Queering Translation, Translating the Queer

Theory, Practice, Activism

Brian James Baer, Klaus Kaindl, Brian James Baer, Klaus Kaindl

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781315505954
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This groundbreaking work is the first full book-length publication to critically engage in the emerging field of research on the queer aspects of translation and interpreting studies. The volume presents a variety of theoretical and disciplinary perspectives through fifteen contributions from both established and up-and-coming scholars in the field to demonstrate the interconnectedness between translation and queer aspects of sex, gender, and identity. The book begins with the editors' introduction to the state of the field, providing an overview of both current and developing lines of research, and builds on this foundation to look at this research more closely, grouped around three different sections: Queer Theorizing of Translation; Case Studies of Queer Translations and Translators; and Queer Activism and Translation. This interdisciplinary approach seeks to not only shed light on this promising field of research but also to promote cross fertilization between these disciplines towards further exploring the intersections between queer studies and translation studies, making this volume key reading for students and scholars interested in translation studies, queer studies, politics, and activism, and gender and sexuality studies.

1 Sexuality and Translation as Intimate Partners? Toward a Queer Turn in Rewriting Identities and Desires

José Santaemilia

Sexuality and Translation: Questions for a Common Exploration

In this chapter I tentatively explore the research potential of combining two disciplines—sexuality and translation—that seem to have been progressively coming together over the last few years. A number of questions have already begun to be addressed—What happens when sexuality is translated? Why is Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex more polite, "less descriptive, more scholarly and detached" (Flotow 2000: 22) than Le deuxième sex? How can we describe Bridget Jones, Helen Fielding's archetypal chick-lit character, as assertive and skeptical (in English) but as a prude (in French)? Why does the dubbing into Spanish of Alfred Hitchcock's Rebecca suppress any reference to the (possible) lesbian relationship between the first Mrs. de Winter and her housekeeper, Mrs. Danvers? What is the role of translation in mediating (the construction of) sexuality? Why are references to sexuality, male or female, (mis)understood, under- or over-represented, in a variety of languages? How do sexual-related terms (gay, lesbian, queer) travel across languages and cultures—or, to put in Masiello's (2004: 2) terms, "[c]an sexuality be translated and represented, with terms that move from nation to nation?" Do the terms for gender/sexual identities have "equivalents" in other languages and cultures, and to what extent are Anglophone borrowings never equivalent? How does translation contribute to confirming or challenging sexual ambivalence? Does our biology (male vs. female), sexuality (heterosexual, homosexual, bisexual, etc.) or gender lead us to translate differently? What is the role of translation in the processes of identity formation in foreign sexual minority cultures? How do feminist writers and activists (e.g., Carmen de Burgos) approach the translation of a misogynistic piece of writing, such as Möbius's Über den physiologischen Schwachsinn des Weibes [On the Physiological Mental Deficiency of Woman] (1900)? Can translation and sexuality become "a space of discursive conflict and negotiation between different ideological positions" (Sánchez 2011: 326)? Why is a piece of erotica more or less daring depending on the language/ culture into which it is translated? Are there ethical issues involved in the translation of explicit (or euphemistic) sexual scenes? Does censorship or self-censorship affect the translation of sex? Are four-letter words (im)possible to translate? Is an erotics of translation the only way to recover the voice and the body present in any text, as suggested by Loffredo (2003)? Have the metaphors for the process of translation been "highly sexed, and indeed, heterosexed" (Livia 2003: 154); or, in Chamberlain's (1988) famous formulation, is there a gendered (or sexual) metaphorics at play that renders both translations and women as subordinate while original texts and men are considered superior? And, finally, are queer theorizations likely to inform translation practice and, in so doing, transform translation into a queer—or a queer-conscious—praxis?

The Translation of Sexuality versus the Sex/ualization of Translation

As can be seen from this list of topics (and from others that will surely be raised in the future), two complementary perspectives can be considered—the translation of sexuality and the sex/ualization of translation. Both are well worth exploring as they address key aspects of cross-disciplinary and cross-cultural research, ranging (in very general terms) from the translators' main challenges in rewriting human sexual experience to the consideration of translation as a sex- or gender-related activity. These two perspectives, which define a rather large and complex area for reflection and research, are likely to be explored from either practical or theoretical perspectives, with both running the risk of generating essentialist positions. And so, while an interest in either sex or translation has been evident since the beginning of time, an interest in both sexuality and translation is much more recent and demands greater documentation and evaluation in order to avoid biased or essentialist analyses.

When we revise any type of research to combine sexuality and translation, we discover that the most common perspective is that translation projects itself onto sexuality (the translation of sexuality), rather than the opposite (the sex/ualization of translation). In fact, translation studies has been incorporating sexuality as an analytical category since the 1990s, with sexuality understood as "a field that is notoriously difficult to translate for reasons of cultural and generational differences—a cas limite that in some ways serves as a test of translation" (Flotow 2000: 16). Its importance is obvious: first, sex/uality—as manifested in acts, desires, identities, and, especially, discourses—is everywhere in our daily lives, in our texts, in our symbolic projections; and, second, when translating sexuality, there is necessarily a translation effect (Flotow 2000) having unpredictable consequences. Translating the language of sex or pleasure, therefore, is not a neutral affair but a political act, with important rhetorical and ideological implications, registering the translator's attitude toward existing conceptualizations of gender/sexual identities, human sexual behavior(s) and moral norms. In this sense, translation and sexuality can together form a powerful interdiscipline uniquely capable of unveiling the most intimate textualizations of our identities and desires for queering translation; in particular, it demands "critical attention to the transgressive, anti-normative spaces where contradictory or deferred meanings may emerge" (Spurlin 2014a: 300), bringing to the forefront "the heuristic power of translation to navigate and linger in the ambiguities and gaps woven into the asymmetrical relations between languages and cultures" (Spurlin 2014b: 213), between sexual performances and identifications. Queer theory has adopted Michel Foucault's post-structuralist notion that "sexuality is not an essentially personal attribute but an available cultural category" (Jagose 1996: 78).

Across history, sexuality has generated a wealth of discourses (e.g., erotic or pornographic writings, and swearwords), moral phenomena (e.g., obscenities and taboos), and pragmatic reactions (e.g., censorship and self-censorship) that are amplified or silenced, confirmed or perverted, in translation. Whether applied to language or translation, queer theory has been especially effective in "calling into question conventional understandings of sexual identity by deconstructing the categories, oppositions and equations that sustain them" (Hennessy 1994: 94), revealing them in their various textualizations to be fictitious, incoherent, contingent, and ultimately performative (Butler 1990).

Sexuality and Translation: Toward a Queer Turn

Perhaps the first step in bringing together insights from both disciplinary fields is to make sense of the current research combining sexuality and translation studies. One of the first realizations in doing so is that many of these studies fail to interrogate basic sex-related (or translation-related) categories or the conceptual bases of these categories, but simply take sex/uality and translation as unproblematic givens. Progressively, however, and as a consequence of what we may call a queer turn in translation studies and in the humanities in general, both categories have come to be treated more critically, illuminating the textualization of our identities and desires while offering analytical tools and approaches for understanding those specific textualizations. For reasons of space, I will focus in this section on two recognizable strands of this research: the translation of erotic literature; and the analysis of censorship and self-censorship of sexual content in translation. In the following section, we will focus on specifically gay/lesbian and queer translation.

Erotic literature, defined as "works in which sexuality and/or sexual desire has a dominant presence" (Brulotte and Phillips 2006: x), represents perhaps the most ancient and sustained manifestation of sexuality in language. Classic works of erotic literature have been repeatedly printed and reprinted since their initial publication. Works by Sappho, Catullus, Boccaccio, Aretino, Delicado, Casanova, Cleland, de Sade, Sacher-Masoch, and many others, have been (and will continue to be) translated into innumerable languages, forming part of a world canon of erotic literature. Printings and reprintings, legal or clandestine, pirated or expurgated editions, are part and parcel of this age-old tradition of erotic writing. The monumental Encyclopedia of Erotic Literature (2006), edited by Gaëtan Brulotte and John Phillips, deals extensively with the literary representation of sexuality and desire, but treats translation as invisible, with only brief references to the first translations into major European languages (German, French, and English) of the works analyzed. While erotic literature has turned sexuality into a powerful social discourse, scholars have largely ignored questions related to the translation of erotic literature.

New research, however, is emerging that shows an explicit orientation and a more integrated approach to both sex/uality and translation (Boulanger 2008; Louar 2008; Santaemilia 2005, 2009, 2011; Rao and Klimkiewicz 2012; Henry-Tierney 2013). These publications deal almost exclusively with contemporary (especially French language) authors of erotic (or pornographic) literature, such as Canadian author Nelly Arcan; French authors Virginie Despentes, Catherine Millet, Georges Pailler "Esparbec," Mohamed Leftah and Anaïs Nin; British authors Ian McEwan and Nipper Godwin; and Spanish writer Almudena Grandes.

For example, Louar (2008) analyzes several versions of Virginie Despentes's erotic novel Baise-moi (1996), including the English translation by Bruce Benderson (1999) and the French-language film adaptation (2000), thus leading to a reconsideration of translation (or adaptation) in terms of alterity and identity. A careful analysis of its different texts and paratexts shows that Baise-moi serves, in French and in English, two different moral projects: the vulgarization of the literary text carried out in the English version, and the rendering of the French film version into a more pornographic and violent text. In Santaemilia (2009, 2011), we see how translation serves the purpose of sanitizing sexually explicit language in the works of "canonical" authors. The book Las edades de Lulú (1989), by Spanish writer Almudena Grandes, for example, a marginal, bold and explicitly erotic¹ text, has generated polemical reactions and has become a privileged locus to test the limits of Spanish contemporary literature and society in terms of its sexual mores. Its publication initiated a boom in erotic literature in Spain. Young Spanish novelists like Lucía Etxebarria, Mercedes Abad or María Jaén have chosen to follow Grandes's example by describing in graphic detail the desires and sexual practices of their female protagonists in order to "implicitly dismantle the inherited models both of eroticism and of literature" (Ríos-Font 1998: 362). An analysis of The Ages of Lulu, the 1992 English-language translation of Grandes's novel by Sonia Soto, reveals the intricate processes and the contradictions involved in the translation of explicit sexuality. The example that follows can be illustrative:

Example 1

"Estaba caliente, cachonda en el sentido clásico del término." (1989: 54)

[I was hot, horny/randy in the classical sense of the term]

"I was hot, turned on in the true sense of the word" (1992: 36)

As in many other passages, the English renderings are reasonable, though milder, options for the sexually explicit Spanish terms. When trying to relay the sexual vulgarity present in the Spanish original, the English version proves less physical, less colloquial. The Ages of Lulu deletes crude references to body parts, sexual acts, and to the frenzy Grandes's women experience in wild sexual activity. As these and other examples show, it could be said that the English translation has transformed a bold text about the limits of women's desire into a somewhat desexualized and sanitized one.

Although Las Edades de Lulú is a daring, frenzied book that crudely depicts—among other things—woman's sexual agency, it also resorts to the traditional misogyny and homophobia still pervading the Spanish language.

Example 2

...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Introduction: Queer(ing) Translation
• 1 Sexuality and Translation as Intimate Partners? Toward a Queer Turn in Rewriting Identities and Desires
• 2 A Scene of Intimate Entanglements, or, Reckoning with the "Fuck" of Translation
• 3 Beyond Either/Or: Confronting the Fact of Translation in Global Sexuality Studies
• 4 The Future Is a Foreign Country: Translation and Temporal Critique in the Italian It Gets Better Project
• 5 Ethnography and Queer Translation
• 6 In All His Finery: Frederick Marryat's The Pacha of Many Tales as Drag
• 7 Transgenderism in Japanese Manga as Radical Translation: The Journey to the West Goes to Japan
• 8 Speaking Silence and Silencing Speech: The Translations of Grand Duke Konstantin Romanov as Queer Writing
• 9 Translation's Queerness: Giovanni Bianchi and John Cleland Writing Same-Sex Desire in the Eighteenth Century
• 10 Literary Censorship and Homosexuality in Kádár-Regime Hungary and Estado Novo Portugal
• 11 On Three Modes of Translating Queer Literary Texts
• 12 Queering Lexicography: Balancing Power Relations in Dictionaries
• 13 Queer Translation as Performative and Affective Un-doing: Translating Butler's Undoing Gender into Italian
• 14 Years Yet Yesterday: Translating Art, Activism, and AIDS across the Visual and the Verbal
• List of Contributors
• Index