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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
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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
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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
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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
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276
291 308
319 336
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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
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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
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444 457
PART V
Discourses in translation
469
35 Translating the Bible into English: how translations transformed gendered meanings and relations Mathilde Michaud
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36 Negotiation of meaning in translating ‘Islamic feminist’ texts into Arabic: mapping the terrain Doaa Embabi
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37 Feminist strategies in women’s translations of the Qur’an Rim Hassen
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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
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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
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Index555
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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
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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.
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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
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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.
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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).
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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
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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
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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
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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.
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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.
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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).
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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
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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
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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.
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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.
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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.
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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
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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.
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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.
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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‘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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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(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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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.
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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/.
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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.
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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.
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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.
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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.
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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
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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
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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.
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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.
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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.
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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].
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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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
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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
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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.
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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).
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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:
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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
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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
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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
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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.
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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].
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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[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
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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.
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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.
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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
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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.
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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:
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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)
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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.
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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.
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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
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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
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“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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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:
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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
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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
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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
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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.
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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.”
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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
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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
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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
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(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
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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].
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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.
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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].
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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.
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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.
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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
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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
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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