Queer in translation (b.j.

epstein and robert gillet)

introduction

What is the link between queer and translation? It depends on what does queer means and what
does translation means. Queer is a notoriously slippery term, while translation can seem quite a
straightforward term, but on a closer look it’s as complicated as the issues of gender, sexuality,
power. The aim is to analyze how queerness “translates” as a sexuality, a politics or a concept.

On a theoretical level translation is already a queer process, because translating implicates a

othering. The re-thinking in translation has political and practical implications. It is delusional to
think that translation is a transparent process through which meaning is conveyed. For example
English does not do gender in the same way as other languages do. Queer theory and translation too
are so anti-hegemonic. Both in queer theory and translation it is fundamental contamination,
hybridity, indeterminacy. It demonstrates that conventional categories make sense only as an
operation of power.

1 - re-mapping translation. Queerying the crossroads (Shalmalee Palekar)

There is a nexus between translation, postcolonial and queer studies, but in order to understand this
nexus we have to change our us-centric ideas of what constitutes queerness. We have to erase the
imperialistic hegemony on the basis of a crude western/non western binary. It is vital to consider
pluralities.

Translation of queer theory/experiences and translation as identity construction

A common question is how to translate the “global” (us-centric) queer identities and communities
into the ‘local’ subjects. Queerying translation can be seen as part of an active construction of
queer identities across different cultural contexts. We then have to debunk the ‘neutrality myth’
in translation studies, arguing that translation is neither an innocent nor a powerless act.

But what does ‘queer’ mean?

Song Hwee Lim’s ‘How to be Queer in Taiwan: Translation, Appropriation and the Construction of
a Queer Identity in Taiwan’. One of the words for ‘queer’ in Taiwan is ku’er; It is a compound term
consisting of the Chinese characters ku (meaning ‘cruel’, ‘cold’ and also ‘very’ or ‘extremely’) and
er (meaning ‘child’, ‘youngster’ or ‘son’).

Tracing and erasing the queer: translation as both interventionist and repressive
Kieran o’driscoll (2008) points out that the nature of translation include an original deconstruction
of a source text, a radical reinterpretation of the same. Conversely, the process of translation can
also lead to an erasure of the queerness of texts and authors, sometimes due to direct censorship and
sometimes to the queerphobic biases of a particular translator. Deborah Giustini (2015), drawing on
translations of Sappho’s works, illustrates how translation can shift into a heterosexual paragdigm.

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 The role of queer/translation in exoticization/orientalism

Homosexuality has been exoticized and orientalized in literature and film produced by western
writers. The combination of eroticism and exoticism has repeatedly been used to sell queer
translations. An example in the popular culture is the thai gay boys, hypersexualized. The projection
of the imperialist/orientalist fantasy onto the body of the thai ‘boy’ can be resisted in multiple ways,
both anticolonial and nativist. It is important not to fall into a hierarchized western/non-western
binary.

The role of queer/translation in colonial and postcolonial encounters

In the colonial encounter between two different cultures, the act of translation has a dual function; it
makes the colonizing subject accessible to the colonized readership, because it expresses it in terms
of the other’s experience, and it also ‘appropriates the cultural texts of the colonized subject by
assigning them the signs that are familiar to the colonizers’ (Ur Rehman 1997: n.p). How then, do
we translate the ‘global’ onto the ‘local’? Postcolonial and queer studies can work together to shine
an often uncomfortable spotlight on cultural practices. Thus the practice and study of translation
and queerness has the ability to radically dismantle and deconstruct notions of Western power,
language and heteronormative dominance.

*The iceberg theory

One of the key problems for the translator is the temptation to try and make explicit a certain kind
of globally legible and homogenizing queerness.
The iceberg theory (David katan?): there are 3 levels of culture, the technical culture
(communication at the level of science), the formal culture (the culture ingrained in traditions, the
correct and accepted way of doing things in a society), and the informal culture (that which we are
unconscious of, acquired informally and through interaction). The first two are the tip of the
iceberg, the informal culture is what sits the deepest, unquestioned and uncoscious beliefs about our
identities.
This triad comes into play in our everyday life and when we translate a text. The translator, then,
performs the role of cultural intermediary, bringing together that which is visible, semi-visible and
invisible.

The Indian context

The act of translation has long been an inherent practice in india. In india, translation must perform
a triple act: one that shows how india is represented to the outside world, how india is represented
to itself, and how the world is represented within/to india.

In conclusion: translators queerying the crossroads

Thus there is always something potentially monstrous and illuminating when attempting to write
both of, and sometimes unavoidably, for another in translation. The narratives are queered,
dispersed, unsettled, and arrogated. They arrive at their destination transformed, sometimes beyond
recognition. But it is perhaps the willingness to be transformed in the first place, that swings queer
literary/cultural/translation studies and practices from heavily monitored Western narratives to the
rich, mutable discourse of other cultures/‘insider’ translations and transfusions. As queer Indian
translators and texts become more globally visible, it is vital that we do not lose sight of local and
regional translation practices and textual strategies; that we do not subsume these under a
chutnified, homogenized queer translation model, and that we formulate the Indian translator as
always rewriting, recreating and reconstituting queer India, just as India continues to rewrite,
recreate and reconstitute the queer translator.
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 5 - translation failure in James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room (Margaret sönser breen)

Introduction
James Baldwin wrote a gay novel, ‘Giovanni’s room’ (1956): a narrator protagonist, a young
american who travels to Paris and meets Giovanni, an italian migrant who works in a gay bar.
Attracted to each other, they become involved, but David is unable to reconcile his same-gender
desires with his investment in heteromasculinity, having also a fiancé, Hella. When hella comes to
Paris, David abandons Giovanni, whose life takes a downward turn (he is accused of having killed
the owner of the bar and he’s sentenced to death). So the book is made by David’s confession of his
double betrayal: his refusal to accept both himself and his love for Giovanni. David’s homophobia
is a refusal of cultural translation. In the book, written in English, French is the language of their
gay intercourse.

*The translator as gatekeeper: David’s selective translation of French

Translation is a dynamic and selective operation, it facilitates and it denies the exchange of
meaning. Translation exposes cultural codes of meaning, and functions as gatekeeper to determine
which meanings will pass and will be acceptable.
The narrator-protagonist never arrives at a point where he can accept homosexuality as no less
authentic and viable than heterosexuality. David proves unable to translate same-gender desire into
a reality. While he narrates promarily in English, he leaves certain words in French: translation
failure marks his homophobia. These untranslated words fall into 2 categories: words that are part
of the Parisian gay subculture in which the two men meet; and words that point to the emotional and
cultural separation between the two men. For example David calls le milieu people who are part of
the gay subculture, saying “while this milieu was certainly anxious enough to claim me, I was intent
on proving, to them and to myself, that I was not of their company”. Such verbal distancing recurs
throughout David’s narrative, these are strategies of self-distancing.

Translation, cultural supremacy and cultural erasure

Language is a powerful vehicle for creating intimacy, and this is perhaps especially apparent in
cross-cultural relationship.

Translation dirt
For Baldwin, David’s selective translation across languages and cultures is a key narrative strategy.
With it, Baldwin allows readers to recognize David’s translation choices as attempts to guard
against admissions and connections that could sully his vision of America, his story and, of course,
himself. David offers readers a narrative that, despite and indeed through its encoding of his
resistance to loving Giovanni, enacts a queer temporal sensibility. In his initial conversation with
David, Giovanni remarks, ‘You have a funny sense of time . . . Time always sounds like a parade
chez vous’ (1956: 48). David Leeming sees in this moment ‘an attack on the white American myth
embodied in such terms as “the American Dream”. And so, again and again, he insists on the
differences between himself and Giovanni, who remains beyond the borders of a time chez vous.
David does not offer a linear account, he disrupts and rearranges chronological events. Time, in
Giovanni’s Room, is simultaneously compressed and porous. By figuring David’s narration as a
temporally queer performance, Baldwin in effect facilitates the reading that David can change and
that he himself understands his potential for self-acceptance. Does David’s use of language and
languages only entail a loss of intimacy that is at once communal, private and personal? Do the
words and phrases that David ignores and leaves untranslated themselves only function as totems of
his refusal of love? The verbal excesses that he bars from his American English are translation dirt:
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 do they serve to mark his translation failure but nothing else? Or do they border a queer time in
which he recognizes his possibilities for belonging? Within his frame narrative, is it possible that
this translation dirt ultimately become David’s ‘dreadful weight of hope’?

13 - queering translation. Rethinking gender and sexual politics in the spaces between
languages and cultures (William j. Spurlin)
inserito in paper

As the world becomes increasingly translational, the spaces produced in the encounters between
cultures become salient sites for addressing how multiple lines of social invention, domination and
respstance continue to be activated both within national borders as well as across them.

The term ‘queer has its origins in western anglophonic cultures, based on a western understanding
of gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgendered, or queer identities. Translation is a cultural production,
exceding the reproduction of a text from one language into another. Texts and cultures have to be
read relationally, producing hybrid and new forms of meaning. Language is a social invention.
See the example of the motsoalle in the paper for the 2nd mid term exam.

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