 Brown, Hilary 117 – 126 Büchler, Alexandra 70, 128 Buck, Pearl S.: The Child Who Never Grew 35; The Good Earth 34; Imperial Woman 36, 37 Buddhism 346, 533 Budrewicz, Aleksandra 111 Bulgaria 2, 266 Bulgarian language 268 – 272; translation of Our Bodies, Ourselves 272, 366, 521 Bullock, Julia 196 – 204 Bunin, Ivan 297

Burgos, Elizabeth 95; Me llamo Rigoberta Menchú y así me nació la conciencia (I, Rigoberta Menchú. An Indian Woman in Guatemala) 95, 97 – 98 Butler, Judith 216, 268, 281, 374; “Contingent Foundations” 284; Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly 545, 550 – 552; see also Gender Trouble Byrkjeland, Bo 84 Byron, George Gordon (Lord) 110 Califia, Pat 323 Califronia, Rosa 179 Caliskan, Aylin 462 Cameron, Deborah 375, 382 Camões, Luís Vaz de 110 Campaña, Andrea 83 – 92 Camus, Albert 205, 212, 297 Camus Camus, Carmen 151, 152 Cantú, Norma 239, 243 – 246 Caraza, Xanath 243 Carey, William 473 Carpenter, Edward 348 Carr, Joanna 160 Carson, Margaret 129, 138 Carter, Angela 530 Casanova, Pascale 72, 79 Casares, Adolfo Bioy 84 Cassin, Barbara 226 – 227 caste and caste system 27 – 28, 96 186, 188, 336 – 342, 533; anti-caste critiques 337 – 338, 341; and womanhood 234 caste, gender, and sexuality 338 – 340 Castellet, Josep Maria 151 Castro, Cristina Gómez 151 Castro-Klaren, Sara 84 Castro, Olga 34, 268, 380, 384, 392, 432; and the Year of Publishing Women (UK) 127 – 146 Catholicism, Catholic Church 107, 216; gender wars 299, 478, 524; guilt 87; Roman 83, 117, 472 – 474; in Poland 477; in Québec 478; theology 474; vulgate 472 Causse, Michèle 458 censorship 297; of books 152 – 153; in China 206, 311, 316, 513, 522; in Iraq 48 – 58; in the Islamic Republic of Iran 40 – 41, 43 – 45; in Italy 419, 423; in Poland 113; religious 497 – 498; of sex and sexualities 230, 332, 513, 548; in Soviet Union 287; in Spain under Franco 147 – 154, 206 Center for Women’s Studies in Islam (CERFI) (Morocco) 488, 490 – 491 Center of Egyptian Woman’s Legal Assistance (CEWLA) 403 Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) 266 – 273 Cervulle, Maxime 261 – 262 Chądzyńsk, Zofia 112 – 113, 115 Chamberlain, Lori 118, 149, 187 557

Index

Chandra, Shefali 340 – 341 Chang Hsiao-hung 張小虹 353 Chateaubriand, François-René de 110 Châtelet, Isabelle 262 Che Guevara 21 Chen, Xueyang 510 Chesler, Phyllis 37 Chian, Fahimeh Godaz 37 Chiang, Howard 350, 354, 356 Chicana writers 239, 243 – 244, 247; feminist 10 Chicanos 246 – 247; feminism 269 childbirth 198, 200, 478, 499, 514, 524 – 525; see also pregnancy children’s literature and translation 112, 528 – 540 Chile 85, 143, 145, 154; Pinochet coup 93 Chilean Spanish 138 China 21, 143; normative sexualities in 345; woman interpreter, perceptions of 160, 162 – 166; see also censorship; feminism; lesbianism; homosexuality; Marxism-LeninismMaoism; May Fourth Movement; Second Sex, The China national knowledge infrastructure (CNKI) 311 Chinese language, translations into 133, 135, 139; of European sexology 348 – 350; Gender Trouble (Butler) 257; men, works by 145; of Sinophone queer literature 355 – 356; of Our Bodies, Ourselves 508 – 515, 512 – 513, 521 – 522; of Peter Pan 533; of Western feminist works 308 – 316; women, works by 143 Chitnis, Rajendra 129 – 130 Chodorow, Nancy 281 Cho, Jinhyun 162, 166 Chopin, Kate 37 Chou Wah-shan 351 Chukovskaya, Lydia 93 Chu T’ien-wen 朱天文 355 ‘chutnification’ 257 Chutnik, Sylwia 296 Cielecka, Małgorzata 296 Cinelli, Delfino 368 Cintas-Peña, Marta 417 cis-gender 523 Cisneros, Renato 145 Cisneros, Sandra 10 citizenship 315, 353; see also cultural citizenship Civil Rights Movement (US) 520 civil war: Nigeria 93; Somalia 93 Cixous, Hélène 54 – 55, 216, 224, 227 – 229, 259, 282 Clancy-Smith, Julia 66 Claramonte,Vidal 149 climate change 12 Clinton, Hillary Rodham 37 colonialism 34, 241, 329; and caste 341; and decolonial critiques 339 – 340, 342n3; European 558

338; French 64 – 65, 78; Islamic critique of 75; and masculinism 186; neo- 69; postcolonialism 74, 77, 322, 336, 352 Combahee River Collective, the Combahee River Collective Statement: Black Feminist Organizing in the Seventies and Eighties (Kombahi River Collective Prakatana–Nallajathi Strivaadhula Swaram) 27 communism, Communist Party: in Central and Eastern Europe 266, 272, 521; in China 310, 312, 350, 356; discursive register of 278, 356; of India (Marxist–Leninist) 20; of Iran 45; in Poland 297 – 299, 302; post-communist 270, 273, 299; scientific 279 Communist Union of Youth (Komsomol) (Soviet Union) 278 Compañeras: Zapatista Women’s Stories see Klein Concilo, Arielle A. 320 Confuciansism 199; 310, 533; Neo- 346, 350 Congo, Democratic Republic of 103 Conrad, Joseph 112, 114 Constantine the Great 72 Contreras, Marcela 83 – 92 Cooke, Anne 120 cooke, miriam 52, 55, 74 Cooper, Robert 376 Cornelia before the Mirror see Ocampo, Silvina Cornelia frente al Espejo see Ocampo, Silvina Cornell, Sarah 228 Correa, Isabel 119 Cortázar, Julio 112 Costa, Claudia de Lima 242, 319 Costa-Jussà, Marta 463 Country Under My Skin. A Memoir of Love and War see Belli, Gioconda Crabb, Peter B. 534 Crawford, Julie 120 Crenne, Hélisenne de 121 Crenshaw, Kimberlé 241 Cresson, Edith 380 Cristoff, Maria Sonia 10 critical discourse analysis (CDA) 163, 166, 390 – 394, 397 – 399, 436, 519; see also feminist critical discourse analysis Cronin, Michael 12 Crowley, Karlyn 532 cultural citizenship: in China 354 Cultural Crosscurrents in Stuart and Commonwealth Britain: An Online Analytical Catalogue of Translations, 1641 – 1660 (online) 123 cultural identity 69, 77, 544 cultural memory: in Iraq 49; queer 341; see also memory ‘cultural otherness’ 206 cultural transfer 173 – 174, 417; cross-cultural transfer 417, 419, 425; in the Maghreb 72; translation as 473, 531

Index

‘cultural turn’ 17, 206 Curran, Beverley 543 – 554 Curtius, Francis 109 Cybele 210 – 211 cyberspace 354, 357 cyborg 284 – 285 Czartoryska, Izabela (née Flemming) 109 Czartoryska, Zofia 109 Czartoryski, Adam Kazimierz 109 Czech language, translations in: feminist works 268, 303; ‘gender’ in 269 – 271; of Wollstonecraft 179; of Woolf 294 Czech Republic 266, 270 Dabishi, Hamid 55 Dąbrowska, Maria 113 Dacier, Anne 117 – 118, 122 Daini no sei see Second Sex,The Dalit movement 20, 26 Dalit Panthers 338 Dalit writers 26, 336, 338 – 341; see also Dohra Abhishaap (Doubly Cursed) Dallal, Jenine Abboushi 77 Dalloway, Jinny 326 Damanhouri, Miramar 393 Damm, Jens 351 Damascus I (Pope) 472 D’Amore, Laura Mattoon 532 Danek, Theodora 139 Daskalova, Krassimira 267 Da‘ūnā natakallam see Windows of Faith Dave, Naisargi 337 Davies, Peter 96 Da Vinci, Leonardo 368 Davis, Kathy 131, 520 Dawood, Sama 390 – 400 Debèche, Djamila 66 Dębska, Karolina 114 decolonization see colonialism Defrancq, Bart 161 Déjeux, Jean 65, 73 Delacroix, Eugène 74 Delille, Jacques 109 Delphy, Christine 259 – 260 De Marco, Marcella 419, 431 – 432 Demirhan, Handegül 528 – 539 Deng Xiaoping 508 Derbyshire, Katy 128 Derrida, Jacques 122, 268, 458 Deshpande, Sushma 18, 28; Nenu Savitri Baini 28 deuxième sexe, Le see Second Sex,The Devika, J. 17 Devi, Mahasweta 186 Dhakirat al-Jassad (Bridges of Constantine) (Mosteghanemi) 72 Dharmasiri, Kanchuka 235 Dialectics of Sex (Firestone) 21

Díaz Cintas, Jorge 404, 419 Dickinson, Emily 262 Dikötter, Frank 350 dirigisme 266 Diriker, Ebru 162 Di Sabato, Bruna 363 – 373 Disch, Lisa Jane 258 – 259 Djebar, Assia 65 – 68, 70, 70, 74, 76 – 78, 93 Dohra Abhishaap (Doubly Cursed) (Baisantry) 96 Downs, Edward 445 Du Bartas, Guillaume Saluste 120 Du, Biyu (Jade) 159 – 169 Ducos, Basile-Joseph 176 Durand-Thiriot, Berthe 73 Dutta, Aniruddha 256, 340 Dvorkina, O. 284 Ebrahimi, Niloofar 37 Eco-Translation (Cronin) 12 eco-translatology 524 Écriture inclusive movement 367, 370 Edelman, Lee 257 Edgeworth, Maria 530 Egalias Døtre (Egalia’s Daughters) (Brantenberg) 11 Egypt 1 – 2; AVT translation in 436; cleaners and discourses of cleanliness in 392 – 394; feminist activism in 401 – 410; feminist works translated in 205 – 208, 216, 491 – 492; Islamic feminism in 485 Egyptian Revolution 401, 432 Ehrlich, Susan 376 Einhorn, Barbara 267 El Gouli, Sophie 66 Eligedi, Rajkumar 17 – 31 Eliot, George: Mill on the Floss 36 Elizabeth I of England 117 Ellis, Havelock 348 El Nashar, Mohamed 393 Elsadda, Hoda 402 El Tarzi, Salma 406 Embabi, Doaa 481 – 495 Emirates see United Arab Emirates (UAE) Emirates Foundation (Abu Dhabi) 56 Ensler, Eve 311; Vagina Monologues,The 311, 524 Epstein, B. J. 255 – 256; In Other Words 255 – 256 Erasmus of Rotterdam 123, 473 Ergun, Emek 5 – 14, 103, 242, 268, 391 eroticism: queer 256, 262; sanitization of 514; see also autoeroticism; homoeroticism Esplin, Marlene Hansen 242 Etaugh, Claire A. 315 ethnographic frame 74 – 76 Euromaidan Revolution 8 existentialism 224 – 227, 230 – 232, 297 – 298 Ezati, Abbas 41 Ezell, Margaret J. 120 559

Index

fairy tales 529 – 530, 532, 535 Fallaci, Oriana 24 fansub groups (Sinophone) 356 Faqir, Fadia 51 – 52, 54 Farahzdad, Farzaneh 268 Farid, Farnak 37 Fassin, Eric 258 – 259 Fatma-Zaïda 496 – 500, 505 Faustyn, Mikołaj 108 Felman, Shoshana 268 Feminine Mystique,The (Friedan) 21, 33, 37, 153, 216, 281, 293; in China 314, 509 feminism: in China 308 – 316; in Iraq 57; Western 308 – 309; Western into Chinese, translation of 311 – 312; see also Islamic Feminism (IF) feminism, first wave 276; iconic texts of 309 feminism, gender, and translation, field of 216, 239 – 240 feminism, second wave 293, 299, 535 feminism in/as translation 271 – 273 feminisms 12, 235, 255, 532 – 533; Chicanx 240, 269; Chinese 308, 316; hegemonic 239; international 314; Latin American 242, 247; transnational 5; Western 266 – 269, 272 feminism, third wave 276, 299, 309 – 310, 374 Feminist and Islamic Perspectives: New Horizons of Knowledge and Reform 488 feminist critical discourse analysis (FCDA) 390 – 392, 394, 397 – 399 feminist ethnographic frame see ethnographic frame feminist neologism, translation of see philosophy, translation of feminist philosophers see philosophy, translation of Feminist Encyclopedia of French Literature 121 Feminist School,The (website) 36 – 37 Feminist Study Circle 20, 26 feminist thought: historical perspectives on 20 – 21 feminist translation studies (FTS) 267 – 268 feminist translation (FT) 391 Ferrán, Jaime 153 Ferrante, Elena 9 Fiedorczuk, Julia 114 Filipiak, Izabela 295 Firestone, Shulamith 21, 200 Floresta Brasileira Augusta, Nisia 180 Florian, Jean-Pierre Claris de 109 Flotow, Luise von 1 – 4, 45, 123, 148 – 149, 206 – 207, 268; and audiovisual translation 401 – 402, 418, 430 – 431; and Christianity, discourse of 471; and gender 458; on ‘hijacking’ 382; on feminist translation 392, 490; and language and women 391; Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies 348; and supplementing, strategy of 406; Translation and Gender 531 Fontanella, Laura 319 – 335 Font, Joel 463 560

Fotopoulou, Aristea 403 Foucault, Michel 174, 258, 262, 348, 350 Fountain, Bill 368 Fourth World Conference on Women (FWCW) 509 France (country of) 6, 117, 144 – 146; Arabic literary titles in 69 – 72; Butler’s work in 258 – 260; female translators in 108 – 109, 119; language reforms in 376; Our Bodies, Ourselves in 523; Protestant Reformation in 6; Wollstonecraft’s work in 173 – 174, 177 – 180; Women’s Movement in 259; see also colonialism; French language Franco, Francisco (General) 93, 148, 154; death of 153 Francoism 147 – 158; and censorship 152 – 153 francophone writers: in Africa 65; in the Maghreb 66, 67 – 69, 73, 77; and queer literature 355 François I 6 Frank, Anke 461 Frase, Lucca 325 Frechtman, Bernard 230 ‘French Feminism’ 259 – 260 French language 272; American gay novels in 357; into Arabic 206 – 216, 482, 487 – 490; dubbing in 432; and gender 367, 458; source texts in 3, 6, 33, 38, 65, 132 – 133, 136, 151 – 152, 303; into Dutch 161, 173; into Japanese 196 – 203; and machine translation 463 – 465; and Maghrebi women writers 66 – 69, 72 – 73, 77; male authors translated in 135, 145 – 146; in Poland/Polish 108 – 110, 112; in pragmatic texts aimed at fighting sexism 375, 377 – 387; Quran translated into 496, 500; and reform 376; as ‘transit’ language 56; translations into 72, 77; in UN documents 377 – 387; Wollstonecraft translated into 174 – 181; women authors in 143 – 144; Woolf in 187, 294 French, Marilyn 37 French philosophy see philosophy French Revolution 309 ‘French Theory’ 258 Friedan, Betty 21, 37, 198; see also Feminine Mystique Friedman, Leonard 230 Frizzi, Adria 321 Funk, Nanette 267 Furukawa, Hiroko 391 Gadamer, Hans-Georg 113 Gallop, Jane 227 Gal, Susan 267 Gamal, Muhammad 433 game localization 446 Gandhi (Mahatma) 340 Garadja, Alexei 284 Garcia-Caro, Olga 162

Index

García Meseguer, Álvaro 375 Garg, Mridula 193 Gatti, Claudio 9 Gauch, Suzanne 76 – 77 gayspeak 420 Geertz, Clifford 346 Gellner, Ernest 279 gender: absence of 325; asymmetry 110, 392; in AVT 401, 413, 417 – 424; and the Bible, translations of 471 – 479; and Borderlands 246 – 247; and caste 27, 96, 338; as a category 185 – 186, 243 – 244, 299; and censorship 150 – 151; and children’s literature 528; and class 98; concept of 21, 299; in Egypt 404; and feminism 255, 543; fluidity of 270; grammatical 212, 363 – 366, 370, 458, 471, 482; and identity 58, 74, 165, 240 – 241, 261, 328, 330; and interpreting as a profession 159 – 166; and language 406; as linguistic category 363 – 364; and machines 12; and machine translation 457 – 458; metonymies that construct 93 – 103; in Polish language 110 – 111; politics and politicization of 22, 25, 56, 64, 324, 512 – 515; and publishing 127 – 139; and the Quran 496 – 506; and religion/faith 488 – 489; and sexuality 257, 299, 320, 324; and social movements 17; and/in translation 118 – 124, 196, 322, 326, 357 – 370, 509, 528; translations of the word 258, 260, 268 – 273, 486 – 487; in UN texts 374 – 387; and video games 444 – 454; violence 71, 94; see also cisgender; transgender gender awareness 350; in AVT 430, 432 – 437; in children 531, 536; in China 515; and feminist thought 550 Gender and Equality in Muslim Family Law 486 gender constructs 200, 202; translation of 188 – 189 gender discrimination 28, 328, 330, 391 gender in/equality 44, 266 – 267, 309; in China 311 – 316, 508; and language 390 – 399; legal frameworks (Egypt) 407; and the Quran 408; in South America 83 – 91, 96, 101 – 102 gender justice 484, 489, 491 gender norms 41, 164 gender relations 26, 99, 483 – 485; in China 310; construction of 103 gender roles 11, 485, 529 – 530; binary notions of 532 gender, publishing, and translation 129 – 132 gender stereotypes 98, 163 gender studies 17, 148, 184, 239 – 240, 292, 327; and AVT 413, 417 – 424; in Russia 276 – 277 gender theory 197, 260; in Russia 276 – 288 Gender Trouble (Butler) 257 – 261, 543; in Polish 291, 294, 300 – 302 Genette, Gérard 205, 215 – 16, 546 – 547 Genlis (Madame de) 108, 178 Gerini, Isabella 323

Germany 93, 117; censorship in 148, 154; Enlightenment in 174; National Socialist (Nazi) 103, 148, 547; Wollstonecraft in 177, 179 German language: men in translation 145 – 146; women in translation 143 – 144 Gervais-Le Garff, Marie-Marthe 376 GETCC (Autonomous University of Barcelona) 150 GETLIHC (University of Vic–Central University of Catalonia) 150 Ghazoul, Ferial 53 – 55, 58 Gibbels, Elisabeth 173 – 183 Gibbons, John 162 Gillet, Robert 255 – 256, 258 Gilligan, Carol 281 Gilman, Charlotte Perkins 24 Giustini, Deborah Elena 321 Glyn, Elinor 151 Godard, Barbara 55, 391 – 392, 544 Godayol, Pilar 147 – 158, 206, 242, 530 Godwin, William 177 – 179 Goethe Institute 138 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 297 Goldblatt, Howard 355 Goldman, Emma 24 Goldstein, Ann 9, 144 Gomola, Aleksander 473, 475, 477 – 478 Gomułka, Władysław 298 Gonzaga, Marie Louise 110 González-Iglesias, David 151 Google Translate (GT) 11, 457, 461 – 464 Gottsched, Louis 174 Govaert, Marcel 226 Graff, Agnieszka 295 – 296, 299, 302 Gramling, David 256 Greer, Germaine 21, 315 Greiffenberg, Catharina Regina von 117, 120 Gross, Nina 9 Grosz, Elizabeth 227 Grünberg, Laura 267 Grzybowski, Konstanty 268 Guan Yin 533 Guarini, Giovanni Battista 119 Guillou, Liane 463 Guthrie, Alice 70 Guo, Ting 256 Guo, Wangtaolue 256, 345 – 357 gynocriticism 121 – 122, 431 Habermas, Jürgen 113 Haddadian-Moghaddam, Esmaeil 45 Hadi, Maysalun 49 – 50 hadith see Prophetic traditions Hahn, Daniel 128 Haitian diaspora 8 Halberstam, Jack 257 Hall, Radcliffe 151 561

Index

Halperin, David M. 262, 268 Hamelsveld,Ysbrand van 178 Handmaid’s Tale,The see Atwood, Margaret Hannay, Margaret P. 118 Hannotel, Philippe 108 Haraway, Donna 284 – 285 Hardmeier, Christian 460, 463 Hartman, Michelle 77 Hartmann, Heidi 281 Hartwig, Julia 113 Harvey, Keith 7, 255 Hassan, Mozn 406 Hassen, Rim 74 – 75, 393, 496 – 507 Hatto, Majeda 53 Havelková, Hana 267 Hawthorne, Melanie 230 Hayes, Julie Candler 122 Hay Literature Festival 127 Hays Code (US) 424 Hays, Mary 179 Heaney, Seamus 114 Hedenberg, Johanna 9 Heidegger, Martin 227, 230 Heilbron, Johan 71 Helminski, Camille Adams 497, 500 – 502, 505 Henley, Nancy 379, 383 – 384 Hennesy, Rosemary 257 Henry-Tierney, Pauline 255 – 265 Hernández-Pecoraro, Rosalie 119 Herz, Henriette 180 Hesse, Herman 296 Hester, Helen 325 heterogeneity 53, 241, 245, 268 heteroglossia 241 heteronormativity 191, 259, 277, 324 – 325, 327; in children’s literature 532; in China 348, 350; elite 340 – 341; queering 369 heteropatriarchy 5, 320 – 321, 330, 338 – 339 hetero/sexism 11 heterosexuality 191, 244, 259; in China 350 – 352, 356; see also homosexuality Heuvel, Katrina van den 281 Hedva, Johanna 325 Heydel, Magda 114 He Zhen 何震 (aka He-Yin Zhen 何殷震) 312 hierarchies 10; caste 338, 341; colonial 67; cultural 68; gender 502; and the internet 311; and language 337, 377; patriarchal 98; social 85; subversion of 77; and transfeminism 323, 329; and translation 528 Hindi language: gender, expressions of 363; queerness, new vocabularies for 337; “transgender” translated into 331; Woolf translated into 184 – 194 Hinsch, Bret 346 – 347, 349 – 350 Hirshfeld, Magnus 348 Hite, Shere 315 562

Hjelmslev, Louis 365 Hobsbawm, Eric 187 Hoffmanowa Klementyna (née Tańska) 110 Holmes, James S. 256 Holmes, Janet 161 Holocaust 93, 96 Ho, Loretta Wing Wah 354 Holst, Amalia 179 homoeroticism 191, 262; in art 547; in China 345 – 349, 351; female 346 homosexuality 25, 244; in China 315, 345 – 357, 512; under communism 274n7; in France 259, 262; and gender 383; hidden 325; as homosexualism 282; in India 337, 339, 341; in Iran 40; and the pink triangle 547 – 548; of Proust 547; in Room of One’s Own, A 190 – 191; in Spain under Franco 151; of Woolf 188; see also LGBTQI; lesbianism; queer Hong Kong 162; normative sexualities in 345 – 350; queerness in 350 – 353, 356 – 357; Zhang Lu in 164 – 165 hooks, bell 534, 543 Hora, Josef 458 Horkheimer, Max 113 Horney, Karen 315 Hosington, Brenda M. 120, 122 – 123 hostage narrative 71 Houdebine, Anne-Marie 376 Houlding, Elizabeth A. 296 Hughes, Geoffrey 414 Hughes, Sophie 138 Hui, Isaac Ting-yan 355 – 356 Hu, Kaibao 161 – 162 Hungary 154 Hungarian language 257, 303, 463 Hungarian Uprising 297 Hu Shu-wen 胡淑 雯 353 Hu Qiuyuan 胡秋原 349 Hussein, Hadiya 52 – 53, 55 Hutchins, John 461 Hutchinson, Lucy 117 hybridity 67, 73, 353; paradigms of 77 I, Rigoberta Menchú. An Indian Woman in Guatemala see Me llamo Rigoberta Menchú Ibn Affan, Othman see Othman Ibn Affan Ibrahim, Mona 487, 491 Ideasdestroyingmuros 322 – 325 ideograms 545 Idrīs, Aida Matarji 218 Idrīs, Suhayl 205 Ikas, Karin 244 Ikushima, Ryōichi 196 – 203 Ilaiah, Kancha 26 Iłłakowiczówna, Kazimiera 113 illiteracy 66, 75, 83 Inclúyanme afuera (Cristoff) 10

Index

India: feminism, history of 20 – 22; literary works set in/about 96, 191, 256; postcolonial 336; queerness and nonconformity in 336 – 342; see also Anzaldúa; Baisantry; Burgos; caste and caste system; Dalit writers; Hindi; Room of One’s Own (Woolf); Savarna movement; Telugu;Volga Indian languages 193 – 194 Infante, Guillermo Cabrera 84 Inoue, Takako 201 intercultural encounters and exchange 68, 159, 163, 515, 546 intercultural studies 56, 347, 535 – 536 interculture 345, 351 International Association of Translation and Interpreting Studies (IATIS) 256 International Center for Human Rights Education (Equitas) 491 International Committee on the Rights of Sex Workers in Europe (ICRSE) 323 International Prize for Arabic Fiction (IPAF) 56 International Woman’s Year 21 interpreter 9 – 10; female 159 – 163, 165 – 166; literary representations of 56; male 160 – 162, 166; media representations of 159 – 166 interpreting 76; collectives engaged in 322, 328 – 329; community (public service) 159, 162, 263; gender imbalance in 160; as a profession 160 interpretive theory of translation (ITT) 226 – 227, 235 Interprise collective 322, 329 intersectionality 10, 12, 57, 131, 241, 523; of sexuality 348, 353 intersectional feminism 320, 322, 331 inxile 93 Ireland 70, 127 Ireland, Amy 325 Iribarne, Manuel Fraga 152 Irigaray, Luce 216, 228, 259 Iran see Islamic Republic of Iran (IRI) Iron Curtain 112, 292 Ishaq, Maliha 49 Ishii, Anne 546 Ishimure, Michiko (Ishimure Michiko) 543 – 544, 550, 553 Islamic Feminism (IF) 74, 76, 268, 481 – 492 Islamic Republic of Iran (IRI) 32 – 44; feminist books in translation 39; Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance (MCIG) 40 Islamic Research Academy 484 – 485 Islamic Sharia 406 – 408, 481 – 485 Jabra, Jabra Ibrahim 50 Jackson, Stevi 260 Jacquemond, Richard 68, 70 – 71 Jaggar, Alison M. 284 Jagose, Annamarie 257

Jakobson, Roman 95, 375 Janasahiti (People’s Literary Organization) 20 Jangnam, Chinnaiah 338 Janion, Maria 292 Jansen, Hanne 7 Japan 312, 345; China’s conflicts with 350; literature/manga set in 550; Our Bodies, Ourselves in 521; queer readership in 256 – 257 Japanese language 2; Beauvoir translated into 196 – 203; English translations of 544 – 554; male authors translated into 135; personal pronouns in 364; source texts in 510; testimonials written in 103, 145 – 146; women writers translated into 133, 144; writing systems in 544 – 546; see also Beauvoir; Ikushima; manga Jardine, Alice 227, 259 Jary, David 282 Jary, Julia 282 Jauss, Hans Robert 207 Jin Tianhe 金天翮 312 Jiresch, Ester 72, 74 Johnson-Davies, Denys 51 – 52 Jordan 205, 433, 433 Josephy-Hernández, Daniel 401, 417 – 418, 430 – 431 Jungeon, Hwang 144 Jyoti, Dhrubo 338, 341 Kachachi, Inaam 52, 54, 56 KAFA (Lebanon) 407 Kahf, Muhja 487 Kaindl, Klaus 256 Kaloustian, Joseph 209 – 211 Kalverkämper, Hartwig 369 Kamala, N. 17, 186, 193 Kamal, Hala 1 – 4, 20, 208, 392 – 393, 402, 430 Kang, Han 140, 144 Kang, Wenqing 349 – 350, 356 Karamitroglou, Fotios 432 Karman, Tawakkol 404 Kašić, Biljana 267 Katz, David 365 Keenaghan, Eric 256 Kong, Travis S. K. 353 – 354 Kannabiran,Vasantha 27 Kaniewska, Bogumiła 114 Karpiński, Franciszek 109 Katherine Parr (Queen of England) 117 Kaufman, Michael 37 Kaur, Rupi 37 Keller, Evelyn Fox 284 Khatibi, Abdelkebir 65, 67 Khomeini (Ayatollah) 32, 39 Khorasani, Noushin Ahmadi see Ahmadi Khorasani, Noushin Kierszys, Zofia 112 Kilito, Abdelafattah 77 563

Index

Kimura, Nobuku 201 King, Ruth 376 Kirkup, James 230 Kita-Huber, Jadwiga 114 Klaw, Barbara 230 Klein, Hilary 11 Klingman, Gail 267 Kłosińska, Krystyna 300 Kłosiński, Krzysztof 300 Koehn, Philip 463 Kollontai, Alexandra 18, 24 – 25 Kołodziejczyk, Ewa 114 Komarnicka, Wacława 112 Konopnicka, Maria 112 Kopeć, Barbara 300 Korsak, Mary Phil 474, 476 – 477 Koyama, Emi 320, 322, 325 – 326 Kozakiewicz, Mikołaj 298 Kozak, Jolanta 113 – 114 Kozłowska, Jolanta 114 Kozyra, Katarzyna 296 Krafft-Ebing, Richard von 348 – 349 Krasińska, Ewa 295 – 296 Kraskowska, Ewa 1 – 2, 114, 291 – 307 Kraus, Cynthia 258 – 261 Krasuska, Karolina 300 – 301 Kripper, Denise 5 – 14 Kristeva, Julia 216, 228, 258 – 259, 268 Krontiris, Tina 118 Kubińska, Olga 114 Kuciak, Agnieszka 114 Kumari, Popuri Lalitha see Volga Kumar, Nita 186 Ku Ming-chun 古明君 353 Kuo, Szu-Yu 433 Kurahashi,Yumiko 199 Kurz, Ingrid 159 Kurz, Iwona 300 Laboratorio Smaschieramenti 257 Laboria Cuboniks collective 325 Lacan, Jacques 258 Lacroix, Paul 110 La Follette, Clara 24 Laghzali, Bouchra 482, 490 – 492 Lakoff, Robin 161, 374 Lalitha, K. 21, 30n5, 186 Lamrabet, Asma 481 – 482, 490 Landheer, Roland 226 Larkosh, Christopher 255 – 256 Laroui, R’kia 65 Larraz, Fernando 147, 153 Latin America: Anzaldúa in 242 – 243; books and publishing in 132 – 133; Our Bodies, Ourselves in 522; queerness in 256; Rights of Women (Wollstonecraft) in 180; women writers 84 – 85, 93 – 103; Woolf in 187 564

Latin American Spanish 247 Latinx: feminism 247; literatures 240, 242 Lauretis, Teresa de 257 La Vallière, Louise de 109 Lawrence, Margaret 151 Lazar, Michelle 391 – 392 Lebanon 72, 205 – 206, 208 Lebensborn 103 Lederer, Marianne 226 Lee, Francis 165 Lee, Harper 151 Lee, Hermione 188 Lefevere, André 39 Lemsine, Aïcha 93 Le Nagard, Roland 463 Lenin,Vladimir 21 Lesage, Alain-René 108 lesbianism: in China 309, 345, 348 – 349, 354, 357, 514; in Hong Kong 351; in India 341; in medical literature 523; in Poland 295; and queer theory 257, 270; in Russian language 321 – 322; in Spain/Spanish 323; in Taiwan 352 – 353; in Woolf ’s writing 191; see also Anzaldúa; Brantenberg; LGBTQI community; Rich; Sappho; Wittig; Woolf LesBitches 325 – 327 Leśniewska, Maria 296 – 297 Lessinger, Enora 374 – 389 Letter to a Child Never Born (Puttani Biddaku Talli Uttaram [Telugu]) (Fallaci) 24 Leung, Ester 162, 166 Levant, the 206, 436 Le Vay, David 229 Levinas, Emmanuel 122 Levine, Suzanne Jill 84, 509 Lévi-Strauss, Claude 258, 282 LGBTQI 320; in China 256, 350, 357; feminism, alliances with and differences from 322 – 324, 332; in Hong Kong 348; language 331; in Poland 302 Li, Boya 508 – 517, 521 – 522 Liddle, Ann 228 Lieberman, Marcia R. 529 Life on Mars see television shows Lim, Song Hwee 351 – 352 Linde, Samuel Bogumił 111 linguistic invisibility 110 linguistic sexism 273, 375 – 376, 378, 381, 383 – 384 linguistics 95, 256, 278; Arabic 492; descriptive 363, 365; feminist 374; historical 364 Lin, Huang 311 Lin, Sylvia Li-chun 355 Lindstrom, Naomi 84 Lionnet, Françoise 77 Lispector, Clarice 83 – 84, 228 Liturgiam Authenticam 471, 473 Liu, Bohong 511 – 514

Index

Li Yinhe 李银河 311 Lloyd-Jones, Antonia 145 Lloyd-Jones, Ian 143 Locke, Anne 117 Longino, Helen E. 286 Loredan, Giovanni Francesco 108 Lorris, Guillaume de 6 Lotbinière-Harwood, Susanne de 122, 458 Louar, Nadia 367 Louis XIV (king of France) 109 Lugones, María 242 Łukasiewicz, Małgorzata 113 Lumet, Sidney 153 Luong, Ngoc Quang 460 Lurie, Alison 530 Lu, Zhang see Zhang Lu Lynch, Teresa, 445 machine translation (MT) 11, 457 – 468 Mackay, Louis 11 Mackie,Vera 348 MacLaine, Shirley 415 Magdy, Rana 402 Maghreb, the 64 Maghrebi literature and women’s writing 65 – 77; Arabic 68 – 71; francophone 67 – 68; see also ethnographic frame Magnifico, Cédric 161 Mahila Margam (Women’s Path) magazine 20 Mahmoody, Betty 71 Mahmoud, Fatma Abdallah 218, 220 Maier, Carol 119 Ma Junwu 马君武 312 Makarska, Renata 114 Malabou, Catherine 7, 11 Malecka, Wanda (née Fryz) 110 Malinche, La 10 Mallan, Kerry 532 Malovany-Chevallier, Sheila 209, 230 – 235, 294 Mamdouh, Alia 50 – 52, 54 – 56 Man Booker Prize 128 – 129, 138 Mandarins, Les (Beauvoir): Arabic translation of 212 – 214 manga 544, 546 – 553 Mankiewicz, Joseph 419, 423 Mansour, Nihad 401 – 412 Mao Zedong 21; post-Mao era 351, 356 Marivaux, Pierre de 110 Marlatt, Daphne 543, 553 Márquez, Gabriel García 112 Marshall, Elizabeth 532 Martínez, Antonio 151 Martin, Fran 354 – 355 Marx, Karl 21; Communist Manifesto 299 Marxism and Marxist theory 24, 186, 269; and Christianity 285; and existentialism 298; and feminism 272; and political correctness 414;

and the Soviet Union 297; and women, theory of 316 Marxist-Leninism 267, 279, 282 – 283, 287 – 288 Marxist-Leninism-Maoism 310, 312 – 313 Marxist Leninist (ML) movement (India) 20 – 22; see also communism Marxist-Leninist Party (M-LP) (India) 21 masculinism 186 Masmoudi, Ikram 55 Mason, Marianne 162 Massa, Manuel María 153 Massardier-Kenney, Françoise 58, 130 Mass Effect 4 (video game) 450, 451 – 453 Master of Translation and Interpreting (MTI) programmes (China) 163 Materyns’ka moltyva (Maternal Prayer) 8 Matthiessen, Francis Otto 118 Matute, Ana María 93 Mauriac, François 297 Mauron, Charles 294 May Fourth Movement 309 – 313, 349 – 351, 356 Mazzei, Cristiano 256, 321 McCarthy, Mary 151 – 153 McConnell-Ginet, Sally 364, 367 McElhinny, Bonnie 366 McLelland, Mark 348 McMurtry, Larry 151 McRuer, Robert 257 Mechakra,Yamina 66 Medal of Honor Warfighter (MoHW) (video game) 447, 447 – 449, 553 Mehrez, Samia 67 – 68, 77, 486 Meï, Siobhan Marie 5 – 13 Me llamo Rigoberta Menchú y así me nació la conciencia (I, Rigoberta Menchú. An Indian Woman in Guatemala) (Burgos) 95, 96 – 98; see also Menchú, Rigoberta memes 173 – 181; Wollestonecraft’s rise to a 180 Mémoires d’une jeune fille rangée (Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter) (Beauvoir): Arabic translation of 215 – 216, 219 memory 543; of the body 72; collective 74, 206, 286; countermemory 74; and erasure 226, 339, 355; in literature 41 – 42, 45, 51, 93, 178 – 179; picture book 544, 553; queer 341, 354 – 355; in testimonial texts 94; of women in the history of translation 149; see also cultural memory Men and Women Gender Equality Programme 491 Menchú, Rigoberta 84, 93; see also Me llamo Rigoberta Menchú Meng, Lingzi 161 – 162 Men in Charge (Al-qiwāmah al-turāth al-Islāmi) 489 men in translation (MIT) 133, 135, 137 Menon, Rukmini 21 Merkle, Denise 45, 147 Mernissi, Fatema 66, 69 – 70, 70, 76 – 77, 497 565

Index

Merrill, Christi 96 metonymy 74, 93 – 106 Meun, Jean de 6 Mezei, Kathy 45 Michałowska, Mira 112 Michaud, Mathilde 471 – 480 Michel, Mozez 187 Microsoft Bing (MB) 461, 463 Middle East 3, 68, 70 – 71, 75, 154; feminism in 406, 533, 535; translation issues in 492, 521 Mignolo, Walter 339, 341 Milani, Farzaneh 71 Miller, Henry 543 Millett, Kate 21, 33, 200, 268, 293, 529; in China 315; reading of Henry Miller 543 Mill, John Stuart 21 Mill on the Floss see Elliot, George Mills, Sara 45, 414 – 415, 420 Milne, A. A. (Alexander Alan) 112 Milton, John 109 Min, Dongchao 511 Minamata umi no koe (Minamata the voice of the sea) 544, 553 Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance (MCIG) see Islamic Republic of Iran Mir-Husseini, Ziba 481 miroir des âmes simples et anéanties, Le (The Mirror of Simple Souls) (Porete) 6 Mistral, Gabriela 84 mistranslation 10, 75, 181, 197, 202, 229 – 231, 235, 484; of gender in machine translation 457, 460, 463 Miszalska, Jadwiga 108 Mizumura, Minae 544 – 545 MohamiatMisr 407 Mohammed, the Prophet 485, 489, 496 – 499, 504 Moi, Toril 216, 231 – 232, 259, 294 Mokeddem, Malika 66, 74 Molière 108 – 109 Molza, Tarquinia 123 Montalembert, Charles de 110 Montenay, Georgette de 119 Monti, Johanna 457 – 468 Moore, Lindsey 77 Morales, Maria Luz 151 Morocco 64 – 69, 73, 75 – 77; and Irish 328; and women 393; see also Laghzali Mortada, Leil-Zahra 401, 432 Moses, Claire 259 Mosteghanemi, Ahlem 65, 69 – 72, 70 Mostowska, Anna (née Radziwiłł) 108 motherhood 17, 22; Beauvoir’s position on 197 – 198, 200 – 202, 233, 235; exalted 312; in literature 25, 83 – 91, 101, 191; and womanhood 529; Zaïda’s position on 500 Moyse,Yvonne 230 Mshvenieradze,Vladimir V. 279 566

Mudu Taralu (Three Generations) (Kollontai, trans. Volga) 18, 22, 25 – 26 Mueller, Magda 267 Muhammad, Harbiya 49 Mullaney, Louise 45 Müller, Catherine M. 119 multiple authorship (concept of) 7 multiple translatorship (concept of) 7 Mulvey, Laura 268, 281 Munday, Jeremy 150 Munro, Alice 38 Murray, Judith Sargent 24 Musawah (Malaysia) 488 – 489 Mustafa, Shakir 50, 52 MUTE (University of Valencia) 150 Muzaffar, May 50 Mycielska, Gabriela 296 Naguib Mahfouz Medal 56, 65, 69 – 70 Nahuatl 239 Nakajima,Yukiko 162, 166 Nakwaska, Anna (née Krajewska) 110 Nancy, Jean-Luc 122 Nanda, Serena 337, 342 Napier, John 122 Napierski, Stefan 112 Narbuttowa, Anna (née Grozmani) 108 Nashaz Law 406 – 407 Nasrin, Taslima 188 Nathanaël (poet) 257 National Assembly, France 259 National Book Trust (NBT) 19 National Catholicism 153 National Council for Women (NCW) (Egypt) 403 national identity 69, 73, 354 nationalism 54, 66, 75, 266, 299, 252 National Library & Archives of the Islamic Republic of Iran 32, 36 – 37, 39 National Taiwan University 351 Navarre, Marguerite de 6 Naxalbari movement see Srikakulam Naxalbari movement Nayef, Heba 393 Nazi Germany see Germany Nehru, Jawaharlal 240 Nesbit, Edith 112 Neopolitan series (Ferrante) 9 Nevalainen, Terttu 364 New Woman Research Center (NWRC) 403 Ng Siu-ming 吳小明 see Xiaomingxiong Niazi, Salah 52 Niedzwiecki, Patricia 380 Nielsen Book 136 Nietzsche, Friedrich 113 Niranjana, Tejaswini 17, 186, 188, 337 Nissen, Uwe Kjær 369, 376 Nodelman, Perry 528

Index

Non-Resident Indians (NRIs) 337 Nord, Christiane 486 Norma, Carolina 162 Norway/Norwegian 9, 143, 145 Norwood, Robin 314 Nwapa, Flora 93 Obank, Margaret 52 O’Barr, William 161 Ocampo, Silvina 83 – 84; Cornelia frente al Espejo (Cornelia Before the Mirror) 85, 88 – 90 Ocampo,Victoria 55, 295 Odyssey,The (Homer) 11 Offen, Karen 173 Okabe, Itsuko 199 Okin, Susan Moller 282 Orientalism 74, 346 Ortúñez de Calahorra, Diego 118 Oslo Coalition on Freedom of Religion or Belief (OC) 486 Ostrowska, Bronisława 112 O’ Sullivan, Carol 418 Oswald, Alice 114 Othman Ibn Affan 497 Othman, Mustafa 491 Otouto no otto (My Brother’s Husband) (Tagame) 544, 546 – 550, 547 Our Bodies, Ourselves 520 – 525; Chinese translation of 508 – 517; in Russia 281 Pai Hsien-yung 白先勇 354 – 355 país bajo mi piel. Memorias de amor y Guerra, El (The Country Under My Skin. A Memoir of Love and War) see Belli, Gioconda Pakszys, Elżbieta 299 Palekar, Shalmalee 257, 331 Pan, Feng 161 Pan Guangdan 潘光旦 Pan Tadeusz 111 Parhiz-kari, Samaneh 37 Payne, Matthew 444 Pennington, John 532 Pérez, Efrén 391 Perez-Gonzales, Luis 405 Pérez, Maria 151 Parhiz-kari, Samaneh 37 Parkes, Bessie 179 Parshley, Howard Madison 196, 231 – 232, 294 Pattnai, Devdutt 338 Pauwels, Anne 160, 376 Pavlenko, Aneta 160 Pears, Pamela 74 Pedro Ricoy, Raquel de 95 Penrod, Lynn Kettler 228 People’s Republic of China (PRC) 308; see also China Perdita Manuscripts database 117

Pérez, María 151 Perrault, Charles 530 Perri, Antonio 363 – 373 Pettini, Silvia 444 – 456 philosophy 5 – 6, 122; 20th century 196; of Beauvoir 196 – 203, 205, 224 – 238; of Butler 258; feminist 229 – 230, 239, 276, 280; French 122; liberal 174, 282; Marxist 20; political 181, 267, 278; publishing houses specializing in 244; of translation 23, 282; translation of, special challenges posed by 224 – 238, 259, 303; Western 188; see also existentialism; Heidegger; Sartre Phule, Jyotirao 28 Phule, Savitribai 28 Pickford, Susan 73 – 76 Pillai, Meena 186, 193 Piller, Ingrid 160 Piotrowczy, Andrzej 108 Piotrowczykowa, Anna Teresa (née Pernus) 108 Piotrowczykowa, Jadwiga 108 “plasticity” 7 Plasticity at the Dusk of Writing (Malabou) 7 Plumas Traidoras 325 Pöchhacker, Franz 159 Poe, Edgar Allan 368 Pokojska, Agnieszka 114 Poland 1 – 2; Anzaldúa’s influence in 240; Bible translation in 473, 476; Catholic Church of 477; censorship in 154; feminist discourse and works translated in 291 – 303; Latin American prose in 112; men translated in 145 – 146; Our Bodies, Ourselves in 521; women translators in 107, 110, 114; women translated in 143 political correctness see sexism Polish October 297 Polish United Workers Party 297 Poole, Roger 188 Pope, Alexander 109 Popescue-Belis, Andrei 460 Porete, Marguerite 6 Potocka, Maria (née Katska) 109 Pradhan, Gopalji 187 – 188 Prates, Marcela O. 463 Preciado, Paul B. 323 pregnancy 24 – 25, 511, 514 Progressive Organization for Women (POW) 21 Programa Universitario de Estudios de Género (PUEG) 239, 243 Project Plume 138 Prophetic traditions 481, 486 – 487 Prophet of Islam see Mohammad, the Prophet Prophet, the see Mohammad, the Prophet Proto-Indo-European languages (PIE) 365 Przedpełska-Trzeciakowska, Anna 112 Puar, Jasbir K. 257 Punt, Jeremy 477 567

Index

Pure Neural Machine Translation (PNMT) 463 Pym, Anthony 20, 345 QAF fan group 357 Qanbar, Nada 429 – 443 qanitat 503 – 504 Qantara 483 Qiu Jin 秋瑾 312 Quarrel of the Ancients and Moderns 118, 122 queer, queering 244, 369; category of 340; concept of 345; and feminism 431; and gender 315; in India 336 – 342; in Sinophone culture 345 – 358; sexuality 355; and the social sciences 277; in Spain 324; term, meaning of 249, 331, 341; and translation 255 – 265; violence against 336 queer scholars 337 queer studies 239 – 240, 242, 294; in Poland 301 – 302; see also Butler queer theory 201, 257 – 258, 261 – 262, 268; attempts to delegitimize 299 queer transfeminism 319 – 332 Quijano, Aníbal 339 Quran, Qur’an 481 – 491, 500, 505 – 506; translations by women 393, 496; wife disciplining in 408 Quran and Woman (Wadud/Adnan) 484, 492 Raczyński, Edward 110 Raczyński, Konstancja 110 Radzinski, Meytal 130 Radziwiłłowa, Barbara 108 Radziwiłłowa, Franciszka Urszula (duchess) 108 – 109 Rahemtulla, Shadaab 484 Rahimi, Norman 37 Raja, Anita 9 Rajabzadeh, Ahmad 40 Rajewska, Ewa 107 – 116 Ramaswamy, Geeta 21 Ranganayakamma, Muppala 26 Rani, Challapalli Swarupa 27 Ranzato, Irene 413 – 428 Rao, Katti Padma 26 Rao,Venkata Subba 20 Raszewska, Anna 112 – 113 Raumolin-Brunberg 364 Rawat, Ramnarayan 340 rawiyat 74 Reader on Feminism and Religious Studies (Al-niswiya wa al-dirāsāt al-dīniya) 488 Reda, Nevin 481 Rée, Jonathan 224, 227 Reed, Patricia 325 referents (linguistic) 363 – 364, 366, 376, 379 – 384; and gender 321, 370, 446; queer, indeterminacy of 352; in videogames 448 Reformation 6, 117, 473 568

Rehak, Bob 445 Renaissance 117, 119; English 118 Renaissance Cultural Crossroads catalogue 122 – 123 Reverzy, Jean 112 Reynolds, Kimberley 532 Rich, Adrienne 131, 543 Robertson, William 109 Robinson, Douglas 119 Robinson, Nick 448 – 449 Robyns, Clem 544 Rochefort, Christiane 34 Rodríguez Carmen 153 Roederer, Pierre-Louis 178 Rofel, Lisa 354 Rogers, Mary 37 Rogoszówna, Zofia 112 Rollings, Andrew 447 Romaine, Suzanne 366 Romanian language 268 Room of One’s Own, A (Woolf): 2, 33, 291, 293 – 296, 309; Hindi translations of 184 – 195 Roper, Margaret More 117 Rose, Jacqueline 531 Rossatti, Alessandro 321 Rossetti, Christina 188 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 38 rowat 74 Rowe, Karen E. 529 Roy, Raina 340 Rubin, Gayle 281 Ruonakoski, Erika 231 Russell, Letty 473 Russell, Sandra Joy 5 – 14 Russia: pre-Soviet 277 – 278; post-Soviet 280 – 282 Russian language 3; borrowed terms in 270; English, translated into 276 – 288; ‘gender’ in 269; as lingua franca 277 – 278; male authors in translation 135, 145; Our Bodies, Ourselves in 272; translations from 112;Volga’s fluency in 20, 24 Ruterana, Pierre Canisius 532 Rutkowski, Sara 5 – 14 Ruvalcaba, Héctor Domínguez 256 Rwandan genocide 93 Ryan, Rachael 159 – 160, 166 Sadiqi, Fatima 393 Sadkowski, Wacław 114 Said, Edward 20, 48, 70, 352 Said, Sahar 208 – 209 Saldívar-Hul, Sonia 244 Saleh, Amani 481 Saleh, Daniel [sic] 208 Salih, Salima 50, 74 Salzmann, Christian Gotthilf 175, 177 – 178 Sami, Hala G. 205 – 223 Sánchez, Lola 149

Index

Sanger, Margaret 24 Sang des autres, Le see Beauvoir Sang, Tze-lan Deborah 348 – 352, 356 Sanguszkow, Barbara Urszula 109 Santaemilia, José 257 Santorski, Jacek 299 Sapir, Edward 391 Sapiro, Gisèle 71 Sapir-Whorf hypothesis 378 Sappho 321 – 322 Sartre, Jean-Paul: and Beauvoir 197, 199, 205, 215, 220, 293, 297; on “sense” 226; Huis Clos 299 Satō, Hiroko 201 Satyanarayan, K. 340 Satyavathi, P. 20 Savarna movement (India) 20, 27, 342 Schäffner, Christina 434 Schiebinger, Londa 461 Schmierbach, Mike 447 Schneider, Gertrude 93 Schreibenycher, Anna 108 Schüngel-Straumann 474 – 476 Scott, Joan W. 268, 281 Scott, Walter (Sir) 110 Seager, Jane 122 Sebbar, Leila 66 Sedgwick, Eve Kosovsky 255; Epistemology of the Closet 257 – 258, 261 – 262; “Queer Performativity” 543 Second Sex,The (Beauvoir) 7, 21, 33, 36, 36, 232 – 234; in Arabic 209 – 212, 219; in China 309, 314 – 315, 509; in English 226, 231 – 233; in Japan/Japanese 196 – 203; in Poland/Polish 298 – 299, 302 – 303; in Spain 151 – 153; see also Parshley, Howard Madison Sellers, Susan 228 Senhouse, Roger 230 Serjeantson, Deirdre 122 Sethna, Christabelle 523 sexism 40, 384; and AVT 417; grammatical 375; and political correctness 413 – 414; and the social sciences 277; struggle against 44, 419; women’s experiences of 415; see also linguistic sexism sexual activity 416; and sin 87 sexual and reproductive health 514, 518 – 525; see also birth control; childbirth; pregnancy sexuality 7, 10, 17, 22, 24, 193 – 194; in Anzaldua’s work 239; in Beauvoir’s work 230, 298 – 299, 313 – 314; in Catholic theology 474, 478; contested 356; deviant 71; discourses on 255, 472; fetishized 72; and gender 269, 272, 301, 410; non-normative 353 – 354, 358; queer 256 – 257, 355; taboos 273; and translation 100; and women’s bodies 402, 519; and women’s health 509 – 514, 518, 521 – 522; see also censorship; heterosexuality; homosexuality

Sexton, Anne 530 Sezer, Melek 530 Shaaban, Bouthaina 496 Shafik, Doria 402 Shakespeare, William 109 Shamma, Tareq 76 Shamsan, Muayad 394 Shamsie, Kamila 127, 131, 136 Shan Zai 善哉 349 Shapiro, Esther 522, 525 Sha’rawi, Huda 402 Sharia (Shariaa) see Islamic Sharia Sharifi, Sima 32 – 47 Sharma, Garima 184 – 195 Shatby (Imam) 496 Shavit, Zohar 531 Shaw, Sylvia 375 Shelley, Percy Bysshe 179 Shen Zemin 349 Shih, Shu-mei 77 Shimon, Samuel 52 Shread, Carolyn 5 – 14, 230 Shree, Geetanjali 186 Shriver, Lionel 127 Shrouded Woman,The see Amortajada, La Shyamala, Gogu 27 Sideeg, Abdunasir 393 Sidney, Mary 119 Sigismund II Vasa (King) 107 Simón, Carmen Valle 239 Simon, Sherry 45, 148 Simons, Margaret 231 Single Numberless Death, A see Sola muerte numerosa, Una (Strejilevich) Skevington Wood, Arthur 473 Skibniewska, Maria 112 Skwara, Ewa 114 Slavova, Kornelia 266 – 275, 366, 521 Smedley, Agnes 18, 25; Daughter of Earth (Bhumi Putrika [Telugu]) 25 Smith, Ali 368 Smith, Barbara 28 Smith, Deborah 144 Smith, Helen 121 Smith, Julia 475 Smith, Rosalind 123 Smith, Stacy L. 445 Sobti, Krishna 193 Sola muerte numerosa, Una (Strejilevich) (A Single Numberless Death) 95, 97 – 99 Solanas,Valerie 327 Solberg, Ida Hove 5 – 14 Solnit, Rebecca 148 – 149 Sommy, Soheil 41, 44 Sora no ito (The Thread of the Sky) (Yada Eriko) 550 – 552 Sørsdal, Kristin 9 569

Index

source text (ST) 32 Soviet Union 93, 266, 270, 278 Spain see censorship; Francoism Spanish language 3; Anzaldúa in 2, 239 – 247; dubbing into 419, 423, 431 – 432; English into 323; as gendered language 363, 375 – 387; as hegemonic language 11, 328; Iranian works translated in 33; Iraqi works translated into 56; into Italian 323 – 324; literary works in 85 – 91; and machine learning 464, 522; in the Maghreb 65; Our Bodies, Ourselves in 522, 525; into Polish 108; testimonios in 97 – 102; translations into 143, 151; in Turkish 533; translations from 132 – 133, 135, 144 – 145, 152 – 153, 178, 187; in videogames 445 – 448, 451 – 454; women depicted in literary works in 10; see also Amortajada, La Spanish Royal Academy 376 Spencer, Herbert 312 Spender, Dale 473 – 474 Spicer, Jack 256 Spivak, Gayatri 17, 77, 186, 188 Spoturno, María Laura 239 – 252 Spurlin, William J. 256 – 257, 331 Srikakulam Naxalbari movement 20 – 21 Środa, Magdalena 299 Staël, Germaine de (Madame de Staël) 180 Stalin, Joseph 295 Stanislaus I 110 Stanton, Domna 259 Stanton, Elizabeth Cady 24, 475 Starkey, Paul 51 Stavrovyetski, Kirill 108 Steinem, Gloria 545 Stein, Gertrude 544 – 545 Stephens, John 529 Stevenson, Jane 123 Stillinger, Jack 7 Stowe, Harriet Beecher 112; Uncle Tom’s Cabin 34 Stree Shakti Sangatana (SSS) (Women Power Organization) 20 – 21 Strejilevich, Nora 93, 95, 97 – 99 Student Federation of India (SFI) 20 Subadra, Joopaka 27 subtitling 3, 256, 356, 430 – 433, 436; in the Arab world 401 – 425 Suddenly, Last Summer (film) 423 – 424 Summit, Jennifer 6 Sunnah 497 – 499, 501, 504 Susam-Saraeva, Şebnem 417, 524 – 525 Sweden 9, 143 Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency 491 Świrszczyńska, Anna (Anna Swir) 298 Switzerland 145 Syria 146, 205; Feminine Mystique in 216; publishers in 486 – 487; see also Said, Sahar; Tarabishi, Georges 570

Szapocznikow, Alina 298 Szwebs, Weronika 291 – 307 Szymborska, Wisława 113 Tabakowska, Elżbieta 113 Tacitus 109 Taffin, Jean 120 Tafsir 497 – 499, 501 Tagame, Gengoroh (Tagame Gengoroh) 544, 546 – 548 Taïa, Abdellah 256 Taiwan 143; Anzaldúa’s work in 240; normative sexualities and queer identity in 345, 347 – 357; Our Bodies, Ourselves in 510 – 511 Takai, Kuniko 200 Talbot, Mary 45 Talib, Aliya 50, 52 Taliban 93 Talleyrand, Charles Maurice de 177 – 178 Tan, Chong Kee 352 Tang, Wenpei 510 Tavits, Margit 391 Tawq, Marie 208, 212 – 214, 219 Tennyson, Alfred (Lord) 189 Tarabishi, Georges 212 – 213, 219 Tarnowska, Krystyna 112 Taronna, Annarita 153, 321 Telangana Armed Struggle 21 television shows 427 – 418; Crown,The 418; Life on Mars 413 – 416; Mad Men 415 – 416 Telugu 3, 17, 18, 20 – 29; see also Volga Tejaswini, Niranjana 17 Teso, Elena 375 – 376 Tharakeshwar,V. B. 17 Tharu, Susie 27, 186 Thatcher, Margaret (Maggie) 421 theocracy: Iran 37 – 38, 40 – 41, 44 Thott, Birgitte 123 Tidd, Ursula 230 Tito, Josip 266 Tobler, Stefan 127 – 128 Tokarczuk, Olga 300 Tolstoy, Leo 297 Tolstoy, Sophia 297 Toury, Gideon 17 Trabelsi, Baha 66 TRACE group (University of Léon) 15 transfeminism 2, 320 – 322; collectives 322 – 327; see also queer transfeminism transgender 270, 320 – 322; in India 336 – 342; in Japan 549; in Taiwan 354 translated feminist children’s literature (TFCL) 533 – 534 translation sociology 354 translators (male) 118 – 119, 122, 185 – 187, 196; see also Holmes, James S.; Parshley, Howard

Index

translators (women) and translation 9 – 10, 118 – 119; Arabic 209 – 216; and censorship 41; as cultural mediators 135, 240; and cultural representation 85 – 90; in the digital age 11 – 12; ‘documentary’ 486; feminist 17 – 29, 58, 119, 193, 208, 224, 235, 259 – 260, 267, 524 – 525; and gender pairings with writers 136, 187; influence of 235; Iranian 34, 44; Iraqi 48 – 56; in modern Europe 117 – 126; Maghrebi 74; Malayam 186; “naïve” 280 – 282, 287 – 288; noble (rank) 108 – 109; in non-Western culture 45; of philosophy 226 – 230; Polish 107 – 116; queer 256, 258, 262 – 263, 270; Russian 278; sexist 413 – 428; South American 84; as subversion 5, 9 – 10, 458; as texts 74 – 76 Tratnik, Suzana 270 trauma: colonial 66; testimonies of 93 Travers, Pamela Lyndon 112 Trentacosti, Giulia 128 Trill, Suzanne 119 Tripathi, Laxmi Narayan 339, 342 Tristan, Flora 179 Trites, Roberta Seelinger 531 Trzeszczkowska, Zofia (née Mańkowska) 110 Tso, Wing 533 Tunisia 64 – 66, 208 Turkey 146; feminism in 533; translated feminist children’s literature in 534; Wollstonecraft in 180 Turra, Elisabetta Caminer 179 Tuwim, Irena 112 Tuwim, Julian 112 Tyler, Margaret 117 – 118 Tymoczko, Maria 45, 96 Ukraine 8, 277 Ulrichs, Karl Heinrich 349 Ulysse, Gina Athena 8 Umutesi, Marie Béatrice 93 Union Feministe Libre (UFL)(Morocco) 407 United Arab Emirates (UAE) 2, 436 Untranslatable, the 226 – 227 untranslatable 320, 341, 496 Upadhyay, Nishant 336 – 344 Urdu 363 Usha, M. 17 Utopia group (France) 327 – 328 Vagina Monologues,The see Ensler, Eve 311, 524 Van Gogh,Vincent 187 Vanita, Ruth 338 Varma, Mahadevi 193 Vanmassenhove, Eva 463 Vassallo, Helen 127 – 146 Vatican 205, 471 Vatican Council 152 Vazquez, Pilar 153

Velasco, Julián de 178 Velde, Theodoor Hendrik de 298 Venuti, Lawrence 76, 206, 225 Vergès, Françoise 323 Verstegan, Richard 122 Vicente, Angeles 393 video games 444 – 468 Vidya (Living Smile) 338 Vindication of the Rights of Women (Wollestonecraft) 24, 235, 309; in China 315; Godwin’s memoirs of 177, 179; in Iran 38; misattributions and mistranslations of 180; translations of 173, 302, 315 Vindya 27 Vinson, Pauline Homsi 69 Viplava Rachayitala Sangam (Revolutionary Writers’ Association) (India) 20 Virgil 121 Visscher, Anna Roemers 119 Vitiello, Giovanni 347 – 348 Vittorini, Elio 368 Volga 17 – 31; “Feminism Ante” (Feminism Means) 23; feminist texts by 18 – 19; Mudu Taralu (Three Generations) 22, 25 – 26; Puttani Biddaku Talli Uttaram (Letter to a Child Never Born) 22; Swechcha (Liberty) 22; Tholi Velugulu–Sthrivadha Siddhantha Vikasam (First Illumination–Evolution of Feminist Theory) 23 Volpp, Sophie 347 Voorhees, Gerald A. 445 Voynich, Ethel: Gadfly 36, 37 Walser, Robert 113 Walsh, Catherine 341 Wang, Hsiu-yun 510 Wasamgi, Siddiqa 485 Wadud, Amina 481, 484, 488, 492, 497 Wang, Hsiu-yun 510 – 511 Wang,Yin 354 Warwick Prize for Women in Translation 129 – 130 Waugh, Thomas 262 Weaver, Helen 229 Wegener, Anna 7 Wei Sheng 薇生 349 Weiss, Max 146 Weiss, Reska 93 Weissenborn, Georg Friedrich Christian 175, 177 – 179 Wells, H. G. 111 Wentz’l, Maria 111 Wenzel, Hélène Vivienne 229 Whipps, Judy 37 White, Micheline 119 Who provides? Who cares? Changing Dynamics in Muslim Families 491 Why Haiti Needs New Narratives: A Post-Quake Chronicle (Ulysse) 8 571

Index

Wilkie-Stubbs, Christine 534 Williams, Tennessee 423 Willis, Sharon 228 Wilson, Emily 11 Windows of Faith: Muslim Women Scholar-Activists in North America 485 Winterson, Jeanette 368 Wirtemberska, Maria 109 Wisłocka, Michalina 298 WITMonth campaign 130 Wittig, Monique 216, 224, 227 – 229, 258, 260 – 261 Wojciechowska, Martyna 296 Wolf, Michaela 45 Wollstonecraft, Mary 2, 24, 151, 173 – 183; Maria, or Wrongs of Women 173 – 181; Vindication of the Rights of Women 38, 173 – 181; see also meme Women and Memory Forum (WMF) (Egypt) 403, 488 women in translation (WIT) 133 – 134 Women’s International Day 127 Women’s Stories,Women’s Lives 491 Woods, Michelle 45 Woolf,Virginia 114, 216, 268, 281, 301 – 302; Mrs Dalloway 36, 294 – 295, 316; Orlando 38, 294, 321; To the Lighthouse 294 – 295, 316; Waves, The 34, 35, 36, 36, 37; see also Room of One’s Own World War II 93, 103, 197, 202; and Beauvoir 293, 296; Kristeva on 286; post-war 212, 266, 295; revolutionary movements of 279; and Western feminism, impact on 292; and Woolf 294 – 295 Woydyłło, Ewa 296 Wright, Chantal 129 Wright, Francis 24 Wright, Gillian 122 Wu Cuncun 346 Wu, Michelle Ming-chih 356

572

Xiaomingxiong 小明雄 346 Xie Se 謝瑟 349 Yacowar, Maurice 415 Yada, Eriko (Yada Eriko) 544, 550, 552 – 553 Yalom, Marilyn 315 Yalta Conference 292 Yañez, Gabriela Luisa 93 – 106 Yang Youtian 楊憂天 349 Yan Shi 晏始 349 Year of Publishing Women (YPW) 127 – 139 Yiddish 365 Yolen, Jane 530 Young, Iris Marion 225 Yuan, Mingming 533 Yúdice, George 321 Yugoslavia 93, 154, 266, 521 Yu, Zhongli 308 – 318, 319, 524 Zagórska, Aniela 118 Zangana, Haifa 50 – 51, 55, 57 Zapatistas 11 Zawistowska, Kazimiera 112 Zawiszanka-Łaniewska, Maria Beata 108 Zawisza,Voivodeship Krzysztof 108 Zeig, Sande 228 Żeleńska, Zofia 112 Zerilli, Linda Marie-Gelsomina 229 Zetkin, Clara 24 Zhang Jingsheng 張競生 348, 350 Zhang Lu 162 – 166 Zhang Zhujun 张竹君 312 Zhao, Jieyu 463 Zheng, Binghan 161 Zilfi, Madeline 498 Zipes, Jack 529 – 531 Zoberman, Pierre 375 Zou, James 462 Zwischenberger, Cornelia 159