The Routledge Handbook of Translation, Feminism and Gender

Luise von Flotow, Hala Kamal, Luise von Flotow, Hala Kamal

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781351658058
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

The Routledge Handbook of Translation, Feminism and Gender provides a comprehensive, state-of-the-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.

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.

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 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 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 – t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Women (re)writing authority: a roundtable discussion on feminist translation
• Part I Translating and publishing women
• Part II Translating feminist writers
• Part III Feminism, gender, and queer in translation
• Part IV Gender in grammar, technologies, and audiovisual translation
• Part V Discourses in translation
• Epilogue
• Index