Reengendering Translation

Re-Engendering Translation
Transcultural Practice, Gender/Sexuality

and the Politics of Alterity
Edited by
Christopher Larkosh
First published 201 by St. Jerome Publishing
Published 2014 by Routledge

2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
 Christopher Larkosh 2011
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.
Notices
Knowledge and best practice in this field are constantly changing. As new research and experience
broaden our understanding, changes in research methods, professional practices, or medical
treatment may become necessary.
Practitioners and researchers must always rely on their own experience and knowledge in
evaluating and using any information, methods, compounds, or experiments described herein. In
using such information or methods they should be mindful of their own safety and the safety of
others, including parties for whom they have a professional responsibility.
To the fullest extent of the law, neither the Publisher nor the authors, contributors, or editors,
assume any liability for any injury and/or damage to persons or property as a matter of products
liability, negligence or otherwise, or from any use or operation of any methods, products,
instructions, or ideas contained in the material herein.
ISBN 13: (pbk)
Typeset by
Delta Typesetters, Cairo, Egypt
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Re-engendering translation : transcultural practice, gender/sexuality and the
politics of alterity / edited by Christopher Larkosh.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-905763-32-0 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Translating and interpreting--Social aspects. I. Larkosh, Christopher.
P306.97.S63R44 2011
418’.02081--dc23
2011035940
Transcultural Practice, Gender/Sexuality and the Politics
of Alterity
Edited by Christopher Larkosh
Of interest to scholars in translation studies, gender and sexuality, and com-

parative literary and cultural studies, this volume re-examines the possibilities
for multiple intersections between translation studies and research on sexuality
and gender, and in so doing addresses the persistent theoretical gaps in much
work on translation and gender to date. The current climate still seems to pro-
mote the continuation of identity politics by encouraging conversations that
depart from an all too often limited range of essentializing gendered subject
positions. A more inclusive approach to the theoretical intersection between
translation and gender as proposed by this volume aims to open up the discus-
sion to a wider range of linguistically and culturally informed representations
of sexuality and gender, one in which neither of these two theoretical terms,
much less the subjects associated with them, is considered secondary or subor-
dinate to the other. This discussion extends not only to questions of linguistic
difference as mediated through the act of translation, but also to the challenges
of intersubjectivity as negotiated through culture, ‘race’ or ethnicity.
The volume also makes a priority of engaging a wide range of cultural and
linguistic spaces: Latin America under military dictatorship, numerous points
of the African cultural diaspora, and voices from South, Southeast and East
Asia. Such perspectives are not included merely as supplemental, ‘minority’
additions to an otherwise metropolitan-centred volume, but instead are integral
to the volume’s focus, underscoring its goal of re-engendering translation stud-
ies through a politics of alterity that encourages the continued articulation and
translation of difference, be it sexual or gendered, cultural or linguistic.
Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Christopher Larkosh 1
Writing on Race and Sexuality in the Harlem Renaissance

Translation as Retelling and Rememory
Annarita Taronna 10
Speaking to the Dead

Juan Gelman’s Feminization of Argentine Poetics as a Politics
of Resistance
Lisa Bradford 32
Transformations of Violence
Metramorphic Gains and Plastic Regeneration in
Marie Vieux-Chauvet’s Les Rapaces
Carolyn Shread 50
Two in Translation
The Multilingual Cartographies of Néstor Perlongher
and Caio Fernando Abreu
The Creation of ‘A Lady’

Gender and Sexual Politics in the Earliest Japanese Translations
of Walter Scott and Charlotte Brontë
Takayuki Yokota-Murakami 91
Western Others (And ‘Other’ Westerns)

Translating Brokeback Mountain into Vietnamese Culture
Loc Pham 111
Gender, Historiography and Translation

Tutun Mukherjee 127
Notes on the Contributors 144
Index 146
Acknowledgements
Many of the intellectual gestures of thanks I wish to offer here are made
clear in the introduction, the contributions themselves, and the readings they
encourage. That said, any other dedications or acknowledgements on my part
would necessarily include:
my mother, a lifelong teacher and working woman, an example for

compassion and generosity in the face of personal adversity and social
injustice, and the provider who made my life as I know it possible, who
passed away at the age of 71 around the time that this book began to
be put together;
the rest of my family, friends and loves across the world, some of
them also gone, but none of them forgotten;
my supportive professional colleagues, past and present, who
continue to believe in and value my work;
and to all in the cultural, linguistic, sexual minority and activist
communities that I have been fortunate enough to consider myself
part of over the course of my life.
They all know who they are and what they mean to me, even if most of them
will not be among those who will eventually read this book.
At the same time, this book also goes out equally, if not more so, to those
with whom I presumably have little or nothing in common, whose languages
and cultures I can never fully experience or completely understand, whose
difficulties and aspirations I cannot even begin to comprehend, and whose
lives may appear to be, and may well remain, irreconcilably separate from
my own.
Providence, Rhode Island, 22 March 2011

This page intentionally left blank
Introduction
Christopher Larkosh
Literature, Roland Barthes has suggested, is of two classes. In the first

place there is the class of poetry, fiction, and drama, in which a writer
uses language to, as he says, “speak about objects and phenomena
which, whether imaginary or not, are external and anterior to lan-
guage”. Besides this there is a class of writing that is a class of writing
which “deals not with ‘the world’, but with the linguistic formulations
made by others; it is a comment on a comment.”
(Holmes 1970:91)
the state of the art of translation studies is better than ever before. it
is not good. There is so much still to be done.
(Holmes 1984/1998:110)
With these two epigraphs in mind – the first, itself the kind of “comment on
a comment” that the author sets out to discuss, the second, a simple yet frank
assessment of the field of translation studies – let me posit another deceptively
simple statement, this one in the form of a question: How and why does each
of us quote others, and do we translate for many of the same reasons? If it is
still possible to take the meaning of this or any other quote at face value, one
might assume that I either agree with, seek support in and wish to strategically
ally myself with the author’s statement, or else that I disagree and prove it false
through my own subsequent arguments or those of others. Less common than
these two approaches, however, is a strategy of quotation that both encourages
an awareness of the semantic ambiguity of such re-contextualized statements
such as those above, and underscores both their inherent ambiguities and un-
derlying, often irreconcilable contradictions, in order to provoke a discussion
of the very utility of such strategies of quotation themselves.
Such a nuanced understanding of quotation – and by extension, translation
– as well as their ever-evolving roles in cultural critique, will be instrumental
for a volume that aims both to reexamine and diversify understandings of the
relationship between translation studies and studies in gender and sexuality:
not only in relation to women’s studies, lgbt studies and/or queer theory, but
also to other conceptualizations of gender and sexual intersubjectivity in trans-
lation studies. The articles compiled in this volume, both individually and in
the multiple intersections suggested by their inclusion here together, offer a
Introduction
number of mediating strategies related to both quotation and translation, and

thus expand potential discussion of this topic over a broader range of gendered,
sexual, and intersecting linguistic and cultural positions.
While the works of feminist scholars, most often focusing on primarily
‘women-oriented’ projects in relation to questions of gender identity,
have by now established themselves for many as central, unquestioned
and thereby unavoidable points of reference in the discussions of gender
in translation studies, it could still be argued that other approaches to
questions on gender and sexuality beyond the limits of a single primary
gender or sexual identity have been circulating at the heart of translation
studies since its formal academic inception in the early 1970s. To give one
example: the author quoted above, the US-born Dutch academic James S.
Holmes, is still considered to be among the most important foundational
figures of translation studies. While characterized by one contemporary as
an “independent and innovative spirit moving in two such separate worlds,
both in the academic and geographical sense”, mainly on the basis of his
professional collaboration on both sides of the iron Curtain (snell-hornby
2006:41), such a description of Holmes’ commitment to transiting cultural
spaces still does not begin to tell the whole story. perhaps precisely because
he was an out, gay-identified man active in the burgeoning leather scene
of Amsterdam of the mid-20th century, a foundational figure in a second
academic discipline, known in Dutch as ‘homostudies’, and a co-founder
of the Amsterdam gay and lesbian bookstore Vrolijk (Keilson-Lauritz
2001), Holmes was hardly someone who needed to be ‘outed’ by his fellow
scholars in more explicit terms. This may shed some light on what now
appears as a somewhat disquieting silence about his sexual orientation by
translation studies scholars who have written on his contributions to the
field. One emblematic example can be found in the collection of articles
compiled in Amsterdam after a conference held there in his honour in
1990. Aside from a comment in the introduction by the volume’s co-edi-
tor, who notes that some of his university colleagues “did not approve of
his life-style” (van Leuven-Zwart 1991:7), and another that refers to his
life partner Hans van Merle in a footnote as Holmes himself often did, as
his “co-translator” (Levie 1991:58), without any further insight into the
multifaceted nature of this relationship, there is no explicit mention of
the possible connection between Holmes’ pioneering work in translation
studies and his equally pioneering work as a gay activist. Nonetheless, the
photo of Holmes on the volume’s cover seems to communicate in visual
terms what the book’s contributors choose not to: the casual attire of jeans,
leather jacket, flannel shirt and hoop earring, as well as the still-discernable
Christopher Larkosh
pink triangle pin on his lapel and the gaze of Holmes himself, smiling as he
looks directly (one might even say defiantly) into the camera.
One exception to this less researched dimension of his life by translation
studies scholars is a seemingly discreet comment by his colleague Raymond
van den Broeck in the introduction to a posthumous 1988 collection of Holmes’
papers after his death from Aids in 1986:
[He] published translations of almost all [the] important Dutch and

Flemish poets. He also translated such Latin poets as Catullus and
Martial, being attracted in particular to the homoerotic element in their
work. Not least, he wrote poems of his own, at one moment under the
transparent synonym of Jacob Lowland (using bound verse), at another
moment under the more familiar name Jim Holmes (using free verse).
of his epic Billy the Crisco Kid, a narrative poem in ottava rima in-
tended to comprise ten cantos of 800 lines each, he was not even able
to complete two cantos. (1988:2)
Holmes’ confluence of life and work had always been a crossroads of work
in translation, gender and sexuality, and especially if his pseudonyms and
often sexually explicit literary output are any indication, one in which his
awareness as a mediator of Dutch-language culture in the English-speaking
world actually transformed the way he understood and configured his own
understanding of identity, not only as a gay-identified man, but also as a mi-
grant and translingual subject committed to the further, if always incomplete,
dissemination of poetic voices: whether ‘his own’, those ‘like himself’, or
of ‘others’. At times, as with Catullus and Martial, one may well perceive
some overlap with his own homoerotic poetic projects, and yet, as the oblique
reference to a specific sexual practice – that of fisting – that the title of his
epic poem suggests, all initial perceptions of commonality in gender, sex and
sexual identity must eventually give way at some point to difference, with
any and all unitary preconceptions of what sex ‘is’ or ‘represents’ in language
and culture no longer delimited by normative boundaries or assumptions of
commonality. It is thus in the specifics of sexual practice that one’s sexuality,
like gender, is always fundamentally distinct from that of any other, and thus
invariably transcultural. It is in this candour with regard to the specificities
of his own sexual life and practices that Holmes was a true pioneer; not only
did he appear on Dutch television to discuss his predilection for anonymous
and public sexual encounters, he did so without any sense of shame or apol-
ogy, aware of his public role not only as a academic theorist, but as a living,
human sexual subject (Holmes 1985).
it is thus by way of such candid reassertions of the often overlooked details
of Holmes’ sexuality into his work in translation studies that I go back to reread
Introduction
the above epigraph, in which there was/is “so much still to be done”: whether
in the field of translation studies as a whole, or at its points of contact alongside
studies in gender and sexuality. What may first appear as a bluntly dissatisfied
appraisal on the part of Holmes, especially placed where it is near the end of
his body of work, nonetheless continues to take on additional meaning post
mortem as his own transcultural/sexual practice continues to be extended into
and across an ever-broader range of languages, cultures and gendered subject
positions. Over this diverse spectrum, none of these sexual subject positions
can be considered indisputably central or marginal (much less normative or
perverse), but instead can also be imagined as alternating on a continuum of
discourses, over which no one position is ever essential or unavoidable. in this
context, the mediating or re-engendering acts such as quotation or translation
may mean at times actually setting aside one’s own understandings of self,
and in doing so, creating an institutional space for others to speak and trace
out divergent understandings of identity and alterity.
With this repositioning of Holmes still in mind – one that reconnects the
separated facets of his identity such as academic, creative artist and sexual
subject – I also wish to make clear that, while identity-based projects will no
doubt continue to emerge here and elsewhere, the point of this kind of transla-
tional re-engendering is not simply to shift the focus of the current discussion
of gender and translation to other examples of what may well be considered
equally identitarian projects. This single example of the still-unexamined
intersections in translation studies, gender and sexualities is nonetheless at
the core of what this volume endeavours to do: in re-engendering the study
of translation, it may be possible to uncover the ways that translation has al-
ways already been gendered in multiple ways, and how all gender and sexual
identifications, wherever they are represented in the translation process, are
poised for a extended discussion which points toward their relevance across
the limits of a single gender or sexual identity.
Such theoretical acts of re-engendering may in fact serve to continue both
to complement and to question the repeated delineation of gender within es-
tablished and continuing projects such as women’s, gay or lesbian studies, and
thereby challenge not only one’s own sense of gender or sexual positionality,
but also complicate one’s primary cultural or linguistic coordinates as well. In
the process, one might open up new possibilities for cross-identification with
others, not only across the often imperfect binary oppositions such as woman/
man, male/female, gay/straight, hiv+/-, native/foreign, sedentary/migrant,
Western/non-Western, developed/developing etc., but also in relation to those
gender and sexual positionalities once considered by many as ‘ambiguous’ or
‘in-between’ in relation to such conventionally fixed binaries, but could just as
Christopher Larkosh
easily be considered primary as any other: whether bisexual, hermaphroditic

or transgender, bilingual or hybrid, or any combination of the above.
Ultimately, a re-engendered study of translation begins to be recognized
as a transcultural practice that calls into question any and all claims to one’s
own or others’ centrally fixed identity by its very nature. After all, none of us
is exempt from the ways in which acts of translation, whether in a literal or a
more figurative cultural sense, continually reshape understandings of ‘our’
identities and limits with what is perceived as other, both as embodied in
‘our selves’ or circulating as part of our lived experience in and across lan-
guages and cultures. While many scholars will no doubt continue to focus
on specific terms of self-professed identity (‘woman’, ‘gay’, ‘lesbian’ etc.),
alternatives to identitarian thinking that encourage no primary or central
identity positions, and thus allow for a multiple set of identifications to
transit this disciplinary space, opening its established borders, historical
understandings and future possibilities to continued renegotiation and a
more extensive intellectual debate. Both are possible alongside one another,
and perhaps even necessary.
At the same time, such a volume, in spite of the diversity that it aspires to,
cannot and does not claim to be in any way fully representative, much less
exhaustive in its scope; in place of this, this volume opts to be selective in a
way that points towards the possibilities for future work much in the way that
Holmes’ words continue to urge us to do. As for rewriting any kind of definitive
academic historical narrative of gender in translation, such a task is perhaps
best left to those most invested in that kind of discursive normativization, as
it is one that all too often continues to place one’s own identitarian projects
(not only of gender and sexuality, but also of language and culture, nationality,
‘race’ and ethnicity, socioeconomic class, personal professional prestige etc.),
at a privileged discursive centre, and relegate those of others to the margins,
however involuntary or unconscious such configurations may be.
Moreover, many potential topics for research still face considerable obsta-
cles on the path to publication: for example, one article originally accepted
for this volume, on the translation of homophobic violence in Afro-Caribbean
culture, had to be retracted because of the author’s fear of the very real threat of
violence against him in his home country if he were to publish it. In this con-
text of ongoing violence, it bears repeating that women, lgbt, hiv+ and others
throughout the world continue to suffer institutionalized political oppression
and even the death penalty, whether by police and governmental forces, or by
the pervasive and equally violent hand of societal control and the family (e.g.
honour killings, assassination, imprisonment, torture, physical abuse, etc.).
While the international press continues to translate and disseminate stories of
Introduction
advances and setbacks in human rights for women and sexual minorities (girls’
and women’s access to education at all levels, marriage rights for same-sex
couples, access to antiretroviral medications, gender reassignment surgery
etc.), such visibility has all too often served as a pretext for backlash against
these groups, organized by the self-appointed representatives of ‘morality’
and ‘traditional values’.
To illustrate this challenge in concrete terms, permit me a single anec-
dote, as many of the ideas that spurred this project on the cross-identificatory
potential for projects in gender and translation continued to take shape as i
stood on the steps of the Massachusetts State House in early 2004 during
the Constitutional Convention debating same-sex marriage. While I stood
there with a friend who had recently immigrated to the US from Venezuela,
commenting in a mix of English and Spanish on the buzz of activity around
us, we noticed that the most well-organized and vocal group of opponents
to same-sex marriage was a group of at least a hundred people from a local
Latin American evangelical church. After speaking with some of them and
interpreting their comments in discussions with others, we learned that many
of them had recently arrived in the area, some with barely enough knowledge
of english to read the identical printed protest signs they were holding. the
concern that arose from this translational encounter, however, had nothing to
do with their proficiency in English, the legality of their immigration status, or
the legitimacy of their participation in a political rally, but with the irony that
a group of people had come to this place in pursuit of a vision of happiness
and fulfilment radically different from mine or that of my friend, only to use
the liberties and protections of this nominally democratic civil society, perhaps
for the very first time, in order to advocate denying to others those civil rights
that they already possessed a priori, even as the newest of arrivals. however
unpleasant it may be to come face to face with the prejudice of others (after
all, it certainly wasn’t the first time for either group), this missed encounter
for mutual political support might easily have served as a pretext to encourage
the more adamantly ‘border-conscious’ in our midst to renege on any political
commitment to immigrant rights they may have held up to that point, asking:
“if society is unwilling to grant me my equal rights as a native citizen, then why
should I be sympathetic to the struggles of others for expanded rights?” Then
again, perhaps there is nothing particularly surprising about such contradic-
tions, especially in those social contexts in which advances in civil rights for
others are all too often imagined as threats to one’s own sense of entitlement,
no matter how limited it may seem in the context of ongoing experiences of
marginalization and stigma.
And yet there were other signs in the passing sea of people and traffic that
Christopher Larkosh
seemed to signal a change in the tide: like that of an African-American man

giving a thumbs up to the pro same-sex marriage group from the driver’s seat
of a Boston Public School bus, itself a symbol of the concrete governmental
actions to end racial segregation against the will of more vocal elements
within the numerical majority. While many still resist any link between the
present moment of social change regarding understandings of lgbt rights and
the mid-20th century Civil Rights Movement, I felt encouraged all the same
to see that otherwise empty school bus and its lone driver, who apparently
drove out of his way long after the school day had ended, either to show his
support and solidarity with others, or possibly as part of a less immediately
visible community that he and I both presumably belong to: no, not that of lgbt
people, fellow citizens, or any gendered, linguistic, ethnic or racial minority,
but simply of those people capable not only of rearticulating a conception of
their own identities, but also of an accompanying politics of alterity: that of
identifying with, and showing active and concrete public support for, people
different from them/ourselves.
The scholars brought together in this collection come from a number of
cultures, languages and literary traditions, and examine the act of translation
and interpretation as representative of a broader set of questions, quite often
ones that challenge conventional discursive limits of gender and sexual iden-
tity. Annarita Taronna investigates the intersections of race and sexuality in
the works of the often-ignored lesbian poets of the African-American Harlem
Renaissance as they are translated into an Italian linguistic cultural context,
one also marked by racism, both during the Fascist era and in the present age
of transnational migration. Lisa Bradford looks at how the argentine poet
Juan Gelman genders the Spanish language in his work, and how the act of
literary translation can act as a means of uncovering, relaying and adding yet
another voice in another language to those speaking out against the injustices
suffered during periods of military dictatorship. In the context of another US-
backed dictatorship, Carolyn Shread dialogues with contemporary feminist
theorists to explore the links between gendered violence and political oppres-
sion through her own translations of Haitian author Marie Vieux-Chauvet. My
own contribution (Christopher Larkosh) juxtaposes the work of Brazilian
author Caio Fernando abreu and the argentine poet and urban anthropolo-
gist Néstor Perlongher to examine how translation may point use toward the
transnational remapping of both linguistic and sexual identities. Takayuki
Yokota-Murakami examines the ways that representations of ‘the lady’, as
portrayed in english literary works by Walter scott and Charlotte Brontë, are
translated into mid-19th century Japanese culture, thus contributing to new
configurations of Japanese femininity and sexuality. Loc Pham proposes a
Introduction
rereading of the North American author Annie Proulx’s short story Brokeback
Mountain through the context of Vietnamese language and culture, exploring
how his own translated text implicitly interrogates the original’s culturally
separate ‘Western’ modes of categorizing and understanding male homo-
sexuality. Finally, Tutun Mukherjee suggests a new set of intersections
between theories of gender and postcolonial translation through a reading
of both classical Indian texts and contemporary women’s literature, above all
the work of the Bengali author Ashapurna Debi.
In this multiply gendered theoretical context of translation, quotation and
textual transfer, questions continue to emerge. For example: How do these
discussions at the intersection of linguistic, gender and sexual identification
have broader implications for studies in bi-/multilingualism or intercultural
studies? What kinds of dialogues have already become possible, not only
between theoretical models in translation studies and those of feminist and
queer theory, especially regarding issues of visibility (‘the closet’, ‘outing’
etc.) and the questioning of normativity, whether of sexuality or of translated
language? How is translation, as a gendered performative act, inextricably
configured within a constellation of other ‘trans’ terms, such as transnational-
ity, transit, transculturation, or transgender? How do these terms challenge the
very notions of fixed source and target languages and cultures as much as they
complicate understandings of intersubjectivity? What is the relationship of
studies of gender and sexuality to other discussions of alterity and difference,
not only by way of feminist or queer theoretical approaches, but those that
intersect with postcolonial concerns and thereby question understandings of
categories of continuing theoretical importance to translation studies such as
socioeconomic class, ‘race’ and ethnicity? What is the relevance of, and the
ethical imperatives connected to, theorizing upon gender and sexual identity
within the specific institutional setting of translation studies (the translator’s
profession, academic departments, professional associations)? How does
translation/interpretation, both as a profession and academic discipline, con-
tinue to act both as censor of representations of non-normative sexualities and
collaborator in the further construction of sexual and gender normativity?
While this volume is primarily academic in its aims and scope, it cannot be
ignored that what is also ultimately at stake in this project remains undeniably
political: whether through encouraging a discussion of concrete questions of
visibility both in the translation studies field and beyond, and through promot-
ing an expanded understanding of human rights, the potential role of translation
studies scholars in the advancement of equal rights for lgbt people and others:
whether through a legal framework for non-discrimination in the workplace
and elsewhere, access to health care, legal representation, immigration and
Christopher Larkosh
citizenship, or expanded reproductive options. And if it appears in the end that

we are all back where we started with Holmes’ never quite realizable assess-
ment, in which “there is so much still to be done”, then perhaps our continuing
involvement in questions of translation, gender and sexuality has less to do
with recirculating the same age-old value judgments we often argue against
– ‘better than ever’, ‘not good’ – than with an evolving understanding of our
own ability both to recognize and test the limits of the academic disciplines
and political discourses in which we operate: one in which our capacity to
quote and translate beyond those perceived limits is not only enhanced, but
revealed as all the more necessary as we continue to listen and learn from, as
we quote and translate from, one another.
Works cited
van den Broeck, Raymond (1988) ‘Introduction’, in James S. Holmes Translated! Pa-
pers on Literary Translation and Translation Studies, Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1-6.
Holmes, James S. (1970) ‘Forms of Verse Translation and the Translation of Verse
Form’, in James S. Holmes, Frans de Haan and Anton Popovič (eds) The Nature
of Translation: Essays on the Theory and Practice of Literary Translation,
The Hague: Mouton, 91-105.
------- (1984/1988) ‘The State of Two Arts: Literary Translation and Translation
Studies in the West Today’, in James S. Holmes Translated! Papers on Literary
Translation and Translation Studies, Amsterdam: Rodopi, 103-12.
-------(1985) ‘Interview with Sonja Barend’, Sonja op Zaterdag, VARA Broadcast-
ing, Nederland 1 TV, 6 April 1985. Transcription and translation at http://www.
lthr.nl/?p+2066 [last accessed 16 June 2011].
Keilson-Lauritz, Marita (2001) ‘James S. Holmes’, in Robert Aldrich and Garry
Wotherspoon (eds) Who’s Who in Contemporary Gay and Lesbian History:
From World War II to the Present Day, London & New York: Routledge,
194.
Levie, Sophie (1991) ‘An Anthology of Modern Dutch Poetry: the Selection
Compiled by Holmes for Botteghe Oscure’, in Kitty van Leuven-Zwart and
Ton Naaijkens (eds) Translation Studies: The State of the Art. Proceedings of
the First James S. Holmes Symposium on Translation Studies, Amsterdam &
Atlanta: Rodopi, 55-63.
van Leuven-Zwart, Kitty (1991) ‘Introduction’, in Kitty van Leuven-Zwart and
Ton Naaijkens (eds) Translation Studies: The State of the Art. Proceedings of
the First James S. Holmes Symposium on Translation Studies, Amsterdam &
Atlanta: Rodopi, 5-11.
Snell-Hornby, Mary (2006) The Turns of Translation Studies: New Paradigms or
Shifting Viewpoints?, Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins Press.
Writing on Race and Sexuality in the Harlem
Renaissance
Translation as Retelling and Rememory
AnnAritA tAronnA
Abstract: This study uncovers a rich tradition of writing by

African-American women, mostly hidden in the first half of the
20th century, whose works developed as a site of ideological
struggle in which gender, sexual and racial politics stand out
as inextricable elements. The stories, diaries and poems of
women writers such as Gwendolyn Bennett, Marita Bonner,
Nellie Bright, Mae Cowdery, Georgia Douglas Johnson, Alice
Dunbar-Nelson and Angelina Grimké reveal overtly feminist
agendas, address issues of alternative sexualities and express
homoerotic affection. This paper starts by looking at how the
re-emergence of these women writers and their texts may fill
some of the gaps in the American literary tradition, thanks to
their re-narration and translation into other languages and
cultures within a process of rememory as conceptualized by
Toni Morrison. The focus then shifts to a discussion of the
resonance that such subaltern subjects as African-American
women writing in the Harlem Renaissance might have in the
context of current Italian political realities, in which new
legislation seeks to enshrine new ‘chromatic’ racial labels
and categories.
Every image of the past that is not recognized by the present as one of
its own concerns threatens to disappear irretrievably.
(Benjamin 1968:255)
As Benjamin’s quote suggests, the recognition of the past inextricably depends

on its inclusion into the present, since it can help us to conceive our memories
as part of contemporary society. Piecing together fragments and retrieving
images and stories from the past can make a contemporary conversation
about cultural identity, language, place and belonging denser, richer and more
complex. Since stories serve as catalysts or prompts to unlock memories, my
objective is to undertake a kind of archival work that explores a rich tradition
Annarita Taronna 11
of writing by African-American women who were prolific, but ignored, during

the Harlem renaissance. the exploration of the causes behind this systematic
exclusion and the re-emergence of several texts may help to fill some of the
gaps in the American literary tradition, thanks to their re-narration and trans-
lation into other languages and cultures. More specifically, the attempt here
is to focus on the value of translating such authors and narratives in italy, an
act of cultural agency which doesn’t merely involve bringing concepts and
histories from one country to another, but opening a window onto some crucial
issues of cultural and racial politics that since the early 1900s have had a great
impact on both italy and the US.
Drawing in particular on Christopher Larkosh-Lenotti’s italian-American
migrant reinterpretation of Gramscian thought with regard to subalternity, he-
gemony and cultural politics, the lived experience of such subaltern subjects as
the African-American women writers may be viewed as a theoretical point of
departure for “the drawing of numerous connections between class inequality
and social immobility, but also racial, ethnic, geographic, linguistic factors,
as well as questions of gender and sexuality that, by now, have become virtu-
ally inseparable from issues pertaining to italian and global meridionality”
(2006:312-13). it may also be a way of discussing to what extent these texts,
in the original and in translation, might offer an implicit commentary on the
political and economic realities of the US and italy, both then and now. in
particular, the continuity and connectivity between these two countries can
perhaps be best illustrated through a close reading of both their established and
more recent histories of imperialism, domination, segregation and discrimi-
nation. For example, during the decades of the Harlem renaissance, that is
from the early 1920s to the end of the 1930s, both the US and italy assisted in
increasing flows of migration. On the one hand, at that time African-American
people were experiencing an internal and external migratory movement: a
significant number of them left the southern part of the US for the seemingly
more socially progressive north in the hope of economic advancement and
freer social interaction. Many artists and writers also moved abroad, in particu-
lar to Paris, as a haven of racial and creative freedom where they believed it
could be easier to forge a modern ethnic consciousness. on the other hand, in
the same years a large number of italians arrived in the US both in search of a
better life, embodied in the myth of the ‘American dream’, and also to escape
from Fascism. Yet, whereas in the US Americans started to face and share their
reality with images of modern, upwardly mobile ‘negroes’ who were making
their mark on the nation and the world, italy was involved in the rise of racial
laws and myths and in the empowerment of its African colonial empire by
invading Eritrea, Somalia, Ethiopia and Libya. this close-up on two different
12 Writing on Race and Sexuality in the Harlem Renaissance
social and geo-political contexts can serve here to make the italian reader of
1930s African-American literature more aware of the historically disjointed
but thematically interrelated racial and political dynamics of these two social
realities, which since then have contributed to the US being portrayed in the
global press as one with renewed democratic promise after the election of
its first black president, with Italy represented as an opaque and oligarchic
pseudo-democracy, still unable or unwilling to humanize the discussion on
the new migrants and the so-called extracomunitari or clandestini (illegal
aliens). From this perspective, the translation of literary texts can stand as an
act of re-memory and reparation to the colonial past, the imperial enterprise
and the consequent sufferings of a people, and can even provide a blueprint
for anti-fascism by reconfiguring established boundaries of self and other and
questioning minoritized discourse of race, gender and sexuality.1
The Gendered Side of the Harlem Renaissance

taking into account these premises, this study aims to undertake a kind of
archival work, that is, an exploration of a rich tradition of writing by Afri-
can-American women who were prolific, but ignored, during the Harlem
renaissance since authors depended heavily on male patronage or sponsorship
and individuals such as Alain Locke went to great lengths to assist men in
achieving publishing contracts and financial support. In addition, acceptable
modes of female behaviour at the time prevented women from networking
at bars or other establishments that men frequented to make contacts in the
publishing world. in Washington’s words, women in this patriarchal model
are sometimes granted a place as a stepdaughter, but they do not influence and
determine the direction and shape of the literary canon (1987:xvi). Women’s
writing is considered singular and anomalous, not universal and representative.
And black women writers in particular have not benefited from a self-conscious
tradition: all too often it seems that they have written in isolation, without the
inspiration of earlier sisters or the help of contemporaries. thus, since few
white publishers would consider their manuscripts, black women had no choice
but to bring out their work privately, in chapbooks, or in newspapers. this is
the reason why many of their pieces are virtually lost to us. the ubiquitous
1
For this remark, as well as for many others in this essay, i am indebted to my
friend, colleague and ‘compatriot’ Christopher Larkosh (-Lenotti), who has always
encouraged me to broaden my frame of reference to focus on the interconnections
between the US and italy, especially with respect to issues of racial and cultural
politics and their implications in translation.
Annarita Taronna 13
imprints ‘n.d.’ (no date) and ‘n.p.’ (no publisher; no place of publication)
on their books stand as emblems of their isolation and recall the power of a
tradition which has often been used to exclude or ignore women who wrote
short stories, poetry, plays and essays during the Harlem renaissance and thus
have misrepresented the era.
Against this background, a wider overview of African-American women
in the Harlem renaissance is needed in order to reconstruct a literary history
that insists on black women as central to that history. Since the 1990s, a new
scholarship has taken on the task of archaeology: that is, the reassessment of
texts and authors who had been lost. Drawing on the poetry, fiction, drama
and chronicles of these women, black feminist critics Gloria Hull, Debora
McDowell, Cheryl Wall, nellie McKay, Claudia tate and others have com-
pelled us to consider additional concerns, which involve the articulation of a
black female aesthetic and the acknowledgement that an authentic tradition
of black women’s writing exists.2 Feminist critics’ investigation has detected
bibliographical sources concerning the early decades of the 20th century
revealing a surprising reality: well over a hundred black women wrote plays,
novels, poetry, short stories, children’s books and essays in the 1920s and
1930s alone, although very little has been written about their lives or their work.
Such uncovering of minor authors, titles and locations of works largely forgotten
is an ongoing process of literary excavation (Fabi 1996:27-36). And it is to be
specified that they are minor in so far as they have published a few articles, short
stories and poems in local newspapers, magazines or journals. in particular, such
magazines3 as Fire!!, The Crisis, Opportunity, Messenger, Challenge and New
Challenge, Black Opals was the main venue where African-American women,
as well as some men, published their works during the Harlem renaissance, thus
serving as a forum to voice their opinions on current sexual and racial violence,
including lynchings, and to arouse social consciousness.
on these premises, my aim in this study is to provide bio-bibliographi-
cal sketches and some critical comment on a selected number of neglected
writers, such as Gwendolyn Bennett (1902-1981); nellie rathborne Bright
(1902-1976); Marita Bonner (1898-1971); Clarissa Scott Delany (1901-1927);
2
in 1988 oxford University Press reprinted the multivolume Schomburg Library
of Nineteenth-Century Black Women Writers edited by Henry Louis Gates. Until
this series was created, there was no proof of the huge volume of black women’s
literary activity in the 19th century.
3
these magazines were also considered as a distinctive type of visual texts since
they hosted photographs, drawings, maps, charts and graphic designs and, in such
a way, their editors, artists and writers worked together to create multi-media
portrayals of African Americans.
Virginia Mae Cowdery (1909-1953); Georgia Douglas robinson (1886-1966);

Marion Vera Cuthbert (1896-1989); Elise Johnson McDougald (1885-1971);
Angelina Weld Grimké (1880-1958); and Alice Dunbar-nelson (1875-1935),
whose works developed as a site of resistance and ideological struggle where
issues of gender, sexual and racial politics stand out as inextricable and
emblematic elements in black women’s literature. Moreover, the knitting to-
gether of these female profiles also show that, despite the fact that most black
women from this era were not political revolutionaries, they found ways to
rebel against false statements that were made about their bodies in the very
act of writing. They were struggling to define their sexual and cultural identity
and to confront the dominant domestic ideologies and literary conventions of
womanhood that excluded them from the definition of ‘woman’. Thus, they
wrote essays, short fiction and poetry questioning issues of gender identity,
female sexuality, racial oppression, male domination and mixed parentage,
affirming their right to exercise their voices freely.
Tracing these bio-bibliographical profiles has also allowed readers to
identify and illustrate to what extent their social lives, literary experiences
and networking activities have shaped and characterized their common path-
ways. indeed, in this literary tradition common themes and experiences can
be detected since African-American women talk to other women about their
thoughts, words, feelings and events that make the realities of being Black in
America look very different from what men have written.
Among the life experiences shared by many of these women writers,
travelling and moving to Paris as a place to look for the acceptance not easily
attained in the United States proves to be a successful move, supplying alterna-
tive perspectives and hopes to their condition as people of colour and having
a tremendous impact on their works.5 Crucially, the years from the 1920s to

in Engendering the Harlem Renaissance (199:22-23), Musser elaborates a
detailed list of various positive and negative characteristics considered to be ele-
ments of a tradition in the writings of African-American women. Positive thematic
traits are: African-American women as potential artists and survivors able to shape
their own lives; their search for an individual and collective meaningful identity;
the rejection of stereotypes. negative thematic characteristics include: African-
American women’s position both in literal and figurative confinement; oppression
against women based upon colour or lack of beauty; the cyclical nature of this op-
pression; problems and contradictions in relations between the sexes; problems of
employment and the working environment; collective and historical violation.
5
But even before the Modern Era, crossing the Atlantic had been constitutive of
the collective experience of the Black diaspora, beginning with the Middle Pas-
sage. For Gilroy, any cultural analysis of Black modernity is inextricably linked
to Africa, to the Caribbean and to the rest of the Americas.
Annarita Taronna 15
the 190s were symbolic touchstones because Paris provided a haven of racial
and creative freedom for African-American artists. indeed, the literate and
cultured French well appreciated the talents of black writers, jazz musicians
and visual artists who were not always acknowledged in their own land.6 this
crossing of national boundaries recalls Gilroy’s assumption (1993:15) that the
black experience in the modern world has always been transnational and has
generated “a politics of travel and voluntary relocation”: that is, a basic intimate
desire to transcend both the structures of the nation-state and the constraints
of ethnicity and national particularity.
in addition to travelling experience, during the Harlem renaissance Af-
rican-American women also attempted to find release from the ever-present
restrictions and from their worries about the gender and colour line through
literary activities and social networking outside the limelight (Mcintosh
1990:1). in particular, they were engaged in co-ordinating the organization of
black women’s groups and holding or participating in salon groups.7 indeed,
several women in the Harlem renaissance sponsored literary salons attended
by prominent members of the African-American community. Among them,
columnist, educator, musician, playwright and poet Georgia Douglas Johnson
(1886-1966) held the famous S Street Salon in her home in Washington, D.C.
Johnson not only opened her home for salons but for writing workshops in
which aspiring writers developed ideas and actual works. those writers based
in new York City often made it a point to visit the Johnson home when travel-
ling through Washington or periodically visited the city specifically to attend
6
Lucrative, satisfying careers, such as that of the entertainer Josephine Baker, were
established, as they were for Harlem renaissance poets in Paris, something that
could not have been possible in the race-obsessed United States. Claude McKay
left for Europe in 1922 and spent the bulk of Harlem renaissance period in France.
nevertheless, McKay loved French literature and remained in France to write several
of his own books, including the celebrated Home to Harlem. the freer cultural
atmosphere and wild applause of Paris attracted many African Americans and other
people of African descent long after the Harlem renaissance. A colony of black
artists continued to develop there (Aberjhani-West 2003:253-55).
7
Writers, visual artists, performers, educators and others interested in cultural
events during the Harlem renaissance often gathered in meetings known as salons,
where they discussed various ideas and sometimes displayed their work. Such
meetings formed an integral and substantial part of the ‘new negro’ movement.
An important complement to those salons hosted by African Americans in the
United States during the Harlem renaissance were those organized by the sisters
Paulette and Jeanne nardal in Paris. natives of François, Martinique, the nardal
sisters published La Revue du Monde Noir, or The Review of the Black World,
one of the early central journals of the negritude movement. At the nardal salons,
African-American writers visiting France often met French authors and students
of African descent (Fabre 1991).
the salon. Some of her guests included: Alain Locke, Jessie Fauset, Countee
Cullen, Marita Bonner, Langston Hughes and May Miller. in addition, John-
son participated in civil rights activities and politics and was also involved
with the Pan-African movement, minority and women’s issues, human rights
organizations, the Congregational Church, the republican Party and various
other literary organizations.
the relevance of these networking activities and social organizations of
various kinds, which joined “the fight to stop the driving of women back to the
kitchen” (Cuthbert 1936/1996a:8), and the call on unity between women as
women – regardless of race and colour – were of great significance throughout
the 1930s.
Experiencing and Writing on Sexuality

Despite the great flowering of black women’s literary activities and artistic
talent, official accounts of the Harlem Renaissance covered the contributions
of only a small number of ‘major’ women whose names were scattered among
the men’s: Jessie Fauset, nella Larsen, Dorothy West, Anne Spencer. the
invisibility of the ‘minor’ writers may have resulted from both the dispersion
and fragmentation of their work and the burning and controversial topics of
their writings. in particular, issues of sexuality became challenging and regular
subjects for African-American women writing for black newspapers during
the 1920s and 1930s, yet negative images seem to have dominated the media
discourse on homosexuality and particularly on lesbianism. the increasing
interest in such topics reflected the influence of white American modernist
attempts to break away from the conservative beliefs of nineteenth-century
Victorians and embrace concepts of free love and women’s liberation. in ef-
fect, the 1920s in the United States was a period of relaxed sexuality generally
among the middle classes, which led to a more accepting view of same-sex
female sexual activity. it was in this decade of ‘lesbian chic’ that women be-
gan to identify themselves as lesbians (Faderman 1991:63) and participate in
butch/femme relationships in places like Greenwich Village and Harlem. in
particular, the blues subculture of Harlem helped lesbians, particularly black
lesbians, to find a place to express themselves sexually. Eric Garber suggests
that the blues “reflected a culture that accepted sexuality, including homosexual
behavior and attitudes, as a natural part of life” (1989:320). there were op-
portunities, public and private, for lesbians in Harlem to meet and interact.
Varied in their positive and negative aspects, costume balls, ‘buffet flats’
(after-hours parties in someone’s apartment) and speakeasies all allowed
different kinds of spaces for homosexual interactions. in addition, blues
Annarita Taronna 17
singers like Gladys Bentley, Ma rainey and Bessie Smith sang openly about
their same-sex desires and behaviours (Moore 1995:183).
Venturing on an exploration of Harlem as a homo/sexual pleasure centre,
we discover that black gay men and lesbians – usually as ‘invert’ types in
‘pansy’ choruses and as cross-dressing female singers – frequently found
employment in cabarets and similar entertainment spots where they were
used to attract tourists (Schwarz 2003). their presence in Harlem, however,
also should be seen outside the context of white exoticist desire and the
Harlem craze. Mumford (1997) points out that homosexual involvement in
what he terms interzones – interracial spaces, usually located in an African-
American environment – predated the 1920s. these interzones, ranging from
cafes and black-and-tans – racially mixed clubs – to speakeasies, provided
spaces for marginalized men and women, some of whom desired members
of their own sex.
Particularly menacing to America’s gender and power structure was the
public change of women’s roles within the first two decades of the 20th century.
Women had become visible elements in America’s workforce and had success-
fully fought for suffrage. A key indicator of the climate of anxiety regarding
sexual morality was an intensification of anti-vice movements’ policing efforts.
organizations like the new York Society for the suppression of Vice (SSV) and
the Committee of Fourteen (CoF) focused on clamping down on prostitution
and, to a lesser extent, homosexual activities and, moreover, concentrated on
the censorship of “indecent” literature and entertainment (ibid.:16).
However, it needs to be noted that although fears about the role, position
and especially the sexuality of women existed, the situation within the black
community was somewhat different. As Alice Dunbar-nelson pointed out in
1927, “For sixty-three years the negro woman has been a co-worker with the
negro man” (1927/2001:113). A black housewife, rather than a black working
woman, represented a novelty in Harlem. Moreover, the Harlem renais-
sance represented an era when women of African descent could respond to
the ‘Hottentot Venus Syndrome’ through literature (Lambert 1998). themes
of sexuality and the black female body are addressed by these writers in an
effort to reclaim their bodies and negate the prevalent myth associated with
this syndrome which proclaimed that they were born with abnormally large
genitalia and had a proclivity for sexual deviance. in Wall’s terms (1995:12-
13), black women writers probed the social and psychological meanings of
their positionality in ever increasing depth. in doing so, they reappropriated
‘old’ definitions of the race, and of the term ‘coloured’, and figured new defi-
nitions of a racial home (ibid.:111).
the mapping of homo/sexuality onto race within the Harlem renais-
sance provides an exploration of points where ‘racial’ discourses meet ‘gay’

discourses, producing gay literary codes with a difference and a multiple
overlapping (black/white/gay/straight). Sexually dissident readings of renais-
sance works first appeared in The Crisis, Opportunity, The Survey Graphic
issue and Fire!!. the latter in particular shows written and visual texts that
combine to draw attention to sex and sexuality in black culture – an aspect
that had been completely left out of other representations of the new negro.
Fire!! answered that silence with a clear proclamation of acceptance. Sexuality
is the first thing that readers encounter when they move beyond the Table of
Contents. it is visually announced on the page facing the opening of Cordelia:
nugent’s black-and-white drawing of a full-breasted woman, completely na-
ked, languishing in front of a coconut tree, confronts the reader with nudity
and sensuality (Carroll 2007:205).
Writing on sexuality was a challenging subject for the Harlem renaissance
women writers, since to bring their bodies into public view under their own
terms was to state that black women were complex beings deserving sexual
pleasure. And to express their female erotic passion in prose or in verse
was resistance to being defined as selfless nurturers or as anyone’s property
(Honey 2006:l-li). Crucially, in many of their writings and their lives some of
these ‘minor’ female voices approached sexuality as an aspect of democratic
freedom open to exploration and definition on one’s own terms. This was not
only a mere literary choice, but a powerful cultural and political act because
the dominant concern of the Harlem renaissance writers was the liberation
of African Americans from the brutal tyrannies of Jim Crow apartheid and
genocide by lynching. in this context, sexuality was generally conceived as
a personal issue and as such it was supposed to belong to one’s own private
sphere. thus, such women writers as Gwendolyn Bennett, Marita Bonner,
nellie Bright, Mae Cowdery, Marion Vera Cuthbert, Georgia Douglas Johnson,
Alice Dunbar-nelson, Angelina Grimké and Elise Johnson McDougald can
be considered exceptions in so far as many of their stories, diaries and poems
reveal overtly feminist agendas, address issues of alternative sexualities and
express homoerotic affection.
For example, activist, educator, poet, short-story writer, essayist and
biographer Marion Vera Cuthbert articulated the complex interface between
race, sex and gender, noting that women of colour had neither white nor male
privilege. In her essay ‘Problems Facing the Young Negro Woman’, which first
appeared in Opportunity (1 February 1936), she encourages black women to
recognize the possibility of empowerment through unity with fellow workers
and particularly with women of all colours and to separate their self-percep-
tions from their images projected on them by society:
Annarita Taronna 19
there is no need to elaborate here upon the fact that the negro woman
suffers from the double discrimination of sex and race. … today, how-
ever, demands a more conscious process. … First of all, the present
day has brought a sense of union that could not have been true of the
old days, when except for such community contacts as a woman had,
she felt herself very much the individual woman struggling alone. ...
There is a second sense of union that is of greater significance at the
present time and that is the unity between women as women, regard-
less of race and colour. (Cuthbert 1936/1996a:359)
But Cuthbert’s essay reaches its passionate political climax when she assumes
gender as the most fruitful resource to give actuality to women’s sense of unity
which “might spring from something deep in the very biological nature of
women, … from the intimacies of pain and ... from the woman’s long battle for
her freedom” (ibid.:7). Given her outspoken stance on issues of race and sex
discrimination it is not surprising that Marion Vera Cuthbert ‘escaped notice’.
Expositors of controversial topics like racism and sexism often encountered
so little interest from publishers and such hostility or indifference that they,
their work, or both disappeared.
At the height of the Harlem renaissance educator, essayist and feminist
Elise Johnson McDougald was another notable voice of the The Crisis,
Opportunity and Survey Graphic, where she addressed the stereotypes and
obstacles that black women had to face: daily contempt, economic exploita-
tion and exclusion from the ideal of beauty prompted by advertising. in her
essay entitled ‘the Double task: the Struggle of negro Women for Sex and
race Emancipation’ she takes up the cause of racial lift, focusing on the lives
of negro women – the privileged as well as the disadvantaged – and on the
stratifications within the community itself. Throughout a detailed analysis
of the black female condition at the time, she relates the origins of sexual
oppression to the habitual limits historically imposed upon “negro women”
by slave masters, and thus their sexual life stands out as a reflection of social
and economic conditions:
throughout the long years of history, woman has been the weathervane,
the indicator, showing in which direction the wind of destiny blows.
Her status and development have augured now calm and stability, now
swifts currents of progress. What then is to be said of the negro woman
today? … Even in new York City, negro women are of a race which
is free neither economically, socially or spiritually. Like women in
general, but more particularly like those of other oppressed minorities,
the negro woman been forced to submit to over-powering conditions.

Pressure has been exerted upon her, both from without and within her
group. Her emotional and sex life is a reflex of her economic station.
the women of the working class will react, emotionally and sexu-
ally similarly to the working-class women of other races. the negro
woman does not maintain any moral standard which may be assigned
chiefly to qualities of race, any more than a white woman does. Yet
she has been singled out and advertised as having lower sex standards.
Superficial critics who have had contact with only the lower grades of
negro women claim that they are more immoral than other groups of
women. this i deny. … Sex irregularities are not a matter of race, but
of socio-economic conditions. (1925/1996:312)
Against this background, Elise Johnson McDougald finds the cure for misdi-
rected aggression and sexual inequality in education and opportunity, since
they can modify the spirit of the younger negro men who, “trained in modern
schools of thought, begin to show a wholesome attitude of fellowship and
freedom for their women” (ibid.:313). the author also insists that the reason
there are few outstanding black women militants for the cause of sexual equal-
ity is that “their feminist efforts are directed chiefly toward the realization of
the equality of the races” (ibid.).
though the women writers of the era conceived sexuality as an aspect of
democratic freedom open to exploration and definition on one’s own terms
as both Marion Vera Cuthbert and Elise Johnson McDougald showed, they
did not always address more ‘burning’ topics like homosexuality explicitly
in their works. in particular, while male homosexuality8 was a more regular
topic in black newspapers during the Harlem renaissance, the theme of
lesbianism could be read only throughout some private places – letters,
journals, diaries, poetry – because stronger social policing and pressures
concerned especially female writers (Schwarz 2003:1). Lesbians were viewed
as particularly deviant since prevailing assumptions held that to be a lesbian
was ‘unnatural’ because one would not be participating in childbearing. in
this light, among the sexually dissident writers of the ‘minor’ Harlem ren-
aissance is Alice Dunbar-nelson, who kept a diary – discontinuously from
1921 to 1931 – which has recently been uncovered, annotated and published
8
Henry Louis Gates acknowledges that the Harlem renaissance “was surely as
gay as it was black” (Warner 1993:223). indeed, of those black writers, artists,
and performers traditionally associated with the Harlem renaissance, a number
were known to be gay or bisexual. included among them were Countee Cullen,
richard Bruce nugent, Alain Locke and Claude McKay (ibid.).
Annarita Taronna 21
by the critic Gloria Hull. Since she was a sensuous woman whose passion
could not always find expression, her emotional life actually emerges from
the diary as a complex one, in which devotion to her husband is unwaver-
ing but shared with emotionally and physically intimate relationships with
women (Hull 198). But, of course, for her – given her personality, place and
time, that is gender bounded – it was absolutely essential that they should
remain hidden. of the two such lesbian relationships explicitly recorded in
the diary, the weightier was obviously with Fay Jackson robinson. Dunbar-
nelson was ecstatic about their touching and, despite misunderstandings,
miscommunications and disappointments, she could yet sigh in her diary on
18 March 1931:
the Anniversary of My one Perfect Day. My day last year in San

Francisco and all the perfection of that day. … and Fay, lovely little
Fay. one day we saw each other, one day, and a year has passed. And
still we cannot meet again. (ibid.:21-22)
Despite the cryptic and hesitant allusions that appear throughout the diary,
Dunbar-nelson clearly reveals the existence and operation of an active black
lesbian network. She mentions that a friend of hers tells her to “look over” a
Betty Linford, and that a “heavy flirtation” between two clubwomen friends
of hers puts her “nose sadly out of joint” (ibid.:30). All of these women
were prominent and professional, and most had husbands and/or children.
Somehow, they contrived to be themselves and carry on these relationships
in what most surely must have been an extremely repressive context. in ad-
dition to telling about her affairs and flirtations, generally speaking the heart
of the diary lies in what it reveals about the meaning of being a black woman
in twentieth-century America.
Translating African-American Women’s Writing: From

‘Dis-memory’ to ‘Re-memory’
this study has illustrated so far a rich tradition of writings by African-Ameri-
can women, hitherto mostly hidden, in the first half of the 20th century. The
value of these inclusions and the re-emergence of these texts may fill some of
the gaps in the American literary tradition also thanks to their re-narration and
translation into other languages and cultures. in particular, starting from my
in-progress translation of a selection of ‘minor’ African-American women’s
works into italian, i would assume that such translations could be framed
within a process of rememory as conceptualized by toni Morrison (198,

1987) in reference to the narrative reconstructions of the African-American
experience during and after slavery. Here re-memory is not only a kind of
socio-historical strategy of reparation to compensate the black people for
centuries of pain, injustice, silence and invisibility, but also a narrative way of
showing contemporary readers that past events can greatly affect the present
and the future configuration of literary history.
in this light, translation as re-memory can be also associated with the no-
tion of “gateway” (Zauberga 2000) in so far as it is a magical preservative
tool which allows retrospective manoeuvres to rediscover and convey new
legacy to a ‘minor’ black, female literature and culture. thus, rather than a
straightforward operation performed on words, translating such talking b(l)ack
stories will also stand as a complex interlinguistic transfer since it frames
deep and problematic relationships among forms of writing, idiomatic uses
of language and variants of register that might reveal distinctive narrative
markers of race, class and gender.
on this frame, my initial assumption is the recognition of the African-
American language as a site of cultural encounter and ideological struggle
rooted in American history. As Baldwin (1979/2003) observes, the argument
has nothing to do with language itself but with the role of language as a
political means and proof of power. Language is adopted here as a tool and
utilized in various ways to express widely differing cultural experiences and
diasporic narratives which are cross-cultural because they negotiate a gap
between ‘worlds’, a gap in which the simultaneous process of abrogation
and appropriation continually strive to define and determine their practice.
in particular, African-American language is representative of the creation of
the black diaspora (Ashcroft et al. 1995) and the institution of slavery, since
it came into existence by means of brutal necessity when blacks came to the
United States chained to each other, but from different tribes, and they could
not speak the other’s language. In this light, a redefinition of this language
can be advocated according to Ashcroft’s distinction between English as a
standard code and english as the linguistic code which has been transformed
and subverted into several distinctive varieties throughout the world (Ashcroft
et al. 1989:8). the history of this distinction can be traced back to the claims
of a powerful ‘centre’ and a multitude of intersecting usages designated as
‘peripheries’ whose language was shaped by an oppressive discourse of power.
Yet such peripheral and minor languages as the African-American have been
the site of some of the most exciting and innovative literatures of the modern
period and this has, at least in part, been the result of the energies uncov-
ered by the political tension between the idea of a normative code (e.g. the
Annarita Taronna 23
mainstream American English) and a variety of regional usages (e.g. African-

American english or black english). in this view, African-American english
stands out not only as a subaltern and antagonistic language, but as a ‘contact
zone’ between liminal cultures as suggested by Mary Louise Pratt (1992) to
define social spaces where disparate cultures meet, clash and grapple with
each other, often as highly asymmetrical relations of power.9 Living in these
contact zones is an attempt to invoke the spatial and temporal co-presence of
subjects previously separated by geographic and/or historical disjunctures,
and whose trajectories now intersect, interact and interlock understandings
and practices both at the linguistic and cultural level. Within this perspective,
as Zaccaria (200:153,159) remarks, the contact zone can be compared to
translation, as both practices perform interlinguistic and intercultural acts in so
far as they embody the urge to dialogue and encounter with the other beyond
any restrictive inclusiveness, but living in trans-action and transition. in this
light, translating diasporic narratives is a practice of cross-cultural under-
standing that can never be neutral since it is enmeshed in relations of power
(Asad 1986). indeed, by asserting its opposition to the centre and constantly
interrogating the dominance of the standard, black english establishes itself
as a contrastive or counter-discourse which is always attacked from the centre
by the dismissive terms ‘colloqualism’ or ‘idiom’.
From these assumptions, i would consider now a few key questions: i)
what effective problems and implications does such a theoretical framework
hold for translation practice when dealing with the African-American language
and culture?; ii) what kind of translation strategies is the translator supposed
to adopt when s/he wants to transfer the language and cultural peculiarities
of the black english literature into other languages?
the translation of sociolects is particularly problematic as it is extremely
difficult, if it is not impossible, to represent and adapt the source text language
variation to the target language repertoire (i.e. the range of language varieties
one uses in speaking). From my in-progress translation of the aforementioned
essays, articles and short-stories, i have come across several translation
problems which refer to some socio-linguistic features typical of the African-
American culture and history, that is, the traces of the diaspora, generating a
dense proliferation of semantic possibilities. Although as a translator one of
my urgent attempts is to render the effects produced by the peculiarities of
this sociolect, in most cases domestication and translation loss seem inevi-
9
Pratt explains that she borrows the term ‘contact’ from linguistics, where it
refers to linguistic improvisation among speakers of different languages whose
need to communicate, usually in the context of trade or colonialism, results in the
development of pidgins or creoles (1992:6).
table since such helpful strategies as vernacular replacement, adaptation and

compensation cannot succeed in the italian language. indeed, italian has got
many regional variations and dialects, but none of them can be borrowed to
reproduce such a culturally distinct idiom as the African-American.
Standardization often stands out as the most accessible translation strategy,
notwithstanding all of the ideological implications and risks it conveys in so
much as it is part of an ethnocentric approach. thus, what the translator can do
to ‘soften the loss’ and negotiate the diasporic narratives with the italian reader
is to discuss such language variations and untranslatability in an explanatory
preface. indeed, this textual device could help translators to provide us with
an extremely interesting and valuable source of information about the time
and the literary, linguistic, historical and political circumstances in which such
writings were produced.
On this account, one challenging field of translation issues and shifts
concerns the lexical level of short stories that demonstrate many culturally
determined features. Among them, I want to mention and briefly examine a) the
wide usage of words defining ‘race’ like colored, negro, black, nigger, nigga,
and b) the reference to some traditional figures of the diasporic imagery like
‘ole Man’ and ‘Aunt Jemima’.
Concerning the above mentioned race words, the first translation task is
to detect and define such adjectives according to their evolution in the source
historical context in order to explain their semantic nuances and pragmatic
shifts from race to racist connotation. this issue has been crucial since 1619
when the first slave ship landed at Jamestown and the slaves were called
Africans. But by 1800, several generations of Africans had been born on
American soil, thousands had been transported from Africa, and the black
population numbered over one million. Both the vision and the possibility of
returning to Africa had become impractical and remote. in the light of this
new reality and in preparation for citizenship and for what they thought would
be opportunities to enjoy the national wealth they had helped create through
two hundreds years of free labour, enslaved Africans began to call themselves
Colored (often spelled coloured, cullud, called) throughout much of the 19th
century (Salikoko et al. 1998). By 1900, the quest was on for a new name to
capture the new reality of being neither “slave nor free”, as one ex-enslaved
African put it (Cohen and Greene 1972). During the period between the two
World Wars the push for negro and for its capitalization hit its full stride.
Leaders such as Dr W. E. B. DuBois, editor of the nAACP, mailed over 700
letters to publishers and editors with the effect that by 1930 the major Euro-
pean-American media were using and capitalizing Negro. Evidences of this
change appear repeatedly in Elise Johnson McDougald’s and Marion Vera
Annarita Taronna 25
Cuthbert’s earlier mentioned essays – entitled ‘the Double task: the Strug-
gle of Negro Women for Sex and race Emancipation’ and ‘Problems Facing
the Young Negro Woman’ respectively – as well as in those of many other
writers, posing the translator with the need to undertake a historical excursion
into the definitional evolution of such adjectives in so far as literal translations
of those terms in the italian target text could convey misleading and racist
connotations. indeed, the corresponding italian word ‘negro’ cannot be used
unconsciously,10 since it is labelled as politically incorrect and is deprived of
the historical meaning that makes it intrinsically and uniquely bound to the
African-American culture. As a translator, what i would propose is to render
‘negro’ by ‘nero’ (i.e. ‘black’) adding an explanatory footnote to specify the
meaning, usage and function of the word in the source text and point out what
cultural and ideological implications it could develop if translated literally into
italian. indeed, as linguists must repeatedly emphasize, the meaning of words
is for the most part conventional, assigned by society in the process of use.
Words change over time and are what people make of them. Finally, footnotes
10
in 1970 italian scholar Giovanni Menarini published a literary anthology en-
titled Nuove Poesie e Canti della Contestazione Negro-Americana (1970). His
choice of such a title sounds very strong and unexpected from a socio-cultural
viewpoint because Negro was the usual name until the 1960s, when Africans in
America struggled to throw off the shackles of Jim Crow and embraced black
culture, the black experience and the black skin colour. indeed, since the end of
the 1960s and under the wave of the Black Power Movement the name changed
to Black and the significance of this change in the language and life of Blacks
spread across the US and Europe as well. What makes that title ‘suspicious’ in
terms of an unconscious racist connotation is that during the same years issues
on literary, cultural and racial politics concerning Black history regularly ap-
peared in italian magazines and books with the label cultura nera. in particular,
two books need to be mentioned for their significant titles: Michele Salerno’s
America Nera (1970) and Walter Mauro’s Il blues e l’America Nera (1977).
However, a further hypothesis related to the use of the word ‘negro’ in italian
– as in Menarin’s anthology – could be figured out if we think that at the time in
the US two other distinctions were emerging, that is between nigga and nigger,
which in much African-American discourse on language are two different words. in
particular, the use of ‘nigga’ does not necessarily mean that it is racist or reflective
of self-hate. terms such as these are used sometimes simply to refer to individu-
als without any evaluative implications. ‘nigger’ belongs to White varieties of
English and carries its own semantic and pragmatic properties. it was often the
common term of reference for African Americans when no African Americans were
present and outside of censored contexts. thus, Menarini’s choice could be also
assumed as an indirect – yet unconscious – translation of this further distinction
that nowadays is still not fully clear since it has currently been neutralized to mean
‘guy, dude, homeboy, homie, brotha’ – regardless of race or ethnicity.
or other paratextual materials – i.e. prefaces, glossaries, etc. – in a translation

are strategic intrusions which represent a reading of that interpretative territory
in which the Other stands as a presence of the culture it signifies.
on the lexical level, another relevant aspect which characterizes the es-
says and the short stories i am translating is the reference to some traditional
figures of the diasporic imagery like ‘Ole Man’ and ‘Aunt Jemima’. in Marion
Vera Cuthbert’s short story Mob Madness a character is introduced as ‘ole
Man’ (i.e. ‘Old Man’), a historical figure representing the white slave master
(1936/1996b). Such a ‘nickname’ recalls the linguistic code used only by
slaves to devise a system of talking to each other about black affairs, and
about the old Man (the White Man), right in front of his face. Because of
continued segregation and racism, this necessity for a coded form of English
persisted even after emancipation, and it underlies the evolution of Black
talk. Against this background, a meaningful translation strategy needs to be
adopted in order to transfer the historical and cultural power embodied in
the old Man. instead of the literal translation ‘l’uomo vecchio’, which is
definitively neutral in Italian, we could use cultural transplantation (Pugliese
2005) as the most appropriate translation strategy, involving the replacement
of cultural features in the source text by target culture elements. thus, the
translation choice ‘l’Uomo Bianco/the White Man’ retains and transposes
in italian the social stereotype and the semantic elements and agents of the
imperial and colonial enterprise carried out by Americans through the slave
trade and the forced deportation of thousands of slaves from the West African
coasts in the 17th century.
Mentioning the African-American ‘Aunt Jemima’ – as Marita Bonner does
in her short story Hate is nothing (1938/200) and Elise Johnson McDougald
in her essay ‘the Double task: the Struggle of negro Women for Sex and race
Emancipation’ (1925/1996) – poses an interesting translation challenge since
the name refers both to black performer nancy Green (183-1923) who was
a black storyteller and one of the first black corporate models in the US, and
to the brand name of the pancake mix she used to advert. thus, the question
is how we can translate and re-narrate into italian nancy Green’s story, her
warm and appealing personality which made the ideal ‘Aunt Jemima’ a living
trademark (Brown et al. 1993). Wearing an apron and bandanna headband,
she stands out in the African-American culture as the archetypical ‘mammy’
whose desexualized body11 is defined and circumscribed according to gender,
11
though the name on the pancake box is still Aunt Jemima – thus perpetrating
titles of slavery and minstrelsy, even in today’s American supermarkets – some
‘revolutionary’ cultural operations have been undertaken in the field of literature
as well as in the arts. in particular, American artist renée Cox, in her photograph
Annarita Taronna 27
race and class and typifies the mythic Old South of benign slavery, grace
and abundance (roberts 199). the burden of such stereotypical images is
what Elise Johnson McDougald (1925/1996:308) sums up and debates in
her essay as follows:
[the negro woman] is conscious that the ideals of beauty, built up in

the fine arts, exclude her almost entirely. Instead, the grotesque Aunt
Jemimas of the streetcar advertisements proclaim only an ability to
serve, without grace or loveliness. … this is the shadow over her.
on this account, a cross-cultural challenge can be undertaken when deal-

ing and ‘passing on’ such narratives into other languages. Since translating
Aunt Jemima as ‘Zia Jemima’ can neutralize the cultural connotation of
this powerful female icon in so far as the italian readers cannot replace or
associate her with any of their national and popular characters, on the one
hand i would suggest to leave the name in the foreign language; on the other,
i would add an explanation in footnotes or in a glossary, which can be a
successful strategy both in terms of transferring the socio-cultural signifier
which Aunt Jemima embodies and reflecting on how such cultural represen-
tations have impacted upon our perceptions of black women’s gender and
sexuality. in this light, translation stands out an act of reparation to some
racial background noise.
Conclusion: Re-Viewing Race and Gender in a Con-

temporary Transcontinental Context
By way of conclusion, this study is not intended to be a definitive work; rather
it is the beginning of an ongoing work on a rich and powerful tradition of black
women writers who have received little critical attention either individually or
collectively during the Harlem renaissance and beyond. reclaiming an Afri-
can-American woman’s writing tradition involves discovering, reinterpreting
and in many cases analyzing for the first time the works of African-American
women intellectuals and artists who were so extraordinary but unknown. And
it is hoped that reconsidering the Harlem renaissance in such a way will lead
entitled The Liberation of Lady J. and U.B., deconstructed and transformed the
mythological representations of the faithful grinning servant Uncle Ben and Aunt
Jemima into young, lithe, sexual beings. this in-your-face image posits the artist
as a superhero who frees Aunt Jemima and Uncle Ben from their racist stereotypes
(Cox 1998).
us to a deeper understanding of the challenges and potentials of representation

and identity issues that it developed as a site of ideological struggle where
art and writing unveiled the burden of race, gender and class representation.
The re-emergence of these texts may fill some of the gaps in black women’s
writing and create a tradition of their own that, with the help of reprints and
translations across other cultures and languages, opens up a genealogical
pathway to common themes and experiences that unite black women writers
across the generations.
When the critical re-narration of such past experiences is not fully recog-
nized as a way to better understand contemporary realities, often amounting
to little more than an ideological interference discourse in the form of an
empty assimilation of fictional ‘stories’, it becomes clear how translation
can also function as an act of betrayal and removal of historical memory.
As a way of re-imagining translation studies as a challenge to this attempt
at a depoliticized textual practice, i wonder what kind of resonance such
subaltern subjects as African-American women writing on race, racism,
gender and class in the Harlem renaissance can possibly have in the current
italian sociopolitical reality in which legislation such as the Bossi-Fini law
is coming out with new ‘chromatic’ racial labels and categories on a daily
basis? Where have the memories of the southern italian emigrants to the
US from the early 1900s and their struggles against racial discrimination
gone? Moreover, how do such racializing terms and concepts as ‘negro’,
‘nigger’, ‘black’ and ‘African-American’, which have shaped the lives and
stories of the writers i want to discuss, sound in contemporary italian, a
language whose political culture is currently characterized by new waves of
xenophobia and hostility? How can a translator who wants to be a mediator
between cultures perform this task in a country like italy which, although it
have experienced neither slavery in plantation society nor Jim Crow segrega-
tion, treats the new migrants coming from the African coasts, for all intents
and purposes, as either rejected or illegal slave labour?
If you want to find concrete answers to these in no way merely theoretical
questions, you might begin with a journey through the tomato fields in the
province of Foggia, my hometown, in the heart of Apulia (Southern italy) and
tell me what you see. Exploited, underpaid African labourers – most of them
from nigeria, niger, Mali, Burkina Faso, Uganda, Senegal, Sudan, Eritrea,
but also many from Romania, Bulgaria and Poland – are lodged in filthy and
decrepit hovels and recruited, better to say enslaved, to harvest tomatoes from
6am to 10pm for 20 euros a day. they work in what is known as ‘il triangolo
degli schiavi’ [the triangle of slaves], since they are completely dependent
Annarita Taronna 29
on the caporale12 and the boss, who control their access to employment, the
permission to speak, have a break or a glass of water, and can even have them
arrested and deported by an anonymous call to the local police. i know all this
may remind you of some scenes from the antebellum US South, but it’s not.
it’s all happening at this very moment, only a few kilometres away from the
Mediterranean coast, where hundreds of other African migrants, crowded onto
filthy and shaky boats, will try to land on Italian soil but are often intercepted
at sea and immediately sent back to Libya, their ‘European dream’ of migration
and exploitation cut short before it could ever even begin in earnest.
Works cited
Aberjhani-West, Sandra L. (2003) The Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance,
new York: Checkmark Books.
Asad, talal (1986) ‘the Concept of Cultural translation in British Social An-
thropology’, in James Clifford and George E. Marcus (eds) Writing Culture:
The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, Berkeley & London: University of
California Press, 11-6.
Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin (1989) The Empire Writes
Back: Theory and Practice in Postcolonial Literature, new York & London:
routledge.
------, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin (eds) (1995) The Post-Colonial Studies
Reader, London & new York: routledge.
Baldwin, James (1979/2003) ‘if Black isn’t a language, then tell me, what is?’,
in ron Scapp Teaching Values: Critical Perspectives on Education, Politics
and Culture, new York: routledge, 75.
Benjamin, Walter (1968) Illuminations, new York: Schocken Books.
Bonner, Marita (1938/200) ‘Hate is nothing’, in Craig Gable (ed.) Ebony Rising:
Short Fiction of the Greater Harlem Renaissance Era, Bloomington: indiana
University Press, 57-7.
Brown, Elsa Barkley, Darlene Clark Hine and rosalyn terborg-Penn (eds) (1993)
Black Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia, Volume 1 and 2, new
York: Carlson Publishing inc.
Carroll, Anne Elizabeth (2007) Word, Image, and the New Negro: Representation
and Identity in the Harlem Renaissance, Bloomington: indiana University
Press.
Cohen, David W and Jack P. Greene (eds) (1972) Neither Slave nor Free: The
12
the
he boss’ bodyguard, usually an African man, who unlawfully recruits workers
for landlords in southern italy.
Freedman of African Descent in the Slave Societies of the New World, Balti-
more & London: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Cox, renée (1998) ‘the Liberation of Lady J and U.B.’, Cristinerose
Contemporary Art, at Artnet: http://www.artnet.com/artwork/2059639/276/
renee-cox-the-liberation-of-lady-j-and-ub.html [last accessed 16 June
2011].
Cuthbert, Marion Vera (1936/1996a) ‘Problems Facing the Young negro Woman’,
in Lorraine Elena roses and ruth Elizabeth randolph (eds) Harlem’s Glory:
Black Women Writing, 1900-1950, Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
359-61.
------ (1936/1996b) ‘ Mob Madness’, in Lorraine Elena roses and ruth Elizabeth
randolph (eds) Harlem’s Glory: Black Women Writing, 1900-1950, Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 39-2.
Dunbar-nelson, Alice (1927/2001) ‘Woman’s Most Serious Problem’, in Venetria
Patton and Maureen Honey (eds) Double Take: A Revisionist Harlem Renais-
sance Anthology, Piscataway: rutgers, 113-16.
Fabi, Maria Giulia (1996) Il Volo di ritorno: Antologia di Racconti Afroamericani
(1859-1977), Firenze: Le Lettere.
Fabre, Michel (1991) From Harlem to Paris: Black American Writers in France,
1840–1980, Urbana: University of illinois Press.
Faderman, Lillian (1991) Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers: A History of Lesbian
Life in Twentieth-Century America, new York: Penguin Books.
Garber, Eric (1989) ‘A Spectacle in Color: the Lesbian and Gay Subculture of
Jazz Age Harlem’, in Martin Duberman, Martha Vicinus and George Chauncey
Jr. (eds) Hidden From History: Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past, new
York: new American Library, 318-31.
Gilroy, Paul (1993) The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness,
Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Honey, Maureen (2006) Shadowed Dreams: Women’s Poetry of the Harlem Ren-
aissance, new Jersey: rutgers University Press.
Hull, Gloria t. (ed.) (198) Give Us Each Day: The Diary of Alice Dunbar Nelson,
new York & London: W.W. norton & Co.
Lambert, Jasmin L. (1998) Resisting the ‘Hottentot’ Body: Themes of Sexuality
and Femininity in Select Plays by Female Playwrights from the Harlem Ren-
aissance, PhD thesis, Bowling Green State University.
Larkosh-Lenotti, Christopher (2006) ‘on Gramsci, ‘Epistemic interference’, and
the Possibilities of Sud-Alternity’, Annali d’Italianistica 2: 311-26.
Mauro, Walter (1977) Il blues e l’America Nera, Milan: Garzanti.
McDougald, Elise Johnson (1925/1996) ‘the Double task: the Struggle of negro
Women for Sex and race Emancipation’, in Lorraine Elena roses and ruth
Elizabeth randolph (eds) Harlem’s Glory: Black Women Writing, 1900-1950,
Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 307-1.
Annarita Taronna 31
Mcintosh, Peggy (1990) Interactive Phases of Curricular and Personal Re-Vision

with Regard to Race, Working Paper no. 219, Wellesley: Wellesley College
Center for research on Women.
Menarini, Giovanni (1970) Negri U.S.A: Nuove Poesie e Canti della Contestazione
Negro-Americana, Milan: Accademia Milano.
Moore, Arwyn (1995) ‘the Harlem renaissance: Forming a Queer Conscious-
ness through the Blues’, in Lynn Witt, Sherry thomas and Eric Marcus (eds)
Out in All Directions: The Almanac of Gay and Lesbian America, new York:
Warner Books, 182-85.
Mumford, Kevin (1997) Interzones: Black/White sex districts in Chicago and New
York in the early twentieth century, new York: Columbia University Press.
Morrison, toni (198) ‘Memory, Creation, and Writing’, Thought 59: 385-90.
-------(1987) ‘the Site of Memory’, in William Zinsser (ed.) Inventing the Truth:
The Art and Craft of Memoir, New York: Houghton Mifflin, 101-24.
Musser, Judith A. (1994) Engendering the Harlem Renaissance: The Short Stories
of Marita Bonner, Zora Neale Hurston, and Other African American Women,
1921-1950, Dissertation, Purdue University.
Pratt, Mary Louise (1992) Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation,
London: routledge.
Pugliese, Cristina (2005) Translation as Cultural Transfer: Challenges and Con-
straints, rome: Aracne.
roberts, Diane (199) The Myth of Aunt Jemima: Representations of Race and
region, new York: routledge.
roses, Lorraine Elena and ruth Elizabeth randolph (eds) (1996) Harlem’s Glory:
Black Women Writing, 1900-1950, Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Salerno, Michele (1970) America Nera: La Rivolta degli Esclusi, rome: tindalo.
Salikoko, S. Mufwene, John r. rickford, Guy Bailey and John Baugh (eds)
(1998) African-American English: Structure, History and Use, London &
new York: routledge.
Schwarz, A. B. Christa (2003) Gay Voices of the Harlem Renaissance, Bloom-
ington: indiana University Press.
Wall, Cheryl A. (1995) Women of the Harlem Renaissance, Bloomington: indiana
University Press.
Warner, Michael (1993) Fear of a Queer Planet, Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press.
Washington, Mary Helen (1987) Invented Lives: Narratives of Black Women
1860-1960, new York: Anchor Press.
Zaccaria, Paola (200) La Lingua che Ospita: Poetica, Politica e Traduzioni,
rome: Meltemi.
Zauberga, ieva (2000) ‘rethinking Power relations in translation’, Across Lan-
guages and Cultures 1(1): 9-56.
Speaking to the Dead
Juan Gelman’s Feminization of Argentine Poetics as a
Politics of Resistance
LISA BRADFORD
Abstract: This article endeavours to reveal Argentine poet-

in-exile Juan Gelman’s poetics of resistance through the
discussion of the translation problems involved in parenting
a similarly resistant text in English. In a verse strongly rooted
in the city of Buenos Aires yet intimately involved in exile and
loss, he authors an elegy entitled ‘Carta abierta’ (‘Public
Letter’, 1980) in response to his son’s disappearance during
Argentina’s military dictatorship in 1976. In these poems, he
deranges language by reinventing words, spelling, grammar
and gender in an attempt to recreate a ‘mother tongue’ that
would allow him to speak (to) his ‘unspoken’ son.
the tower of babel was just that: not an essential discord but rather the
partial knowledge of the word. reality has a thousand faces and each
one, its own voice.
(‘Exergo’, Gelman 1986/1998:163)1
The lyrical ‘I’ becomes a chorus in the poetry of Argentine writer Juan Gel-
man. In summoning different personae to represent his perception of reality
through heteronyms, reappropriations and pseudo-translations, he scumbles the
boundaries between original and copy to spawn a preponderant “versability”
– the versatile and verse-able – in his writing. This exploration of different
1
‘Lo de la torre de babel fue eso: no discordia esencial sino ciencia parcial de la
palabra. la realidad tiene mil rostros y cada cual, su voz’ (All translations in this
essay, if not stated otherwise, are my own).

The German writers of the 19th century who formed part of the Atheneum group,
principally Novalis, A.W. Schlegel, Goethe, and Schleiermacher, produced a rich
theorization on poetry and its translation. Within this same hermeneutic drive, they
believed that translation, critical analysis and translation contributed to the survival
of a work through the proliferation of one inherent characteristic in poetry, which
is its “versability”, a neologism that points to its versatility and the “versability”
of a poem, a phenomenon that exists because of the different versions that one
same poem may generate (Berman 199:78).
Lisa Bradford 33
voices arises from an attempt to evade the “intimism” of his earlier verse3 and
to dialogue with poets from the past (Gelman 010a:103). Though in his later
works one senses a Whitmanesque collective I, the quality of personal response
is always present as he interlaces these ‘other’ poems with filaments of his
own visions. The reading of much his work, in fact, becomes a participation in
intermingled songs, and, thus, a translation of his verse requires a regeneration
of these polyphonic manifestations. The subject of this essay, ‘Carta abierta’
(‘Public Letter’, 1980), builds upon this tradition of versability and polyphony,
but it assumes a particularly special voice moulded by both a mystical and
a parental touch, a voice that can speak with a son ‘disappeared’ during the
Proceso of the military dictatorship in 1976. Indeed, many features of this
voice correspond to what may be considered a feminized discourse in its use of
diminutives, hyperboles and archaisms that collide with the terror and torture
there portrayed. Moreover, along with a provocative series of neologisms,
there is a discordant gendering of nouns that exacerbates the instability of
the text, sending it into an uncanny realm of semiosis. In order to render this
book into English, one must find the proper blend of incongruent tones to coax
these poems to sing with an analogous primordial resonance on a stage that
is bereft of his particular radical sources, Spanish grammar and euphony, and
the experience of twentieth-century Latin American politics.
Gelman’s poetry emerges in the 190s during a volatile period of Argen-
tine aesthetics that in many ways mimics the pendular swings of politics. In
fact, he publishes his first book of verse, Violín y otras cuestiones (196), in a
time of coups and countercoups of a nascent Peronism.6 Within this same time
3
According to his own words in an interview with me in 009 (Gelman 010a).

Though Bakhtin used this term to address the nineteenth-century novel, in modern
and postmodern poetry, with their intertextualities and personae, it is useful to
describe their processes of reading and writing (1981).

After the death of Perón, in 197, both left and right-wing terrorism shakes the
country, with the end result being a coup under the leadership of General Jorge
Videla. In this period ending after the Falklands War, it is calculated that from
1,000 to 30,000 people ‘disappeared’ (Conadep, National Commission on the
Disappearance of Persons 198) under the strategies of the ‘Proceso de Reorga-
nización Nacional’ (also called ‘The Dirty War’) used in order to cleanse the nation
of all subversive forces, which included unionists, students, clerics, journalists,
etc., and often, the friends of these people as well.
6
Peronism is a political party founded by Juan Domingo Perón. He was a charis-
matic and complex leader who came to power by popular vote in 196 and again
in 191 and was overthrown during the ‘Revolución Libertadora’ in 19, but was
reelected during democratic elections in 1973, the period in which he returned
from his exile in Spain. His power was largely based on middle and lower-class
workers because of the support he gave to the unions, but in his third government,
34 Speaking to the Dead
frame, in the literary arena, the magazine Poesía Buenos Aires (190-1960)
appears, replete with contradictions as the traditions of the old guard and the
chaotic but revolutionary zeal of those agents in search of change are made to
cohabit its pages. Though publishing dozens of translations of Paul Eluard and
Rene Char, its translator/poets wrote manifestoes that reviled the tendencies
of surrealism and social commentary in poetry.7 Nevertheless, Gelman’s work
blooms with the influx of currents provided by this imported verse, and his
surreal blending of social engagement and wordplay expressed in a colloquial
language produces an unnerving irony and poignancy.
In order to bring to life the streets and common people of Buenos Aires,
Gelman makes a collage of the everyday speech of the rioplatense (the in-
habitants of areas surrounding the River Plate) including their slang and
grammar, current events, and the tango imaginary. However, in the 1960s,
he attempts to establish a distance between his personal affairs and his
verse through the ‘othering’ process of pseudotranslation (published under
pseudonyms such as Sidney West, John Wendell and Yamanokuchi Ando),
and during the time he traveled in exile from Rome and Paris to Geneva
and Madrid, his exile beginning in 197, he begins his Citas y Comentarios
(199/1997)8, comprised of glosses on tango lyricist Homero Manzi and
the ‘exile vision’ of sixteenth-century Spanish poets Saint John of the Cross
and Saint Teresa de Ávila, among others. Manzi is known for his stylization
of the tango tradition, whose main topic is often a man’s pain after having
been abandoned by some femme fatale, often placed in dialogue with his
mother. The latter two poets became renowned for their use of erotic tropes
to create a Christian mystical poetry, a mysticism that interestingly arises
in part from an interior exile with their own traditions owing to the fact that
they were both descendants of converted Jews. Gelman himself is of Jewish-
Ukrainian descent, and, reaching back to intermingle ethnic, national and
personal histories in this collection dedicated to “mi país” [my country], he
transforms tango lyrics and an erotic poetry dedicated to God into a poetry
of engagement and nostalgia. This othering mode continues with the 1986
publication of Com/posiciones, a translation of sorts that provides an echo
of numerous Sephardic poets. In these adaptations of tenth and eleventh-
century Sephardic verse and a poet of his own invention, Eliezer Ben Jonon,
a younger generation assumed his decisions would be leftist, and because of the
internal conflicts of the party, both leftist and reactionary terrorism ensued, reason
for which Gelman, with his leftist sympathies, was forced into exile.
7
For a further discussion of translation in Poesía Buenos Aires, see Bradford
(009).
8
Translated as Commentaries and Citations (Gelman 010b).
Lisa Bradford 35
Gelman works as their ventriloquist to fuse their voices intertextually with

his own concerns and style.9
Of these concerns, he himself cites three main obsessions: love, poetry and
revolution (Casaus 1985). The first two are inextricably linked since he often
portrays poetry as a seductive lover; whereas the third encompasses his entire
outlook and imbues his verse with images of pain, abandonment, injustice,
and frustration, all of which tie into the traditions of tango and mysticism.
While this notion is linked to his social concerns in the 190s and 1960s, in the
1970s, his own exile and the discontent with the political situation in Argentina
forcefully emerge in his verse, which by 1976 involves the personal loss as his
son, Marcelo, and his pregnant daughter-in-law who are ‘disappeared’ during
the military dictatorship of Jorge Videla.10
This loss becomes the tour de force behind the composition of ‘Carta abi-
erta’11. The last page of the collection contains the following note:
just as in dozens of thousands / of similar cases, the military / dicta-

torship never officially recognized / the “disappeared”. it spoke of /
“those forever absent”. / until i see their bodies / or their murderers, i
will never / give them up for dead.
These poems represent the poet’s refusal to abandon his son to death. Instead
he will initiate a legal battle that will last more than a decade and has not yet
ended.1 After learning of the kidnapping, he begins to compose while in Paris
9
“i call the following poems com/positions because i have com/posed them, that
is, placed things of my own in texts written by great poets centuries ago. i did not
of course attempt to improve on them. i was shaken by their exiliary vision and
i added – altered, ambled, offered – that which i myself was feeling. as contem-
poraneity and company? mine with theirs? vice versa? inhabitants of the same
condition?” (‘Exergo’, Gelman 1986/1998:13).
10
This term begins as a euphemism of sorts, but continues and evolves into a tran-
sitive verb meaning those who were made to disappear, not killed outright, since
most of the bodies were never recovered, habeas corpus being the only way to
prove they had died. The implications range from legal battles regarding pensions
to political repercussions regarding government responsibility.
11
All Spanish quotes from ‘Carta Abierta’ in the following analysis are taken from
Gelman 1980/1997, and all English translations are from from my bilingual edition
of the book Between Words (Gelman 010a), which includes a preliminary study
and an interview with the poet. The specific place where each quote is found is
indicated by the name of the poem in which it appears.
1
Gelman’s son, Marcelo, died after being shot in the neck at blank range, with
his body thrown into the San Fernando River in a barrel filled with cement. His
granddaughter, María Macarena Gelman García, was located in Montevideo in
and Rome this portrait of pain and loss as a testimony that will be first pub-
lished as a public letter to his son in 1980 and later reedited in Interrupciones
I (1980/1997). Here we find the shattered pieces of his son:
an april autumn when your mystery opened

like this pain that comes / to cry full-fraught
for the countries where i had your
peace or content / breaths where
you speak of yourself / insides torn

by this ceasing of your self / insides of mine /
unraveling me inside out / worlding me /
or like the dread of losing you like
losing me in your losing / unsheltered water

distilled from you / music under dogs
of this broken half of you / without you /
that blindly works you / finally unblinking (‘II’)
The birth, the loss, the pain, and the dogs – underdogs, counterdogs, dogged
blunders, etc. – that will serve as fragments for the image he configures of
his son.
This slender set – eight to 3-line poems composed in quatrains – con-
tains most of Gelman’s characteristic poetic strategies: the typical slashes
in lieu of punctuation, neologisms, rhetorical questions, and conversational
language. There is, however, an exacerbation of his particular manipulation
of diminutives, hyperboles, archaisms and grammatical gender disagreement,
which gives the sensation of a feminine discourse, as if the poet were trying
to speak to his dead son in a mothering tongue. This is a voice deranged to
the point of sounding pre-symbolic, as a gesture that lies between desire and
grief, creating a haven above the absence where he can speak to him, or speak
him, his son therein converted into a language to be expressed. In other words,
there appears to be a regendering domestication of the language that merges
with the poet’s former strategies of mysticism and colloquial discourse, thus
forming an uncanny realm to communicate memory and sorrow. To read this
collection of poems in Spanish is an act of faith: ambiguity hovers above all
meaning and demands an active participation in the deciphering of “amphib-
ian” words – as Gelman has termed them (Gelman 010:99) – that grow out
000 after living with her adoptive parents for years, but her mother’s body
has not yet been recovered.
Lisa Bradford 37
of permutations of words in combination or unorthodox grammatical forms.

Furthermore, read aloud, the text echoes with puns, intertextualities and a mu-
sicality that hearken back both to childhood simplicity and to previous poets,
thus creating a tension between the simplicity and the erudition of the text.
These traits coalesce to transmit a heady and hurtful experience that both
fascinates readers and discourages translators. On the one hand, the wordplay,
puns and musicality challenge the translator to a re-creative activity that both
invigorates and destabilizes the translation process; on the other, this ‘mother-
ing’ tends to sentimentalize and disturb the discourse in such a way that the new
rendering may be read as either stereotyped, infantile or ostensibly inane.
In order to regenerate this book through translation, it is necessary to first
categorize the poetic devices of this new language and so invent similar sys-
tems in the target language. Such systems must account for three main areas:
i) neologisms ii) the feminized tongue conformed through diminutives, recast
grammatical genders and superlatives; and iii) archaisms that often stem from
the mystical tradition previously used in his work. To duplicate these catego-
ries, one must translate the original performativity – the way the text means
– in order to convey the resistance ingrained in the text, a resistance that is
not only poetic, but political as well.
Before entering into the actual poems and their translations, there are
other considerations regarding the available repertoires for the reception of
such a translation in English poetry that create a basis for discussion. For ex-
ample, many of the characteristics listed can be found in postmodern poetry,
particularly in the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Poets, who reject an expression
that promotes reading as an ‘absorption’ into the text, favouring rather an
opaque and aleatory verse that questions normative readings. Furthermore,
the translations into English of poets such as the exiled Peruvian vanguard
writer, César Vallejo – a distinct influence on Gelman’s work – and Paul Celan
– also a Jewish exile and language architect – offer a wealth of options that
may assuage the reception of the translation of a such inventive verse and
serve as a gauge as to how creative a translation can be. Since textual ele-
ments, together with their rules of combination, constitute a model which is
familiar to the audience, a translation such as Pierre Joris’ version of Celan’s
Atemwende/Breathturn, which embodies his aim to “get as much of the com-
plexity and multi-perspectivity of Celan’s work over into American English
… [and ultimately] to transform the language” (Celan 006:60), serves to
establish such a model. Balancing the interior movement of the etymologies
of Celan’s invention, Joris works to recreate the analogical word construc-
tions, producing words never seen before in English. Vallejo, too, has been
widely translated and his complete works have been recently published in a
bilingual version by Clayton Eshleman (Vallejo 007). An example of his

translation of Vallejo’s inventiveness can be found in ‘XI’ from Trilce: “como
un par de mal rebocados sepulcros”, which Eshleman converts to “as into a
pair of badly bitewashed sepulchers” in order to signal the misspelling of
‘revocar’, which in this form contains the word ‘boca’ (mouth). In this way
he has capitalized on the etymology affixing ‘bite’ to what would have been
“whitewashed”. Furthermore and no less importantly, both of these poets
generated a highly politicized poetry – Celan of the sociology of WWII and
Vallejo of Latin America and the Spanish Civil War – that provides readers
with functioning models for them to intuit the undercurrents of violence and
political strife present in Gelman’s work. Thus we see that the repertoire of a
deconstructed expression of resistance – linguistic and political – exists both
in English poetry and in the translation of key postmodern poets.
With all of these considerations in play, the result of Gelman’s English
versions can still be disconcerting. Focusing on the very first poem of the
collection (‘I’), the translation problems posed become immediately evident.
This text is both the longest and most replete with the features cited above
and thus serves to establish a pattern of forms and motifs for reading the rest
of the book. Being an elegy, it introduces Gelman’s intention of speaking to
his son, bidding him farewell, and remembering him, imag(in)ing him, while
portraying his own pain and frustration: “hablarte o deshablarte / dolor mío
// manera de tenerte / destenerte /”; [“to tell you or untell you / my sorrow //
a way of having you / unhaving you/”]. Beginning with these first two lines,
there lies a strategy of coining ideas with an unusual prefixing. The prefix
‘de’ or ‘des’ signifies an undoing, and in this entire collection, it points to a
retreat into the past and perhaps a wish to untravel roads taken. Though one
could systematically apply the same Latinate prefix, due to the deceptive and
sometimes archaic/infantile simplicity of the discourse, I chose to use the early
English ‘un’ so as to maintain the tone established in Gelman’s use of Spanish.
Nevertheless, in some cases, for reasons of rhythm and concept, within the
very same poem, it was necessary to use the ‘de’: “as if depaining truth //of its
early ending” so as to transmit the process, almost surgical, of removal.
Within a similar problematic of word construction, Gelman creates the
following neologisms in this same poem: soledadera, lloradera, musicanto,
morida. The first two are built with a standard Spanish suffix that indicates a
place or container: ‘soledadera’, from ‘soledad’ (loneliness) is thus a place to
be alone, and ‘lloradera’, from ‘llorar’ (to cry), a place to cry. English does
not possess a similar morpheme, and the solidity of these terms demands a
clear tacitness in the translation. I therefore opted for ‘lonesomeroom’ and
‘tear-flood’, the first of which affixes a space analogous to ‘living room’ and
Lisa Bradford 39
the second, a kenning to produce a visual image.13 ‘Musicanto’ is a compound

word, which is an unusual assemblage in Spanish, but quite simply resolved
with ‘musesong’ since amalgams are common course in English. The last,
‘morida’, is a complex construction that could be seen as an erroneous form
from the infinitive ‘morir’ (to die) since this word’s past participle is the ir-
regular ‘muerto’. However, the regularization makes it sound like a child’s
conjugation and the feminization of the term becomes a suffix signalling an
action and effect. For this reason, I chose a progressive formation of a noun
to capture all these qualities: ‘deathing’.
Turning now to the issue of Gelman’s regendering, one of the most difficult
obstacles to translating Gelman’s work into English lies in the reproduction
of the unconventional pairing of feminine articles with masculine nouns in
phrases such as ‘la trabajo’ and ‘la todo’, a situation found in many of these
poems. As modern English does not ascribe a gender to nouns except when
occasionally referring to ships or countries, Gelman’s re-gendering of the
language must be duplicated by other means. I sought to create a pattern of
this disagreement through a literal mothering of the terms: ‘mother work’,
for example; for the second idea, I brought the interflow of sound and mean-
ing together in ‘mother wit’ (natural wit or intelligence), which perhaps is an
overextension of sorts, but is justifiable in light of Gelman’s musicality and
themes, as will be observed in further poems.
In conjunction with this regendering we find the repeated use of diminu-
tives and superlatives, typical of a woman’s speech when talking to a child, but
sounding uncomfortably sentimental in English. Therefore, for many instances
of ‘hijito’ (little son), I resorted to semantic field related to youngsters’ school-
ing: ‘kinder’. As such, ‘kindertot’ is used here – just as ‘kindersmock’ and
‘kinderblood’ are used to translate other poems from this collection – to depict
this affectionate signification through Old English and even Germanic roots.
There is another diminutive: ‘agüitas’ (tiny waters), which can be translated as
such, though this solution does not produce the warm, motherly tone emitted
by the Spanish word. The superlatives ‘dulcícimo’ (sweetest), ‘astrísimo’ (star-
riest) and ‘derramadísimo’ (most spilled) can be rendered using two different
methods: the first two can be constructed with one word, but the third would
have needed two, so, resorting again to the Anglo-Saxon tradition, I built
‘flood-flowed’ as a kenning to transmit this hyperbolic notion, a strategy that
13
This rhetorical device of Old Norse and Anglo-Saxon origin serves as a figure
to create analogies through circumlocutions of a genitive nature such as ‘road of
the whales’ or ‘whale-road’ to speak of the sea, often through defamiliarization
and hyperbole. Since Gelman draws from many ancient sources of Spanish, this
may compensate for the loss of these roots in other places in the translation.
I used in the translation of other similar situations in order to create a pattern

within the English version of the collection. Admittedly, the use of kennings
is not a feminizing device, sounding more epic than childish, but again, since
there are many archaisms of mystic and Sephardic origin in the original text,
perhaps this strategy can emit the same reaching back to an earlier language,
which will be further discussed in the analysis of the ‘mothering’ discourse.
There are still other translation problems in this poem that occur because of
the intra and intertextualities such as, respectively, the word ‘pedazos’ (pieces)
(‘I’: “piece that the land”; ‘III’: “the piece of me?”, “which piece”; ‘VI’: “can
i gather up your pieces again”), and, from Saint Teresa “to kiss with kisses
from the mouth.” The word ‘piece’ is repeated throughout the collection and
seems to point as much Gelman’s own missing country, which now is miss-
ing his son, as to Benjamin’s broken vessel since all of these pieces of voices
come together to try to complete the puzzle of his language and reality while
living in exile. One overriding intertexual presence in this collection is that of
Vallejo. Not only are lines of his cited in the poems (“take this cup from me”
in ‘XI’) but also misspellings (b/v), rhetorical questions, the feminine presence
of the mother, and puns that bespeak his influence. In this poem, the neologism
‘hijar’ (to son), formed by making a verb out of a noun is a homonym for the
word ‘ijar’ (flank or side), used by Vallejo as a pun for producing offspring
in a famous image from Trilce, ‘III’: “Simplificado el corazón, pienso en tu
sexo, / ante el hijar maduro del día” [My heart simplified, I think about your
sex, / before the ripe daughterloin of day] (Vallejo 007:190-191). In Gelman’s
poem it is appropriated to make resonant Vallejo’s voice and develop a way
of ‘verb-alizing’ his son and his parenthood.
Numerous examples of these situations can be discussed from the follow-
ing poems in this collection. However, the focal point of this study is the
issue of regendering, and Gelman’s feminized poetic voice is certainly one of
the most problematic elements for the translator since, unlike the models set
forth regarding wordplay and indeterminacy in postmodern poetry both writ-
ten in English and in English translation, this feminization is neither present
in nor promoted by current trends. On the one hand, some of this ‘baby talk’
may read as trite or maudlin, and, on the other, the avoidance of it could mean
the loss of the lyrical voice Gelman has created to generate this painful and
public intimacy.
For example, the portrayal of innocent childhood is evoked in ‘III’
through a resemanticization of facets from school: ‘delantal’, ‘cuaderno’
and ‘bacas que te pacieron la dulzura’ [long-sleeved pinafore used as a
uniform; a notebook; and the erroneous spelling of the phrase ‘cows that
grazed on sweetness’]. The first can be rendered as ‘kindersmock’ to high-
Lisa Bradford 41
light the elementary school location; the second, ‘workbook’, reinforces this
environment; and finally, ‘kows that grazed on your sweetness’ represents a
child’s spelling error and adds a ‘your’ to enhance the tender intimacy of the
recollection.
More troublesome is the use of gender incongruence in “contra la padre
doledor de tanto” and “sangre niña” (against the father – which should be ‘el
padre’ – sufferer of so much; girl or girlish blood – ‘girlish’ because the word
blood is actually feminine but seems discordant because it refers to a boy).
The first instance of disagreement is lost in my translation, but the regendering
is perhaps achieved in the phrase ‘weeper so fathering’ since, in ages passed,
weepers were women for the most part, and, conjoined with ‘fathering’, it
may reproduce this clash:
how to retender you / tenderness silenced in

what you bought with your kinderblood? /
locked up and down in stocks you cannot leave?
gravest of countries where you scream
against a weeper so fathering? / (‘III’)
The ‘sangre niña’ as ‘girlish blood’ seems to throw the tone into an overly
feminized area, when the important element is the mothering connection in
this communication between the speaker and his son. Therefore, ‘kinder-
blood’, following the pattern set with the use of a kinder-compound, works
to continue the affectionate mood established in this collection.
The word ‘criatura’ presents another interesting aspect in this verse
because it can refer to both a creature and a child. Moreover, converted
into a verb, ‘encriaturarse’ in poem ‘IV’, it seems to signify the action of
becoming a child. In this case, since its subject is ‘soul’, either ‘to kinder’
or even ‘enkindler’ may capture this concept, particularly considering the
line that follows: “se abre la pecho para recogerte” (the chest – a masculine
noun with a feminine article – opens to gather you up). Once again, there
is a gender disagreement that seems to suggest a chest become breast, and
the word for soul, ‘alma’, is a feminine term in Spanish, so the kindlering
(with the morpheme ‘kin’) produces a meaningful correspondence in the
flow of the poem: “soul to soul she watches you / becoming enkindlered //
opens her mother chest to cuddle you // shelter you / reunite you / undie you
/”; ‘bosom’ could provide a semantic meaning of the phrase, but it cannot
serve to provoke the gender clash present in the Spanish since it reduces the
disagreement and smoothes out the jarring effect.
In the same quatrain, we find the word ‘zapatito’ (little shoe), which I ren-
dered as ‘baby booty’ in order to intensify the infantile quality of the verse,
but at first it runs the risks of becoming overly sentimental:
baby booty of yours taking its first steps upon /

the world’s sufferingblock tendering it /
clarity trodden / water undone /
since you speak so / you crackle / burn / want /
give me your nevers like a true blue boy (‘IV’)
The following three brutal lines of the quatrain, however, counterbalance this
cloying mawkishness. The same creative process of affixing the morpheme
‘era’ appears again in this poem (‘sufridera’, a place to suffer), which I re-
solved by an intensification of the violence of this suffering by joining the
words suffering and butcherblock – highlighting the association between
butcher and torturer – to form ‘sufferingblock’, a word that will appear three
times in my version of this collection. The last line contains one of various
archaisms, ‘mesmo niño’, (true child) from pre-seventeenth-century Spanish,
which, within Gelman’s poetics, may recall the mystical poets or a tradition
of romancero, in some ways similar to the English ballad tradition. The solu-
tion of ‘true blue boy’ serves to summon up an air of folklore, which helps
maintain the polyphony in the work.
I also weighed the possibility of using the phrase ‘put you back together
again’ instead of ‘reunite’ so as to evoke the nursery rhyme of Humpty Dumpty
and strengthen the infantile quality of the text, but the musicality of the original
verse, “abrigarte / reunirte / desmorirte”, where the words grow out of words,
convinced me to maintain the slant rhyme of “shelter you / reunite you / undie
you” in order to recapture the intense, rhythmic nature of these poems.
In many poems we find the unruliness of the previously cited grammati-
cal gender discrepancy of pairing feminine and masculine: ‘la cielo’ (the sky,
‘VI’), ‘la pueblo’ (the nation, ‘XIV’), ‘la ser’ (the being, ‘XXI’), ‘la dolor’
(the pain, ‘XXII’), which are all masculine nouns modified by feminine defi-
nite articles. The first one can be rendered, continuing the initial ‘mothering’
solution already established in the translation of the first poem, by ‘mother
sky’, and the second, ‘motherland’. However, they do not signal a grammati-
cal deviation. The other two admit no compounds or modifications with the
word ‘mother’. So, instead of creating a feminization of the term, I strove to
maintain this tension within the conflict of a paratactic solution involving a
masculine sorrow flowing like milk from a mother’s breast:
Lisa Bradford 43
sun that oxes for such helplessness /

it dries the weeping felled without crying /
do you hope for the earth where i suffer? /
do you bask against the wound or duration? / milk
you imagine so that man-sorrow might milkspring

like grace flying / flowing / like
love from one who often goes absent? / flight? /
shadow of your past clarity? (‘XXII’)
“Man-sorrow may milkspring” constitutes a strident and even extravagant

translation of the strophe, but the rebellious spirit of the text and the musicality
achieved perhaps authorize this ‘sub-version’. Also, this milk, together with
the weeper’s tears of the previous poem cited, evoke an image of the Mater
(Pater?) Dolorosa, and with the mysticism that interlaces many of Gelman’s
poems and his growing up in a predominantly Catholic country, this association
does not seem at all farfetched.1 Noteworthy too is the word ‘felled’ – ‘cáido’
– in the second line that contains yet another spelling error in the Spanish,
one a child might make, which enhances the infantile tone of the poem while
creating a rhythmic musicality. ‘Felled’, of course, is proper to English, but
could be taken for an ungrammatical form of ‘fall’, and, in view of the murder
that took place, it may also help transmit the political violence in the text.
The prefix ‘un’ also becomes interlaced with this problem of rendering
gender in the following words: ‘unfather’, ‘unmothered’, ‘unkinder’ and
‘uncreature/unkindler’ (‘V’, ‘VIII’, ‘IX’, ‘X’, respectively) which I chose
to translate for ‘despadrás’, ‘desmadrado’, ‘desniñás’ and ‘descriaturás’.
Perceived together, they evoke the undoing of all these relationships through
the son’s death: the father is no longer his father; in death, he has no mother;
in suffering he is no longer a child, and he has shed his state as creature or
child in order to see beyond an earthly vision. The second word in this series,
‘desmadre’, is a slang expression that also signifies excess or chaos, which
his death and the military dictatorship have provoked.
As for the neologism ‘descriaturás’, since in poem ‘IV’ I rendered the word
‘enkindler’, in order to continue this pattern, I was first inclined to repeat the
construction. In this case, however, in spite of my endeavour to systematize
all wordplay, here it is essential to maintain the visibility of ‘creature’ instead
of joining it with the notion of fire or spirit, particularly where the image of
a dove is brought to the fore:
1
See, for example, Julia Kristeva’s essay ‘Stabat Mater’ (Oliver 00).
am i not here to father you? /

will you forgive me for sonning you so much? /
reality that suffered as if in labor /
your sufferingblock / does it sing for me? /
against me? / will you show me what i may be? /

are you winging me / wing of my fury? /
will you uncreature yourself like a dove
seeking a blind eye to see? (‘X’)
Poem ‘XVIII’ contains other allusions to infanthood, words deriving from a

semantic field of childhood and innocence contained within a ‘topsy turvy’
tumble, ‘babbling’ through abstract shards, literal disembodiments and
workbook drawings to arrive at the question of how love can be given after
death. The word ‘unswaddled’ extends this field in English, as a baby is
swaddled in blankets (or bandages?), and the soul has now become exposed
and vulnerable.
The poem is cited as it exemplifies the Gelman’s characteristic represen-
tation of chaotic discourse and highlight one overarching notion: babbling.
Such ‘babbling’ calls first to mind the tongues emerging from the myth of the
Tower of Babel, but this disorder(ed)ly speech also coincides with theories
regarding “the shattering of discourse” (00:9) put forth by Julia Kristeva.
In speaking of modern poetic language in general in ‘The Semiotic and the
Symbolic’, Kristeva theorizes that “[mimesis and poetic language] no longer
act as instinctual floodgates within the enclosure of the sacred and become
instead protestors against its posturing. And thus, its complexity unfolded by
its practices, the signifying process joins social revolution” (ibid.:9). She
further states:
textual experience reaches the very foundation of the social – that

which is exploited by sociality but which elaborates and can go beyond
it, either destroying or transforming it. … Once the break instituting the
symbolic has been established, what we have called the semiotic chora
acquires a more precise status. Although originally a precondition of
the symbolic, the semiotic functions within signifying practices as the
result of a transgression of the symbolic (ibid.:).
This semiotic chora, associated with the maternal body and rhythm, that is
“indifferent to language, enigmatic and feminine”, becomes a foregrounding
force in modern poetry and proves ‘revolutionary’ as it supports the resistance
to traditional norms (ibid.:38).
Lisa Bradford 45
In these poems, the symbolic often ‘means’ nothing, or nothing fixed, but
the combinations of dynamic bodily drives and “pieces of speech” create ef-
fects beyond the stable syntactical and grammatical symbolizations and serve
to transform the disenchantment brought about by loss into a sublimation of
Gelman’s melancholia.1 Gelman’s aesthetic activity constitutes a representa-
tion of a semiotic, pre-language realm that he reaches in this collection through
words that trespass symbolic definition and social strictures. This is achieved
through linguistic invention and rhythm combined with feminine speech ele-
ments, which are intensified by gender discordance.
The manner in which Gelman plays with words – forming slant rhymes out
of words that are born of other words, words that are of his invention – often
seems nonsensical, and though we as readers endeavour to determine con-
nections in order to naturalize the babble, we often find ourselves clinging to
our childhood remembrance of children’s songs and mother/baby talk in order
to make sense of it. The diminutives, the superlatives, and even the grammar
‘mistakes’ evoke an endearing time of a light, tender touch, again suggesting
a feminine manner. He seeks out such a tongue in order to construct this elegy
of resistance, and the topics of death and pain continually collide with this
mode of expression. One is again tempted to ponder Kristeva’s words from
‘Stranger to Ourselves’: “Are death, the feminine and drives always a pretext
for the uncanny strangeness?” (ibid.:8).
Moreover, this search for a ‘mother tongue’ does not stop with this collec-
tion. In 199 Gelman publishes a curious book entitled dibaxu, which contains
poems written in a Sephardic language he invented as a way to return to his
origins: “I know that the Sephardic syntax brought me back to a lost candor
and its diminutives, a tenderness of other times that is still alive” (Senkman
199:107). He further comments:
the mother tongue is what truly ties us to a vision of the world … . This
is why I believe that the only authentic Jewish writers, regarding their
literature, were those who have written and write in Yiddish or Hebrew
[and I would add the special case of Sephardic]. (ibid.)16
1
In ‘Black Sun’ Kristeva speaks of sublimation through aesthetic activity that
structures a sense of self and world in order to overcome melancholia: “aesthetic
and particularly literary creation, and also religious discourse in its imaginary,
fictional essence, set forth a device whose prosodic economy, interaction of charac-
ters, and implicitly symbolism constitute a very faithful sociological representation
of the subject’s battle with symbolic collapse” (Oliver 00:19).
16
Gelman goes on to say: “The thing is that needed to write in Sephardic, as if
it were a question of returning to the childhood of language that would coincide
with an attempt to return to my own childhood, not because it was my mother
These commentaries provide a rich basis on which to build a translation of

Carta abierta, as well as a justification for paying special attention to Kristeva’s
notions in the process of translation since Gelman has, since early on in his
work and certainly stemming from his exile, been amassing and conjoining
different manifestations of the Spanish language in order to express things
beyond the symbolic. Even though Gelman’s work has been labelled as ‘ma-
chista’ by some due to his tango intertextualities and his analogies between
women and poetry,17 his writing embodies a tenderness configured through
a feminine discourse, a ‘mother tongue’ that, in the incongruent context of
death and violence, explodes with poignancy. He may continue to represent
masculine topics or analogies, but he clearly elaborates a renewal of the semi-
otic chora in order to transcend loss in these texts. Therefore, this process can
be classified as a remothering of the Spanish language, and a translator must
use this information to ensure a proper reposition, and more specifically, a
remothering of the English language that equally transgresses and signifies
beyond semantics. What may seem mawkish at first sight, particularly in
English where the tiny hands and tiny faces and baby booties could make a
reader cringe, has to be rendered as such to ensure this pre-linguistic, semiotic
force in the poetry.
Furthermore, the regeneration of other poets’ voices as a strategy of versifica-
tion written while in exile bespeaks the division and search for a mother tongue
that has become a stranger to him, much in the sense of Kristeva’s label of “Toc-
cata and Fugue” (‘Strangers to Ourselves’) where the foreigner is “brought up,
relieved, disseminated, inscribed in an original play being developed, without
goal, without boundary, without end. An otherness barely touched upon and that
already moves away” (Oliver 00:66). A poetry of versability.
Others have referred to Gelman’s use of these devices as a minorization of
the language.18 This concept, developed by Deleuze and Guattari, is based on
notions of collective and political values in Kafka’s use of “deterritorialized”
language, that is to say, language that ceases to be representative of a specific
identity and moves toward its limits to create ambiguous borders and multiple
centres of power as an exercise of power or resistance (1986/197:17-). This
is done in order to promote a linguistic chaos and install a “deterritorializa-
tion” of the language. In Gelman, this process is actually reversed: instead of
tongue, but because it is a way of returning to what is, let’s say, the origin” (Senk-
man 199:108-09).
17
See, for example, Joan Lindgren’s commentary in Translation Review (Sillato
007:8).
18
See Ana Porrúa’s ‘Juan Gelman: voces menores y territorios poéticos’ in Brad-
ford (001).
Lisa Bradford 47
deterritorializing Spanish, he tries to reterritorialize it through ancient phrasing

in conjunction with modern uses of the language in order to recover a tongue,
his tongue, as an assemblage to complete the language and, in the case of this
book, to compose it to ‘tell’ his son, which is, at the same time, a way to defy
total loss. For this reason, my decision to write the pronoun ‘I’ in lower case
corresponds not only to the total absence of capitalization in Gelman’s Spanish
but also to the signifying possibilities of locating another way to minorize the
voice of the poet and so challenge the English norms of grammar.19
As has been previously insinuated in this study, this practice, along with
his othering and feminizing, parallels some of Benjamin’s notions regarding
translation’s role in the recuperation of a reine Sprache (pure language), though
for Gelman, the search is for a pure Spanish:
In all language and linguistic creations there remains an addition

to what can be conveyed, something that cannot be communicated;
depending on the context in which it appears, it is something that
symbolizes or something symbolized. It is the former only in the finite
products of language, the latter in the evolving of languages them-
selves. … Though concealed and fragmentary, it is an active force in
life as the symbolized thing itself, whereas it inhabits linguistic crea-
tions only in symbolized form. (Benjamin 1969:79)
In Gelman, the “symbolized form” is deconstructed and thus de-symbolized

through his archaisms, neologisms and feminizations of the expression. In
this fashion, he invents an artificial ‘natural’ language or ‘mother tongue’ to
‘carry across’ his message, which is similar to Celan’s process of “telescoping”
words from “the very oldest layers of language” (Celan 006:16,0).0 Using
“pieces of speech / broken grandeurs” (‘XVIII’), Gelman represents a “mother
tongue” by realizing it in an “embryonic” and “intensive” form (Benjamin
1969:7) through the conjunction of different evolutionary levels of Spanish
to form a chorus of voices.
Carta abierta is a book of personal and political resistance composed to
transcend the pain of loss while representing the death of a son at the tortur-
ers’ hands. In light of the examples offered, we observe how Gelman creates
a polyphonic voice for this verse, which searches out a pre-symbolic mode
19
e.e. cummings, of course, comes to mind here with his unconventional use of
capitalization, and he has established a model against which this strategy will
unavoidably be read in English.
0
In Joris’ translation of Breathturn, he quotes Celan, who said he did not so much
invent as search the strata of the language for new words (Celan 006:0).
of expression by intensifying a feminized and infantile speech within the

invention of novel combinations of grammatical roots and morphemes. The
poet’s creation of a sublimated discourse of mothering candour and cadence
demands a similar reshaping of the text in its translation and even invites a re-
versioning because of the tradition of versability he establishes in his writing.
The performativity of the text has been translated here through the mothering
musicality and endearments and through the voices of ancient, modern and
invented English; in short, a replication of Gelman’s semiotic chora. Strategies
to capture these poetics stem from Germanic, Anglo-Saxon or Early English
forms through their roots, morphemes, kennings and ballad devices just as
Gelman’s word choices often originate in sixteenth-century Spanish in his
search for an analogous “pure” Spanish. The neologisms I have created func-
tion analogically with those present in the Spanish text, following the original
processes of construction and signification, as well as the English language
permits. Of course, the invention of ungrammatical forms, misspellings, and
mothering neologisms in my quest for this feminized English may prove too
ostentatious or may even appear as erroneous since a translator lacks the autho-
rial license to intentionally make mistakes or re-gender. It is, however, vital to
maintain a roughness in the texture of the translation by placing a colloquial
and feminine language in tension with the intertexualities and neologisms,
even though this dissonance may be difficult to naturalize for the English
reader unversed in Gelmanean poetics of re-gendering, re-chronologizing
and, ultimately, re-writing.
The translation of these poems constitutes a conversion of his signifying
processes so as to transmit his polyphony and his challenge to existing norms.
All of Gelman’s texts are revolutionary and engaged, and this book – and by
extension any committed translation of it – actively resists the despair of exile
and loss through this mothering tongue he nurtures as a counterforce against
the Argentine military dictatorship, social injustice, forced exile, and all the
deaths ensuing thereof.
Lisa Bradford 49
Works cited
Bakhtin, Mikhail (1981) The Dialogic Imagination. Trans. Michael Holquist,
Austin: University of Texas Press.
Benjamin, Walter (1969) Illuminations. Trans. Harry Zohn, New York: Harcourt,
Brace, & World.
Berman, Antoine (199) The Experience of the Foreign. Trans. S. Heyvaert,
Albany: State University of New York Press.
Bradford, Lisa (ed.) (001) La Cultura de los Géneros, Rosario: Viterbo.
Bradford, Lisa Rose (009) ‘The Agency of the Poets and the Impact of their Trans-
lations: Sur, Poesía Buenos Aires, and Dario de Poesía as Aesthetic Arenas for
Twentieth-Century Argentine Letters’, in John Milton and Paul Bandia (eds)
Agents of Translation, Amsterdam: John Benjamins: 30-6.
Casaus, Victor (198) ‘Prologue’, in Juan Gelman, Poesía, Havana: Casa de las
Américas.
Celan, Paul (006) Breathturn. Trans. Pierre Joris. Los Angeles: Green Integer.
Conadep, National Commission on the Disappearance of Persons (198) Nunca
Más (Never Again), http://www.desaparecidos.org/nuncamas/web/english/li-
brary/nevagain/nevagain_001.htm [last accessed 16 June 011].
Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari (1986/197) Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature.
Trans. Dana Polan, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Gelman, Juan (196) Violín y otras cuestiones, Buenos Aires: Gleizer.
------ (1980/1997) ‘Carta Abierta’, in Interrupciones 1, Buenos Aires: Seix Bar-
ral/Planeta.
------ (198/1997) ‘Citas y Comentarios’, in Interrupciones 1, Buenos Aires: Seix
Barral/Planeta.
Gelman, Juan (1986/1998) ‘Com/posiciones’, in Interrupciones 2, Buenos Aires:
Seix Barral/Planeta.
------ (199) dibaxu, Buenos Aires: Seix Barral/Biblioteca Breve.
------ (010a) Between Words: Juan Gelman’s Public Letter. Trans. Lisa Rose
Bradford. Albany, CA: CIAL.
------ (010b) Commentaries and Citations. Trans. Lisa Rose Bradford, San
Francisco: Coimbra Editions.
Oliver, Kelly (ed.) (00) The Portable Kristeva, New York: Columbia University
Press.
Sillato, María del Carmen (007) ‘An Interview with Joan Lindgren: The Chal-
lenge of Translating Argentina’, Translation Review 7, -9.
Senkman, Leonardo (199) ‘Entrevista: Escribí poemas en sefaradí para buscar
la niñez del lenguaje y también mi origen’, NOAJ 7/8: 106-113.
Vallejo, César (007) The Complete Poetry. Trans. Clayton Eshleman, Berkeley:
University of California Press.
Transformations of Violence
Metramorphic Gains and Plastic Regeneration in Marie
Vieux-Chauvet’s Les Rapaces
CAROLYN SHREAD
Abstract: The main objective of this article is to suggest that

a commitment to translation that engages with the new pos-
sibilities evoked by gender and sexuality studies allows us to
envisage and practice non-violent negotiations of similarity
and difference. Marie Vieux-Chauvet is a Haitian novelist
known for exposing gendered violence during the Duvalier
dictatorships (1957-1986) in her trilogy Amour, Colère,
Folie (1968). As translator of Vieux-Chauvet’s last novel,
the allegorical fable Les Rapaces (1986), I had to engage
with the ways in which violence is articulated at individual
and structural levels, and consider the implications of my
intervention in the text. Ultimately, my translation seeks to
extend the social transformation envisaged by Vieux-Chauvet
through self-reflexive, feminist strategies and paradigms of
translation. Grounding my argument in this particular trans-
lation project, I review and resist the ways in which the term
‘violence’ has accrued around translation, proposing instead
an understanding of translation as a generative activity.
In Slavoj Žižek’s 2008 book Violence, he argues that, contrary to the popular
view, language is a mediator of acts of violence, and that to speak to one an-
other is to gesture towards a renunciation of violence, that language itself is
violent. Drawing on Lacanian psychoanalysis, Žižek’s point is that because
it defines, because it is the source of symbolization, because it signals the
assigning of essences, language is inherently violent. Moreover, the crux of
his argument is that this symbolic violence, along with the systemic violence
caused by economic and political structures, is obscured by the focus on in-
dividual, subjective acts of violence. Žižek thus seeks to wrench us free from
our media-fed fascination with individual violence in order to understand the
paradoxical ways in which we reinforce “a violence that sustains our very
efforts to fight violence” (2008:1). To conclude with Žižek that “the ultimate
cause of violence … is founded in the violence that inheres to language it-
self, the very medium of overcoming direct violence” (ibid.:206), would be
Carolyn Shread 51
a sombre conclusion indeed. But is Žižek forgetting that language is not as

hegemonic as it seems, or rather, that monolingualism is not the rule? In this
article I argue that in translation, in what Jon Solomon (2009) calls an ethic
of “heterolingual intimacy”, there is a possibility of transforming violence,
including the violence of language. Interestingly, Žižek makes no reference
to translation in Violence, although the necessity for translation points to the
failure of language’s violent ambitions, the illusory vanity of any given lan-
guage’s claim to define definitively or exhaustively. This article focuses on
the puncture of the Symbolic by the gap of translation – by which I mean not
the losses, but rather the creative withdrawal, the spacing, the Tzimtzum1 that
allows translations to emerge, engendering new texts.
This is the theoretical context in which I shall discuss my French to English
translation of Marie Vieux-Chauvet’s novel Les Rapaces (1986), an allegorical
novel about the interactions of systemic and individual violence during the
Duvalier dictatorships in Haiti (1957-1986). My discussion considers both
the thematic of violence in the text and the issue of violence in the translation
process. While acknowledging Mona Baker’s warning in Translation and
Conflict (2006) against the discipline’s tendency to idealize translation as a
facilitator that enables communication across languages – Baker is right that
bridges produce occupation as much as they foster understanding – I wish
to explain how a conceptualization and practice of translation in terms of
gains rather than loss offers a response to discourses that treat translation as
an aesthetic, ethnographic or political form of violence. The primary aim of
this article is therefore to resist the dominant view that translation invariably
involves loss due to its unpardonable violence to an ‘original’ text. Solomon
perpetuates these prejudices when he characterizes what he sees as the vio-
lence of translation:
Translation is related to violence in two, essential ways. The first intrin-

sically occurs in the operation of translation itself, precisely because it
is never definitive and always bears some kind of metaphorical violence
towards the original enunciation or text. Any translation is inherently
subject to the ever-present possibility of counter-translation, against
which further arguments for retranslation can be posed, thus forming
a kind of on-going linguistic tug-of-war … the second aspect of vio-
lence seen in translation concerns the historical dimensions of social
praxis, and it occurs precisely when indeterminacy is resolved through
institutionalization and its disciplinary measures (2009).
1
Tzimtzum (Hebrew: withdrawal) is a Jewish theological concept that explains
that God withdrew into Himself to make space for the world.
52 Transformations of Violence
Just as I wish to challenge the idea that language is violent because it seeks to
define on the grounds that for all its pretensions there is always the possibility
for renegotiations of meaning, I also question the contrary assumption that
translation is violent because of its indeterminacy. Ultimately, both argu-
ments reflect an inability to entertain multiplicity and regenerative processes
and derive from a traditionally masculine privileging of the autonomy,
self-sufficiency, and independence of the individual. Why, if we have two or
more translations, must we assume that they will be in a tug-of-war? If we
look at the same traits of contraction or withdrawal that allow for regenerative
growth from a feminine perspective, we may not experience the same degree
of anxiety. Indeed, if we come to appreciate translation for what it actually is
– rather than for the ‘original’ text that it is not – then we may begin to cel-
ebrate the fact that translation emphasizes “the ethical value of dependency …
[it] reveals our multiple dependencies and the connectedness underlying the
consoling fictions of absolute autonomy” (Cronin 2003:40). In other words,
translation may not be so much violence as the manifesting of plastic life
processes: exploding form, yes sometimes, but also giving form, receiving
form, regenerating form.
In presenting this vision of translation as a potential site for the dismantling
of violence through generative change and interactions of mutual dependence,
I shall refer to both my new research into Catherine Malabou’s philosophical
concept of plasticity and the article in TTR in which I proposed a model of
metramorphic translation, drawing on the feminist psychoanalytic theories
of Bracha Ettinger (Shread 2008a). Responding to the title, Re-engendering
Translation, I explain how Ettinger’s matrixial model, which draws out
feminine subjectivity-as-encounter, a layer of subjectivity involving several-
ity, being more than one or less than one, allows us to reconsider translation
from outside the dominant masculine vantage through which it is typically
viewed. In the term re-engendering, I read an appreciation of the future and
becoming aspect of translation that a metramorphic understanding draws to
our attention. The metramorphic and plastic understandings of processes at
work in translation thus offer a counter-balance to the many ways violence
has accrued around the practices and theories of translation. I draw out the
practical implications of these theoretical paradigms for my translation of
Les Rapaces to show how it is precisely through a recognition of multilin-
gualism that violence – of both language itself and the violence it signifies
– can be addressed.2
2
Jon Solomon is right to point out, however, that multilingualism “does not in
itself guarantee access to the heterolingual mode of address, which still requires
Carolyn Shread 53
This contemplation of the conjunctions of violence and translation was

prompted by the process of translating Vieux-Chauvet’s novel, Les Rapaces.
Written and set during the Duvalier dictatorships, Les Rapaces addresses
violent oppression from a female perspective and offers a vision of social
transformation. Vieux-Chauvet is renowned for her bravery in exposing sexual
violence specifically against women through the female protagonists’ psycho-
logical narratives in her masterpiece, Amour, Colère, Folie (1968).3 Indeed,
it was the publication of the trilogy, followed by its immediate removal from
distribution, that forced Vieux-Chauvet to go into exile in the United States,
where she wrote Les Rapaces, her last work, shortly before her death in 1973.
Although Les Rapaces is now out of print, two of her texts have been recently
republished in France, and the translation, entitled Love, Anger, Madness, was
published by Random House in 2009.
Analyzing Vieux-Chauvet’s writing in terms of her portrayal of gendered
violence, critic Myriam Chancy emphasizes that her work “resists the inter-
pretation of her characters’ violations as a metaphor for the ‘rape’ of Haiti”
(1997b:184). Responding to the way that Vieux-Chauvet’s texts challenge
a longstanding tradition of metaphorical interpretations of violence against
women to emphasize the bodily experiences on which such metaphors draw,
this article suggests that likewise one of the tasks for translation studies
scholars is to investigate and rework the traditions and many metaphors that
associate translation with violence – be it through loss, depletion, colonization
or appropriation – both symbolically and in practice.
To conceptualize translation beyond paradigms of violence is not to deny
the historical role that translation practices have had as a part of violent
projects such as colonization. Indeed, as an Anglo-American translator of
Vieux-Chauvet’s Les Rapaces working in the United States, the oppressive
relationship between the United States and Haiti is an important factor
in my investigation, as is the fact that I am translating a text by a ‘Third
World’ woman of colour into English, a language of imperialism and the
current United States’ neo-colonial global hegemony. Yet while Lawrence
Venuti claims that translation is by definition violent: “the ethnocentric
violence of translation is inevitable: in the translating process, foreign
languages, texts and cultures will always undergo some degree and form of
the recognition of and commitment to heterogeneity in all situations, even those

normally thought to be ‘monolingual’” (2009).
3
Carolle Charles points out that the state violence against women that Vieux-
Chauvet describes ironically produced gender equality in that the “brutally
repressive regime of the Duvaliers’ dictatorship was to turn Haitian women into
full political subjects” (1995:138-142).
reduction, exclusion, inscription” (1996:310), again reiterating the discourse

of translation as loss, it is the potential for the productive, transformative
effects in this encounter, the new subject positions that it may re-engender,
that I wish to emphasize. While translation continues to be maligned either
on account of its ‘derivative’ status or its role in imperializing projects, it
may equally well be creative, producing supplements that are not so much
violent revolutions as expansive reformulations.
Exploring violence in Les Rapaces is unavoidable, for even the title con-
notes plundering and the ravaging by allegorical birds of prey. Although the
immediate purpose of this study is to reflect on the violence of Vieux-Chauvet’s
text, while attending to the ways that the translated representation may perpe-
trate violence, my wider goal is to challenge theoretical presuppositions that
link translation with violence in translation studies through an exploration of
the relevance of Malabou’s philosophical concept of plasticity to translation
and my proposal of a metramorphic translation practice that accounts for the
transformations of texts and the agents of such transformation, the becoming
or engendering of translators.
This article has two parts: in the first I analyze definitions of violence in
terms of physical and discursive, individual and structural, parameters with
particular attention to the Haitian context of the translation project and the
text. These analyses exemplifying the relevance of this research into violence
for a specific translation lay the groundwork for the second part, which em-
phasizes the plasticity of translation practices and explores both the agency
of translator and the impact of the receiving context of the translation to ex-
plain how a metramorphic translation produced certain translational choices.
The ultimate goal of this discussion is to suggest that translation allows us
to practice many nuanced negotiations of similarity and difference, some of
which are not defined by violence, and all of which challenge the hegemony,
and hence purported violence of language as presented by Žižek.
Intersections of Violence in Les Rapaces
In Translation and Conflict, Baker asserts that “conflict is a natural part of

everyday life” (2006:1). We should be careful, however, not to equate conflict
with violence. Conflict, as a productive and creative structure, may well be
inevitable and even desirable, but is violence? In Malabou’s philosophical
readings of Hegel, Heidegger, and Derrida, she presents the articulation of
differences as a structuring that avoids a violent dialectical resolution of
differences. For Malabou, plasticity embodies conflicting positions in many
Carolyn Shread 55
ways, only some of which are violent. Drawing out the multiple meanings of
the French word plasticité, she explains that it bears at once the giving (like
sculpture) and receiving (like clay) of form in les arts plastiques, along with
the regeneration (like stem cells) and exploding (like a bomb, plastiquage)
of form. While these differing types of plastic change are certainly violent on
occasion, they are by no means necessarily violent.4
Some argue that violence is not only negative, but also a positive force,
necessary for change. Madeline Cottenet-Hage’s article ‘Violence Libératoire,
Violence Mutilatoire dans L’Amour de Marie Chauvet’ reflects this ambiva-
lent view of violence as both emancipatory and nefarious (1984).5 Thinking
about violence in the context of Haiti’s history, we are confronted with the
mutilating violence of slavery and colonialism, followed by the foundational
emancipatory violence of the Haitian Revolution from 1791 that led to the
successful creation of the first black republic in 1804. Yet even as we celebrate
the heroic achievement of the Haitian slaves in refusing colonial impositions
and appropriations, the continued recycling of violence, even in the name of
a better future, remains an unsatisfactory pattern. As Heckenbach points out,
quoting René Girard’s La Violence et le sacré, “Il faut conclure que la violence
ne peut jamais en finir, une fois pour toutes, d’avec la violence” (1998:40).6
In other words, given inevitable conflict, violence is not a sustainable solu-
tion. Following this argument, I am inclined to conclude with Hannah Arendt
(1970:80) that violence has just one result: it produces an ever more violent
world. But I am not ready, like Žižek, to simply withdraw into political absten-
tion on the premise that “sometimes doing nothing is the most violent thing
to do” (2008:217). Between these differing paths, I look to the resourceful
resistance of those who, in the face of gendered violence, have turned to either
plastic or metramorphic solutions.
The ideological consequence of refusing to accept the perpetuation of
violence, along with a mistrust of what Heckenbach (1998) describes as a
masculine discourse on the necessity of violence to provoke change, is to adopt
the non-violent resistance of, for instance, Mahatma Gandhi, or – to give an ex-
ample closer to our topic – the slave resistance known as marronage, whereby
slaves escaped to the hills to change their condition and form alternative, free
4
For further elaboration of the concept of plasticity, see Malabou (2005, 2010,
2009/2011).
5
Ida Eve Heckenbach (1998:37) describes a similar ambivalence as violence
salutaire and violence néfaste (‘salutary violence’ and ‘harmful violence’). All
translations, except where indicated, are my own.
6
‘We must conclude that violence will never be done, once and for all, with
violence’.
communities of equals. This response to the violence of colonialism is just

as much Haiti’s heritage as the bloody revolutionary call to koupè tet boulè
kay.7 Indeed, Beverly Bell sees the stubborn resistance typifying maroons as
an essential component in Haitian history:
The iron might of successive Haitian rulers, on the one side, is in-
famous. Yet on the other side, the poor citizenry has been equally
obstinate. Two centuries of noncompliance, protest and revolt have
kept the economic and political rulers from ever fully consolidating
their power (2001:9).
Bell’s ethnography Walking on Fire: Haitian Women’s Stories of Survival and

Resistance not only contributes to Haitian history by recording women’s oral
histories, but also expands our understanding of alternative ways of negotiat-
ing power differentials, for as she explains, “there is no absolute line between
power and powerlessness” (ibid.:8). Bell reworks the concept of resistance to
empower those who appear to be powerless and thereby contributes to expand-
ing the forms of non-violent resistance available in conflictual situations:
The definition of resistance is expanded to include any act that keeps

the margins of power from being further encroached upon, even where
the protagonist cannot expand those margins. Given the forces arrayed
against the Haitian woman, simply to kenbe la, hold the line – even
without making any advance – is a victory (ibid.:5).
Taking this example into my own sphere of activity, this article is motivated
by the belief that to identify ways in which violence occurs in translation is
to take a step towards alternative forms of engagement. Moreover, it strikes
me that the question of whether conflict is necessarily violent is one of the
questions translation studies may be able to answer through reflection on the
extensive practice of negotiating and engendering transformed selves and oth-
ers across differences of language and culture. For this reason, the conjunction
of violence and translation invites us to look for ways in which new approaches
in feminist, queer, and postcolonial translation help not only to identify, but
also to circumvent or defuse violence.
Establishing a typology of the various ways in which translation is de-
scribed as violent is a vast project; consequently, the classifications I suggest
below are only a preliminary attempt to differentiate between some of the
differing, yet often interconnected, spheres in which violence occurs. By
7
‘Cut off heads, burn down houses’.
Carolyn Shread 57
distinguishing physical violence from discursive violence, with particular at-

tention to gendered violence, I approach the realm of textual violence – and
moreover the intertextual translational transaction with violence – which is
the pragmatic concern of this study.
If, like Arendt (1970:46, 79), we define violence in terms of instrumental
action, then we draw attention to the fact that violence bears the ascription
of responsibility, which is important not only from an ethical standpoint, but
also from a practical, juridical impetus to determine the agency of both victim
and perpetrator. Yet beyond the actions of the individual and group, we must
acknowledge the critical role of what Paul Farmer describes as structural
violence. A doctor who set up a health clinic in one of the poorest regions in
Haiti, Farmer examines the question of individual suffering and concludes
that “to explain suffering, one must embed individual biography in the larger
matrix of culture, history and political economy” (1996:270). In his examina-
tion of the sources of suffering, Farmer concludes that the global forces of
structural violence conspire to inflict suffering on particular segments of the
world population, “whose life choices are structured by racism, sexism, po-
litical violence and grinding poverty” (ibid.:262). By expanding the concept
of violence to include not only individually accountable actions, but also the
wider consequences of economic, political, and social pressures, as well as
forms of inequality that are structurally reinforced, my analysis follows trends
in public health, for “the World Health Organization now acknowledges that
poverty is the world’s greatest killer” (ibid.: 274). Although it is impossible
to point to individuals to explain why certain populations are poorer than
others, an analysis of structural violence makes it clear that the challenge in
ascribing responsibility does not imply that poverty is the result of arbitrary
forces, nor that it is solely a matter of the individual’s failure to succeed in
the dominant capitalist economy. Poverty is a systemic, international, and
institutionally supported form of violence, one to which women and children
are particularly susceptible.8
Farmer’s descriptions of the workings of structural violence are reminis-
cent of Vieux-Chauvet’s representation of its devastating consequences in Les
Rapaces. Her novel is an allegory of the ways violence circulates in society,
crushing those who are most vulnerable. In her text there are several transferen-
tial objects – cat, house, blood, cadavers – all of which circulate, exemplifying
8
Carolle Charles (2003) analyses the counterdiscourse of poor Haitian women
that allows them to levy with hegemonic norms in terms of their sexuality and the
significance of their bodies. This brokering of gender inequalities and hierarchies
exemplifies Bell’s argument that there are possibilities for resistance, even for the
most disempowered members of society (2001).
the mechanisms that perpetuate structural violence. The fable presents these
complexities in their barest form, asking for instance “l’homme était mort,
puis le rat, puis le chat. A qui le tour?” (1986:64).9 Beyond the symbolic death
of the cat who moves from the spoilt pet of a torturer to become a mangy and
desperate rat-killer and eventually a meal for a starving family who join the
ranks of pitiful mangeurs de chats (cat-eaters), Vieux-Chauvet includes real
scandals that occurred in Haiti: the trafficking of blood and cadavers for in-
ternational scientific purposes.10 Exposing the way in which the United States’
need for blood plasma is fed by an indigent father who comments “Je fais
ça pour les enfants. Je vends mon sang pour eux, pour leur offrir le bouillon
que je leur ai promis”, the text shows how structural violence is global in its
functioning (ibid.:57).11
To further explore structural violence at an international level, we might
consider the relationship between the United States and Haiti. Ever since the
1915-1934 Occupation, the actions of the United States in Haiti have been expe-
rienced as a form of national violation. The traumatic, neocolonialist Occupation
cut to the quick Haitian national pride and identity by threatening to undermine
the achievements of the revolution. This involvement continued through finan-
cial support during the Duvalier dictatorships and later in the imposition of an
embargo with devastating economic consequences when the massively popular
Jean-Bertrand Aristide was elected in 1991. The responsibility for violence can
be ascribed not only to individuals or groups, but also to nations whose inter-
national policy and business practices have a global impact.
In classifying these different agents of violence – from the individual to
global structures – it is important to recognize a physical baseline of embodied
experience. Physical violence may have various origins, individual or struc-
tural, whether the annihilation of the body in murder; inflicted pain in rape or
torture; or negligence, as in Les Rapaces, where young Adélia is blinded by
cataracts and her mother dies for lack of medical services. In addition to these
forms of violence, which impact women and children disproportionately,12
9
‘The man died, then the rat, then the cat. Who next?’
10
Elizabeth Abbott describes Luckner Cambronne, whose blood plasma and cadaver
dealings earned him the nickname ‘Vampire of the Caribbean’ (1991:172-73).
11
‘I’m doing this for the children. I’m selling my blood for them, to give them
the soup I promised them.’
12
Marie-José N’Zengou-Tayo (1998) offers a social history of rural and urban
women in Haiti, emphasizing the inequalities and forms of violence to which
they are subject, with a particular focus on how these socio-economic realities
are portrayed in the representations of women by both male and female Haitian
writers.
Carolyn Shread 59
a level of discursive violence interacts with, and may precipitate, physical

violence, as in hate-crimes or psychological violence. Discursive violence
acts both literally and figuratively, so that it is not only words, but also as-
sociated images and tropes that are violent.
Textual violence is a subset of the discursive, in which violence appears at
a thematic level, as well as in textual representations, which impinge on wider
social discursive formations, sometimes reinforcing them, sometimes chal-
lenging them. An example of discursive violence fed by textual violence is
the predominantly negative images of Haiti in the United States. As Michael
Dash explains, Haiti has been subjected to persistent discursive violence:
Just as Joseph Conrad had earlier supplied the dominant images of

Africa in the European imagination, in the 1960s Graham Greene per-
formed the same dubious service for Haiti in the Western imagination.
The puritanical crusader immersed in sensual darkness; the unspeak-
able kingdom of the night; a static, timeless world of absence – these
durable and influential images establish an imaginative quarantine
around Africa and Haiti in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899) and
Greene’s The Comedians (1966) (1997:101)
Alongside negative narratives are the ‘imaginative quarantines’ in which

violence occurs through absence or silencing – the gaps in discourse that
structure discursive formations.
As a form of textuality engaged in cross-cultural negotiations, translations
are deeply involved in questions of representation, both in the selection of
texts and the communication of the images they provide of a nation or culture.
One of my concerns in translating Les Rapaces was to avoid reinforcing the
negative stereotypes. Although the text is undoubtedly set in a situation of
violence that might be seen to perpetuate the image Dash identifies, Vieux-
Chauvet’s response to that violence is valuable because it offers the vision of
a transformatory, non-violent way out of the cycle that is notable precisely
because it is discursive.
While a discursive response to physical violence might appear utopian,
the argument Laura Tanner makes in Intimate Violence: Reading Rape and
Torture in Twentieth-Century Fiction is that the discursive is inextricably
bound up with the physical. Tanner draws a comparison between the way
Karl Marx revealed the material reality of the labourer’s body in his read-
ing of capitalism and the way this effort of “restoring the original referent”
(1994:7) may also occur in a literary text that treats the topic of violence.
Tanner writes:
Marx unveils the apparently “magical” economy of capitalism by trac-

ing the way in which its success depends upon the capitalist’s ability
to cover over or deny the cost borne by the laborer’s body. … [Marx]
provides a critical model for understanding representations which
obscure the materiality of bodily violation ... An accurate theory of
reading violence must account for the reader’s experience of the text
as a negotiation between that empirical dynamic of violence and its
representational counterpart. (ibid.:8)
Tanner’s appeal to Marx’s materialist framework is helpful in extricating the

experience of violence from its representations since it insists on the primacy
of the bodily relation to violence and cautions readers against the mystifying
potential of the text. This analysis helps understand the compulsion to repeat
physical violence through textual violence, a response that many critics of
Vieux-Chauvet’s work have highlighted – although, as Régine Jean-Charles
argues, more often than not they have done so without “calling it rape”, thereby
“creating a critical silence about gendered violence that mirrors societal and
cultural responses to sexual violence” (2006:5).13 In early postcolonial cri-
tiques, violence to women is used as a metaphor for other forms of violence,
producing an erasure of the embodied reality of the violence at work behind
such metaphors, and exemplifying a type of “magical system” Marx’s mate-
rialist analyses uncovered (Tanner 1994:8). Describing the literary traditions
of Caribbean male writers, Chancy is alert to precisely this risk in metaphors
of violence:
Women appear as elusive figures who represent cultural loss: they

function as symbols of the feminized Caribbean landscape that has
undergone pillage and violence. The cultural and geographical ‘rape’
of a feminized Caribbean is linguistically and imagistically rendered
in a way that has the effect of sublimating and denying the violence
perpetrated against women. (1997a:107)
In considering the ways in which metaphors of violence are used to describe

translation, we are never far from the underlying reality that the violence
impinges most on one particular sex and further, that it specifically targets
13
Jean-Charles offers an important interpretative revision to the trilogy: “Vieux-
Chauvet creates a protagonist who is a victim of rape, not, as others have claimed
intra-textually and extra-textually, a martyr for her family” (2006:16).
Carolyn Shread 61
particular members of the very diverse group women. This is the intersec-
tional basis for understanding how embodied violence acts as our baseline
in discussions of violence. My question is how, as translator, can I respond
creatively to this history of multiple, intersecting forms of violence?
Ronnie Scharfman engages with the question of how texts can be formative
in their effect by asking “under the regime of the Duvaliers and their Tontons
Macoutes, what does it mean to speak of violence?” (1996:229). She presents
a matrix for explaining how literature offers a means of resistance by enact-
ing a level of violence in the reading experience that provokes resistance to
violence via the reader:
In a universe where all are susceptible to arrest, rape, torture, disap-

pearance, even murder at any moment and for any reason … is it
possible to explore a violence that would be specifically discursive
and if so, what sense would such an exercise have, confronted by
the horrors of the lived? ... this work functions as an act of resistance
to the violence from which it springs, but that it can only resist by
repeating, by violating the reader as it proceeds, dragging us in as
accomplices. (ibid.)
Examining the cumulative effect of reading Vieux-Chauvet’s trilogy, Scharf-

man encourages us to consider not only the ways in which texts are implicated
in discursive violence through representational repetition, but also the ways
they can interrupt violence. This is all the more relevant to a reading of Vieux-
Chauvet’s Les Rapaces since the force of her fable lies in the transformative
effect of a revolutionary manuscript written by the poet Michel and eventu-
ally read by a government minister, whose conscience is reawakened and
who vows to repair the violence he has done. Clearly Vieux-Chauvet’s hope
in the exile from which she wrote her last text is that her work would have a
similar salutary effect.
In the second part of this article, I discuss how I sought to respect
Vieux-Chauvet’s literary project to mediate change in my translation and
how certain strategies emerged in the translation process. I shall present
the transformations of myself as translator and the text as it remerged for a
specific audience: the many Haitian Americans in the diasporic community.
I read these transformations of text and translator through the concepts of
plasticity and metramorphosis offered by Malabou and Ettinger to show how
new feminist theories present paradigms for change that are not premised on
inevitable violence.
The Plasticity and Metramorphic Creativity Engender-

ing Translation
Malabou’s philosophical proposal of plasticity has recently joined my me-
tramorphic understanding of the processes of translation. While Ettinger’s
matrixial paradigm reflects feminine bodily specificity, notably matrixial
borderspace and metramorphic exchanges between mother and late pre-natal
infant, Malabou’s elaboration of plasticity as a motor scheme in contempo-
rary thought draws on the field of neuroscience, in which new research into
brain plasticity offers us additional models for thinking change. Malabou
certainly entertains the violence of some change, emphasizing the explosive
quality of breaches in identity as a result of brain trauma or illnesses such
as Alzheimer’s,14 but she also explores other routes for transformation, spe-
cifically here, the synaptic gap. While gaps are frequently associated with a
negative, rather than creative or generative, female space, following recent
neuroscience, Malabou offers a further reworking of the view of space as a
negative void, an unknown that must be filled and mapped. As she explains,
“synaptic fissures are certainly gaps, but they are gaps that are able to form
or take shape” (2010:60).15 In other words, here we have not a depletive gap,
but rather a creative reformulation dependent on distance. In counterpoint
to Derrida’s conceptualization of the trace of writing, Malabou argues that
“neuronal plasticity – in other words, the ability of synapses to modify their
effectiveness as a result of experience – is a part of genetic indetermination.
We can therefore make the claim that plasticity forms when DNA no longer
writes” (ibid.).16 From this we might extrapolate that to engender a translation
is to create new synaptic pathways and that a part of the “genetic indetermi-
nation” of any given text is the possibility of its translations, its openness to
plastic reformulation.
As a means of thinking through the identities of the ‘original’ text and its
translations, plasticity has the advantage of offering an anti-essentializing view
that aligns Malabou’s work with the work of queer theorists such as Judith
Butler. As Malabou explains,
14
Malabou’s recent Ontology de l’accident : essai sur la plasticité destructrice
discusses the violent effects of destructive plasticity (2009/2012).
15
“Les fentes synaptique sont bien des écarts, mais des écarts susceptibles de
prendre forme” (2005:112).
16
“la plasticité neuronale – c’est-à-dire la capacité qu’ont les synapses à modifier
leur efficacité sous l’effet de l’expérience – correspond à une part d’indétermina-
tion génétique. On pourrait dès lors affirmer que la plasticité prend forme là où
l’ADN n’écrit plus” (2005:112).
Carolyn Shread 63
Today, the concept of plasticity tends to become at once the dominant

motif of interpretation and the most productive exegetic and heuristic
tool of our time. … new metamorphic occurrences appear that impose
themselves at the level of social and economic organization, at the level
of “genre” or of the sexual identity of individuals, that show that the
privileged regime of change is the continued implosion of form, by
which form revises and reforms itself continually. (2007:439)
It is because we are plastic that we and our texts, translations, are not fixed
or referentially bound to any original form, but rather constantly re-engender
and perform ourselves. We give form, receive form, regenerate form: this is
the understanding of a fundamental plasticity that can shape our investigation
into the place of violence, and other forms of change, in translation.
While Malabou writes about change as metamorphosis, Bracha Ettinger
adds metramorphosis to the range of terms we have for discussing trans-
formation (1996). Ettinger’s concept of metramorphosis offers a nuanced
understanding of exchange beyond the dominant alternatives of appropria-
tion or identification (in which difference is incorporated or assimilated into
sameness) and rejection (in which difference is exiled or expelled). From a
matrixial perspective there is a possibility of distance in proximity, severality,
relations that are not premised on the equivalent and totalizing exchange of
discrete subjects. The violence that ensues from phallic responses to difference
are thus modulated. This is the primary paradigm that informed my translation
since the practice of translation is an art in which access to a metramorphic
form of relating is an alternative to the traditional emphasis on metaphoric
or metonymic models. Indeed, we might even see translation as a privileged
space for the emergence of the matrixial strata of subjectivization, strata in
which we no longer read the translational transaction as one of inevitable
loss, but rather as a place of creative becoming premised on Tzimtzum, the
drawing back or contraction that allows for growth. In translation, the text
withdraws to engender new forms. Ettinger explains these types of matrixial
interactions as follows:
Matrixial objects (a) are relational hybridized and shared, and their
partial subjects are involved in unconscious transmitting, relating
and sharing; that which is created or lost for one creates transforma-
tions within the other … In the Matrix, a stranger sprouts, necessary
to subjectivity and creativity; a stranger without whom the human
matrixial stratum of subjectivization cannot be created or creative; a
stranger without whom I will not co-emerge. If I attack, if I expel or
swallow the stranger, it is me who will be reduced; it is me who will

be impoverished in our unconscious matrixial borderspace; it is me
who will freeze the becoming-threshold of borderlines, block their
conductivity and turn them into fixed frontiers. (ibid.:154)
This matrixial ethics directed my approach to the author, text, culture, and
society of Les Rapaces. I approached the text not as the knowledgeable expert
keen to determine a singular, correct equivalent translation, but rather as a
participant in a space of learning, where definitive mastery is neither desir-
able nor possible. For instance, if, as I explain below, I brought Kreyòl out of
the French text this was as much an effect of the audience I was writing for, a
matrixial listening, as my own competencies and positionality.
A matrixial approach recognizes the effects of translation as they relate
to the translator, as well as the translation, and in this sense a metramorphic
consciousness accords well with the direction Carol Maier proposes in her
article on ‘The Translator as Theôros’ (2006). Countering conventional mod-
els and ethics of translation that strive to erase the translator, to neutralize all
signs of her presence, to, in effect, ignore the synaptic gap of the translator as
actor in the translational exchange, Maier has been one of the most articulate
voices calling for acknowledgement of the translator’s person in the process.
Maier’s contribution is distinctive in that while other scholars have sought
to recognize the translator’s agency in terms of ideological investments, she
draws attention to affective components in the process. Maier’s exploration
of the visceral violence that translations may imprint on the translator’s body
further explores the notion that translations transform not only texts, but also
translators. Following the concerns of this paper, we might then ask in what
ways does translation have a violent, “often unsettling effect” on a translator?
(ibid.:163) Maier’s interest in the impact of the translation activity not just on
the text, its source or receiving cultures, but also on the mediator, implies that
there is a violence in ensuring that the translator remain invisible.
Returning to my translation of Les Rapaces, I ask then, what does it do
to me to translate a scene in which a starving child has his toe chewed by a
rat? How am I implicated in and affected by the interrogation session of a
brutal, sadistic torture scene? Moreover, how am I to position myself within
the profession in the inclusion of two interpreters who mediate blood deals
between the Americans and Haitian officials? In the negotiation over the price
of cadavers, the interpreter’s body is the essential channel for clinching the
deal. What deals am I making as translator of this text and with whom? In my
reflections on these experiences in a scholarly article, is it possible to write “in
the airplane as I left Haiti I cried” (Shread 2010:123)? If it is strange, what is
Carolyn Shread 65
it in that effect that is unacceptable to academia? In other words, beyond the

question of my initial positionality, perhaps a more pertinent question is: who
do I become in the process of translating this text?
Translation implies movement and change – not only for the text, but also
for the translator. In the course of this translation, I went to Haiti to participate
in the International Conference on Caribbean Literature in 2006 and in 2008
for the Haitian Studies Association. Knowing that this contact was essential, I
went to Haiti despite State Department warnings about the security situation,
advice to avoid ‘non-essential’ travel, the U.N. tanks of the MINUSTAH forces
deployed to quash unrest, and a spate of kidnapping. I was therefore forced to
personally entertain the threat of potential of violence. Of course, this remains
a relatively modest violence when compared, for instance, to interpreters in
war zones, but nonetheless, it also runs counter to the image of the neutral,
disengaged, disembodied translator. Translating Les Rapaces I become im-
plicated in the violence faced by many in Haiti and my global sensibilities
are altered and realigned in solidarity, for instance through a regular financial
commitment to support Dr Farmer’s Partners in Health initiative,17 and through
personal connections with individuals I met in Haiti and collaborated with in
the translation project.
The concern to integrate the translator into our analysis of violence brings
me back to Baker’s work in Translation and Conflict. Baker’s argument
rehabilitates the literary pursuits we might ignore in a more pragmatically
engaged study of violence. Using narrative theory, Baker accounts for the ways
in which a literary understanding of the workings of discursive structures is
relevant to the practical negotiation of embodied violence. She explains “how
the discursive negotiation of conflictual and competing narratives is realized
in and through acts of translation and interpreting” (2006:1). Realizing the
value of entering into these narratives, we appreciate that translation may
protect us against what Baker, citing Lukes, refers to as “the most effective
and insidious use of power”, namely, “to prevent … conflict from arising in
the first place” (ibid.).
It is precisely due to its recognition of the unavoidable imperative to con-
front similarities and differences – to allow for conflict – that translation is
not condemned to ethnocentric violence, but also offers a means of redirecting
violence. This shift in perspective is enabled by Baker’s argument that narra-
tives do not simply represent reality; rather, they are an important constitutive
force. The narrative theory that Baker proposes argues that “because narratives
17
For more information about Partners in Health, visit: http://www.pih.org/home.
html.
are continually open to change with our exposure to new experience and
new stories, they have ‘significant subversive or transformative potential’”
(ibid.:3). One of the key decisions then becomes not so much the issue of style
or equivalent terms, but the far larger question of which narratives we will tell
and, as translators, who we tell them to and for.18
Translating Vieux-Chauvet’s Les Rapaces for the diasporic community
in the United States, and more specifically, for second-generation Haitian
Americans who do not read French, my purpose is to supplant the negative
stereotypes that oppress Haitians in the United States with a transformational
fable that extends the tradition of the Haitian Revolution through an affirmative
view of a determination to effect change in the face of corruption and violence.
If the translation succeeds in effecting this shift in narratives even slightly, it
will have effected the type of narrative transformation Baker identifies as the
power of translation.19 Our narratives, just like our identities, are plastic, open
to reformulation, and if we are willing, open to Tzimtzum, open to entering
into metramorphic exchanges.
Baker’s claim to narrative brokering is empowering for translators, not
only in terms of their agency and the goals of their actions, but also because
she argues that all forms of translation and interpreting – literary as well as
pragmatic – are engaged in the process of producing and contesting narratives.
Even as translators and interpreters adopt an activist role that recognizes their
agency, their ethical responsibility, and the becoming function of the act of
translating, Baker urges them not to forgo an engagement with literature, as
one of the most profound means of developing a sensitivity to narrative and
to the processes of interpretative manipulation. She argues that:
Narrative theory recognizes that undermining existing patterns of

domination cannot be achieved by concrete forms of activism alone
– demonstrations, sit-ins, civil disobedience – but must involve a
direct challenge to the stories that sustain these patterns. As language
mediators, translators and interpreters are uniquely placed to initiate
this type of discursive intervention. (ibid.:6)
Vieux-Chauvet’s allegorical tale may be understood as her determination to

alter some of the dominant narratives about Haiti. Just as Michel’s manuscript
provokes the minister to abandon the narrative of the powerful in favour of
18
For further elaboration of Baker’s narratological approach to translation, see
Baker (2005).
19
My article in the Journal of Haitian Studies analyzes narrative reworking of
predominant stereotypes of Haitians within the United States (Shread 2008b).
Carolyn Shread 67
the disempowered, Vieux-Chauvet’s text is intended to revamp its readers’

visions through its portrayal of the structural violence oppressing the poor in
Haiti and the possibility for effecting change through solidarity. My translation
seeks to extend the transformative narrative into a transnational context that
may contribute to the change she hopes to promote.
It should be clear then that I am not interested in presenting a discourse that
identifies the challenges of the translation and its inevitable losses, cultural or
linguistic, nor in explaining how I sought to compensate for losses to mitigate
the violence of the translating act. Rather, I wish to talk about how the French
text of Les Rapaces was regenerated in its English translation as an instance
that may help reformulate our assumptions about what translation does.
One example of translation as plastic regeneration is the metramorphic
accessing of the Kreyòl that had been suppressed in the French, even when
it was the very air and matter of the text. Translation re-engenders through
the creation of new relational exchanges. In this case, while the ‘source’ text
all but excluded Kreyòl – even if it is “the language spoken by 100% of the
Haitian population, and the only language spoken by 80% of its citizenry”
(Hoffman 1999:58) – the translation saw Kreyòl reemerge in the English
text.20 While initially it was simply the poor ‘mèsi’ of a blind girl given a
dollar for her song by an American tourist, eventually Kreyòl found its way
back into the text from which it had been silenced by the author writing in
a culture in which the dominance of France still produced significant impe-
rializing effects despite two hundred years of independence. This linguistic
transformation, the Kreyòl that appeared within the English text in proverbs
and common expressions, the language handed down through generations
and still present in the code-switching practices of many Haitian American
communities, was an effect of writing for the Haitian American audience
who might not know French, but who could very well be familiar with
Kreyòl. In ‘Je voyage en français’, Dany Laferrière’s contribution to Michel
Le Bris and Jean Rouaud’s manifesto Pour une littérature-monde, which
proposes that the term ‘Francophone’ be replaced by ‘world literature in
French’ in order to abandon the colonial legacy and claims of France to the
French language, the narrator’s niece moves “de l’anglais au créole comme
on change de vitesse” (2007:89).21
The metramorphic emergence of Kreyòl brings us back to the discussion
of Žižek at the opening of the article. Žižek is by no means the only person to
argue that language is violent. Jean-Jacques Lecercle’s book The Violence of
20
For a further discussion of this process, see Shread (2009).
21
‘from English to Kreyòl as if she were simply shifting gears’.
Language (1996) takes the notion as its title, and indeed in The Transla-
tor’s Invisibility Venuti took Lecercle’s concept of a textual “remainder”
to advocate translations that are disruptive of hegemony (Venuti 1995). In
place of fluent translation, which he views as doing violence to the source
by making the foreign familiar, Venuti envisages a reading experience that
violently unsettles the assumptions of the home culture, advocating specific
translation strategies such as foreignization to foster “resistancy” in the
text. Adopting Philip Lewis’s notion of abusive fidelity, Venuti looks for
ways to shift the impact of violence away from the source culture and onto
the target culture, or from the abused onto the abuser. This approach was
used successfully and creatively by some feminist translators, for instance
Françoise Massardier-Kenney added Wolof in her English translation of
Madame de Staël’s all-French Mirza (1994) to counter the colonial legacy
of France.
However, if we look at the effect of Kreyòl in an English translation read
by Haitian Americans, the introduction of a third, suppressed language is
very different. Kreyòl does not so much alienate its readers as give them a
means of reconnecting with a heritage they cannot access. In other words,
the assumed violence of foreignizing is entirely dependent on its readers
(indeed, it is Venuti’s exclusion of minority readers that is violent). In this
instance, one might also say that it is the alienation of the ‘original’ French
text in a language that remains the buttress of the elite, the privilege of
education and the purview of bourgeois class – in a word, the long-term
consequences of colonization that is violent. Again, in Laferrière’s story,
the niece makes it very clear what French is to her: it’s the language of
power, status, seduction: “je ne vais pas gaspiller mon français avec les
amies, je ne l’utilise qu’au travail ou si je veux impressionner un homme”
(2007:89).22 Describing the linguistic situation of Haiti, and the privileged
role of French that oppresses the mass use of Kreyòl, Erik Jacobson has
argued: “these language policies keep the working masses in their place
just as effectively as a gun” (2003:14). To this violent situation, translation
can bring healing by gesturing towards a restoration of popular speech.
Ettinger’s theory of matrixial consciousness is very much concerned with
the therapeutic potential of metramorphic exchange; in re-engendering
Kreyòl within the English translation, we have an example of how such
healing may be produced by the act of translation.
22
‘And what about French then? I ask at point blank range. What? She laughs,
I’m not gonna waste my French on my girlfriends. I only use it at work or if I
want to impress a guy.’
Carolyn Shread 69
Conclusion
In discussing the question of violence and translation with reference to the
translation of Marie Vieux-Chauvet’s Les Rapaces, this article has sought
to give up a sense of responsibility predicated on the translator’s guilt and
replace it with a more optimistic view that translators are not condemned to
committing ethnocentric violence, nor entrenched in metaphors that speak of
translation as an inherently violent act, but that this long derided profession
is critical to undertaking negotiations of similarities and difference and the
conflicts that ensue. I sought to demonstrate some of the many ways in which
translation can be used to contest violence, as well as explaining how, from
the perspectives of plasticity and metramorphosis, violence becomes one of
the objects of translation, rather than its condition.
Works cited
Abbott, Elizabeth (1991) Haiti: An Insider’s History of the Rise and Fall of the
Duvaliers, New York: Simon & Schuster.
Arendt, Hannah (1970) On Violence, New York: Harcourt, Brace & World.
Baker, Mona (2005) ‘Narratives in and of Translation’, SKASe Journal of Transla-
tion and Interpretation 1(1): 4-13.
Baker, Mona (2006) Translation and Conflict: A Narrative Account, London:
Routledge.
Bell, Beverly (2001) Walking on Fire: Haitian Women’s Stories of Survival and
Resistance, Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Chancy, Myriam (1997a) Framing Silence: Revolutionary Novels by Haitian
Women, New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.
------ (1997b) Searching for Safe Spaces: Afro-Caribbean Women Writers in exile,
Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
Charles, Carolle (1995) ‘Gender and Politics in Contemporary Haiti: The Du-
valierist State, Transnationalism, and the Emergence of a New Feminism
(1980-1990)’, Feminist Studies 21(1): 135-64.
------ (2003) ‘Popular Imageries of Gender and Sexuality: Poor and Working-Class
Haitian Women’s Discourses on the Use of their Bodies’, in Linden Lewis
(ed.) The Culture of Gender and Sexuality in the Caribbean, Gainesville, FL:
UP of Florida, 169-89.
Cottenet-Hage, Madeline (1984) ‘Violence Libératoire, Violence Mutilatoire dans
Amour de Marie Chauvet’, Francofonia 6: 17-28.
Cronin, Michael (2003) Translation and Globalization, London, Routledge.
Dash, J. Michael (1997) Haiti and the United States: National Stereotypes and
the Literary Imagination, New York: St Martin’s Press.
Ettinger, Bracha Lichtenberg (1996) ‘Metramorphic Borderlinks and Matrixial
Borderspace’, in John Welchman (ed.) Rethinking Borders, London: Macmil-
lan, 125-59.
Farmer, Paul (1996) ‘On Suffering and Structural Violence: A View from Below
(How Poverty Influences Suffering)’, Daedalus 125(1): 261-84.
Heckenbach, Ida Eve (1998) ‘La Violence et le discours antillais au féminin: Une
approche à la littérature des Caraïbes’, LittéRéalité 10(1): 37-46.
Hoffman, Léon-François (1999) Haitian Fiction Revisited, Colorado: Passeggiata
Press.
Jacobson, Erik (2003) ‘Critical Sociolinguisitics in the Adult ESOL Classroom’,
Radical Teacher 68: 13-17.
Jean-Charles, Régine (2006) ‘They Never Call it Rape: Critical Reception an
Representation of Sexual Violence in Marie Vieux-Chauvet’s Amour, Colère,
Folie’, Journal of Haitian Studies 12(2): 4-21.
Laferrière, Dany (2007) ‘Je voyage en français’, in Michel Le Bris and Jean
Rouaud (eds) Pour une littérature-monde, Paris: Gallimard, 87-101.
Lecercle, Jean-Jacques (1996) La violence du langage, Paris: Broché.
Maier, Carol (2006) ‘The Translator as Theôros: Thoughts on Cogitation, Figura-
tion and Current Creative Writing’, in Theo Hermans (ed.) Translating Others,
Manchester: St. Jerome Publishing, 163-79.
Malabou, Catherine (2005) La Plasticité au soir de l’écriture: Dialectique, de-
struction, deconstruction, Paris: Éditions Léo Scheer.
Malabou, Catherine (2009/2011) Changing Difference: The Question of the Feminine
in Philosophy, translation of Changer de différence: Le féminin et la question
philosophique, 2009, Trans. Carolyn Shread, Cambridge: Polity Press.
------ (2009/2012) Ontology of the Accident: An essay on Destructive Plasticity,
translation of Ontology de l’accident : essai sur la plasticité destructrice, 2009,
Trans. Carolyn Shread, Cambridge: Polity Press (forthcoming).
------- (2010) Plasticity at the Dusk of Writing: Dialectic, Destruction, Deconstruc-
tion. Trans. Carolyn Shread, New York: Columbia University Press.
N’Zengou-Tayo, Marie-José (1998) ‘Fanm Se Poto-Mitan: Haitian Woman, the
Pillar of Society’, Feminist Review 59: 118-42.
Scharfman, Ronnie (1996) ‘Theorizing Terror: The Discourse of Violence in
Marie Chauvet’s Amour, Colère, Folie’, in Mary Jean Green, Karen Gould,
Micheline Rice-Maximin, Keith L. Walker and Jack A. Yaeger (eds) Postco-
lonial Subjects: Francophone Women Writers, Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 229-45.
Shread, Carolyn (2008a) ‘Metamorphosis or Metramorphosis?: Towards A Femi-
nist Ethics of Difference in Translation’, Traduction, Terminologie, Redaction
20(2): 213-42.
Carolyn Shread 71
------- (2008b) ‘Translating Marie Vieux-Chauvet’s Les Rapaces for a Transna-

tional Haïti’, Journal of Haitian Studies 14(2): 86-106.
------- (2009) ‘La Traduction métramorphique: Entendre le kreyòl dans la traduc-
tion anglaise des Rapaces de Marie Vieux-Chauvet’, Palimpsestes 22.
------- (2010) ‘Decolonizing Paratexts: Re-Presenting Haitian Literature in English
Translation’, NeoHelicon: Special issue on the Poetics of the Paratext 37(1):
113-25.
Solomon, Jon (2009) ‘Translation, Violence, and the Heterolingual Intimacy: The
Biopolitics of Translation’, EIPCP website: http://translate.eipcp.net/transver-
sal/1107/solomon/en [last accessed 25 June 2011].
Staël, Germaine de (1994) ‘Mirza, or Letters of a Traveller’. Trans. Françoise
Massardier-Kenney, in Doris Y. Kadish and Françoise Massardier-Kenney (eds)
Translating Slavery: Gender and Race in French Women’s Writing, 1783-1823,
Kent: Kent State University Press.
Tanner, Laura (1994) Intimate Violence: Reading Rape and Torture in Twentieth-
Century Fiction, Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Venuti, Lawrence (1995) The Translator’s Invisibility, London: Routledge.
------- (1996) ‘Translation as a Social Practice: or, The Violence of Transla-
tion’, in Marilyn Gaddis Rose (ed.) Translation Perspectives IX: Beyond the
Boundaries of Translation Spectrum, Binghamton: Center for Research in
Translation, 195-213.
Vieux-Chauvet, Marie (1968) Amour, colère et folie, Paris: Gallimard.
------- (1986) Les Rapaces, Port-au-Prince: Henri Deschamps.
------- (2005) Amour, colère et folie, Paris: Maisonneuve & Larose.
------- (2009) Love, Anger, Madness. Trans. Rose-Myriam Rejouis and Val Vinokur,
New York: Random House.
Žižek, Slavoj (2008) Violence, New York: Picador.
Two in Translation
The Multilingual Cartographies of Néstor Perlongher
and Caio Fernando Abreu
CHRISTOPHER LARKOSH
Abstract: This essay discusses the problematics of literary

translation and transcultural communication in the literary
and cultural production of late twentieth-century Brazil, es-
pecially in the works of the Brazilian novelist and journalist
Caio Fernando Abreu and the exiled Argentine poet, essay-
ist and urban anthropologist Néstor Perlongher. Through a
comparative analysis of common themes in their writing, such
as multilingualism, male homosexuality and hiv/Aids, a trans-
national dialogue emerges that allows for a more nuanced
and informed discussion of sexual subalternity in translation
studies, above all in its implications regarding the ethical
imperative of cross-identification for work in transcultural
communication.
Público: Ana Cristina, você usa muito inglês, não é?

Ana C.: É, atravessa, de vez em quando.
Público: É, as vezes, atravessa até o leitor, que fica meio embananado,
não sabe onde fica ... É um meio de afastar o leitor, um meio de afas-
tamento, ou é uma coisa natural?
Ana C.: Mas eu acho que é tal coisa do primeiro contato. Acho que
intimida no primeiro contato. Mas depois ... o inglês está tão dentro
da vida da gente. Letra de música, o rock, “baby” ... O inglês se in-
corporou um pouco, ele entrou na vida da gente.
(Cesar 1993:206-07) 1
1
‘Audience: Ana Cristina, you use a lot of English, don’t you?
Ana C.: I do; it causes problems at times.
Audience: It does; sometimes even for the reader who ends up feeling confused
and doesn’t know where he is. Is it a way to distance the reader, or is it something
natural?
Ana C.: Well I think that’s something that might happen at first. I think it can be
intimidating at the beginning. But then … English has worked its way into our lives
so much. Music lyrics, rock, “baby” … English has become a part of us, has entered
into our lives’ (All translations in this essay, if not stated otherwise, are my own).
Este livro de poemas, que ia se chamar O EX-ESTRANHO, expressa,

na maior parte de seus poemas, uma vivência de despaisamento,
o desconforto do not-belonging, o mal-estar do fora-do-foco, os
mais modernos dos sentimentos. Nisso, cifra-se, talvez, sua única
modernidade.
(Leminski 1996:19) 2
Let us begin in this most vertiginous of linguistic spaces; it is here that language
resurfaces continually, not from within the established territory of any single
ethnic group, but from the dispersed and unstable points of cross-cultural
contact. In this interstitial space, communication arises out of difference,
as part of a translingual practice that predates the transition to transnational
economic blocs common both in the Southern Cone of South America and
elsewhere. This language is different, as it is precisely this sort of literary work,
one that renews not only a discussion of cultural difference in Latin America
as a whole, but also points toward the challenges of mediation in this period
of increased intercultural transit.
Of course, one could argue that this is the same with any text, even
those written within the strict confines of the grammar and literary tradi-
tion established by any national academy of language. Indeed, multilingual
writing is a sort of “aesthetic information” (Campos 1992:32-34), one
which serves in late twentieth-century Brazil not merely to add a touch of
cosmopolitan erudition to academic discourse, but often, as the poet Paulo
Leminski states in his introduction to the collection of poems O ex-estranho,
to underscore a deep-seated sense of “not-belonging” (1996:19), a term
which, although presumably foreign in this context, needs no translation
beyond that already provided in the original, and one whose combinations
and variations continue to multiply exponentially with continued global
migration and intercultural transfer. It is within this theoretical context that
I wish to explore an ‘other’ Brazil, one not completely Brazilian, whose
putative linguistic and cultural cohesiveness is undercut in a corpus of
recent writing in which any interpretation would act as negotiator, not of
a uniform Brazilian literary idiom, but also of overlapping cultural spaces
whose heterogeneity is manifested through markers of ethnicity, race, class,
gender and sexuality which can only be defined as ‘migrant’. Recognizing
2
‘This book of poetry, which I was going to call THE EX-STRANGER, ex-
presses in most of its poems the sense of separation from one’s own country, the
discomfort of not belonging, the malaise of feeling out of focus that is the most
modern of all sentiments. That might be the only place where its modernity might
be encoded.’
74 Two in Translation
and dialoguing with these migrant markers of alterity is an essential part of

the projects of translation and transcultural critique.
In this context of multilingual, transcultural contact I wish to discuss
the work of two authors writing in São Paulo in the 1980s and early to mid-
1990s: Néstor Perlongher and Caio Fernando Abreu. Perlongher: gay activist
and poet in his native Argentina, essayist, translator, sociologist and urban
anthropologist in his adopted Brazil. Abreu: self-described “ex-hippie” and
“ex-punk” (1982:46), not only an author of novels and short stories, a journalist
and translator in his native Brazil, but also a squatter and migrant worker in
Europe, occupying those vacant spaces in the economy, urban landscape and
intellectual discourse of metropolitan culture. It is said that the two knew one
another, a fact not surprising given the ways in which their spatial, literary,
linguistic and sexual itineraries seem to continually overlap and complement
each other, not only in their exploration of the margins of normative sexual-
ity, but also of esoteric spirituality (the syncretistic Santo Daime sect with its
ritual use of the drug ayahuasca, Afro-Brazilian religious rituals, astrology);
a shared fascination with alternative urban cultures; and multilingual literary
imaginations which continually link South America with the real and imagined
spaces of faraway foreign cultures, ones which might satisfy a shared desire
for escape from the officialized spaces of national language and culture dur-
ing a period of transition in the wake of military rule. Multilingual writing
marks not only a common experience with other languages, but also essential
differences: in contrast to Abreu and his contact with the English language
and culture shared with other writers of the period, such as Ana Cristina Cesar
and Paulo Leminski, Perlongher kept a curious distance from English; when
asked in an interview in which languages he reads, he responds: “En castel-
lano, portugués, francés. A contragusto, en inglés.” [In Castilian, Portuguese,
French. In English, however unwillingly] (Perlongher 1997:14). In Perlongh-
er’s delimitation of his own linguistic preferences, one might begin to discern
once again how each author traces a different personal relationship and limits
to a “translatable foreign” (Larkosh 1996), forming a continually varying set
of intersecting multilingual coordinates to create a map of multilingualism
both fluid and unique.
In this reading of literary crossed paths of Perlongher and Abreu in the
São Paulo of the 1980s and early 90s, one might note that both seem to
exemplify what the French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari
called “devenir autre”, a desire to surpass the limits of one’s own identity
in an act of cross-identification (1980). Although the traces of Deleuze
and Guattari’s thought are explicit in Perlongher’s writings, one would
be mistaken if one were to assume that Perlongher is a mere transferral
of French post-Structuralist thought to South America. As is evident as far

back as Oswald de Andrade, the deterritorializing vocabulary of migration,
flight and itineraries was in circulation in Brazil long before their incorpora-
tion in the work of Deleuze and Guattari, a fact which may have nonetheless
facilitated their work’s reception in South American intellectual circles in the
1980s and 90s. Such movement is legible in Perlongher’s self-imposed exile
from Argentina to Brazil in 1981, in his almost immediate adoption of the
Portuguese language, writing essays for Brazilian journals and newspapers
only a year after his arrival, translating poetry and essays on translation
by Haroldo de Campos and short stories by Murilo Rubião, among others.
His continuing dialogue with Deleuzo-Guattarian concepts in Brazil is
evident in the essay ‘Devenires minoritarios’, in which the elliptical list of
“becomings-other” from Mille plateaux – “devenir-intense, devenir-animal,
devenir imperceptible” (ibid.:284) – is extended in the Brazilian context to
implicate a whole series of “other becomings”:
Delínease ... el mapa de otro Brasil: Brasil de devenires minoritarios

– devenir negro, devenir mujer, devenir homosexual, devenir niño,
etc. –, de procesos de marginalización, de movilizaciones de sujetos
‘no-garantizados’ (lo que clásicamente se llamaría de ‘no-integrados’)
en tentativas de fuga que recorren y agitan el cuerpo social. (Perlongher
1997:67)
It is here that the map of another Brazil is traced out. A Brazil of

minoritarian becomings – becoming-black, becoming-woman,
becoming-homosexual, becoming-child, etc. – of processes of mar-
ginalization, of mobilizations of ‘non-guaranteed’ subjects (which
traditionally would be called ‘non-integrated’) in attempted lines of
flight that run through and agitate the social body.
As Perlongher points out, there is no need to “re-integrate” these minoritar-

ian becomings, as the marginal is in constant motion through the very centre
of what already has been mapped out as Brazil, constantly redrawing its
boundaries and complicating the distinctions which keep official conceptions
of national identity intact. One might also see in Perlongher’s first book of
poetry Austria-Hungría [Austria-Hungary] (1980), with its overlay of Central
Europe onto the lived space of the poet, as a prefiguration of his own transna-
tional nomadism between Argentina and Brazil. Argentina-Brazil: yet another
possible personal fiction of an imagined dual state which, like its historical
counterpart, maintains two official, if ever-overlapping, languages (to say
nothing of the countless unofficial ones). From those spaces which evade
the market and the state, however, a multiplicity of minor linguistic registers
resistant to incorporation emerge, and it is precisely these registers which are
of greatest interest to Perlongher.
One of the most intense explorations of suppressed spaces of language
might be found in the poem ‘Cadáveres’, written on a long-distance bus
between Buenos Aires and São Paulo in 1981. The poem takes shape out of
fragmented scenes of violence: dead bodies seem to be hidden within all social
institutions (schools, hospitals) and every possible scene of human contact,
and communication appears to be made impossible by the fear of being the
next dead body, and each scene punctuated by the inescapable refrain: “Hay
Cadáveres” [There are cadavers]. This refrain becomes doubled in in the sub-
sequent bilingual edition entitled Lamê with the translation of Josely Vianna
Baptista on the opposite page, much as a witness to a call for help (1994:78-
109). The collection also contains a poem by Haroldo de Campos written for
Perlongher; departing from the same cry of “Hay cadáveres” it also converts
this cry into a multilingual form of political denunciation: “hay cadáveres
canta néstor/perlongher/e está morrendo e canta/hay” [there are cadavers/ sings
nestor/perlongher/and he is dying and sings/ay] (ibid.:15). While a transborder
condemnation of military regimes may be the most immediate layer of inter-
pretation, one might also read in this denunciation the impulse towards the
creation of a more complex post-authoritarian transnational culture in his later
work, as in poems from the collection entitled Alambres [Wires] (1987c).
Perlongher is not the only outsider in transit here: “O gaúcho Caio Fern-
ando Abreu,” as he is called on the back cover of Os dragões não conhecem o
paraíso (1988), although no foreigner in the official sense, remains a cultural
border dweller long after his departure from his home in the southern Brazilian
state of Rio Grande do Sul for São Paulo in 1968: a listener not only to Brazil-
ian popular music from Nara Leão to Caetano Veloso along with international
stars such as Janis Joplin and the Beatles, but also to the boleros and tangos
of the Spanish-speaking countries to the South. Abreu combines a vocabulary
and grammar common to both sides of the southern Brazilian border with the
English phrases of an increasingly international pop culture. This disparate
set of cultural references is embodied in the narrator/protagonist of his novel
Onde andará Dulce Veiga? [Whatever happened to Dulce Veiga?], a journalist
who, in searching for a popular Brazilian singer from the 1960s, is confronted
with the fragmented narrative of his own life:
Entregando jornais em Paris, lavando pratos na Suécia, fazendo

cleaning-up em Londres, servindo drinques em Nova York, tomando
ácido na Bahia, mastigando folhas de coca em Machu Picchu, nadando

nos açudes límpidos do Passo da Guanxuma. Minha vida era feita de
peças soltas como as de um quebra-cabeças sem molde final. Ao acaso,
eu dispunha peças. Algumas chegavam a formar quase uma história,
que interrrompia-se bruscamente para continuar ou não em mais três
ou quatro peças ligadas a outras que nada tinham a ver com aquelas
primeiras. Outras restavam solitárias, sem conexão com nada em volta.
À medida que o tempo passava, eu fugia, jamais um ano na mesma
cidade, eu viajava para não manter laços – afetivos, gordurosos, – para
não voltar nunca, e sempre acabava voltando para cidades que já não
eram as mesmas, para pessoas de vidas lineares, ordenadas, em cujo
traçado definido não haveria mais lugar para mim. (1990:56)
Delivering newspapers in Paris. Washing dishes in Sweden, cleaning

up in London, serving drinks in New York, dropping acid in Bahia,
chewing coca leaves in Machu Picchu, swimming in the limpid pools
of Passo da Guanxuma. My life was made up of stray pieces like a
puzzle without a final shape. I randomly put down pieces. Some of
them almost came to form a kind of story, one that was brusquely in-
terrupted only to continue with three or four more pieces connected to
others that had nothing to do with the first ones. Still others remained
alone, disconnected to anything around them. To the extent that time
passed, I fled, never more than a year in the same city, I travelled in
order not to maintain any dense, emotional ties, never to return, and I
always ended up returning to cities that were no longer the same, for
people with linear, orderly lives, inside of whose well-defined outline
there would be no more room for me.
These pieces of life – places, times – appear to be part of a puzzle (a world

map? an acid trip?), but the pieces do not fit together, appearing to be in fact
from a number of different puzzles from different places with instructions in
different languages. The attempt to map out (or “clean up”?) the narrative
of one’s own life with the help of these random pieces is thus made nearly
impossible by the fact that the disparate places on this personal itinerary are
not connected by any kind of conventional, ‘linear’ logic. The non-linearity
of such experience suggests that it fragments the text which results from it to
such an extent that, were it to appear, it would be illegible, incomprehensible,
not ‘literature’ in the customary sense. This is nonetheless the way in which
the personal cartographies of the multilingual writer appear to come into
being: with a limited range of possible mappings, given that much of one’s
personal experience proves untranslatable into a single language or impossible
to transpose to a single place. The narrator thus attempts to give one possible
explanation for the incomprehension of multilingual, nomadic border-crossers
within the series of sedentary, national and monolingual spaces through which
they inevitably pass. It is interesting that Abreu associates this sense of spatial
diffusion with a flight from affective and discursive connections as well, as
if his disconnected relationship with space were the very model of that with
writing and feeling.
Within this migratory fascination with divergent cultural spaces, there is
also a continual return home; in the story from the collection Ovelhas negras
[Black Sheep] (1995) entitled ‘Introdução a Passo da Guanxuma’, [Introduc-
tion to Passo da Guanxuma], Abreu attempts his own personal cartography of
a small town on the Brazilian pampas whose identity is continually marked
by the proximity of the border. Imagining it photographed from above, the
town appears as “uma aranha inofensiva, embora louca, com suas quatro patas
completamente diferentes” [a harmless little spider, albeit a crazy one, with
four completely different legs] (ibid.:68), each stretching not only towards
the national borders of Argentina and Uruguay, but towards other more invis-
ible borders with other equally foreign spaces: the red-light district, or poor
neighbourhoods. These incongruous borders of national and sexual identity are
also underscored in the story from the collection Morangos mofados [Spoiled
Strawberries] (1982) entitled ‘Sargento Garcia’, [Sgt. Garcia], a portrait of
a military recruitment officer during the dictatorship whose life has been
dedicated to policing this national border, one complicated nonetheless by
the eruption of his own homosexuality in his encounter with a boy called for
military service. The language used by the officer during their sexual encounter
attempts to draw a clear distinction between them: “Seu puto – ele gemeu.
Veadinho sujo. Bichinha louca” [Faggot, he moaned. Dirty queer. Crazy little
queen] (ibid.:84). His apparently abusive language is also intended to police
a border: that between the pathological (dirty, crazy, effeminate) ‘faggot’ and
the ‘real man’, an identity position also considered under continual threat.
In spite of this official language, however, the scene is much different, one
that belies those clear distinctions that the border cannot maintain. Although
the boy’s first sexual experience results from an act of apparent institutional
violence, he nonetheless appears to take some satisfaction from revealing, if
only to himself in a fleeting moment, a break in the flawless image of state
power and its ability to exercise absolute authority over people and space
through language.
Thus, in this transit between the dispersed references of Abreu’s stories,
one is at once in/between the ‘real-and-imagined’ spaces of Brazil and off the
map entirely; this is no doubt the closest one ever comes to fulfilling Abreu’s
wish expressed in the biographical note to Morangos mofados: “descobrir

um jeito de mudar, rapidinho, de planeta” [discover a way to quickly change
planets] (ibid.:146). That is, if it is not that moment near the end of his semi-
autobiographical London diary Lixo e purpurina, published in Ovelhas negras,
when the narrator records his reactions aboard an Aerolineas Argentinas flight
home to Brazil:
Peço a aeromoça algumas revistas ou jornais brasileiros. Ela me traz

uma Manchete. Misses, futebol, parece horrível. Então sinto medo. Por
trás do cartão-postal imaginado, sol e palmeiras, há um jeito que me
aterroriza. O deboche, a grossura, o preconceito. (1995:134)
I ask the stewardess for a couple of magazines or newspapers from

Brazil. She brings me a copy of Manchete. Beauty queens, soccer: it
all seems horrible. I begin to get afraid. Behind the imaginary post-
card, sunshine and palm trees, there is something that terrifies me. The
mockery of it, the tastelessness, the prejudice.
The space to which he returns, Brazil, is dominated by a standardized mass-me-

dia bloc (Bloch?) whose images, although apparently innocuous at first glance,
are often as violent as the society they claim to represent. In comparison to
this officialized media simulacrum of an authoritarian Brazil, a beauty pageant
and sports spectacle which has yet to be interrupted, Abreu is literally ‘off
the map’, flying in a holding pattern in a tenuous cultural airspace that cannot
sustain him indefinitely. Perhaps one might find this sentiment reflected in the
two-line poem of Abreu’s friend, the poet and translator Ana Cristina Cesar,
entitled ‘Recuperação da Adolescência’ [Recuperation of Adolescence]: “é
sempre mais difícil/ ancorar um navio no espaço” [it is always more difficult/
to anchor a ship in space] (1982:57).
Mapping the Space of Urban Sexuality: O negócio do

michê
It is within this context of operating around, above and beyond the border,
complicating its terms and questioning its permanence, that one can also situate
Perlongher’s approach to language and minor registers of urban culture in his
study on male prostitution in São Paulo’s ‘Boca do Lixo’ entitled O negócio
do michê, originally presented as a master’s thesis at the University of Campi-
nas and eventually published in 1987. This literal ‘mouth of garbage’ is by
no means the ever-discriminating orifice of the Modernist urban intellectual,

which digests and transforms the great works of European culture as it devours
them. On the contrary, it is where the city’s human refuse is collected, chewed
up, devoured and spat out again; in short, the epicentre of urban marginaliza-
tion. Perlongher’s desiring cartographies are mappings of this otherness, and
in this way he performs an act of translation at its most radical and subversive,
one which, by operating at the very limits of the possible and making legible
voices never before recorded, reveals its potential of crosspollination between
the disciplines of urban anthropology and translation, if not also between the
world of the academic and that of the urban lumpen.
Perlongher stresses the multiplicity of this nomadic urban space, and the
complexity of its encoded spaces. He maps out the differences in the kinds of
prostitution practiced in the various zones of the city centre (1987a:111), and
finds at least 56 linguistic distinctions in use to denote differences between
michês based on age, social stratum and gender identification (ibid.:147).
Many of the terms of Yoruba origin, such as ‘Okô’, ‘erê’, ‘monokô’ etc.,3
actually need to be translated by Perlongher for his Brazilian readership: this
terminology, moreover, underscores once again the relationship between race,
culture and economic inequality fundamental to this cross-cultural transit,
as Perlongher notes that many of the michês in the areas studied were Afro-
Brazilians from lower-class families who had migrated from the Northeast,
whereas their clients were overwhelmingly white, upper-class Paulistas.4 In
any case, what is most important in this recognition of African cultural influ-
ence is how the idea of “minoritarian-becomings” is put into practice through
multilingual writing; in making the Brazilian reader more familiar with non-
Western elements of his/her own culture, which exist not in some distant,
impoverished part of the interior or in some unknown border region, but at
the very centre of an all-too-familiar urban cartography, Perlongher and Abreu
both illustrate how Brazilian culture continually both affirms and belies
its often claimed place within the limits of the West.5 In this context, the
3
‘Macho’, ‘boy’, ‘femme’, etc.
4
In Abreu’s work, one might see a parallel in Onde andará Dulce Veiga? in the
protagonist’s neighbours: a young black transvestite called Jacyr/Jacyra who fre-
quents São Paulo’s gay bas fond, and his mother Jandira, whose Afro-Brazilian
religious beliefs not only allow her to tell the narrator’s fortune, but even offer
explanations for her son’s sexuality.
5
In comparison with the terminological diversity which Perlongher uncovers in
his study, the Dictionary of Informal Brazilian Portuguese, although it lists at
least 42 different terms for male homosexuals, often treats them as synonyms;
for example, the term ‘o bofe’ is defined as “the male homosexual, ‘gay’ (same
as ‘a bicha’)” (Chamberlain and Harmon 1983:69), when in fact few Brazilians
question of Brazilian identity is no longer the oft-quoted Oswaldian dictum

“Tupi or not Tupi”,6 but perhaps Tupi and not Tupi, a variation which might
allow the possibility for continual transit between categories of cultural identity
and alterity once considered mutually exclusive.
What is perhaps most illustrative of the interplay between language, power
and sex in this continual remaking of sexual difference, however, is the at-
titude of one michê to his professional persona, also echoed in the subsequent
statement of a customer:
Eu não existo, michê não existe como pessoa. Só existe como fanta-
sia do cliente. Eu jamais estou sendo eu, estou sendo o personagem
que o cara quer que eu seja. O que eu faço é captar o que ele quer e
representar esse personagem. Existe uma tática para isso, é ficar frio,
mentalmente branco, sem pensar em nada, aí você vai pegando o que
ele quer. …
quando eu estou pagando um michê, não estou pagando uma pessoa,

estou pagando uma fantasia. Por isso é que eu pago, para viver uma
fantasia. (ibid:.225)
I don’t exist; a michê doesn’t exist as a person. He only exists as the

fantasy of the client. I am never being myself, I am being the character
that the guy wants me to be. What I do is capture what he wants and
portray that character. There is a tactic for that: it is to go cold, mentally
blank, without thinking of anything, that way you slowly get an idea
of what he wants …
When I am paying a michê, I am not paying a person, I am paying for

a fantasy. That’s why I pay, to live a fantasy.
The words of this michê and his customer echo a figure well known in the his-
tory of translation: that of the self-effacing, presumably ‘invisible’ translator.
In Perlongher’s study, another operative metaphor for cross-cultural contact
of any sexual orientation would consider these two terms synonyms; ‘o bofe’ is
considered more masculine, ‘active’, whereas ‘a bicha’ is associated with effemi-
nacy and the ‘passive’ role. This lexical conflation illustrates the constant danger
in any translation of cultural data from minority linguistic registers: the tendency
to reduce distinctions of identity, thereby erasing the subtle distinctions that are
at the very core of its signifying system.
6
This well-known phrase is from Oswald de Andrade’s 1928 Manifesto Antropóf-
ago, perhaps the most important literary manifesto in Brazilian history.
surfaces: as a kind of prostitution in which the cultural subject only exists in

so far as s/he fulfils the desires of his/her imagined clientele. Here, however,
gender identification is multiple, surpassing the conventional male-female
dynamic and casting the relations of power, economics and sexual politics in a
radically different, potentially destabilizing framework of disidentification, in
which the characteristics of the translator resemble those of an apparatus, “cold,
mentally blank”, invisibility functioning here not as a mere self-effacement,
but also as a vital means of self-protection in a potentially violent cultural
milieu. As Perlongher’s work in this other São Paulo affirms, the metaphors of
cultural identity are not always employed with the aim of definition, but once
again in an alternating and mobile strategy, a simultaneous being/non-being
(Tupi and not Tupi?) which allows greater space to manoeuvre in the violent
encounter with societal norms and values while evading, if never completely,
the repressive compartmentalizations of marginality. Obscurity is thus not
necessarily disappearance, but perhaps, if only at times, a tactic of recovering
and preserving one’s own voice as well.
“The Workers of Babel” and “the Beginning of Non-

Death”
In his essay ‘Estado, mercado, quem manda na arte?’ [State or market, Who
Rules in Art?] Paulo Leminski points to the increasing commodification of art:
“Entre o dirigismo ideológico do Estado e a sutil dominação do Mercado, não
sobra um lugar onde a arte possa ser ‘livre’. A não ser nos pequenos gestos
kamikazes, nas insignificâncias invisíveis, nas inovações formais realmente
radicais e negadoras” (1997:54).7 Once again Leminski formulates the essence
of his thought in foreign terms, this time in Japanese: this feudalistic act of
divine sacrifice, however, is no longer subordinate to the imperial desire for
capitalistic expansion, for its mission has now become invisible to state and
transnational market forces. For Leminski, the notion that art can ever be truly
“free”, as these ironic quotation marks may indicate, seems out of the ques-
tion, bound as it is to many of the same social and market forces which shape
translations. What Leminski foresees in this metaphor of the divine suicide
artist, whether “kamikaze” or “kamiquase” [demigod, semidivine] (1983:137),
is that within this ever-increasing commodification of human activity, the artist,
7
‘Between the ideological dirigisme of the State and the subtle domination of
the market, there is no space left in which art can be ‘free’. If not in the small
movements of the kamikaze, in those spaces of invisible meaninglessness, in those
formal innovations that are truly radical and negating’.
both as a potential creative force and body in crisis, can only trace an escape
route through potentially violent danger zones: the only integration possible
here, disintegration. In this context the words of the poet and translator Ana
Cristina Cesar take on an even darker meaning: “E suicidaram-se os operários
de Babel” [And the workers of Babel committed suicide] (1982:52).
Does multilingual writing truly border on the self-destructive? Despite the
globalizing trends in language visible in common usage and the media, the
official line, enshrined in the ideologies of national academies and institutions,
has never strayed far from that notion: foreign language, when not confined to
quotation marks in displays of cosmopolitan erudition, breeds contamination,
decay, death. And death indeed reappears – all too often, all too soon – on this
tableau of multilingual urban literary activity: not only Ana Cristina Cesar’s
suicide in 1983 and Leminski’s premature death from cirrhosis in 1989, but
those of Perlongher and Abreu, both of Aids, in 1992 and 1996 respectively.
Like the bodies in transit on Perlongher’s nomadic sexual cartographies, or
Abreu’s contaminated cultural migrants in the story ‘Linda, uma história
horrivel’ [Linda, a horrible story] (Abreu 1988), or the aforementioned novel
Onde andará Dulce Veiga?, the intersection of multilingual writing and sex
in the 80s and early 90s is likewise transformed into a suicide mission, played
out against the backdrop of the most desperate years, first of South American
dictatorship, and then of the hiv/Aids crisis.
In his book O que é Aids, Perlongher reminds us of Guattari’s observation
that if Aids had not surfaced upon a social body beginning to liberate itself
from the control mechanisms imposed upon it, something similar would have
to have been invented (Perlongher 1987b:92), with seropositive status perhaps
only the most recent addition to a series of future “minoritarian becomings”.
In Brazil as elsewhere in the late 90s, however, it is Aids itself which is slowly
being reinvented, as medical experts, scholars, people with hiv/Aids, and
those involved in the retransmission of cultural signals, whether as authors,
cultural critics or translators, began to transform how this disease and others
are experienced through language (Bessa 1997). One example is found in Caio
Fernando Abreu’s collection Ovelhas negras, one which he himself calls in a
1995 interview a “posthumous work”, given the fact that the press had cho-
sen to ignore the content of the book and focus almost exclusively upon the
author’s Aids diagnosis; he also views the book as a sort of “literary suicide”,
precisely because of the fact that many of these works had been rejected from
earlier collections because of editorial choices or press censorship.8 As in Dulce
8
This interview was published in the Brazilian newspaper Zero Hora on 31 May
1995.
Veiga, they were precisely those pieces of his literary life that did not belong
to any larger picture. In one story, entitled ‘Depois de agosto’ [After August],
two lovers, both hiv+, trace out the possibilities of an imagined future:
Talvez um voltasse, talvez o outro fosse. Talvez um viajasse, talvez

outro fugisse. Talvez trocassem cartas, telefonemas noturnos, domin-
icais, cristais e contas por sedex, que ambos eram meio bruxos, meio
ciganos, assim meio babalaôs. Talvez ficassem curados, ao mesmo
tempo ou não. Talvez algum partisse, outro ficasse. Talvez um perd-
esse peso, o outro ficasse cego. Talvez não se vissem nunca mais, com
olhos daqui pelo menos, talvez enlouquessem de amor e mudassem um
para a cidade do outro, ou viajassem juntos para Paris, por exemplo,
Praga, Pittsburg ou Creta. Talvez um se matasse, o outro negativasse.
Seqüestrados por um OVNI, mortos por bala perdida, quem sabe.
Talvez tudo, talvez nada. Porque era cedo demais e nunca tarde. Era
recém o início da não-morte dos dois. (1995:257)
Perhaps one would return, or the other would leave. Perhaps one would
travel, or the other would take off. Perhaps they would exchange letters,
phone calls at night or on Sundays, crystals and beads, by express mail,
for both were part wizard, part gypsy, part voodoo doctor. Perhaps they
would be cured, whether at the same time or not. Perhaps one would
leave, and the other would stay. Perhaps one would lose weight, and
the other would go blind. Perhaps they would never see each other
again, at least not with their eyes, perhaps they would go crazy from
love and one would move to the other’s city, or they would travel to-
gether, to Paris for example, Prague, Pittsburgh or Crete. Perhaps one
would kill himself, and the other would become negative. Kidnapped
by a UFO, killed by a stray bullet, who knows,
Perhaps everything, perhaps nothing. Because, for the two of them,

it was too early and never too late. It was only the beginning of their
non-death.
In mapping out the possible beginnings of “non-death”, Caio signals what is

at stake, not only in literature, but also in intercultural transfer, in the contin-
ued dissemination of possibilities too precious to be lost or obscured. This
ever-elliptical series of culturally divergent spaces which form the basis of a
future itinerary no longer appear as pieces of a non-existent picture or map;
on the contrary, they are connected by an ever-quickening communications
network, one not only technological, but mystical as well, one which reaches
beyond the control of any officialized monopoly to touch the limits of human
knowledge: be it in marginal cultures, in outer space, or in the truth told by
one’s own living body.
This horizon of possibility is also suggested in the climactic scene from
Onde andará Dulce Veiga? in which the narrator/protagonist, possibly hiv+,
finally catches up with the ageing star in a town in the North of Brazil. Here,
once again off the conventional map, solutions appear in the most unimagi-
nable of forms; not only pure ones, but also in continually evolving cocktails
and combinations:
Espiei um líquido amarelo, frio, denso, meio dourado. Tinha um cheiro

que lembrava tangerina, amêndoas, terra molhada, e a palavra exata
que me ocorreu foi: pungente. De alguma forma, doía.
-O que é isso?
-Um chá, só um chá. Toma, vai te fazer bem. ...
Eu bebi. Como se tivesse cola, visgo, o líquido escorregou com dificul-
dade pela garganta. Fechei os olhos, e senti os dedos de Dulce Veiga
fazendo o sinal da cruz na minha testa. Não como se eu morresse, mas
feito uma bênção, batismo. O gosto amargo permanecia na boca.
Abri os olhos. Ela tocava meus pés.
-Você está muito tenso. Estende o corpo, vou fazer uma massagem.
Ela tocou a planta dos meus pés descalços, na ponta dos dedos. ... Onde
pressionavam, doía terrívelmente.
O pior gosto do mundo. A pior dor do mundo. ...
[O]uvi sua voz cada vez mais baixa, ... aquela voz meio rouca ... essa
voz que não sabia mais de quem era, repetiu assim:
São tudo histórias, menino. A história que está sendo contada, cada
um a transforma em outra, na história que quiser. Escolha, entre to-
das elas, aquela que seu coração mais gostar, e persiga-a até o fim do
mundo. (1990:202-04)
I saw a yellow liquid, cold, thick, somewhat golden. It had a smell that
reminded me of tangerines, almonds, damp soil. The exact word that
I thought of for it was: pungent. In a way, it hurt.
-What is this?
-It’s tea, just tea. It’ll be good for you. ...
I drank it. It was like it had glue or resin in it, and I had trouble getting
it down. I closed my eyes, and felt Dulce Veiga’s fingers making the
sign of the cross on my forehead. Not like I was dying, but as a bless-
ing or a baptism. The bitter taste lingered in my mouth.
I opened my eyes. She was touching my feet.

-You’re very tense. Stretch out, I’m going to give you a massage.
She touched the soles of my bare feet, the tips of my toes ... Wherever
she pressed down, it hurt terribly.
The worst taste in the world. The worst pain in the world. ...
I heard her voice getting softer and softer ... that voice, somewhat
hoarse ... that voice, that I no longer knew whose it was, said over
and over:
They’re all just stories, my child. The story that is being told now is
transformed by each of us into another one, into whatever story we
want. From all of them, choose the one your heart wants most, and
pursue it to the end of the world.
Dulce’s cure is multiple: medicinal, physical, linguistic, spiritual. Her voice

is also multiple: disembodied, without fixed coordinates. As Dulce’s herbal/
verbal remedy suggests, somewhere, in the biological and cultural diversity
that is Amazonia, there may be a plant, person or language capable of curing
every human illness – that is, if they haven’t yet been burned or persecuted into
non-existence by the advance of national ‘monoculture’. Diversity, whether
biological, cultural or linguistic, in contrast to conceptions of it as contami-
nation, may in fact be the key to continued human survival. What remains is
not the aftertaste of the liquid remedy, but the words which underscore the
possibility of intervention in any process of historical transformation, be it
out of the figures of popular culture, or more esoteric sources of inspiration:
here both appear united in a single figure, one which is, for a brief moment of
contact, closer than any other.
Not Yet a Conclusion: On the Positives of Post-Identity

Although most would willingly concede that the tenuous promise of a literary
afterlife is a poor replacement for life itself, there are at least those among the
living who continue to return to the works of Perlongher and Abreu in an act
of artificial resuscitation always pending, one literally committed to memory.
This commitment to memory, which all too frequently arises only in the wake
of an author’s premature death, is visible in the recent resurgence of publica-
tion around the work of Perlongher in Argentina, with the publication of a
compilation of his essays (1997) and a collection of Argentine literary criti-
cism (Cangi and Siganevich 1996). The critical attempt, however, to ‘bring
home’ multilingual authors (e.g. the Polish immigrant to Argentina Witold
Gombrowicz, or the Argentine Manuel Puig, who spent years in Italy, the US,
Mexico and Brazil), often by overemphasizing their dead author’s ‘belonging’

within a national pantheon, is a risky enterprise at best, as it is precisely that
which does not translate into the national language which is often the point
of greatest complexity. Likewise, one example of that ‘other’ Perlongher, the
one never completely legible in Spanish, can be found in the essay ‘El deseo
de unas islas’ [The Desire for Some Islands], written originally in Portuguese
and subsequently translated into Spanish for publication in Argentina. In this
essay Perlongher discusses the sentiment among many homosexuals that they
have no homeland (“los homosexuales no tenemos patria”):
Apelación esta última que habría que pensar hasta qué punto es deseable
– o qué significa su deseo. Ya que si lo que se desea es un recocimiento
desde el poder, habrá tal vez que formar un bloque homogéneo que sea
reconocible como tal y que delimite claramente su frontera. De ahí el
enojo de cierto militante gay cuando yo confundí –¿inconcientemente?
– la consigna: no PT os gays tem [sic] vez (cantada en un acto público)
con otra: no PT as bichas tem [sic] vez. (1997:186-87)
As for this last assessment, one would have to ask to what extent it
is desirable – or what their desire means. Because if what one wants
is a form of recognition from power, it might be necessary to form a
homogeneous bloc that would be recognizable as such and would clearly
mark off its boundaries. For this reason, the anger of a certain gay militant
when I confused – unconsciously? – the Workers’ Party slogan “In the
PT gays have a chance” with “In the PT, fags have a chance.”
Simplified, uniform identities, like simplified translations, may initially facili-

tate basic comprehension, but what suffers ultimately from such simplifications
is the ability to capture those subtle distinctions that are the essence of a more
nuanced understanding. In the Spanish version of this essay, the slogans are left
in Portuguese, as if the author expected the reader/editor to have at least a basic
knowledge of the other language. Nonetheless, when the essay is published, not
only is this fragment transcribed incorrectly (as is, unfortunately, much of the
Portuguese in the edition) but a translation is attached in a footnote that differs
somewhat from the meaning in the original. In this footnote, the Portuguese
idiom ‘ter vez’ [to have a chance] is translated into Spanish as ‘tener voz’ [to
have a voice]. Perhaps not a major difference, but one considerable enough to
suggest that the nuances of what Perlongher is saying about the sexual and na-
tional identity are not being fully understood; it is clear that ‘Latin America’ is
far from being a zone of unified and transparent interlinguistic comprehension,
but the only thing worse than non-comprehension in translation is the mistaken
assumption, all too common in Spanish-Portuguese translation, that one does
understand when in fact one does not. But this is a secondary point: more
importantly, in using (accidentally on purpose?) the politically incorrect term
‘bicha’ [‘fag’, ‘queen’) instead of the more acceptable international borrowing
‘gay’ in quoting a Brazilian gay liberation slogan, Perlongher reaffirms that any
political advance limited to those who accept the rigid definitions of minority
identity, be they national, sexual or linguistic, remains incomplete.
One is reminded of the two protagonists from the short story in Morangos
mofados entitled ‘Aqueles dois’: Raul and Saul are migrants who have come
to work in São Paulo, one from the North of Brazil, the other from the South,
each apparently only partially aware of a mutual attraction which to others
seems obvious (Abreu 1982). Their migration to the city is thus not only geo-
graphical but also sexual, as both are ‘in transit’ out of a more accepted sexual
identity, be it an unquestioned heterosexuality or the closet, into one more
‘in synch with the times’: perhaps the ‘homosexuality’ of the post-Stonewall
international gay liberation movement, or perhaps that fluid ‘bisexuality’ so
in vogue during the 1970s and early 80s (Moriconi 1996:144). It hardly seems
to matter which model they might choose, however, as in the final scene, with
the two stepping into a taxi after being fired from their jobs, their former co-
workers jeering them from the window above, it appears that no definition of
sexual identity has in and of itself the power to diminish the possibilities of
violence in a potentially intolerant social milieu. But then again, that is not
how the story ends, as it is not over yet:
Ai-ai, alguem gritou da janela. Mas eles não ouviram. O táxi já tinha
dobrado a esquina.
Pelas tardes poeirentas daquele resto de janeiro, quando o sol parecia

a gema de um enorme ovo frito no azul sem nuvens no céu, ninguem
mais conseguiu trabalhar em paz na repartição. Quase todos ali dentro
tinham a nítida sensação de que seriam infelizes para sempre. E foram.
(Abreu 1982:135)
Ay-ay, someone taunted from the window. But they didn’t hear. The
taxi had already turned the corner.
Through the dusty afternoons of the end of that January, when the
sun seemed to be the yolk of an enormous fried egg on the cloudless
blue of the sky, no one was able to work in peace in the office. Almost
everyone there had the crystal-clear awareness that they would be

unhappy forever. And they were.
As Caio suggests, those unhappy souls on the inside ‘know who they are’;
indeed, they are possessed of an absolute certainty of self, one that nonetheless
appears to be of little consolation to them.
In this study I have attempted to offer some points of reference for a more
extended discussion of how authors, translators and others negotiate the
transfer of cultural material from beyond the margins of national language.
Some of the spaces which await transfer on this cultural map are not from
historically obsolete spaces, antipodal spaces of potential escape, or even that
beyond the nearest international border, but may in fact be closer to Perlong-
her’s and Abreu’s overlapping São Paulo cartographies. Even the postmodern
urban conduits/barriers of freeways, interurban ‘air bridges’, private security
systems, video surveillance cameras, media oligopolies and the Internet can-
not insulate cultural mediators completely from these ‘other’ urban spaces;
one can never guarantee, however, that the call to translate these spaces will
in fact be answered. In a cultural milieu characterized by discussions of glo-
balization, the cultural heterogeneity of Latin America and beyond, studies
of translation and/or transculturation in the context of ‘race’, ethnicity, class,
gender and sexuality, and a renewed commitment to subaltern studies, there is
continually more potential space being created for a discussion of the sort of
migrant identity I have attempted to map out here, in spite of the fact that the
role of sexual difference in the processes of translation, globalization and the
creation of urban space has often remained terra incognita for many academ-
ics. But then again, now may actually be the moment in which the expanding
dimensions of this discussion might re-engender a new series of sexualized
multilingual cartographies.
Works cited
Abreu, Caio Fernando (1982) Morangos mofados, São Paulo: Editora Brasiliense.
------ (1988) Os dragões não conhecem o paraíso, São Paulo: Companhia das
Letras.
------ (1990) Onde andará Dulce Veiga?, São Paulo: Companhia das Letras.
------ (1995) Ovelhas negras, Porto Alegre: Sulina.
Bessa, Marcelo Secron (1997) Histórias positivas: a literatura (des)construindo
a Aids, Rio de Janeiro: Record.
Campos, Haroldo de (1992) ‘Da tradução como criação e como crítica’, in Haroldo
de Campos Metalinguagem e outras metas, São Paulo: Editora Perspectiva,
4th edition.
Cangi, Adrián y Paula Siganevich (eds) (1996) Lúmpenes Peregrinaciones: en-
sayos sobre Néstor Perlongher, Rosario: Beatriz Viterbo.
Cesar, Ana Cristina (1982) A teus pés, São Paulo: Editora Brasiliense.
------ (1993) Escritos no Rio, São Paulo: Editora Brasiliense.
Chamberlain, Bobby J. and Ronald M. Harmon (1983) A Dictionary of Informal
Brazilian Portuguese, Washington: Georgetown UP.
Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari (1980) ‘10. 1730: Devenir-intense, devenir-
animal, devenir-imperceptible’, in Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari Mille
plateaux, Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 284-380.
Larkosh, Christopher (1996) ‘The Limits of the Translatable Foreign: Fictions of
Translation, Migration and Sexuality in 20th-Century Argentine Literature’,
Doctoral dissertation, University of California-Berkeley (unpublished).
Leminski, Paulo (1983) Caprichos e relaxes, São Paulo: Editora Brasiliense.
------ (1996) O ex-estranho. Eds. Alice Ruiz and Aurea Leminski. Curitiba:
Fundação Cultural de Curitiba; São Paulo: Iluminuras.
------ (1997) ‘Estado, mercado, quem manda na arte?’, in Alice Ruiz and Aurea
Leminski (eds) Ensaios e Anseios Crípticos, Curitiba: Pólo Editorial do
Paraná, 52-54.
Moriconi, Ítalo (1996) Ana Cristina Cesar: O sangue de um poeta, Rio de Janeiro:
Editora Relume Dumar/Prefeitura da Cidade do Rio de Janeiro.
Perlongher, Néstor (1980) Austria-Hungría, Buenos Aires: Tierra Baldía.
------ (1987a) O negócio do michê: a prostituição viril em São Paulo, São Paulo:
Editora Brasiliense.
------ (1987b) O que é Aids, São Paulo: Editora Brasiliense.
------ (1987c) Alambres, Buenos Aires: Edición Último Reino.
------ (1994) Lamê: Antología bilingüe español-portugués. Trans. Josely Vianna
Baptista, Belo Horizonte: Unicamp.
------ (1997) Prosa plebeya: Ensayos 1980-1992. Eds. Christian Ferrer y Osvaldo
Baigorria. Buenos Aires: Colihue.
The Creation of a ‘Lady’
Gender and Sexual Politics in the Earliest Japanese
Translations of Walter Scott and Charlotte Brontë
TAKAYUKI YOKOTA-MURAKAMI
Abstract: The Shogunate regime of sexuality divided women

into two categories: ji-onna (ordinary women; housewives,
marriageable women) and yujo (prostitutes/courtesans). The
former performed the household labour and reproductive
functions, and were thus separated from the amorous/sexual
activities fulfilled by the latter. The lady, or kajin, had become
a predominant object of literary/artistic representation in the
Edo period; at the same time, a female beauty was defined
by the term bijin, one that used to be synonymous with kajin.
By examining the Meiji translations of the poem The Lady
of the Lake and the novel Jane Eyre, this paper attempts to
analyze how ‘pre-modern’ and ‘modern’ sexual ideologies
negotiated with each other in Meiji-era literary discourse,
as well to demonstrate, through the history of the translation
of the English word ‘lady’, how the ‘old’ conception was
reconfigured and thus was able to survive. It also traces the
changing definitions and theories of translation in the 19th
and 20th centuries that influenced the development of the
conflicting gender politics embodied in the term kajin.
The ‘first’ Japanese translation of Walter Scott’s The Lady of the Lake appeared
in 1884, as Shunsō kiwa, ‘narrated’ (sanjutsu) by one of the most eminent
literati of the period, Hattori Seiichi, the author of the popular Tokyo shin
hanjō ki [The Chronicle of Rising Tokyo]. It is known that the translation
was actually completed by the eminent authors and future scholars of English
literature Takada Sanae, Tsubouchi Shoyo, et al. (Yanagida 1966:178).1 The
manuscript was eventually purchased by Hattori, who then proceeded to edit
and revise it considerably before publishing it.
1
The Japanese names in the article are given in the order of a family name,,
followed by a given name, without a comma in between. �acrons, indicating
long vowels in the personal names, are, as a rule, omitted.
92 The Creation of a ‘Lady’
Scholars are somewhat divided over whether to consider this edition the
first translation of Scott’s poem or some kind of adaptation; as far as the plot
is concerned, the translation differs rather significantly from the original. In
the preface, furthermore, the translator makes a perplexing comment that
he relied on the “theatrical libretto” for the translation. What the original
“libretto” that corresponded to The Lady of the Lake could have been remains
a mystery, especially in light of the fact that, in spite of the confession just
quoted, the translation is written in plain prose. This confusion in genre is
further complicated by the fact that in his introduction, Hattori valorizes the
‘Western’ literary principle of realism practiced in the genre of the novel
(i.e. not in theatrical texts, on which he had ostensibly based his transla-
tion). Apparently, adaptation between literary genres was something that
neither changed the essential nature of literary activities nor needed any
justification, and the indiscriminate treatment of various genres was thus
not particularly alarming.
�oreover, we also have to keep in mind that, until the 1890s, the distinction
between translation and adaptation was rather vague in Japan, just as it had
been in European cultures until the 17th and 18th centuries. The term hon’yaku
(translation) was often used to describe what the present-day scholar would
call an adaptation (hon’an). The term goketsu ryū (the heroic style) referred
to a relentlessly free translation, and it was not considered a derogatory term.
The translation of François Fénelon’s The Adventures of Telemachus, by Izawa
Shinzaburo, entitled Tetsuretsu kidan, which appeared in 1883, is normally
considered a landmark work, one which ushered in the principle of word-to-
word translation. Subsequently, this principle was more consciously followed
by the translator, �orita Shiken, whose style was termed shūmitsu tai (the
minute style), as opposed to the “heroic style” (Yanagida 1966:111-12). The
idea of absolute faithfulness to the original was first advanced in Japan by
Futabatei Shimei, a literary figure whose translations of Turgenev’s works
exerted a decisive influence on the emergence of modern Japanese literature.
In an interview, published as ‘The Standards of �y Translation’, he explains
his principles:
I have tried to convey the tone of the original, making light of not
even a single comma or a single period; if the original text had three
commas, I placed three commas in the translation; if the original had
one period, I placed one period. (1965:174)

This is, probably, why the translation is subtitled Taisei katsugeki [A Western
Drama].
Obviously, such a notion of translation emerged in parallel with the establish-

ment of the concept of literature itself as a valorized form of art, possessing a
value that should not be violated. On this point Futabatei remarked:
When Turgenev engaged himself in the literary production, he con-

sidered the work as something highly sacred. Therefore, translators
should also have the sense of reverence for his work. This is why I
believed that I should attach importance to a single letter and a single
phrase in the original. (ibid.:175)
Before the emergence of such an attitude, translators had the freedom to alter
the original as they wished, depending on various requirements – editorial,
literary, commercial, and so on. The first ‘translation’ of The Lady of the Lake
was completed according to this previous literary convention.
For this reason, up until the late 1880s translation in Japan hardly differed
from adaptation.3 �oreover, if we choose to judge Shunsō kiwa as not really
a translation but rather as an adaptation since it departs too freely from the
original, we are simply ascribing to the contemporary notion of translation.
Let us, then, more closely examine, the way in which such earlier transla-
tions departed from the original. The opening stanza of The Lady of the Lake
reads thus:
Harp of the North! That mouldering long hast hung

On the witch-elm that shades Saint Fillan’s spring,
And down the fitful breeze thy numbers flung,
Till envious ivy did around thee cling,
�uffling with verdant ringlet every string, –
O �instrel Harp, still must thine accents sleep?
3
Incidentally, such a pre-modern convention would be positively acknowledged
by the contemporary followers of Harold Bloom’s theory of “anxiety of influence”
or of Adaptation Studies. Linda Hutcheon writes: “[A case study to examine ad-
aptation] has tended to privilege or at least give priority (and therefore, implicitly,
value) to what is always called the ‘source’ text or the ‘original’ … The idea of
‘fidelity’ to that prior text is often what drives any directly comparative method
study. Instead, as I argue here, there are many and varied motives behind adapta-
tion and few involve faithfulness. Other earlier adaptations may, in fact, be just
as important as contexts for some adaptations as any ‘original’” (Hutcheon 2006:
xiii). Hutcheon’s scope, however, is limited more or less to the recent phenom-
ena of adaptation (for instance, the adaptation of literary works into films after,
naturally, the invention of cinematography). In spite of the recent enthusiasm for
Adaptation Studies, there still does not seem to be any study in Euro-American
scholarship that addresses this historical shift.
�id rustling leaves and fountains murmuring,

Still must thy sweeter sounds their silence keep,
Nor bid a warrior smile, nor teach a maid to weep?
(Scott 1905:1)
The opening stanza of the translation reads thus:
You people! Do you want to enjoy your freedom underneath the sun,
when the mist covers the mountain which looks like verdant, smiling
eyebrows, when a light breeze raises green, coquettish waves, when
cordial spring gives you neither chill or heat, when you find a fluttering
butterfly dancing elegantly in the shade of the willow branches as you
glance around through the spacious field and wander through it with-
out any restraint, and when nightingales sing as they please, perched
on the twigs in full blossom? Or do you want to experience endless
tedium in a miserable autumn setting, when in the cloudy shade of the
dim mountains, a dry, melancholic wind and desolate fallen leaves
involuntarily strike you as dreary, when all that is in your vision is just
an aid to increase your sorrow in vain, when a stray goose, wailing
among the clouds, merely reminds you that you yourself are all alone,
when a cricket cries muffled in the bush as if its mouth is gagged, and
when, as the field is severely frosted, the grass has completely withered
up and spring water flashes on the rocks, making a sorrowful sound?
(Scott 1884:2)4
Except for several words taken from the original (mountain, fountain, muf-
fle, shade, leaves, green, etc.), without which one might wonder if Hattori’s
rendition truly relies on Scott’s opening stanza, and for the general atmosphere
of the text, the two texts appear to have few points of correspondence. The
translator unrestrainedly adds various associations and connotations (a but-
terfly in the willow branches, a nightingale warps in the blossom, a wailing
goose, a muffled cricket, etc.).5 Some of them are purely ‘Oriental’ (a goose,
a cricket, etc.) to be found only in the literary vocabulary of the East (or to be
4
All translations, except where indicated, are my own.
5
An American researcher of early modern Japanese literature, �arleigh Ryan,
explains: “During the two years between the time Tsubouchi and Takada sold
the manuscript and its date of publication, Hattori revised the text considerably,
adding completely unrelated material, difficult Chinese words and phrases, and
revising the sequence” (1990:47). According to The Bibliography of Tsubouchi
Shoyo, “Shoyo translated 60-70 percent; Takada Sanae, 30-40 percent; Amano
Tameyuki translated a few poems in the Chinese style” (Takita 1937:131).
more exact, of Chinese high literature).6

The title itself is quite liberally rendered as Shunsō kiwa [A Unique Story
of the Vernal Window].7 This peculiar title, utterly unrelated to that of the
original, is actually in the matrix of the titles of narratives in the early years of
�eiji-era modernization (1868-1911), and thus quite normal in that respect. It
consists of four hieroglyphs (Shun-sō ki-wa), attesting to its Chinese heritage,
which can be traced back, via the Edo gōkan stories, to the hakuwa shōsetsu
(bai hwa xiao yue) in �ing and Qing China.8 For instance, according to this
matrix, Walter Scott’s The Bride of Lammermoor was translated into Shumpū
jōwa, ‘A Passionate Story of a Vernal Wind [or an Erotic Wind]’ (1880);
Another of Scott’s novels, Ivanhoe, was entitled Bairai yokun, ‘Remnant
Flagrance of Plum Buds’ (1886); Bulwer-Lytton’s Ernest Maltravers, Karyū
shunwa, ‘A Vernal [or Erotic] Story of a Demimonde’ (1878). The last was to
become one of the most popular, successful translations of Western literature
in 1870s and 80s.
This schematic matrix aside, we still notice a remarkable departure of these
titles from the original in terms of meaning, one that requires some explana-
tion. Taking a look at the last example, we cannot but be perplexed that the
title of Bulwer-Lytton’s Ernest Maltravers is rendered as ‘an erotic story of
the pleasure quarters’ since, although it features a romance between the hero
Ernest and a lovely girl named Alice, it is surely neither an erotic story nor
does it feature courtesans. On the contrary, the chastity of both is constantly
stressed in Lytton’s source story. And the depiction of the ‘demimonde’ is
certainly not to be found anywhere in the narrative.
The Shogunate invented and prescribed a rather unique system of sexual-
ity, completely alien from the Western systems both in the feudal period and
in modernity. The government authorized public pleasure quarters in Edo
(present-day Tokyo) in 1617, subsequently, establishing similar facilities
6
One of the actual translators, Tsubouchi, read the final version of the translation
only after its publication and received the following impression: “I could imagine
that Hattori edited it with much toil, dressing up the story with embellishments …
In the extreme cases he added some completely different plots, which he, prob-
ably, had taken from other translations. There were also references to Ryōzanpaku
[the legendary den of the talented youths in The Tale of the Water Margin] and
Lu Zhi Shen [a character from the Tale]; I think they were added for the sake of
comparison, but if you are reading the text carelessly, in many places it reads like
a transcription of a Chinese novel” (Yanagida 1966:119).
7
Ryan renders it “romance of the spring window” (1990:46).
8
Gōkan are “popular illustrated stories and romances, prose narrative succeeding
kibyōshi, and flourishing sometime after 1807” (�iner et al. 1985:275). Hakuwa
shōsetsu is “a novel in vernacular Chinese” (Watanabe
Watanabe et al 2003:2095). ).
in Kyoto and Osaka, to which all the prostitutes were deported and thereby
registered. All amorous activities of the samurai class and urban middle-class
inhabitants were to be associated with, and concentrated in, these quarters,
which became the major source of inspiration for literature and theatre.9
When in poetry, fiction, drama, art, etc. an author referred to ‘love’, he10 pri-
marily meant a relationship with a courtesan. In contrast, both home and the
‘ordinary women’ (ji-onna) who inhabited it were largely dissociated from
amorous activities.11 This system and its concomitant ideology survived until
the Anti-Prostitution Act of 1956, although the Westernization of the late 19th
century and the introduction of the modern concept of romantic love along
with middle-class, protestant family ideology made its influence all the more
palpable (Yokota-�urakami 1998).
Consequently, it was perfectly natural for a translator to associate any
Western narrative depicting a heterosexual relationship with the erotic culture
of the demimonde. This is precisely why the translator of Ernest Maltravers
did not have any scruples about entitling the translation A Vernal (or Erotic)
Story of a Demi-monde. A ‘demimondian’ story was essentially synonymous
with a ‘love romance’ (Kimura 1978).
Neither did the translator have any problem with the ‘erotic’ aspect of
the title. The dichotomous notion of spiritual love versus carnal lust was not
known in the amorous tradition of the Shogunate. The Edo period conception
of ‘Eros’ consisted of both spiritual and physical aspects indiscriminately,12
while a confluence of erotic and chaste love was not an oxymoron for Japanese
readers until the introduction of the ‘Western’ notion of romantic love in the
1880s. To consider Ernest and Alice to be erotic lovers was thus not felt to
be a misconception.
9
Later, areas for prostitution other than the quarters sanctioned by the government
developed, such as Fukagawa, where geishas, not courtesans, were the main pro-
tagonists. But this did not essentially change the nature of the regime of sexuality
and of the erotic culture deriving from it in the Edo period.
10
Edo literati were almost exclusively males.
11
Books of conduct in the Edo period (represented by the genre of onna daigaku,
women’s teachings) ordered ordinary women to avoid wearing fancy kimono to
attract men’s attention, to stay away from theatres (which mostly featured love
romances), and so on. Of course, such directions are the proof that ordinary women
were drawn to sexual excitements.
12
So did Eros in the Greek antiquity. Recent poststructuralist (namely, Foucauldian)
understandings of sexuality have in turn recognized it as subject to pathologization
in the 19th century, most notably as a form of pure physical appetite that could
potentially develop into perversion (erotomania).
Thus, carnal nuances were invariably and abundantly inserted into the
titles of translations in this period, represented by the usage of such terms
as ‘colour’, ‘spring’, ‘wind’, ‘flower’, ‘plum’ (or any fruit), ‘a nightingale’,
etc., referring the readers back to a somewhat Taoist erotic atmosphere, richly
found in the tradition of Chinese colloquial fiction (hakuwa shōsetsu or bai
hwa xiao yue).
Now, given the fact that translators were freely adapting the Western vo-
cabulary of love to the Japanese conception, what strikes the contemporary
reader as somewhat curious is the fact that they were not particularly aware
of it: i.e. their act of curving the Western romantic notions to fit demimondian
conceptions of Shogunate literature or Chinese popular romances. They were
content with, or even unconscious of, the inconsistency of the competing sexual
ideologies expressed in their works, which is typically observed in the case of
Karyu shunwa, whose title completely contradicts the content of the novel.
The translation of The Lady of the Lake in 1884 was no exception. Shumpū
kiwa is, in fact, a hodgepodge of a courtly tale and a modern, bourgeois nar-
rative. In it, the notion of lady worship is expressed. The courtly notion of
enduring hardship, and thus enhancing one’s own capacity as a knight (or
as a man) in order to win the favour of a lady whom he adores, is expressly
represented. The unfamiliar concept of lady worship, definitely unknown
to the male readership under the patriarchal, male chauvinist Shogunate, is
introduced through the figure of a mystic beauty, Ellen. At the same time,
the lady implied here is often not a knights’ lady, the Ellen, Rowina, Isolde,
or Guinevere kind, but a lady of the English high society. The illustrations
sometimes depict a medieval tale, sometimes an English contemporary life.
The contradiction does not seem to have troubled the translator much. The
notion of the ‘organic unity’ of a work is yet to be formed. Thus, Shumpū kiwa
incorporates within itself three kinds of sexual ideology: medieval courtly love;
modern, bourgeois, sexual-marital ideology; and the masculinist sexuality of
the Edo period.
Some reservations are due here. One is that the introduction of the alien no-
tion of chivalry is made somehow more feasible by resorting to the vocabulary
of a subgenre of hakuwa shōsetsu (bai hwa xiao yue), saishi kajin shōsetsu
(caizi jiaren xiao yue), in the �ing and Qing dynasties. Normally rendered
as either talent-and-beauty or scholar-and-beauty fiction, it is a popular genre,
a kind of a Chinese version of the Bildungsroman, which featured a talented
young scholar and promising bureaucrat, often quite handsome, who makes
a solemn promise with a beautiful maiden to be united in the future once
his career goal is fulfilled. The hero undergoes various hardships, while his
bride-to-be also experiences a series of adventures, courageously retaining
her chastity until they are finally bonded. In the explication of an American
translator of the genre:
In the mid-seventeenth century a type of vernacular romance appeared

that literary studies and colloquial parlance refer to as the story of the
‘scholar and the beauty’. One of the most prominent features of these
works is their portrayal of smart, capable, and chaste young women
who are equal to or better than their male counterparts in terms of
literary talent, moral fiber, and wit. (�c�ahon 1995:99)
The influence of the style of hakuwa shōsetsu on Shunsō kiwa is evident. The
adherence to the Chinese literary taste in the following quote, summarizing
the plot in advance in the first chapter, with the imagery taken from the �ing
popular literature (the moonlit palace), is indicative of it:
Someone whom you want comes to you, but will not please you. On
the contrary someone who you do not want comes to you. It is a most
unusual thing that you are given a chance to have a stroll with a lady
(kajin) to have a pleasant chat with her in the moonlit palace. (Scott
1884:2)
In fact, the translator blatantly defines the hero and the heroine of the story as
a talented scholar and a beauty: “Kajin wants to meet a talent, but a wicked
scholar intervenes. A talent wishes to be wedded to kajin, only to be interrupted
by an ugly woman” (ibid.:7).
Then, we now have the fourth paradigm of sexuality, i.e. the Chinese
bureaucratic notion of love and sex in the �ing-Qing eras, contrived into
the translation of The Lady of the Lake. The heteroglossia of Shunsō kiwa is
tremendous. Yet, are not all translations, essentially, heteroglossic?
Saishi kajin (Caizi jiaren) fiction was popular among the Confucian
scholars in Shogunate Japan and commonly appreciated by authors of popular
fiction, too. Accordingly, a talent and a beauty had also become a stereotypical
relationship of a man and a woman in love. A talent and a beauty (kajin) were
made to stand in for any romantic heterosexual liaison.
Reference to the saishi kajin paradigm is evident in Shunsō kiwa as well.
For instance, the third chapter is entitled: “The Flowers fall in disorder; The
Lady (kajin) is hurt; The Sad wind ceases; The Talent (sairo [equivalent to
saishi]) is remorseful” (Scott 1884:41). Another of Scott’s novels, which also
typically depicts the world of chivalry, Ivanhoe, expresses this association
as well. The nineteenth chapter is entitled: “The Talent (saishi) fights with
brigands and falls into the Dun; The Lady (kajin) loses her strength and is
captured by them” (Scott 1886:208).
Thus, the fourth tradition in the �eiji translation of Western literature, i.e.
that of the Chinese popular fiction, was quite decisive. The medieval notion of
lady worship and the modern notion of a lady, representing a good society and
happy family, were both important aspects of Western society that the �eiji
literati were eager to transplant. Both were absent in Edo sexual ideology and
had to be represented afresh. The translators used various words to convey the
sense of ‘lady’: otome, taoyame, hime, shukujo, but the most common choice
was kajin (jiaren), relying on the �ing-Xing literary tradition, regardless of
whether it was accurate or not.
The Lady of the Lake was translated again ten years later, in 1894, in verse
more or less without any omission or addition, which, therefore, contemporary
readers might choose to name as the first real translation of Scott’s poem into
Japanese. It was entitled, however, Kojō no bijin; the lady, bijin (meiren), i.e.
the beauty on the lake, but not kajin (jiaren) (Scott 1894).
Basically, bijin and kajin have been used as synonyms, except that kajin
(jiaren) had an additional nuance of possessing a moral virtue (which largely
meant chastity). This association, however, was not obligatory. In the Edo
period, the term kajin was frequently used to denote a courtesan. In a sharebon
(popular pulp fiction, describing life in the pleasure quarters), Kokei sanshō
(1787), the author Santo Kyogen declares: “Hoppō ni kajin ari (There are
kajin in the North)” (Nakano et al. 1971:102).13
The connotation of kajin as a morally pure, respectable woman, the share-
bon notion notwithstanding, did exist concurrently, and derived of course from
talent-and-beauty fiction. The association was fortified in the subsequent �eiji
era through the success of Tokai Sanshi’s immensely successful multi-volume
novel, Kajin no kigū [Chance Encounters with Beautiful Women] (1885-97).
This political novel features the hero-author, Tokai Sanshi, who has chance
encounters and potential romances with Irish women activists in the struggle
for Ireland’s independence. These two women (kajin), whom the hero admires
and esteems highly, are, apart from being fair, described as superbly respect-
able with a just cause, striving for ideals.14
Chance Encounters was one of the earliest manifestos of the Western idea
of romantic love, stressing the spiritual virtue, lady worship, and the sense of
13
‘The North’ was a slang term for the Yoshiwara pleasure quarters, since they
were located in the northern part of Edo (Tokyo).
14
The primary translator of the 1884 translation of The Lady of the Lake, Tsubouchi
Shoyo, confesses that he was an ardent reader of Chance Encounters and that its
style served as a model for his translation (Yanagida 1966:119).
moral perfection, which cut a clear contrast to the pre-modern Japanese no-
tion of love. According to the pre-modern binary regime of sexuality already
mentioned, the feudal, masculinist society divided women into ji-onna, the
‘ordinary women’, and yūjo, the courtesans or the prostitutes. �en married the
former, who performed the functions of reproduction and household labour,
while seeking sexual pleasure with the latter. The wives were not regarded
as objects of male affection; ‘love’ was, I repeat, exclusively associated with
the pleasure quarters.
Chance Encounters opposed the new image of a respectable, marriageable
woman, inciting a feeling of love to the premodern system of sexuality, and
this image was represented by the term kajin.
It is, then, slightly dubious that the second translation of The Lady of the
Lake foregrounded a medieval notion of lady worship à la Scott or a modern,
middle-class ideal of a good lady, seeing that the choice of the translation of
the word ‘lady’ was bijin, not kajin, whereas progressive thinkers were begin-
ning to distinguish these two terms in the 1890s. Through Chance Encounters
the word kajin was increasingly assuming a new moralistic nuance.15 A rather
eccentric subtitle to the translation, Imayō nagauta (The Contemporary Na-
gauta Songs), attests to the translator’s indifference to this new consciousness.
Nagauta was a genre of chants, accompanied on the shamisen, the string instru-
ment first played in the puppet and kabuki theatres and then popularized in the
pleasure quarters. Nagauta, therefore, represented a feudal masculine ideology.
It is natural, then, that the ideological rereading of the thematic of chivalrous
love in the original into Edo eros is observed throughout this translation.
In the beginning, this led to the erasure of courtly conceptions in the transla-
tion, a notion that was certainly very difficult to appreciate for the male literati
and readership who were accustomed to the Edo patriarchal, hedonistic system
of sexuality. As has been mentioned, Shioi’s choice for the translation of the
word ‘lady’ in the title was not kajin, but bijin. In the main body of the text,
however, he shows a consistent bend in not translating the word, i.e. omitting
it altogether, possibly, attempting, consciously or unconsciously, to avoid the
courtly thematic. When he did translate the word, his choice was more often
than not either otome (an unmarried, young, pretty maiden) or taoyame (or its
corrupted form, tawayame; a gentle, beautiful girl). Thus the passage where
the hunter (King Fitz-James in disguise) “stood concealed amid the brake, /
To view this Lady of the Lake” (Canto I, xvii) is rendered: “konata no kishi ni
fune yosuru/ otome no sugata mite itari (he was watching an otome, approach-
15
The normal English translation of the title Chance Encounters with the Beautiful
Women is, therefore, inaccurate. It should be Encounters with the Ladies.
ing the shore)” (Scott 1894:12). In a ballad on the legendary Alice Brand in
Canto IV, which the Bard, Allan Bane, sings: “‘tis merry, ‘tis merry, in good
greenwood; / So blithe Lady Alice is singing,” ‘Lady’ is rendered ‘tawayame’
in the translation: “mizue sasu midori no mori wa / mini shimite tanoshikumo
aruka / tawayame no Arisu wa iitozo” (“‘it is heartily joyous in the woods of
fresh green’, said the lady [tawayame] Alice” (Scott 1894:197).
The choice of otome or taoyame for ‘lady’ was natural with a demimondian
model of a sexual relationship, i.e. that of a male patron-client and a pet-girl
to be fondled. This connotation is made all the more evident through the use
of the word taoyame, one which was used to mean a courtesan during the
Shogunate.
Likewise, the scene where Fitz-James kisses the hand of Ellen, bidding
farewell before he departs to meet his foe in defence of her is reread (Canto
IV, xix).16 In the translation Shioi omits the kiss: Fitz-James gives his ring as a
token of his protection and just takes his leave. The idea of a champion, defend-
ing a lady, pledging his loyalty by a chaste kiss in reverence, was something
that would have been totally enigmatic to the �eiji Japanese readers.
It is true that the translator sometimes takes pains to convey this unfamiliar
notion of chivalry. But, apparently, such attempts are mostly in vain. When
Ellen is captured by the soldiers, the captain mocks her thus, resorting to the
vocabulary of chivalry:
Welcome to Stirling towers, fair maid! / Come ye to seek a champi-

on’s aid / On palfrey white, with harper hoar, / Like errant damosel
of yore? / Does thy high quest a knight require, / Or may the venture
suit a squire? (Canto VI, ix).
Shioi’s translation reads as follows:
Oh, you, pretty young mistress! / Welcome to this castle. / Just like a
familiar of yore, / In the court, / Just like a familiar did, / On a white
palfrey, / A greyhaired harper / Accompanying, from a brave man /
Wishing to obtain help / did you come here? / The help you count
on / Is no match for a sword / Of a young warrior like me. (Scott
1894:433)17
16
Here (“Hear, lady, yet a parting word!”), too, Shioi uses the word, taoyame,
for ‘lady’.
17
Incidentally, as the quoted translation shows, Shioi repeats the same words, the
same phrases, or the same stylistic construction in two separate lines quite often.
For instance, “hateshimo aranu / Bohasutoru / WAKEMO HATASAZU / KOMA
In this passage, Shioi quite literally renders “a champion’s aid” as “masurao

no tasuke” (assistance of a young, brave man), conveying a chivalrous senti-
ment. But he somehow misunderstands the lines “Does thy high quest a knight
require, / Or may the venture suit a squire?”, which he renders as “imashi ga
negau so no tasuke / onore no gotoki waka musha no / katana ni kanau koto
nariya (The help you count on is no match for a young soldier like me)”, dis-
pensing with the notion of a noble ‘knight’ (and a squire) in the original, who
performs the lofty duty of rescuing a lady.18 Furthermore, Shioi commits one
simple mistake and another rather inexplicable ‘mistranslation’. Firstly, he
translates the word “court” as “minori no niwa” (the court of the law), i.e. not
in the sense of “the place where a sovereign (or other high dignitary) resides
and holds state, attended by his retinue” (�urray et al. 1989:1057), but in the
sense of “court of judicature, of law, or of administration” (ibid.).19 This is in
line with the translator’s apparent ignorance of, or indifference to, the courtly
(höflich/höfisch) paradigm of love.
Secondly, he translates “the errant damosel” quite mysteriously into “a famil-
iar spirit (a messenger of God)”.20 The word ‘damosel’ should evoke a courtly
association. The editor of an edition of Scott’s poem, Stuart, explains:
In the ‘days of yore,’ when chivalry was the fashion, any oppressed
‘damosel’ could obtain redress by proceeding to the court of the nearest
TOMETE / NAGEKISHI MONOMO / OKARAMU / minagiri watasu / Taisu gawa

/ nami ito hayaki / fuchise oba / WATARIMO ESEZU / AWARE TOTE / UMEKISHI
MONOMO / OKARAMU (Vast is the Bochastle’s heath. / In the full grown field
of reeds, / there were many who wailed, / stopping their horses without achieving
their duty. / Stretches long the River Teith. / In its swift current, / there were many
who anguished, / not crossing the torrent, in sorrow)” (Scott 1894:6) [The repeti-
tions are indicated by capital letters]. This is, probably, the result of his adherence
to the nagauta style, in which such a practice was common for the purpose of a
heightened theatrical effect. For instance a popular nagauta song, Musume Dōjoji,
featuring a young maiden, with which Shioi was certainly familiar, opens thus:
“Hana no hoka niwa matsu bakari; hana no hoka niwa matsu bakari” (Except for
the flowers, only the pine trees are seen).
18
Of course, “a high quest” for a knight is addressed here in a mocking manner.
19
The word ‘court’ does not appear in the passage I quoted, but the reference is
merely to the Stirling. The translator, apparently, supplied the word from the con-
text. For instance, slightly later in the text the reader would hear King Fitz-James
utter: “Come, Ellen, come! ‘Tis more than time, He [the King] holds his court at
morning prime’ (Canto VI, xxv).
20
The original Japanese word is tsukai hime. Tsukai is a Shintoesque messenger,
normally appearing in the form of some animal: a serpent, a deer, a rabbit, a
crane, etc.
king, and asking for a champion. Among the knights who frequented
the court some one would volunteer, or be appointed, to act as her
champion and avenge her upon her enemies. (Scott 1905:243)21
In the note by William Rolfe, “the errant damosel” is a reference to “the Errant
damozell” of Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene (ii, I. 19). This association
would reinforce the connotation of chivalry. The strange rendition of ‘damosel’
as a ‘familiar’, if it does not spoil the courtly association, in no way enhances
it. This, too, probably shows that Shioi was not particularly concerned about
the chivalrous connotations, or was ignorant about them.
I hasten to add that the above analyses are not meant to simply devaluate
Shioi’s translation as inaccurate. Returning to the issue of the distinction be-
tween translation and adaptation, the concept of ‘inaccurate translation’ arose
only with the establishment of the original text as sacred and inviolable. Shioi
was working within a paradigm which guaranteed a ‘translator’ maximum
freedom concerning the revision of the text.
The 1894 translation of The Lady of the Lake, thus, did not significantly
depart from the demimondian associations, represented by the imayo style, in
spite of featuring ‘lady’ as its central thematic.
It was �izutani Futo, a student of British literature, who finally presented
the term kajin as a true equivalent of the English ‘lady’ in his translation when
he chose the title of Risō kajin (The Ideal Lady) in translating Jane Eyre in
1896, the first translation of the work in Japan.23
He was fully conscious of the problematic of romantic love. In the preface,
he explains the subject of the novel thus:
This work is originally entitled Jane Eyre, the masterpiece of Charlotte

Brontë. Why did I choose to name it Risō kajin (The Ideal Lady)? It
does not refer to a perfect lady with a beautiful shape and a good heart.
21
The reference can further be traced back to �alory’s Morte D’Arthur, Book
vii, Chapter 2, referring the readers to the Arthurian legends, or the courtly tales
in general.

It can be that the enigmatic rendering of a ‘damosel’ into ‘a familiar’ may at-
test to Shioi’s familiarity with The Faerie Queene, as the damozel in the alluded
text of Spencer is merely pretending to be a damosel, but, in reality, is a witch in
disguise. Of course, this would not justify the translation ‘a familiar’ since Scott’s
‘damosel’ does not imply anything supernatural.
23
This is a partial translation that covers only the first fourteen chapters, i.e. roughly
up to Jane’s encounter and acquaintance with �r. Rochester. The translation ap-
peared in four numbers of the literary magazine, Bungei kurabu (The Literary
Club) (Brontë
Brontë 1896a, Brontë 1896b, Brontë 1896c, Brontë 1896d).
It is an ideal lady for Rochester, the lady whose temperament and tastes
are compatible to his own. (Brontë 1896a:142)
This was one of the earliest manifestos of the idea of companionate marriage,
which was going to be propagated in progressive, liberal bourgeois discourse
at the crossroad of the centuries. At the same time, it testified to the discovery
of the concept of spiritual love as a component of romantic love ideology. One
speaks of the compatibility of temperaments and tastes, not of bodies. At issue
are the moral features, and not the physical features, of one’s object of love.
It was definitely one of the central polemics of the novel, Jane Eyre, that a
woman was to be selected by her internal, and not external, beauty.
Such an ideal had already been clearly expressed by a progressive Chris-
tian thinker, Iwamoto Yoshiharu, who published an essay with the same title,
Risō no kajin [The Ideal Lady] in 1889 in a liberal Christian journal, Jogaku
zasshi [The �agazine for the Education of Women].24 Iwamoto’s arguments
concerning kajin were as follows: a kajin of the former time was a mere beauty,
the likes of geisha and courtesans; a kajin of the modern time may not be
physically beautiful, but is distinguished by her noble moral sense and tender
feelings. The distinction between kajin and bijin is now firmly established
and unconditional: kajin denotes a woman with excellence in spiritual value;
bijin is a woman with mere external beauty, lacking soul. Iwamoto denigrates
bijin, writing:
In one’s life-long spouse, one loves not her nose, lips, rosy face, slender
body, but some indescribable profundity. However much one loves
a beauty (bijin), that love does not last long, but eventually perishes
just like, as autumn deepens, every leaf turns yellow and withers.
This testifies that a man does not love physical beauty forever ... A
real man is not content in loving a so-called bijin with all his heart ...
A woman whom a man does not forget is such that expresses certain
soulfulness behind her facial feature, some spiritual entity behind her
body, i.e. a kajin with chaste, lofty heart and will, and caring love.
(1889/1973:17)25
24
It is quite likely that the translator adopted the phrase from Iwamoto’s article.
25
Of course, one can point to the concealed male chauvinism behind Iwamoto’s
nineteenth century version of ‘feminism’. In fact, it was his wife, Wakamatsu
Shizuko, who was to become a prominent translator and novelist herself, who, in
the subsequent issue of The Magazine for the Education of Women, published an
article criticizing the essay ‘The Ideal Lady’ written by her husband/critic. She
took Iwamoto to task for his lack of sympathy for those women who have diffi-
culty becoming true ladies because of their troubled social conditions. This debate
The Magazine for the Education of Women was an arena for new romantic,
sexual, and family ideology. In 1892 a monumental essay by a poet, Kitamura
Tokoku, entitled ‘The Pessimist Poet and a Woman’ appeared, in which he
introduced the new coinage ren’ai in order to convey the sense of Western
romantic love. The opening phrase “Love [ren’ai] is a secret key to life”
astounded the contemporary readership, who had been accustomed to the
playfulness of the Edo notion of love (1976b:68). In another influential essay,
Kitamura writes: “Consider, how far apart love [ren’ai] is from lust [kōshoku;
Edo amorous ideal of eros] in literature. Lust is liberation of the most base
bestiality of mankind; love is the realization of the spiritual beauty of mankind”
(1976a:72). The new notion emphasized moral perfection through hetero-
sexual or conjugal union, something that the Japanese under the Shogunate
never dreamed of. Conversely, it denounced the carnal aspect of male-female
relationships. The new term ren’ai is also used in the translation, Risō kajin,
when Jane speaks of passages of love and adventure that Bessie related. This
is rather significant, considering that only four years had passed since the ap-
pearance of this new word into the language.
The translation of Jane Eyre and the essay by Iwamoto testify to the en-
thronement of a morally upright, if aesthetically challenged, woman as a new
standard of the modern era, to be renamed as kajin in the sense of a ‘lady’,
under the influence of the romantic love ideology. Iwamoto’s comment on
Brontë’s novel is typical in this respect: “It was truly an excellent idea that
in the novel Jane Eyre the heroine is not a particularly beautiful woman”
(1889/1973:17).
Jane Eyre, however, is not really a novel about a man searching for and
finding an ideal lady. Apparently, this is a point that turn-of-the-century Japa-
nese readers often failed to grasp. In the preface, the translator explains:
Rochester once wandered in Europe for several years in search of an

ideal lady. He did not find one in the continent, but in the governess
at home ... Undoubtedly, the author, Charlotte Brontë, recognized
in Jane Eyre an ideal lady from Rochester’s point of view. (Brontë
1896a:142)
Jane Eyre is actually a Bildungsroman, the story of Jane achieving woman-

hood that satisfies her idea of it, of her becoming a woman of her choice. But
was Jane a truly ideal lady? Or, for that matter, did she really want to be one?
Of course, we are inclined to answer negatively to such questions in line with
between these two spouses/critics is worthy of special attention, one which, while
not possible here for lack of space, I hope to explore in future research.
the recent tradition of feminist criticism, especially after Gilbert and Gubar,
if we are to discern in Jane an ambiguous will to be both a good lady and a
monstrous, mad rebel. The latter, naturally, is represented as Bertha �ason,
whom Gilbert and Gubar term as “[Jane’s] secret self” (1979:348): “Bertha is
Jane’s truest and darkest double: she is the angry aspect of the orphan child”
(ibid.:360). The readers of the first translation, however, were not to witness
this monstrous double of a supposed lady. The translation was terminated at
Chapter XII, where Jane meets �r. Rochester for the first time. The reason for
the termination is unclear. As we have already noted, the �eiji translators were
not particularly concerned about the unity of the work. In fact, �izutani, after
the third chapter, began to translate rather freely, omitting in abundance.
To get a sense of this, let us attempt to compare some passages from the
source text with the translation. We will read the first paragraph of Chapter
II, which describes how Jane was taken to the red chamber after the scene she
made with John at the end of the first chapter:
I resisted all the way, – a new thing for me, and a circumstance which
greatly strengthened the bad opinion Bessie and �iss Abbot were
disposed to entertain of me. The fact is, I was a trifle beside myself,
or rather out of myself, as the French would say; I was conscious that
a moment’s mutiny had already rendered me liable to strange penal-
ties, and like any other rebel slave I felt resolved, in my desperation,
to go all lengths.
“Hold her arms, �iss Abbot; she’s like a mad cat”. (Brontë 1848:14)
The translation reads:
Ware wa arayuru sikata nite futarini teiko shikereba, karera mo motea-

mashiken, Abotto wa waga ude o yakushite hatarakasezu, “Kono ko
wa marude kichigai neko ni niteru yo”. (Brontë 1896a:153)
As I resisted in all the ways possible, the two must have thought that
I was too difficult to manage. �iss Abbot held my arms firmly so that
I couldn’t move them, and said: “She’s like a mad cat”.
The first paragraph is almost completely omitted except for the first sentence:
“I resisted all the way”, which is, however, somewhat mistranslated, unfor-
tunately. The translator excludes the observation that Jane has made about
Bessie’s and �iss Abbot’s opinion of her, thus failing to show the self-con-
sciousness of Jane. �izutani translates the part about Jane being “beside, or out
of herself” as “Jane was too difficult to control”. It is an unfortunate change,
as it shifts the emphasis from the inner, mental status of Jane, which concerns
the central thematic of the novel, women’s madness, to the physical reality
of being difficult to handle from the outsiders’ point of view. The translator
also omits the following narration, concerning Jane’s consciousness (“I was
conscious...”), and moves on to �iss Abbot’s comment. Once again, I hasten
to add that, just as I did not reject the translations of The Lady of the Lake
for being inaccurate, it is not my intention here to depreciate the translation
of Jane Eyre and valorize the original as a more developed and refined work
of literature. The difference probably simply reflects the different modes of
literary consciousness.
What �izutani’s omission shows, nonetheless, is that he is not particularly
interested in the psychological drama of Jane: what is seen, analyzed, and
challenged (spiritually, especially) by her. This is because �izutani did not
understand the fact that Jane Eyre was the story of a woman’s becoming (a
woman, or a lady), a woman’s Bildungroman, which is ascertained by Jane’s
comments such as “I was a real lady already”, “I wanted to be a lady”, etc.,
which �izutani ended up not translating. It is significant that �izutani changed
the title completely to Riso kajin, i.e. The Ideal Lady, as the original title was
supposed to be Jane Eyre: An Autobiography.26
In all likelihood, this simply attests to the limitations of a male translator.
There were scarcely any female translators except Wakamatsu Shizuko, who
was active at that time. There were scarcely any female authors at all, for that
matter. A first-person narrative of a woman was yet to come.
The translation was also interrupted before the readers found out about
Bertha. If the translation did not integrate the inner psychology or perspective
of a woman narrator, it is no wonder, then, that her double is also absent. In
this sense, it is also significant that the translation ended before the disclosure
of a dark double of a lady.
In Spivak’s reading of Jane Eyre, Bertha is not so much a psychological
double of a middle class woman, but the instance of colonialism:
[Bertha �ason is] a figure produced by the axiomatics of imperial-

ism. Through Bertha �ason, the white Jamaican Creole, Brontë
renders the human/animal frontier as acceptably indeterminate, so
that a good greater than the letter of the Law can be broached. (Spivak
1985:247)
Riso kajin also lacks the animal colonial double that was soon to appear with
26
Unfortunately, we cannot determine which edition the translator (�izutani)
used. It might have just been entitled Jane Eyre.
the expansion of the Japanese empire. But strangely enough, it was not a black-
haired Bertha from the West Indies, but a blonde White Russian woman from
�anchuria that would play the role of the female Colonial Other in modern
Japanese literature (Yokota-�urakami 2010).
As we have noted, kajin, originally meaning a ‘beauty’ in relation to mod-
ern, bourgeois marital/sexual ideology, was to become a woman/wife/mother
with the spiritual, aesthetic and moral/intellectual qualities expected of a
‘lady’ (the dark double that challenges this patriarchal regime in Jane Eyre is
not present in the translation Riso kajin). What will, then, become of bijin, a
beauty? The Shogunate had two types of women, ji-onna, ordinary, marriable
(and, hence, commonplace and unattractive) women, and yujo, the courtesans,
beautiful both spiritually and physically. Ordinary women in the new era are
expected to be chaste and moral. The other kind is, naturally, courtesans with
mere physical beauty.
The journal Bungei kurabu (The Literary Club), which started as a solid
journal, publishing high literature, began to be inclined towards tabloid jour-
nalism after a few years. When the translation of Jane Eyre was serialized,
the journal was already printing photos of beauties of the world and from the
various parts of Japan, and stories concerning the physical beauty of women.
Beautiful women, bijin, discussed and visually represented in the journal were
all courtesans. In Number 2, Volume 2, shortly before Riso kajin appeared, the
magazine printed photos of selected beauties, called bijin, from Tokyo, all of
whom were women in the pleasure quarters. The former synonyms of kajin
and bijin were now antonyms, representing a dichotomy between the idealized
Western bourgeois lady and spiritual beauty and a physically beautiful woman.
Kajin was now used to translate the Western term ‘lady’. And just as Western
literary works were apotheosized as sacred texts, which had to be translated
as the exact mirror image (the new standard of translation), the term kajin was
expected to faithfully represent the signified of ‘lady’ in order to propagate
and perpetuate European moral views. In conjunction, however, bijin lost the
status of a synonym of kajin. Nonetheless, it was recuperated within the new
masculinist sexual regime with a different nuance. The word did not signify
a courtesan, both physically and spiritually beautiful, anymore. It was a mere
physically beautiful courtesan (geisha). But in that qualification it survived in
the margin of official male desire, not authorized in the new ideology of love
(ren’ai), which featured chaste, marriageable, ordinary women. The adaptation
(not the translation) of the English ‘lady’ was now complete. The translators,
thus, negotiated with the Western paradigm and recuperated the Edo sexual
ideology. It would take another few decades to deconstruct this dichotomy
until the advent of the generation of female authors and translators.
Works cited
Brontë, Charlotte (1848) Jane Eyre, London: Collins.
------- (1896a) ‘Risō kajin’. Trans. �izutani Futo, Bungei kurabu 2:8: 142-58.
------- (1896b) ‘Risō kajin’. Trans. �izutani Futo, Bungei kurabu 2:11, 150-62.
------- (1896c) ‘Risō kajin’. Trans. �izutani Futo, Bungei kurabu 2:12, 156-73.
------- (1896d) ‘Risō kajin’. Trans. �izutani Futo, Bungei kurabu 2:14, 110-44.
Bulwer-Lytton, Edward (1878) Karyu shunwa. Trans. Jun’ichirōō Oda, Tokyo:
Takahashi.
Fénelon, François (1883) Keisei shishin: Tetsuretsu kidan. Trans. Izawa Shinza-
buro, Tokyo: Hakubai shooku.
Futabatei, Shimei (1965) ‘Yo ga hon’yaku no hyojun’ [�y standards for transla-
tion], Futabatei Shimei zenshū, vol. 5, Tokyo: Iwanami shoten.
Gilbert, Sandra �. and Susan Guber (1979) The Madwoman in the Attic: The
Woman Writer and the Nineteenth Century Literary Imagination, New Haven:
Yale University Press.
Hutcheon, Linda (2006) A Theory of Adaptation, New York: Routledge.
Iwamoto, Yoshiharu (1889/1973) ‘Riso no kajin’ [The Ideal lady], Jogaku zasshi
bungakkai shu. Meiji bungaku zenshu, vol. 32, Tokyo: Chikuma shobo, 9-20.
�urray, James, A. H., Henry Bradley, William A. Craigie and C. T. Onions (eds)
(1989) Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd edition, Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Kimura, Ki (1978) Meiji shoki hon’yaku bungaku kaisetsu, Tokyo: Yusho do.
Kitamura, Tokoku (1976a) ‘Kyara makura oyobi Shin hazue shu’ [A criticism
of Kyaramakura and Shin hazue shu], Kitamura Tokoku shu. Meiji bungaku
zenshu, volume 29, Tokyo: Chikuma shobo, 70-73.
------- (1976b) Enseishika to josei [The World Weary Poet and Woman], Kitamura
Tokoku shu. Meiji bungaku zenshu, vol. 29, Tokyo: Chikuma shobo, 64-68.
�iner, Earl, Hiroko Odagiri and Robert E. �orell (eds) (1985), The Princeton
Companion to Classical Japanese Literature, Princeton, NJ: Princeton Uni-
versity Press.
�c�ahon, Keith (1995) Misers, Shrews, and Polygamists: Sexuality and Male-
Female Relations in Eighteenth-Century Chinese Fiction, Durham: Duke
University Press.
Nakano, �itsutoshi, Kazuya Jinbo and Ai �aeda (eds) (1971) Sharebon, kokkei-
bon, ninjobon. Nihon koten bungaku zenshu, vol. 47, Tokyo: Shogakkan.
Ryan, �arleigh Grayer (1990) Japan’s First Modern Novel: ‘Ukigumo’ of
Futabatei Shimei, Ann Arbor: Center for Japanese Studies, the University of
�ichigan.
Scott, Walter (1880) Shumpu jowa. Trans. Shoyo Tsubouchi, Tokyo: Nakajima.
------- (1883) The Lady of the Lake. Ed. William J. Rolfe, Boston: Houghton.
------- (1884) Taisei katsugeki: Shunso kiwa, Vol 1 and 2. Trans. Seiichi Hattori,
Tokyo: Private edition.
------- (1886) Bairai yokun (Ivanhoe). Trans. Yoshisuke Ushiyama. Tokyo:
Shunyo do.
------- (1894) Imayo nagauta: kojo no bijin. Trans. �asao Shioi, Tokyo: Kaishin do.
------- (1905) The Lady of the Lake. Ed. G. H. Stuart. London: �acmmilan
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty (1985) ‘Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of
Imperialism’, Critical Inquiry 12:1: 243-61.
Takita, Sadaharu (1937) Shoyo shoshi [The Bibliography of Shoyo], Tokyo:
Yoneyama do.
Tokai, Sanshi (1885-97) Kajin no kigu [Chance Encounters with Beautiful
Women], Tokyo: Private edition.
Watanabe, Toshiro, Edmund R. Skrzypczak and Paul Snowden (eds) (2003) Kenky-
usha’s New Japanese-English Dictionary, 5th edition, Tokyo: Kenkyusha.
Yanagida, Izumi (1966) Meiji shoki hon’yaku bungaku no kenkyu, Tokyo:
Shunju sha.
Yokota-�urakami, Takayuki (1998) Don Juan East/West: On the Problematic of
Comparative Literature, Albany: SUNY Press.
------- (2010) ‘Samurai i blondinka: dve imperii v Harbine v proizvedenii Gunji
Jiromasa’ [A Samurai and a blonde: Two Empires in Harbin in the works of
Gunji Jiromasa], Materialy XXV rossiisko-iaponskogo simposiuma istorikov i
ekonomistov DVO RAN i raiona Kansai (Iaponia), Vladivostok: Dal’nenauka,
100-11.
Western Others (And ‘Other’ Westerns)
Translating Brokeback Mountain into Vietnamese Culture
LOC PHAM
Abstract: The current practice of English-Vietnamese transla-

tion, along with the dominant theoretical pronouncements by
translators and literary critics, has perpetuated the peripheral
position of translated literatures in the Vietnamese literary
system. While translation is recognized as a real demand in
Vietnam, it is alienated as the Western Other and contained
in a closed-off and disempowered territory. Like translated
literature, homosexuality experiences the same disempower-
ment. This essay arises from my experience of translating
Annie Proulx’s Brokeback Mountain. In this project, I argue
that in the case of translating homosexuality from English into
Vietnamese, the technique of radical domestication allows
the translated text to be read not as a cultural product of the
Other, but as a condition within Us, a condition that is per-
petually displaced and remains unrepresented. My Vietnamese
Brokeback Mountain represents the unspeakable from within,
resisting the presumed otherness of homosexuality and the
very translational medium through which it is told.
Story of the Other (1): Homosexuality
The long history of resistance against foreign domination has ingrained in the
Vietnamese mind a very sharp sense of home and foreignness, of friends and
enemies, of self and the other. Boundaries between Us and Them are estab-
lished in times of war and conflict as a necessary condition to identify both
the subject and object of resistance; and in peace, a condition presumed to be
the opposite of war, those boundaries are reinforced rather than torn down,
especially in the case of peace under the powerful force of globalization. As
globalization tends to eradicate economic borders among nations, the world
is deeply territorialized culturally. Different realities have “leaked into each
other” in the postcolonial world, to borrow from Salman Rushdie’s phrase
(1981:38), but paradoxically, this interpenetration only serves to enhance
discursive practices that negate itself and construct differential identities that
112 Western Others (And ‘Other’ Westerns)
claim uniqueness, unity and purity. Globalization widens gaps among nations
culturally just as much as it unites them economically. The binary division
between Self and the Other becomes inherent in cross-cultural relations.
Perpetual resistance against foreign domination followed by post-war
nationalism has produced within the cultural landscape of Vietnam a Western
Other through a chain of signifiers: cruel invaders, hungry plunderers, blood-
thirsty killers, or more generally, decadent imperialist cultures. The Vietnamese
language is rich in debasing terms that denote the negative attributes of the
enemy. Debasing the enemy, the Other, is facilitated by an extremely rich
system of third-person reference. Thằng, chúng, bọn chúng, tên, hắn, lũ, bọn,
đám, quân are some of the many third-person pronouns that show hatred and
contempt toward the referred subjects. Children acquire the use of these terms
quite naturally as they are part of the language of historical narratives taught at
schools and circulated in the media. I still remember two lines from a popular
poem that schoolchildren learn in their reading classes: “O du kích nhỏ giương
cao súng / Thằng Mỹ lom khom bước cúi đầu”, which literally means “The
little guerrilla girl raises her rifle / The American guy stoops forward, looking
down”. The poem is illustrated with a cartoon of a small Vietcong girl with
her rifle pointing at a giant handcuffed American soldier looking down at his
feet as he stoops ahead of the girl.
Through the contrastive imagery that divides Us from Them, such as small
versus big, girl versus man, free versus captured, victory versus defeat, a dou-
ble victory is presented, a warfare victory and a cross-cultural gender victory:
an indigenous girl defeats the American male soldier and subjects him to her
own power. The overall message is not just the American failure in Vietnam,
but a defeat charged with disgrace and mortification of a superpower signified
through the smallness of a young girl. Such a divisive representation of Us
and Them is indeed embedded in a system of differentiation that is at work
throughout the war and continues into post-war national construction. As this
system intersects with the authoritarian pronouncements of national culture,
the consequence is a cultural intolerance to foreignness and hybridity, and also
a nationalist promotion of cultural integrity. Within such a cultural framework,
the foreign, including its trace, is rendered intolerable, foregrounding the
obsessive aspiration to purist cultural integrity.
Cultural purity defines the construction of national identity as it represents
political independence and unity much needed for a new sovereignty. Language
is one of the most prominent forefronts in this purifying movement. Purify-
ing the Vietnamese language often involves the elimination of the Classical
Chinese vocabulary that has been historically incorporated into the language.
Apart from the ‘contamination’ that this foreign element in the language may
Loc Pham 113
induce, Classical Chinese vocabulary is rather pedantic and even shows a

nostalgic yearning for the feudal past of Vietnam, a historical period perceived
as antithetical to the atmosphere of newness inspired by revolutionary ideolo-
gies. I can still recall the many language drills I had in secondary school that
required translating words from Classical Chinese into ‘pure’ Vietnamese.
Interestingly enough, the original intralingual translation for the purpose of
purity and simplicity quickly gained momentum during the brief war with
China in 1979 and has shifted into a symbolic act of exclusion. Underpinning
this shift is the Us-versus-Them system of differentiation that has characterized
political discourses in Vietnam since the country gained independence. The
post-war culture of Vietnam is largely imagined along the line of boundaries
distinguishing Us from Them, inside from outside, Self from the Other. Re-
sisting foreignness, especially that which comes from the Western capitalist
world, becomes the emblem of national construction.
An important aspect of this system of differentiation is that it not only fab-
ricates a discursive reality of the Other for the definition of the ideal Self, but
also creates a point of exteriority through which culture displaces unwanted
values and practices from within. Cultural values and practices undesirable for
cultural coherence and unity are not merely denied or criticized, but deported
to the territory of the Other, the presumed place of their origin. Homosexuality
is an example of this process of displacement. Contemporary representation
of homosexuality in film and literature as well as in the news tends to depict
homosexuality as a social movement imported from the West, as a story of the
Other. A recent film about this theme that has captured wide public attention
is Le Hoang’s Trai Nhay [The Dancing Boy] (2007). The film is about an on-
call massage boy who is forced into a sexual relationship with a gay Vietkieu
businessman. The boy is portrayed as a presumably heterosexual, innocent and
hardworking person, while the Vietkieu is a wealthy businessman with rather
explicit homosexual behaviour. Unsurprisingly, the homosexual character is a
Vietkieu, a Vietnamese American who comes back to his home country from a
foreign culture and disrupts the well-ordered home culture represented by the
innocent straight boy. The title of the film suggests the theme of homosexuality,
which would arouse enormous public curiosity as it has long been designated
as the unspeakable. The film marks the beginning of an era of openness in
Vietnam, yet it precipitates a kind of discourse that contains homosexuality
within the designated territory of the Other. The Othering of homosexuality is
also manifested in cultural stereotypes, and also in performances on the part
of homosexual subjects themselves. They tend to gather in specific bars and
nightclubs in major cities like Saigon and Hanoi and thus territorialize their
own visibility within this social space. These clubs are still imagined in the
public mind as icons of Western cultures that have permeated into Vietnamese
culture through globalization. Rural areas, which harbour eighty percent of
Vietnam’s population, are perceived as free from homosexuality. A gay farmer
or peasant is an incredible notion in the Vietnamese mind. This is probably the
reason why the film has the title of The Dancing Boy while it tells the story
of a straight boy who earns his living by providing on-call massage services.
Dancing boys are merely background characters at the bar that the massage boy
comes to one evening. The title, however, is quite inviting to young audiences
as it suggests the sensitive and largely unrepresented theme of homosexual-
ity. Quite irrelevant to the plot of the film, the title provokes the stereotypical
designation of homosexuality as a cultural product of the West suggested in the
image of ‘the dancing boy’ and the associated ‘decadent’ nightlife. Realities
“have leaked into one another”, and the fact that ‘they’ are ‘here’ with ‘us’,
requires culture to quarantine ‘them’ within designated territories, so as ‘our’
identity is not interrupted or mutilated. Homosexuality exists and persistently
exerts its visibility in social and cultural spheres, and for that matter, it is
designated as a realm of the foreign, the immoral, the excluded.
Story of the Other (2): Translation

The system of differentiation and the exteriorization of homosexuality that I
have discussed above have several implications for my translation of Annie
Proulx’s novella Brokeback Mountain. Unsurprisingly, the task is enormously
challenging, not just because of the preconceived foreignness of the subject
matter in the target culture, but also because of the containing and disem-
powering conception of translation. In a way, translation and homosexuality
in Vietnam share the same fate: they are contained and disempowered. In
Enlarging Translation, Empowering Translators, Maria Tymoczko proposes
a holistic approach to cultural translation in which translators are required to
translate beyond the level of surface cultural aspects by considering the larger
“field or system of cultural formations that must be negotiated in translating a
source text within which the specifics of the text can be situated” (2007:234).
Central to this approach is an exclusive emphasis on the source text and its
embodying culture. In what follows, I suggest that a holistic cultural approach
should also take into account the cultural field in which the translated text
is received, and more importantly, an analysis of the status and practice of
translation within that field.
Current theoretical and practical pronouncements by translators and literary
critics in Vietnam are still restricted within the binary categories of original
Loc Pham 115
versus translated or derivative, of primary versus secondary or subordinate.

Such a conception of translation, which views the original as an authoritative
text, perpetuates the peripheral position of translation. Translation is but an
absence of the original and has no reality in itself. This negation of translation
can be found in numerous translator’s notes and prefaces in which translators
often relegate their own work to a deficient substitution with unavoidable
errors. Translating itself is configured as an act of guilt that often compels
translators to write apologetic prefaces.
The presupposed authority of the original, unity of meaning and absolute
translatability have produced what I call the compulsory duality of accuracy
and fluency. As meaning can be fully decipherable and transferable across
linguistic and cultural boundaries, the translator’s task is conceived as that of
decoding the original meaning and re-encoding it into the target language. In
this translational process, the translator is supposed to achieve both accuracy
and fluency, a task that practically dooms the translator’s work as impossible.
With meaning conceived as intentional and fixed, a translation must be ac-
curate simply because it can be accurate. At the same time, it must be fluent
and conform to the linguistic norms of the receiving language.
Through its paradoxical idiom, this dual discourse perpetuates the other-
ness of translation, consolidating its state of non-reality and failure. On the
one hand, accuracy is less a qualifying category than a pretext for foreigniz-
ing translation. Being accurate often induces being foreign, as implicit in any
source-oriented practice. The foreignizing language then signifies accuracy,
and accuracy as a category in the compulsory duality promotes foreignizing
as an inevitable practice. On the other hand, fluency as a target-oriented cat-
egory, which fails in the face of the foreignizing language, denies translation
of legitimacy and value in the target system, perpetuating its marginal status.
At this point, there arise the questions of why foreignizing in Vietnam needs
to be articulated as an inevitable practice and what social, cultural and political
conditions underpin its dominant status.
The dual discourse of accuracy and fluency at first glance seems to suggest
what Franz Rosenzweig calls the drama of “serving two masters” (Berman
1992:3), or what Antoine Berman designates as a somewhat fundamental
resistance to translation that all cultures have despite an essential need for
it (ibid.:4). If resistance to translation is a universal cultural phenomenon as
Berman seems to suggest, it should be furthered that the cultural and political
ramifications of such resistance are not homogeneous around the world but
vary depending on the power relations at work between the translating and
translated cultures. For a postcolonial culture like Vietnam, where nationalism
lingers on decades after the war, Western stories are perceived as posing a
threat to cultural coherence and unity. As globalization promises the country

a choice of economic integration after more than a decade of post-war isola-
tion from the capitalist world, it also undermines the cultural integrity that
the communist government has struggled to construct and preserve. In such
a dilemma of integration and cultural identity, translation emerges as a solu-
tion. Foreign stories, however powerful, have to be told, or retold, through
translation, and denying translation of its reality is an effective way to mitigate
the hegemonic power of the foreign. The foreign in Vietnam is then instituted
not just as secondary experience through translation, but ultimately as unreal.
The Other which comes through translation is thus irremediably deficient, and
translation itself becomes the Other.
The Other of Western Translation Theories

How can I translate in a context where both translation and the subject mat-
ter being translated are doomed to be the Other and denied of their reality?
Can a story of homosexuality ever be read as a story of reality within Us,
and not a story of the Other? What translation strategies are available for the
translator to resist the preconceived otherness of translation? In what ways
can my Vietnamese Brokeback Mountain subvert the cultural displacement
of homosexuality and reinstate it as a reality in the receiving culture through
my translation? What kind of risks will I take if I refuse to translate into the
‘truth’ of the dominant discourses on translation and homosexuality? And
most important of all, can I find the answer to these questions in contemporary
translation theories?
To date, translation studies has largely been a Western enterprise, and it
should come as no surprise that translation theories have for the large part
drawn upon Western experience of history, philosophy and epistemology as
well as its relation to the rest of the world. The place of enunciation from which
translation studies as a discipline is born and undergoes shifting theoretical
re-articulations has been conveniently or ideologically grounded on translation
experiences in Europe and in the United States. Even when a discussion about
a particular translation necessarily involves a culture distant from the European
and American cultural centres, the derived theories often relate back to this
place of enunciation, be it an articulation of translation norms, a descriptive
analysis of actual translation practices, or a denouncement of the complicity
of translation in colonialism and imperialism. Translation studies talks about
other cultures, yet in a way that ultimately concerns the West; in many ways,
it is a dialogue of the West to the West about its Other.
Loc Pham 117
This is not, however, to diminish the growing scholarship in the field in

recent years that attempts to contest Eurocentric conceptualizations and calls
for new definitions of translation that meaningfully take into account the
highly differentiated discourses on translation across cultures and histories.
Tymoczko (2007:65) has recently stressed the need for translation studies to
be alert to “the varied and capacious nature of the cross-cultural and cross-
temporal concept *translation” as a necessary step toward an open concept of
translation, and throughout her book Tymoczko uses the asterisk to constantly
remind us of this necessary openness. In Translation and Identities in the
Americas, Edwin Gentzler examines the vast continent of ‘the Americas’, yet
carefully dissects geography into multiple cultural centres where he shows
the diverse trajectories that translation has taken in shaping various cultural
and literary movements, from feminism in Canada to cannibalism in Brazil
and ‘border writing’ in the Caribbean (2008). Enunciating translation as
constitutive of cultures, Gentzler’s study exemplifies the attempt to include
cultural experiences beyond Europe and the United States as a new direction
in theorizing translation. Some translation scholars have also mapped out
alternative perspectives based on literary figures of marginalized cultures and
refigured the image of the translator, and translation in general, at the limits
of received notions of Self and Other. Christopher Larkosh, in ‘Translating
Woman: Victoria Ocampo and the Empires of Foreign Fascination’, assumes
the responsibility of carrying out this test of limits by suggesting to “future
writers on the ends of Empires” that “any theory of translation is necessarily
a theory of alterity” (2002:116). The “politics of alterity”, as first articulated
by Larkosh in another essay ‘Je me souviens… aussi: Microethnicity and the
Fragility of Memory in French-Canadian New England’, questions grand
identitarian narratives of monolingual cultures and polarized bilingualism
and engages in “a truly hybrid ethnic identity” that cultivates the memory of
microethnic nuances (2006:112). Although Larkosh’s work remains within
the confines of the West, at least from the perspective that I am engaging with
it in this paper, it still provides a workable model that informs my choice of
strategies in translating Brokeback Mountain into Vietnamese, a point to which
I will return in the next section.
Works that set out to address the various types of translation existing
beyond Western traditions as well as those that aim to re-discover through
translation the micro realities effaced and repressed by identitarian politics
seem to still remain at the margin of translation studies. The discipline is
overshadowed by works that in the final analysis turn back to this dialogue of
the West to the West. Lawrence Venuti’s The Translator’s Invisibility, which
has now become a classic in translation studies, sets the ground for an original
critique of the Eurocentric foundations of the field (1995). In this book, Venuti
convincingly problematizes the ethnocentricity of the translation practices in
the Anglo-American world that valorize transparency and fluency and thus
suppress the translator into invisibility. Like Antoine Berman, Venuti borrows
from the German Romantics the notion of foreignizing translation as a tool for
his project. However, while Berman and representatives of the German Ro-
mantics such as Friedrich Schleiermacher advocate foreignizing translation as
a way to construct and enrich their respective national languages and cultures,
Venuti translates it into an interruptive force that challenges the established
canons of transparency and undoes what he calls “the ethnocentric violence
of translation” in contemporary Anglo-American culture (ibid.:20). Foreigniz-
ing translation for Venuti performs a much needed resistance to the dominant
domesticating discourse that is violent to foreign cultures and suppressive and
exploitative for translators. Interestingly enough, this resistance, as Venuti is
well aware, bears the mark of an imperialistic imperative of “appropriating
foreign texts to serve its own cultural political interests at home” (ibid.:308).
Up to Venuti’s endorsement, the history of foreignizing in the West has been
an imperialistic project that consumes the Other for the sake of the self, be it
the self of Schleiermacher’s Germany, Berman’s France, or of Venuti’s An-
glo-American world. Perhaps such imperialism manifests itself most vividly
when one begins to ask questions about the very foreignness that constitutes
the material of the project. What is the nature of this material? What happens
to the foreign as it is appropriated as a signifier of difference and discontinu-
ity within the receiving linguistic culture? Does foreignizing not presuppose
a concept of the foreign as homogenous? What is most troubling about the
politics of foreignizing is the silence around this totalizing conceptualization
of that which comes from beyond the place of enunciation of the self. As a
pinnacle of the enclosed dialogue of the West with the West, foreignizing loses
sight of an ethical responsibility for the Other, reiterating the very homog-
enizing mechanism it seeks to subvert through a concept of undifferentiated
foreignness. In what follows, I offer an account of foreignizing as practiced
beyond the Western traditions, namely in Vietnam, and articulate a strategy for
translating Brokeback Mountain that addresses both the contemporary transla-
tion culture of Vietnam and issues in language, identity and the processes of
cultural displacement discussed in previous sections.
In a country with a long history of nationalism like Vietnam, foreignizing
translation provides a signifying difference that makes possible the nationalist
imagination of internal coherence and unity. Cultural nationalism has effec-
tively appropriated the foreign and turned it into a point of exteriority, rather
than using it as an enriching material or an interruptive power. Foreignizing
Loc Pham 119
constructs a division between original writing and translation as separate

symbolic orders and thereby fashions up an ideal unified Self in opposition to
a disorderly Other signified through the cacophony of foreignness emanating
from the language of translation. If homosexuality is narrativized through
this kind of translation, it suffers a double displacement: by its own otherness
as a subject matter and by its status as a narrative caught in the medium of
translation. Neither banned nor repressed, it is displaced as the Other merely
by being translated.
Venuti is right in his rigorous resistance to the dominant practice of domes-
ticating translation in the Anglo-American world. However, a holistic analysis
of the case in Vietnam, which takes into account both the translation culture and
the cultural processes of displacement, does not seem to favour foreignizing
if the aim of my translating Brokeback Mountain is to question the perceived
otherness of homosexuality. My project is at best an experiment informed
by results from holistic analyses and also by my conviction that translation,
having the power of representing other cultures, should be allowed a multi-
plicity of methods and approaches if it is to resist and destabilize, rather than
be complicit in, hegemonic representational ideologies, and open them up to
new questions and challenges. Translation essentially involves linguistic and
cultural shifts and transformations, and the rising of one single approach to
domination effectively constrains the very terms whereby translational shifts
and transformations are possible, generating representational ideologies of the
‘-ism’ kind as in Orientalism or Occidentalism. In his essay ‘Translation and
Cultural Hegemony: The Case of French-Arabic Translation’, Richard Jacque-
mond shows us an example of such ‘-ism’ consolidated through translations
which reaffirm the Orientalist representation of the Other and reduce it to an
“irremediably strange and different” reality (1992:149).
The current relation between domesticating and foreignizing translation
in Vietnam represents an extreme case of relational difference, in which one
is zero and the other equals the total sum, exhibiting an absolute domination
of one practice over the other, thus an absolute form of power. Interestingly
enough, a cursory review of the history of translation in Vietnam, particularly
at the advent of thơ lục bát (six-eight verse form) written in the demotic script,
chữ Nôm, is sufficient to enumerate examples of domesticating translations
that have provided the main source of literary material for the construction of
national canonicity, and hence cultural identity. While a full-fledged discus-
sion of the shift from domesticating to foreignizing as the dominant translation
paradigm at Vietnam’s different historical junctures requires research beyond
the scope of this essay, it suffices for the current purpose to note the histori-
cal deployment of domesticating as a powerful tool in the construction of the
Vietnamese culture and identity. Such a historical perspective has informed

and inspired my perception of translation as recuperative, which involves us-
ing the historical domesticating discourse, with its historical cultural weight,
to counter the current situation of hegemonic foreignizing. One instance of
domesticating translation like my own, especially such of a text ready to be
displaced as Other, risks being unrecognizable within the current norms of
translation, yet it resonates a voice from within restrictive normativity that de-
mands negotiation for a non-paradigmatic multiplicity of translated narratives.
Positing translation as fundamental to speaking, or narrating, Paul Ricoeur
points out that “just as in the act of telling a story, we can translate differently”
(2006:10). From the perspective of the translation culture as a whole, my at-
tempt at domesticating Brokeback Mountain represents an act of translating
differently to bring forth, not just a “linguistic hospitality” of dwelling in and
receiving the Other’s language as Ricoeur proposes (ibid.), but a true cultural
hospitality in which homosexuality is not perceived as an external Other dwell-
ing in our home, but already as the very condition of this home.
Any translator, whether translating from a dominated language-culture into
a hegemonic one or vice versa, should learn to be frustrated by being caught
in a polarized relational difference between translational approaches. In fact,
neither domesticating nor foreignizing translation is ideological in itself. It is in
their differential relations that ideology is generated. A translation is ideologi-
cally resistant when it subtracts from the hegemonic position that one particular
approach has come to occupy, and complicit in reinforcing existing ideologies
when it contributes to foreclosing alternative possibilities and suppressing all
traces of multiplicity. In the current translation culture of Vietnam as I see
it, translation needs to assert alternatives to prevent further petrification and
subvert the binary divide between Self and Other, even if the Other is already
recognized as inhabiting the linguistic and cultural home of the Self.
Conceptualizing a Vietnamese Brokeback Mountain

As it did go. They never talked about the sex, let it happen, at first only
in the tent at night, then in the full daylight with the hot sun striking
down, and at evening in the fire glow, quick, rough, laughing and snort-
ing, no lack of noises, but saying not a goddamn word except once
Ennis said, “I’m not no queer”, and Jack jumped in with “Me neither.
A one-shot thing. Nobody’s business but ours”. (Proulx 1997:15)
This is the scene after the two protagonists of Brokeback Mountain, Jack and
Ennis, have sex with each other. Full of imagery and sound, yet it strikes us with
Loc Pham 121
a fundamental lack, the lack of language. The men’s consciousness of sexuality,

it seems, becomes transparent after their subversive bodily intercourse; at this
juncture of falling outside of sexual norms, that sexual consciousness emerges.
Norms are most stable and effective in their regulative and productive power
when consciousness of norms is infinitely repressed. The moment when one
no longer sees oneself as heterosexual, yet practicing heterosexuality all along,
marks the summit of normative heterosexuality where it is totally open, and
therefore, invisible. At this moment of absoluteness, language becomes most
limited and inadequate and norms are structured into language, limiting sig-
nification to the extent that there is no possible signification outside of norms.
The representation of the outside is only possible through the negative terms
of the inside, of norms, which is in itself a translation from the unspeakable
into the symbolic. No lack of noises, yet wordless. There is more in Ennis’s
utterance “I’m not no queer”, with which Jack finds complete identification,
than the fact that they are engaged in a homosexual relationship while each
having his own heterosexual life. Silence abounds in their relationship as a
signifier of the outside of norms, a wordless, unspeakable outside; and for
that matter, there lurks a desire to translate silence into language, as if silence
could never fulfil a mode of existence or offer a liveable life. At the moment
of Ennis’ utterance, silence is broken, and the outside is translated into the
inside through negation. Queer, not-queer, not-no-queer are all the language
of norms outside of which there is only unliveable silence. For Ennis and
Jack, speaking is already translation, from silence into language, through
which they experience the inadequacy of a language that recognizes only
positive identities: homosexual, heterosexual, bisexual, queer, gay, lesbian,
etc. It is after all a translation that promises liveability only through subjuga-
tion by language and its positivities. Framing their translated identity in the
negative, the not-no-queer, they manifestly refuse the positive signifiers that
divide subjectivities into bordered symbolic territories and thereby express an
uneasiness with translation into existing separable identities; it is not only a
translation-into, but also a translation-out-of that resists positive signification
and territorialization. Speaking is already translation, and Ennis and Jack show
that they can always translate differently to bring forth the negative space of
being that is infinitely deferred by identity categories.
The negative identity of not-no-queer that Ennis and Jack craft upon
themselves does not destroy normative heterosexuality or the positive terms
of language. Rather, it signifies border-crossing necessarily as border-erasing.
Proulx shows us throughout the story how negative desire constantly resists
being spoken by positive language. In a world of normative heterosexuality,
it is impossible to approach a person of the same sex with an unproblematic
assumption that s/he is homosexual, unless there are visible or decipherable

significations of the subject as such. The natural, or rather naturalized, as-
sumption is invariably aligned to normative heterosexual desire, or in the case
where subjects have been identified neatly within positive terms such as gay
and lesbian, the assumption is thus aligned to the respective positive desires.
Any expression of homosexual desire for another person whose sexual ori-
entation is not yet identified has to be spoken through this alignment to either
the dominant norms or the identified position if it is to remain within cultural
intelligibility. How is then the desire of this negative not-no-queer identity
expressed, especially when no signs of sexual identification are given? How
do Ennis and Jack approach each other sexually? What language do they
speak for their desires?
If the scene following their first sexual intimacy is filled with unspeakable
silence, the moment preceding it is also heightened by a lack of language, a
lack of desire speech. Positive signifiers are absent within the little space of
the tent on Brokeback Mountain where the two characters approach each other
sexually without any heterosexual assumption or expressed signs of homo-
sexuality. In any case, are there signs within the sanctioned language that can
adequately express the desire of negative identities? Here, they do not simply
cross borders set up in positive language, but erase them completely. Within
that little space of their own where silence reigns, readers are thrown into a
sudden sexual scene just as the characters are thrown into each other’s space
and body without prior positive language and signification. An extensive quote
from the text would show the unspeakable and unspoken desire that defies
any use of language:
“Jesus Christ, quit hammerin’ and get over here. Bedroll’s big enough”,
said Jack in an irritable sleep-clogged voice. It was big enough, warm
enough, and in a little while they deepened their intimacy consider-
ably. Ennis ran full-throttle on all roads whether fence mending or
money spending, and he wanted none of it when Jack seized his left
hand and brought it to his erect cock. Ennis jerked his hand away as
though he’d touched fire, got to his knees, unbuckled his belt, shoved
his pants down, hauled Jack onto all fours and, with the help of the
clear slick and a little spit, entered him, nothing he’d done before but
no instruction manual needed. (ibid.:14)
The scene goes on in silence, “except for a few sharp intakes of breath”. It
is filled with anomalous abruptness; no “instruction manual” is needed, yet
their desire is more than instinctive. The same abruptness comes up again
Loc Pham 123
after four years of separation with literally no communication between the

partners. During this lapse of time, each has established a heterosexual family
of his own. Yet, their reunion is filled with a passionate kiss, and no renewal
of desire needed despite the long absence, right on the open stairs leading to
Ennis’ apartment, within the gaze of his wife from inside the half-shut door.
No borders exist between them as their relationship represents a world of no
language, even if that world constantly risks being translated into the symbolic
order of positivities, demarcations and exclusions.
Reflecting on Annie Proulx’s French-Canadian background and her in-
volvement in a Franco-American writers’ group in New England, Christopher
Larkosh invites readers of Proulx’s works to be mindful of the author’s trans-
lation of her own ethnic identity and career into the world of her characters
(2006). Highlighting the fragility of ethnic memory in French-Canadian New
England under the weight of bilingualism and monolingual cultures with their
demarcations and borders, Larkosh asks what language Ennis and Jack will
speak as they are translated into other cultures (ibid.:120). And here I add
to this line of questioning about language and translation by reflecting on a
possible form for my Vietnamese Brokeback Mountain. As a domesticating
translation, it abandons the microethnicity embedded in the original text, yet
will transcreate the interstices of identity crafted upon the characters. The
silence outside of language and its eventual translation into language and out
of the restrictive signification within that language is recreated in the translated
version. The silence Ennis and Jack experience before and after their cross-
ing/erasing sexual borders does not have linguistic or cultural boundaries. It
is not Proulx’s French-Canadian silence, nor is it any other specific ethnic
silence. It is a silence that speaking subjects of any language and culture will
experience at some point in their life. Silence is desire, a pre-symbolic desire
that constantly risks being translated into the symbolic. Brokeback Mountain,
for all its linguistic specificities, is not a text grounded in cultural untrans-
latability, but one that speaks the universal silent language of desire, and as
such opens itself to multiple translations and transcreations across linguistic
and cultural borders. Domesticating Brokeback Mountain, therefore, is not
tantamount to an imperialistic act that erases cultural differences through
translation for a reductionist representation of the Other, but constitutes a
strategy that allows the silence of negative sexual identity to be heard from
within the inside/outside dynamic of the translating language and culture. In
this way, a domesticated Brokeback Mountain does not make the receiving
audience travel abroad, simply because there is no need for such a journey
in this case. Gay and lesbian communities exist visibly at the margins of the
domestic culture, and travelling into those ‘dark’ corners of society is one way
to resist the cultural displacement and exteriorization of homosexuality. Instead

of letting the audience travel to imaginary distant lands through the foreign
traces of translation, the domesticated Brokeback Mountain invites the reading
public to travel into their own domestic cultural spheres where there are still
microrealities, both ethnic or sexual, to be rediscovered and acknowledged
with a more inclusive social and cultural outlook.
If translation is travel, travelling into our own Self is just as necessary as
travelling into the Other. During the course of translating Brokeback Moun-
tain, I found myself exploring my self, a self that I had hardly had a chance
to think and wonder about, and if I did, it would be a grand Self presented
to me through narratives that I have no voice in telling. Domesticating the
voices and images of the American West into Vietnamese culture, I could
travel to territories beyond the immediate reality of a member of the dominant
ethnicity and delve into the forgotten microethnic vestiges buried under the
cultural surfaces of nationalist ideologies. Could there be a gay Hmong liv-
ing in the remote mountainous areas of northern Vietnam, miles away from
the dark urban recesses of bars and nightclubs? Would he be wearing jeans,
drinking tea, and driving a truck? What bodily stylizations are available to
him and how would he perform his negative identity in cultural spaces beyond
national imagination? To resonate the question Larkosh asks about Ennis and
Jack’s language as they travel the world, I also ask about the language that
the translation itself would speak, as after all, the language of the translated
characters is also the language of the translation. Ennis and Jack translate
their silence into language at the same time they translate themselves out of
language through negative identity. I absorbed a foreign text into Vietnamese
culture at the same time I let the translation travel outside of that totalizing
culture, into the microethnic and sexual realities covered and effaced by cul-
ture. Like Ennis and Jack, I speak as I translate, and it is a speaking into as
much as a speaking out of.
In what follows, I discuss some general techniques used in my translation.
I brought Proulx’s setting of the 1960s to the post-doi moi Vietnam of the
1990s. This temporal shift would give the translation more cultural currency
regarding the burgeoning of writings, fiction and non-fiction about life in
the era of national construction. The open door policy of this period brought
with it critical social and cultural transformations, and life in transforma-
tion became a rich resource for writers who wanted to resist the suffocating
atmosphere of cultural and political isolation. This period witnessed the
emergence of multiple voices in a momentum that shattered the dominant
ideology. Figures like Nguyễn Huy Thiệp, Dương Thu Hương, Bảo Ninh,
all quite well known in the United States, came to prominence with their
Loc Pham 125
subversive modes of writing. Although many of their writings were banned,

they are remembered as leading figures who blew a new breath into the sedating
body of canonicity constructed and preserved by socialist ideologies. Positing
the translation in this period would not only give the work a sense of life in
transformation, but also allow it to be read within the well-nurtured public
memory of a brief, yet prolific, tradition of cultural subversion. Translating
into this literary tradition of the 1990s is also already a translation out of the
1960s bordered geopolitical vision of both the source culture of the United
States and the receiving culture of Vietnam.
Linguistically, the characters of the Vietnamese Brokeback Mountain
speak the northern rural dialect. There is an imbalance in the Vietnamese
language in terms of cross-regional linguistic exposure. While southerners
are more familiar with northern dialect through different means, such as the
media, literature, film and the southward migration, many northerners find the
southern dialect alien or even unintelligible. Speaking the northern dialects,
therefore, the characters can easily identify with the larger reading public,
avoiding regional enclosure. This linguistic choice is also useful because the
south is imagined to be more of a commercial centre with higher international
exposure, in contrast to the more reserved north. Translating homosexuality
into the southern dialect would simply place the text neatly into this divisive
presupposition, which ultimately condemns the subject matter as an imported
cultural product from the West.
Domesticating Brokeback Mountain was an enlightening experience for
me as the activity posed numerous questions about language, culture, society,
and most importantly, about my own self as a translator and researcher. It was
a chance for me to wonder about the constitution of my own self, the condi-
tions in which I am and continue to be constituted as a subject within social
and cultural frames that have become too close and familiar to be visible. It is
a journey into distant realities within my own culture, where there are people
who live and speak every day, but are rendered voiceless and bodiless in the
national imagination of cultural coherence and unity. In one of his essays,
Larkosh stresses the urgent need
to recognize how translation is not simply our object of study, but also
an essential intellectual and cultural tool that can allow the translator
a measure of critical distance and selectivity in relation to current dis-
courses, policies and priorities, thus shaping a new set of future ethical
imperatives with relation to language, culture and society. (2004:41)
This essay of mine speaks to this need for a new recognition of the role of
translation. Through my selecting of the text and the translation approach,
I have contextualized the critical distance and selectivity in the form of a

translation out of current discourses, ideologies, and practices, showing all
the way the rewarding experience of travelling through translation into buried
micro cultural realities of ethnicity and sexuality. Translating homosexuality
into Vietnamese culture requires the necessary translating out of the cultural
displacement of homosexuality and of translation itself.
Works cited
Berman, Antoine (1992) The Experience of the Foreign: Culture and Translation
in Romantic Germany. Trans. S. Heyvaert, Albany: State University of New
York Press.
Gentzler, Edwin (2008) Translation and Identity in the Americas: New Directions
in Translation Theory, London: Routledge.
Jacquemond, Richard (1992) ‘Translation and Cultural Hegemony: The Case of
French-Arabic Translation’, in Lawrence Venuti (ed.) Rethinking Translation:
Discourse, Subjectivity, Ideology, London: Routledge, 139-57.
Larkosh, Christopher (2002) ‘Translating Woman: Victoria Ocampo and the
Empires of Foreign Fascination’, in Maria Tymoczko and Edwin Gentzler
(eds) Translation and Power, Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press,
99-121.
Larkosh, Christopher (2004) ‘Levinas, Latin American Thought and the Futures of
Translational Ethics’, TTR: traduction, terminologie, redaction 17(2): 27-44.
Larkosh, Christopher (2006) ‘Je me souviens… aussi: Microethnicity and the
Fragility of Memory in French-Canadian New England’, TOPIA: Journal for
Canadian Cultural Studies 16: 111-27.
Le, Hoang (dir.) (2007) Trai Nhay, Ho Chi Minh City: Galaxy.
Proulx, Annie (1997) Brokeback Mountain, New York: Scribner.
Ricoeur, Paul (2006) On Translation, New York: Routledge.
Rushdie, Salman (1981) Midnight’s Children, London: Jonathan Cape.
Tymoczko, Maria (2007) Enlarging Translation, Empowering Translators, Man-
chester: St. Jerome.
Venuti, Lawrence (1995) The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation,
London: Routledge.
Gender, Historiography and Translation
TUTUN MUKHERJEE
Abstract: This paper is an exploration of the interpellation

of gender in the writing of literary and cultural history, and
an attempt to understand how this may be conveyed through
translation. The aim is to emphasize the need for dynamic
interplay among the three components of gender, historiog-
raphy and translation. The paper takes up for close study
Subarnalata, a novel by Ashapurna Devi, one of India’s most
eminent women writers, as well as its translated versions.
This novel, the second of an expansive generational trilogy,
tells the story of women’s emancipation and the emergence
of the ‘lekhika’ or woman writer in India. It is axiomatic that
a translator does not merely ‘transfer’ the text into another
language, but also its cultural context. In this instance, the
challenge is to convey the socio-cultural problematics and the
milieu that the author very deliberately weaves into her text.
The main question this raises: What kind of cultural sensitivity
would be required to effectively translate all the elements of
history? The paper then offers the concept of ‘ex-centrality’ as
a desirable approach for translating texts of the marginalized
and the underprivileged.
The thoughts for this paper were triggered by two occurrences: first, a recent
seminar organized by the National Translation Mission of India on Ashapurna
Debi, a brilliant foremother of women’s writing in the Bengali (Bangla)
language; and second, reading Christopher Larkosh’s discussion of Victoria
Ocampo’s representation of Argentine culture, in which he poses the question,
“Is it possible, then, to retell Argentine literary history from the point of view
of the translating woman?” (2002:04).
Indeed, Ashapurna Debi’s fiction brings alive through gendered human

Ashapurna Debi (1909-95), a legendary Bengali author and poet, has left an al-
most inexhaustible legacy of literary creations. She was widely honoured, being
conferred D.Litt degree and gold medals by many Universities; ‘Deshikottama’ by
Viswabharati University; Honorary Fellowship by Sahitya Akademi, the national
Academy of Arts and Letters; the Padma Shri, a civilian award by the Government
of India; and India’s highest literary award, Jnanpith Puraskar in 1976.
128 Gender, Historiography and Translation
experience the history of Bengal during the troubled decades of mid-

twentieth-century India.2 Her stories, straddling the decades of the Indian
Independence, reflect the turmoil in the public and the private domains as the
country struggled first for freedom and then for the realization of nationhood
and self-reliance at the macro level while at the micro level Indian/Bengali
women struggled to loosen the coils of rigid patriarchy in their search for voice
and selfhood. In this paper I shall try to understand how successfully (or not)
this historiography is conveyed through the translation of her texts.
Born in 1909, Ashapurna Debi would have turned one hundred in 2009.
Had she lived, she would have been happy to see that her hope for the alle-
viation of the suffering of women that she had articulated in her writing had
been achieved, not fully but to a large extent. A self-taught bhadramahila,
a gentlewoman of the upper middle class, Ashapurna’s narrative world re-
flects the urbanizing Kolkata, the erstwhile Presidency town of Bengal. The
protagonists of her fiction are women configured by the socio-cultural norms
and practices of those times but who protest against their gendered positions
from within the confines of the domestic space and challenge the stereotypes
of Indian womanhood. She presents the antahpur or the inner quarters of the
Bengali home that she herself knows intimately, with its convention-and-ritual
driven domestic milieu, strict hierarchical and patriarchal family order, and
the specificities of socio-cultural circumstances that governed the daily lives
of women. Ashapurna’s opus magna is a trilogy, written between 1965 and
1974, that narrates with exceptional boldness the lives of women from three
generations. Each volume is a Bildungsroman of sorts that tries to locate the
protagonists’ search for identity and voice in the larger struggle of Bengali
women in the domain of gender relations. The first volume, Pratham Pratisruti
(First Promise) is the story of Satyabati; while the two later novels Subar-
nalata and Bokul Katha (Bokul’s Story) trace the travails of the eponymous
protagonists, Satyabati’s daughter and grand-daughter. Along with these major
characters in the novels are numerous other women characters representing
2
Bengal entered an extremely turbulent phase described later as the Age of Fire
(Agnijug) that escalated with the 1905 anti-Partition movement, the Swadeshi/
Freedom Movement, the boycott of foreign goods, economic struggle. National-
ism also brought its attendant shadow, communalism. The following decades saw
the two World Wars, the inter-war economic slump, the continuing nationalist
struggles, the emergence of trade unions and peasant fronts, the great famine of
1942, the Independence and the Partition of India accompanied by violent com-
munal riots, the ‘Tebhaga’ peasants movement, the extremist Naxalite upsurge.
All impacted Bengali society and mindset and, not surprisingly, were reflected
in its literary output.
Tutun Mukherjee 129
different aspects of the gendered experience of life and society. The novels are
organized temporally and spatially to show a movement from the colonial to
the post-colonial ethos and from the countryside to the city. They document
Hindu Bengali middleclass in transition – “from the village to the city, from
the joint family to the nuclear, from the illiterate child bride to the single
professional woman” (Dev Sen 1997:vii) – and elaborate the way women
were affected by the change and, more importantly, “how women were partly
instrumental in bringing about the change by challenging the systems from
within” (ibid.). Their social-cultural emancipation becomes apparent through
subsequent generations, but each of Ashapurna’s protagonists is a rebel, and
represents both protest and resistance to the persisting subjugation of women
in the stifling and oppressive conditions of her time and in the personal search
for identity.
The discourse of women’s emancipation and social change in India was
initiated in the later part of the 19th century, when the colonial encounter
led to major reorganization in the related areas of social subjectivities and
cultural production. Bharati Ray (1991:4) clarifies in her insightful survey
of the subject that although there weren’t any radical changes or shifts in the
perception of women’s role in the family and society, one could however trace
“the evolution, albeit slow, of new beliefs shaping their goal, attitude, activi-
ties. What began to emerge, although in an embryonic form, is an awareness
of and an attempt to change women’s subordination and disadvantages under
patriarchy”. Gradually, the spirit of social critique and reform gathered mo-
mentum with the founding of several women’s journals and magazines in the
early years of the 20th century. The awakening of women to their rights and
‘voice’ was helped by the increasing number of women writers who generated
wide ranging discussions on different aspects of women’s life and experience.
This was of immense significance as it encouraged the education of women,
their desire for more independence and participation in activities outside of
the home. In her Foreword to a collection of essays by early Bengali women,
Tanika Sarkar writes
Around the middle of the nineteenth century, a social category was born
in Bengal, along with the new word that named it: lekhika or the female
author. Earlier women’s literary compositions had been predominantly
oral, eponymous or anonymous, and fragmentary. (2003:ix)
Thus the print media enabled women to share their thoughts on a range of
issues – from apparel and footwear, to marriage, childbirth and divorce, to
education, culture and travel. These articulations made evident an emergent
binary which distinguished the pracheena or the traditional woman unwilling

to step out of the confines imposed by patriarchy from the nabeena or the new
woman venturing into the world with new found confidence.3 Once begun,
the women sought through the articulation of their introspection and response
to the socio-cultural milieu to move beyond the domestic sphere and find a
place and attention in the public domain. Ashapurna locates the emergence
of women’s protest in the discourse that was generated by the writings of
these women. Her own efforts seem geared to merge the earlier topos with
the newly emergent one by coaxing into fruition the seeds of resistance sown
by her predecessors. In fact, the first book of the trilogy, Pratham Pratisruti,
contextualized in the last years of the 19th century, commemorates with its
opening lines the legacy bequeathed by the older generations:
The shadow-dark waters of a pool in some secluded village overflow

in the monsoon to join the river and gush forth in torrents. The same
stream rushes along and one day joins the sea. Surely we must always
acknowledge the initial flowing forth from the shadows.
Behind the innumerable Bakuls and Paruls of today’s Bengal there is a

history of years of struggle – the history of the struggle of their moth-
ers, grandmothers and great grandmothers. There were not too many
of them – they were solitary individuals among many. They went forth
alone. Over ponds and creeks; shattering stones, uprooting bushes. And
sometimes while building the road they sat down exhausted, on the
path they themselves had cleared. Then someone else would come
and lift on to her shoulders the burden of that promised work. This
is how the road was built – this road on which Bakuls and Paruls are
striding ahead. (Chowdhury 1998:402)4
Ashapurna incorporates women’s struggle for freedom by narrativizing “the

history of torment, of torture and loss…the price extracted by the patriarchal
society” (ibid.:404). She advocates the transformation of social norms and
3
This, however, was not as uncomplicated as it appears because there was am-
bivalence and dilemma in the choice women made. There were extremes in both
kinds of behaviour and often the ‘New Woman’ – challenging the paradigm of
ideal Indian Womanhood – was deliberately parodied by male writers of the time.
The complexity of the matter has been highlighted in the fiction of Rabindranath
Tagore, Swarnakumari Debi, Sharatchandra Chatterjee and several eminent writ-
ers of the time.
4
This quotation is taken from a translation by Indira Chowdhury in her 1998 study
of Pratham Pratisruti.
Tutun Mukherjee 131
living conditions for women and stresses the need for their education and
empowerment. Things evolved in stages as the country changed from colo-
nization to democracy after 1947 and various economic and socio-political
structures were put in place.
Ashapurna Debi’s trilogy is structured in the mother-daughter continuity-
disruption pattern, recording “through the eyes of strong sensitive women the
changing socio-cultural scenes of Bengal through three generations” (Dev Sen
1997:vii). Of the three volumes, my personal favourite is the second book,
entitled Subarnalata, which traces the life-long struggle of its feisty and
spirited eponymous protagonist. Subarnalata was serialized through 1966-67
before being compiled and published as a book. Subarnalata’s story begins
where Pratham Pratisruti ends. Placed in the midst of the expansive genera-
tional narrative, Subarnalata is the daughter of Satyabati – the first novel’s
uncompromising ‘heroine’ – and the mother of Bakul, the protagonist of the
final volume. Subarna has inherited all of her mother’s qualities: her intrepid
nature, honesty, uprightness, sensitivity and quest for knowledge. Married at
the age of nine, the child bride Subarnalata enters the domestic sphere, which
was governed by a strict familial hierarchy that placed her at the periphery.
Subarna wants to read and write; she wants to see the world; she wants to be
like the liberal ‘new women’ [nabeena] of the Brahmo Samaj; she wants to
escape the petty games of domination played by her husband and mother-in-
law. She wants a room of her own with a balcony, which would serve as her
window to the world. Dreaming of education and open skies for herself and
her daughters, Subarna fights all her life, first with her husband, his conserva-
tive family and the oppressive living conditions of their home, and then with
her sons and daughters, who can’t understand why their mother can’t live a
contented life like other women with her comfortable lifestyle and the prevail-
ing social norms. They can’t understand her desire to fight the British for the
Independence of India. Introducing the novel, Ashapurna writes,
Subarnalata is a life story but that is not all. Subarnalata is the story
of a particular time, a time that has passed but whose shadow still
hovers over our social system. Subarnalata symbolizes the helpless
cry of an imprisoned soul … sociologists write down the history of
a changing society, I have merely tried to draw a curve to depict the
change. (Dev Sen 1997:vii)
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, while problematizing the possibility of radical

social ‘change’ happening by the mere textualizing of experiences of the
subaltern or the ‘postcolonial’ subject, described the ‘text’ as “an area of
discourse ... in which the problem of the discourse of the human sciences is
made available” (1988:77). Yet, as Spivak warns, what generally happens
– (but which, however, does not happen in Ashapurna’s text) – is that often
the unavailability of solutions to the highlighted ‘problem’ are glossed over
or subsumed by universal contours presumed as the “generating, generated,
and receiving consciousness of the text” or its discourse (ibid.:78). Another
theorist of ‘postcolonial’ subjectivity, Homi Bhabha, adds that
the construction of the colonial subject in discourse, and the exercise

of colonial power through discourse, demands an articulation of forms
of difference – racial and sexual. Such an articulation becomes crucial
if it is held that the body is always simultaneously (or conflictually)
inscribed in the economy of pleasure and desire as well as in the
economy of discourse, domination and power. (1994:67)
Indeed, what Ashapurna’s trilogy succeeds in establishing is the process of

gendering as the major societal problem that consistently and deliberately
inscribes woman’s body for pleasure and desire and reduces her identity to a
‘cipher’ in the patriarchal discourse of domination and power. As a woman
writer Ashapurna Debi is acutely conscious of the way gender permeates
women’s lives in India, and that knowledge is reflected in her writing. No
attempt is made to gloss such facts by transcendent euphemisms or quick-fix
answers. Each of her protagonists cries poignantly in protest and no ‘univer-
salizing contours’ are allowed to mask their suffering or stifle their lament.
Ashapurna’s desire is to sensitize the receptor society to the ‘problem’ of gen-
der and highlight the need to engage with it and address it seriously through
discourse. That underpins the significance of her trilogy in the literary his-
tory of India, especially in terms of a genealogical understanding of women’s
writing. Thus, Subarnalata truly represents ‘herstory’ – that is, it recounts the

Hatim and Mason’s use of ‘discourse analysis’ is inspired by M.K. Halliday’s
cognitive framework of functional grammar used to analyze (a) field or what is
being written about; (b) tenor or who is communicating and to whom; and (c)
mode, the form of communication. These are key terms for interpreting textual
connections within the cultural context since language communicates meaning
and social power relation. Languages and texts are considered to be socio-cultural
messages representing discourse in the wider sense used by special groups in
specific contexts. Hatim and Mason use the method for translation as well since
“translating is a communicative process which takes place within a social con-
text” (1990:3). The discourse semantics of a text is made of three metafunctions
– ideational, interpersonal, and textual realized through the choices of syntax,
semantics and lexicon.
Tutun Mukherjee 133
story of women’s search for identity and their struggle for emancipation from
the stranglehold of patriarchy but also, through its groundbreaking popular-
ity, records the achievement of women’s writing claiming its rightful place in
India’s literary world.
Translation, or the process of ‘carrying across’ or ‘mirroring’, can
have many strategies to explain a text’s movement from one language and
culture to another as well as the “perils” involved for the writer and the
translator in undertaking such a movement (Tymoczko 1999a:19-20). There
are also warnings that translating a text ‘faithfully’ 6 is an impossible task
– “a utopian task” as Ortega y Gasset (1937/1992:93) put it. The truisms
regarding the processes and risks involved in ‘rewriting’ the ‘fixed’ source
text into the fluidity of the target language are well known and need not
be repeated here. It would suffice to say that mediating between languages
and cultures is not an easy task and involves profound knowledge of the
source culture and its historical developments. Languages and texts are
regarded as socio-cultural messages that represent discourse in the wider
sense. In 1990, Susan Bassnett and André Lefevere announced what had
been under way for some time – the “cultural turn” in translation studies
(1990, 1998; Bassnett 1998). In brief, they envisaged that “neither the
word, nor the text, but the culture becomes the operational ‘unit’ of transla-
tion” (1990:8). What is being transmitted or carried across in the language
chosen is another culture involving a whole world of reference that needs
to be understood empathically by the receptor culture. Hence, both ‘text
knowledge’ and ‘world knowledge’ are central in a translator’s work and
the translator must choose strategies to evaluate the amount or the kind of
knowledge to be shared with the target readers in terms of her/his familiar-
ity with the cultural topics of the text. It is understood that the translator
would seek to unveil the linguistic, social, historical and cultural traces of
her/his cultural world to be revealed to new readers embedded in different
linguistic and cultural webs. Tymoczko explains that
a literary translator is de facto concerned with differences not just in

language [transposing word for word, mechanically] but with the same
range of cultural factors that a writer must address. ... The culture or
tradition of a postcolonial writer acts as a metatext which is rewritten,
explicitly and implicitly, as both background and foreground in the act
of literary creation. (999a:2)
6
To be sure, the notion of ‘faithfulness’ or ‘fidelity’ to the original text has had its
share of controversy both in terms of the critique of ‘origins’ as well as ‘feminiza-
tion’ of the translating act.
Indeed, the painstaking practice of translation confirms that it offers a means

for cultural representation and that the distance separating the source from
the target texts is a gap quite challenging to bridge. One is always aware that
beyond the lesser or greater skills of the translator, the uneven correspond-
ence between languages or the dissimilarities between cultures, there is an
amorphous and imprecise middle ground, a veritable quagmire that can pull
the translator into its sinking depths of difficult choices that may impact a
particular translation in a lasting manner.
This paper examines two translations of Ashapurna Debi’s Subarnalata:
one, into English by a female translator, Gopa Majumdar, and the other into
Hindi by a male translator Hanskumar Tiwari to understand whether – and
how effectively – the translations have carried across ‘herstory’ or the narrative
of women’s subjectivity that Ashapurna had articulated that made evident the
literary ‘history’ of the time.
The English translation of Subarnalata by Gopa Majumdar (Debi 1997)
was commissioned by Macmillan India as part of a special selection of
novels of the post-Independence decades that marked, as the euphoria of
the Freedom Struggle faded, the significant political, social and ideological
re-orientation that were gradually becoming evident in the newly-formed
nation. Majumdar is an experienced and successful translator who has
contributed significantly to the process of ‘carrying across’ Bengali texts
into the wider English language readership. Explaining the challenges a
cultural text may posit and the choices that confront a translator, Majumdar
maintains that
it is one of the major duties of a translator to think about the interest

of a reader while simultaneously thinking about the original work.
If the translator can bridge the gap between readers and writers, the
translator is successful. (Rusam 200)
In the same write-up, she admits making changes in her own translation “be-
cause it is quite impossible to translate everything – especially idioms and
proverbs – properly” (ibid.). For her, “literal translations have no meaning at
all”, so in her own practice she “excludes the parts which may not be mean-
ingful for foreign readers” and adds that “in many cases I have included many
English phrases and rhymes”. According to her, “it is a translator’s duty to
make the works enjoyable while, at the same time, being as honest as possible
to the original writing”. In her view, minor changes are allowed in translation
if the changes make the stories enjoyable. Majumdar’s clarifications regarding
her choices and her attitude regarding translation are interesting since these
Tutun Mukherjee 135
obviously govern her praxis. The question is, how justified are such decisions
vis-à-vis a text like Subarnalata?
Since the 1960s, la féminité and l’écriture féminine developed as pow-
erful concepts to challenge male-centred thinking and masculinist ways
of perceiving and articulating the world. According to Hélène Cixous, in
addition to the search for ‘silenced’ female voices and a recuperation of the
history of women’s writing, the impelling endeavour was the interpellation
of the female body as the main source of l’écriture feminine (1976). In her
view, the relationship between feminine writing and the female body lies
in the heterogeneity and multiplicity of female sexuality. Just as the female
libido is diverse, so is the woman’s imaginary inexhaustible and mutable.
The inexhaustible fluidity of feminine imaginary enables women’s writing to
transcend univocality, linearity, and the fixity of ‘phallic’ discourse through
excess, circularity and repetition. Cixous explains that a woman’s writing
can only keep going, “without ever inscribing or discerning contours …
[because] her language does not contain, it carries; it does not hold back, it
makes possible” (ibid.:878).
We recall here that Subarnalata was serialized and hence has a cir-
cuitous, circular, repetitive and reflexive structure with frequent overlaps.
Ashapurna writes the female body into the entire process of ‘engendering’
the text. There are evocative and vivid scenes of the inner courtyard of a
Bengali household, Subarna’s initiation into married life and the intimacies
of conjugal relationship, the curtailment of her individual freedoms by the
patriarchal and hierarchical family set-up, the varied and nuanced develop-
ment of interpersonal relations (women-women as well as women-men
relations which were sometimes tenuous and sometimes deep), the layered
textures of socio-cultural interaction within the domestic sphere. There are
also details of lifestyle, cuisine, dress, rites and rituals – all etched with de-
liberation and sensitivity. Ashapurna wrote into her narrative her feelings,
observations and reflections on women’s lives and their relationship with
the society as well as her critique of the perpetuating patriarchal norms.
As a book, Subarnalata ran up to 410 pages in fine print. It is noteworthy
that the Macmillan translation by Gopa Majumdar (Debi 1997) is only 209
pages in elegant reader-friendly font; in other words, the English version
of the novel is half the size of the original text. Here, the obvious question
would be: In the process of its syncopation, what parts of the narrative were
edited out by the translator?
7
Through the years the novel has had many reprints and sometimes the number
of pages vary, but the matter of its voluminous length remains undisputed.
In the illuminating Introduction to the translation written by an eminent

woman writer and literary critic of contemporary times, a paragraph is devoted
to justify the severe editing by the translator. Dev Sen explains,
Due to certain constraints the novel had to be abridged … This has

been done with great care and discretion, so that the number of pages
could be reduced without affecting the main narrative. In the original,
Part One has 27 chapters, the translation has 21; and Part Two has
thirty-one chapters, the translation 20. (1997:xv)
While we are on this subject, I must share a similar experience with another
formidable text of immense relevance, Rabindranath Tagore’s 1910 text Gora,
written in response to Rudyard Kipling’s Kim (90). The English translation
published by Macmillan in 1924 does not even carry the translator’s name – it is
assumed that the translation is the work primarily of W. W. Pearson in collabo-
ration with others, because the varying stylistic registers suggest the subsequent
input of many. The Macmillan went through 2 reprints from 924 to 99
and served – sadly – as the basic text for translations into other languages.
This was ‘sad’ because the Macmillan translation is a flawed and an abridged
text. Large chunks of descriptions have been left out, the most glaring and
unpardonable being the opening paragraph conveying a powerful evocation
of the metropolis Kolkata. Similarly, many portions considered ‘unnecessary’
or ‘unsuitable’ for the target readers were dropped. On the other hand, strange
words and idiomatic changes were introduced to ‘tailor’ the source language/
cultural text to suit the visitor/target language readership. Published in 1924,
the translated version of Gora illustrates the ‘colonial’ paradigm of cultural
transfer based on the cultural inequality between SL/Culture and TL/Culture.
Fortunately, Gora’s ‘afterlife’ was restored its ‘glory’ in the 1997 translation
by the eminent Tagore scholar Sujit Mukherjee, in an edition commissioned
by Sahitya Akademi, India’s national academy of letters, although even that
version drew some criticism regarding its non-differentiation of the speech
registers of the various characters representing different social class, caste and
socio-religious background.
Let us now reiterate what the cultural turn theorists and others have pro-
posed: that translation takes place not just between languages but, more
importantly, between cultures, and that the material to be handled by the
translator goes beyond the strictly linguistic. Hence the most valuable source
or point of reference for the translator is the book selected for translation
8
For a more detailed discussion, see Mukherjee (2002).
Tutun Mukherjee 137
as well as the author of that book. Through translation, the translator is ac-
tually constructing an image of a literature or a culture to be consumed by
readers of another culture. The role of the translator is like that of a cultural
ambassador or a facilitator between two cultures. This critical broadening
of the act of translation to move beyond the merely linguistic found support
in Even-Zohar’s polysystem theory (1990), as well as what Theo Hermans
describes as the ‘manipulation school’ (1985). In line with Bassnett and
Lefevere’s promotion of the cultural turn, these theories helped to reposition
translation as an essential shaping force and medium for the transference of
literary history and cultural dynamics. In the later years of the 20th century,
a significant paradigm shift occurred in translation practice that moved from
the ‘colonial’ to the ‘postcolonial’ and the ‘centrist’ to the ‘subaltern/ mar-
ginal’. The endeavour sought to balance the unstable relationship in terms of
power that one language or culture could exercise over another since what
gets carried across through translation is not merely textual equivalents but
important social-cultural information consisting of the re-presentation of the
context along with the cultural polysystem within which a text is located. The
translator thus becomes a social agent who can communicate differences and
negotiate limits.
Postcolonial theory of translation also understands the act of translation
as a discursive and rhetorical operation that is not free from ideological and
political cadences. Tymoczko postulates that the ideology of the translation lies
not only in the text translated but also in the position adopted by the translator.
Hence the translator is immersed in an unending process of decision-making
as “ethical agents of social change” which “configures the space of enuncia-
tion from which one translates” (1999b:201). Incidentally, ‘ethics’ is not to
be taken as just the ‘source of values’ but as the way of responding to those
values. The translator is first a reader and as a reader responds to the features
or values that attracts her to the text. Equally important is to understand ‘what’
one reads with ‘how’ it is read. There is neither a magic formula for the transla-
tor to mechanically adopt nor can there be a perfectly transparent or a ‘final’
translation because each reader makes certain choices regarding the issues to
highlight and gives greater or lesser emphasis, subconsciously or otherwise,
to different kinds of values, characteristics or impressions. The path is rough
and the choices are difficult. The relationship between the text and its transla-
tor is dynamic and transformative because each text calls for strategies to be
arrived at after attentive engagement with it, which includes the considera-
tion of possible alternatives (Mukherjee 2008). For instance, that a woman’s
experience comprises unique perceptions and emotions and that women and
men do not inhabit an identical world, or at least do not view it identically.
Such a sexual or gendered perception as a social construct has implications

regarding the way a woman’s world is understood and interpreted. For this
purpose one needs to be contextually sensitive, or as Gayatri Chakraborty
Spivak proposes, to be alert regarding the dangers of encouraging uniformity
and erasing differences, especially with texts that attempt to re-define ‘differ-
ence’ vis-à-vis socio-cultural boundaries and ideologies (1988).
Given the above dialectical framework, let us examine what the ‘abridged’
translation of Subarnalata reveals about the ‘ethical’ choices Majumdar made.
First, Majumdar imposes a ‘structure’ on Ashapurna’s female aesthetic that is
protean, circumspect, reflexive and non-linear in nature; second, she condenses
sentences (but not for the purpose of syntactical re-arrangement, which is a
perfectly acceptable practice given the divergent grammar and structure of
languages); third, only the ‘main narrative’ is retained – one would like to
know what ‘constitutes’ the so-called ‘main narrative’ and does it not thereby
erase the text’s dialogism (for instance, the main narrative of Ramayana
would merely recount Rama’s marriage to Sita, their forest exile due to the
stepmother’s machinations, evil Ravana’s abduction of Sita, Rama’s battle
with Ravana to rescue Sita symbolizing the eternal fight between good and
evil, Rama-Sita’s victorious return to their kingdom. If this is the ‘main nar-
rative’, why did Valmiki expend 2400 verses to create an epic?)? Fourth, by
the retaining only the ‘main’ narrative, many characters are dispensed with
and with that, the richness of their speech and idiomatic variations as well as
the dialogic quality of the text. Finally, and most unpardonably, Majumdar
excludes those sections of the narrative where gender operates, such as inci-
dents where Subarna refuses to remain silent, her protests against oppressive
rites and practices, particularly those relating to pollution and touch, and
women’s health and hygiene. Invariably Subarna uses her body as the site of
resistance, as for example, to rebel against the customary way of confining the
expectant mother to the dingy and dirty ‘birthing chamber’ and the untrained
midwife with crude instruments. Ashapurna’s deliberate and detailed account
of such incidents emphasizes her effort to continue the discourse which her
foremothers began through the journals in the early 20th century about the
prevalent conditions within the domestic sphere which must change to ensure
the emancipation and education of women about their well being and thereby
the well being of their children. Her reflexive writing represents a critique of
contemporary society and of times when women seem to have moved forward
yet in actuality remain where they have always been as subservient, neglected
and oppressed subjects.
The Hindi translation of the novel by a male translator, Hanskumar Tiwari,
must be juxtaposed here as a test case (Debi 1978). Regional languages of
Tutun Mukherjee 139
India may be taken in clusters in terms of their linguistic and cultural affini-
ties. Bengali and Hindi can thus be regarded as being ‘close’ to each other
and idiomatically commensurable. It is noteworthy that Tiwari’s translation
also remains ‘close’ to the original in spirit, structure, style and semantics.
Thus, his translation seems a more ‘complete’ text that displays ‘fidelity’ to
the original.
To return then to Larkosh’s question: “Is it possible to rewrite literary
history from the point of view of the translating woman?” Larkosh’s essay
(2002) examines the way in which Victoria Ocampo, during the days of her
close interaction with Rabindranath Tagore, laboured to understand the nu-
ances of Tagore’s language and style as he translated his own poetry from
Bengali into English. She was obviously conscious of the challenging ‘task’
that she would face as a translator while trying to create direct translational
links between seemingly disparate cultures such as Argentina and a far-flung
Asian country like India. She was also sensitive of the fact that, at that point
of time, translation praxis was mostly Eurocentric. Hence, to ensure a fair and
reliable translation of an Indian and a Bengali text into the language of her
people, as a translator she would have to necessarily negotiate the cultural
paradigms to maintain the delicate balance in the complex relationship be-
tween cultures and languages without favouring one over the other. Only then
would she succeed in retaining and conveying the excitement of ‘discovering’
a new cultural continent through the translated text. Ocampo’s preoccupa-
tions demonstrate a subtle but extremely significant shift from a colonial to a
postcolonial attitude to translation.
Through this paper I have tried to reflect upon this ‘balancing act’ that a
serious translator must engage in and the choices that need to be made, by try-
ing to assess the difference in the practice of translation that a woman translator
of a woman’s text could bring into the ‘post text’. Elaine Showalter refers to
“the contextual analysis” that Clifford Geertz describes as ‘thick description’.
Adopting the Geertzian category, Showalter explains that “a genuinely ‘thick’
description of women’s writing would insist upon gender and upon a literary
tradition among the multiple strata that make up the force of meaning in a text”
(1988:350). By that logic, a genuinely ‘thick’ translation by an informed and
caring translator (female or male) will bring out and analyze the layers of the
text hitherto downplayed or unvoiced, or re-present woman as the text. In the
light of this understanding, analyzing Ashapurna’s text that ‘embodies’ the
feminine along with the two models of translation selected for discussion in
this paper by Majumdar (female) and Tiwari (male), I conclude that it would
be essentialist and patronizing to claim that one must be biologically female
to accurately translate the voice of a female author. On the contrary, I consider
deep and rigorous engagement, empathy, sensibility and sensitivity to be the

characteristics of a sincere and diligent translator. These are the qualities that
are put to test during the process of translation and govern the ‘making’ of the
‘post-text’. The translator must intervene in this creative process but not to
efface, erase or silence. As stressed by Theo Hermans, “a translated narrative
always contains a second voice … the Translator’s voice, as the index of the
Translator’s discursive presence” (2010:198). In Herman’s view, there is an
increasing need for that voice to come out and intervene in the text so that
the reader will recognize that in such cases where the text spoke in one voice
(Ashapurna’s text is dialogic), that there are “other voices at play, duplicating
and mimicking the first one, but with a timbre of its own” (ibid.:209-0).
The translator’s pro-active intervention is a crucial notion that contributes
to the wide-ranging discourse regarding the ‘unheard voices’ from and the
social and political participation of emergent and marginal sectors of the
society in the ‘new’ nations such as India. Who speaks or can speak for
or on behalf of the ‘other’ has become a matter of essential importance in
the sociocultural turmoil that the 20th century witnessed, the aftermath of
which is carried into the 21st, for two primary reasons: one, in times of
global circulation of “cultural capital” (see Casanova 2010; Heilbron 2010;
Cronin 2010), dominating languages with considerable literary capital have
the ability to sway power equations among languages to the detriment of the
less empowered (minority) languages and the speakers of those languages;
and two, the appropriation of the voice of the unprivileged and marginal-
ized ‘other’ (such as, for instance, tribals, dalits or women in India) – even
through translation – has ideological ramifications and requires a thoughtful
and discerning mind to address them. So, in the realm of translation, what
possible strategies could one keep in mind to respond to the demands of
contemporary times? What role can the translator envisage for herself/him-
self as a cultural facilitator?
I would suggest a conscious inculcation of an increased sensitivity to ‘ex-
centrality’ in discursive contextual situations to emphasize or draw attention to
the submerged intensities contained within a text that could then be “framed”
and “re-framed”, as Mona Baker proposes, to uphold the inherent and situ-
ational “narrative conflict/s” (2010:112-29). According to Baker,
Rather than ignoring the choices that do not fit into a repeated pattern,
recognizing the interplay between dominance and resistance allows us
to elaborate a more complex picture of the positioning of translators
and to embed them in a concrete political reality. (ibid.:128)
Tutun Mukherjee 141
A translation of a text involves the knowledge of Bourdieu’s concept of ‘habi-

tus’, which is re-created in another socio-cultural medium to communicate a
nuanced understanding of the source culture and thereby enable the post-text to
‘re-position’ history and participate in the contemporary discourses of politics
and social power. A translation that fails to narrativize the intensities or the
conflict/s that lie in the heart of a text, is actually hastening the exclusion of
that text from literary tradition and participation in socio-political debates.
Works cited
Baker, Mona (2010) ‘Reframing Conflict in Translation’, in Mona Baker (ed.)
Critical Readings in Translation Studies, Oxford & New York: Routledge,
2-29.
Bassnett, Susan and André Lefevere (eds) (1990) Translation, History and Culture,
London & New York: Pinter.
------ and André Lefevere (eds) (1998) Constructing Cultures: Essays on Literary
Translation, Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.
------ (1998) ‘The Translation Turn in Cultural Studies’, in Susan Bassnett and
Lefevere (eds) Constructing Cultures: Essays on Literary Translation, Cleve-
don: Multilingual Matters, 123-40.
Bhabha, Homi K. (1994) The Location of Culture, London and New York:
Routledge.
Bourdieu, Pierre (1994) ‘Structures, Habitus, Power: Basis for a theory of Sym-
bolic Power’, in Nicholas B. Dirks, Geoff Eley and Sherry B. Ortner (eds)
Culture, Power, History: A Reader in Contemporary Social Theory, Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 155-59.
Casanova, Pascale (2010) ‘Consecration and Accumulation of Literary Capital:
Translation as Unequal Exchange’, in Mona Baker (ed.) Critical Readings in
Translation Studies, Oxford & New York: Routledge, 285-03.
Chowdhury, Indira (1998) ‘Rethinking Motherhood, Reclaiming Politics: A Read-
ing of Ashapurna Debi’s Pratham Pratisruti’, Economic and Political Weekly
33(44): 401-18.
Cixous, Hélène (1976) ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’. Trans. Keith Cohen and Paula
Cohen, Signs 1(4): 875-93.
Cronin, Michael (2019) ‘The Cracked Looking Glass of Servants: Translation and
9
Key terms in Pierre Bourdieu’s sociological thought are: social field, capital, and
habitus. Habitus indicates those features that are adopted through living conditions,
upbringing and education. At the individual level, the concept means a system of
acquired dispositions functioning on the practical level as categories of perception
and assessment as well as being the organizing principles of action (994).
Minority Language in Global Age’, in Mona Baker (ed.) Critical Readings in

Translation Studies, Oxford & New York: Routledge, 247-62.
Debi, Ashapurna (1978) Subarnalata. Trans. Hanskumar Tiwari, New Delhi:
Bharatiya Gyanpith Prakashan.
------ (1997) Subaranalata. Trans. Gopa Majumdar, New Delhi: Macmillan.
------ (2007) Subarnalata [Bengali]. Kolkata: Mitra & Ghosh Pub. Pvt Ltd,
35th rpt.
Dev Sen, Nabaneeta (1997) ‘Introduction’, Ashapurna Debi: Subaranalata. Trans.
Gopa Majumdar, New Delhi: Macmillan.
Even-Zohar, Itamar (1990) ‘Polysystem Studies’, Poetics Today 11(1): 9-26.
Hatim, Basil and Ian Mason (1990) Discourse and the Translator, London &
New York: Longman.
Heilbron, Johan (2010) ‘Towards a Sociology of Translation: Book Translations as
a Cultural World System’, in Mona Baker (ed.) Critical Readings in Transla-
tion Studies, Oxford & New York: Routledge, 304-16.
Hermans, Theo (ed.) (1985) The Manipulation of Literature: Studies in Literary
Translation, London and Sydney: Croom Helm.
------ (2010) ‘The Translator’s Voice in Translated Narrative’, in Mona Baker (ed.)
Critical Readings in Translation Studies, Oxford & New York: Routledge,
193-212.
Kipling, Rudyard (1901) Kim, London: Macmillan & Co.
Larkosh, Christopher (2002) ‘Translating Woman: Victoria Ocampo and the
Empires of Foreign Fascination’, in Maria Tymoczko and Edwin Gentzler
(eds) Translation and Power, Amherst & Boston: University of Massachusetts
Press, 101-21.
Mukherjee, Tutun (2002) ‘Translation, Communication, Utopia: Re-Discovering
Gora’, in Anisur Rahman (ed) Translation: Poetics and Practice, New Delhi:
Creative Books: 145-57.
------ (2008) ‘SLT, TLT and the ‘Other’: The Triangular Love Story of Translation’,
Translation Today 5 (1/2): 9-25.
Ortega y Gasset, José (1937/1992) ‘The Misery and the Splendor of Translation’.
Trans. Elizabeth Gamble Miller, in J. Biguenet and R. Schulte (eds) Theories
of Translation: An Anthology of Essays from Dryden to Derrida, Chicago,
University of Chicago Press: 93-112.
Ray, Bharati (1991) ‘Women of Bengal: Transformation in Ideas and Ideals: 1900-
1947’, Social Scientist 19(5/6): 3-23.
Rusam, Robab (2005) ‘Gopa Majumdar Translating Satyajit Ray’, in New Age
(Dhaka): http://www.newagebd.com/2005/sep/10/lit.html [last accessed 17 No-
vember 2009].
Sarkar, Tanika (2003) ‘Foreword’, in Malini Bhattacharya and Abhijit Sen (eds)
Talking of Power: Early Writing of Bengali Women, Kolkata: Stree, ix-xiv.
Showalter, Elaine (1988) ‘Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness’, in David Lodge
Tutun Mukherjee 143
(ed.) Modern Criticism and Theory: A Reader, London: Longman, 345-55.

Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty (1988) In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics,
New York & London: Routledge.
Tagore, Rabindranath (1924) Gora, London: Macmillan.
------ (1997) Gora. Trans. Sujit Mukherjee, New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi.
Tymoczko, Maria (1999a) ‘Postcolonial Writing and Literary Translation’, in
Bassnett and Trivedi (eds) Post-colonial Translation: Theory and Practice,
London & New York: Routledge, 19-42.
------ (999b) Translation in a Postcolonial Context: Early Irish Literature in
English Translation, Manchester: St. Jerome.
Notes on the Contributors
Editor:
Christopher Larkosh is Assistant Professor in the Department of Portuguese
at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. His research interests include
Lusophone and comparative literature, literary theory and translation studies.
Some of his articles can be found in Translation Studies, Portuguese Literary
& Cultural Studies, Contemporary French and Francophone Studies/Sites,
Flusser Studies, Annali d’italianistica, TTR, Social Dynamics and The Transla-
tor, as well as in a number of edited volumes. He is currently writing a book
on Lusophone transnationalisms and diaspora cultures, as well as co-editing
a volume on German-Brazilian intercultural encounters.
Contributors:
Lisa Rose Bradford teaches Comparative Literature at the Universidad
Nacional de Mar del Plata, Argentina. She has edited three books of and on
translation (Traducción como cultura, La cultura de los géneros, Usos de la
imaginación: poetas latin@s en EE.UU.) and published poems and transla-
tions in various magazines. She is currently translating three volumes of Juan
Gelman’s verse into English, to appear in CIAL, Coimbra Editions.
Tutun Mukherjee is Professor and Chair of the Centre for Comparative

Literature, and Joint Professor at the Women’s Studies Centre and Theatre De-
partment at the University of Hyderabad, India. Her specialization is Literary
Criticism & Theory, and her research interests include Translation, Women’s
Writing, Theatre and Film Studies. On translation, her publications include:
Defying Winter (Oxford UP, 2009); ‘SLT, TLT and the ‘Other’: The Triangular
Love Story of Translation’ (Anukriti: Translation Today, 2009); and ‘Hidden
Rhythms and Tensions of the Subtext: Cultural Transference in Translation’
(Anukriti: Translation Today, 2004).
Loc Pham recently received a Ph. D. in Comparative Literature from the Uni-
versity of Massachusetts Amherst. His background is mainly in Vietnamese
and English language teaching. Prior to the essay in this volume, his publica-
tions were mainly concerned with issues in language testing and curriculum
development. but in recent years he has developed an academic interest in
the cultural turn in translation studies. His dissertation explores the role of
translation in the construction of cultural identity in Vietnam. He is currently
working as a Professor and as the Director of the General Education Program
at Hoa Sen University, Ho Chi Ming City, Vietnam.
Carolyn Shread is Visiting Lecturer of French at Mount Holyoke College,

Massachusetts. She has translated six books, including Plasticity at the Dusk
of Writing: Dialectic, Destruction, Deconstruction by Catherine Malabou. Her
articles on translation include: ‘Decolonizing Paratexts: Re-Presenting Haitian
Literature in English Translation’ in NeoHelicon; ‘Translating Marie Vieux-
Chauvet’s Les Rapaces for a Transnational Haïti’ in the Journal of Haitian
Studies; ‘Redefining Translation through Self-Translation: The Case of Nancy
Huston’ in French Literature Series; and ‘Metamorphosis or Metramorphosis?
Towards A Feminist Ethics of Difference in Translation’ in TTR. Her current
translation project is Catherine Malabou’s Changer de différence: Le féminin
et la question philosophique.
Annarita Taronna is Assistant Professor in English and Translation Studies

in the Faculty of Education, University of Bari, Italy. Her areas of research
include women’s and gender studies, translation theory and practice, con-
trastive linguistics, and comparative cultural studies (Chicana literature,
African-American literature). She has published several articles and authored
The Languages of the Ghetto: Rap, Break-Dance e graffiti art come prat-
iche di ®esistenza (Aracne 2005) and Pratiche traduttive e Gender Studies
(Aracne 2006). She has recently edited Translationscapes: Comunità, lingue
e traduzioni interculturali (Progedit 2009), a collection of academic essays
on interculturality and translation.
Takayuki Yokota-Murakami is Associate Professor in the Department of

Russian, Graduate School of Language and Culture, University of Osaka,
Japan. His academic interests include literary theory, translation, genealogy
of sexuality in modern Japan, and Japanese contemporary popular culture.
Among his publications are the books Don Juan East/West: On the Problematic
of Comparative Literature (SUNY Press 1998), and Iro-otoko no kenkyu (The
Study of Japanese Libertines in Literature) (Kadokawa gakugei shuppan 2007),
which received the 2008 Suntory Award for Outstanding Academic Book.
Index
A Bennett, Gwendolyn 10, 13, 18

Abreu, Caio Fernando 7, 72, 74, 76, Berman, Antoine 32, 115, 118
78, 79, 80, 83, 86, 88, 89 Bhabha, Homi 132
abridged 146, 138 bilingual, bilingualism 15, 35, 76,
adaptation 7, 24, 34, 92, 93, 103, 108 117, 123
Adaptation Studies 93 bisexual, bisexuality 5, 20, 88, 121
Africa, African 26, 29, 59, 80 Black Power movement 25
African-American 7, 10, 11, 12, 13, Bloom, Harold 93
14, 15, 16, 18, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, Bonner, Marita 10, 13, 16, 18, 26
26, 27, 28 Bossi-Fini law 28
Afro-Caribbean 5 border writing 117
Afro-Brazilian 74, 80 Bourdieu, Pierre 141
America, American, Americans (see Brazil, Brazilian 72, 73, 74, 75, 76, 78,
also United States, US) 10, 17, 21, 79, 80, 81, 83, 85, 88, 87, 117
23, 26, 37, 64, 94, 98, 112, 116, Bright, Nellie 10, 13, 18
124 Brokeback Mountain 8, 111, 114, 116,
Anglo-American 53, 118, 119 117, 118, 119, 120, 123, 124, 125
Aids 3, 72, 83 Brontë, Charlotte 7, 91, 103, 104, 105,
alterity 4, 7, 8, 74, 81, 117 106, 107
Andrade, Oswald de 81, 75 Bulwer-Lytton, Edward 95
archaisms 33, 36, 37, 40, 42, 47 Bungei kurabu (Japanese journal) 103,
Arendt, Hannah 55, 57 108
Aristide, Jean-Bertrand 58
‘Aunt Jemima’ 24, 26, 27 C
Argentina, Argentine 7, 31, 32, 35, Cambronne, Luckner (‘Vampire of the
48, 72, 74, 75, 78, 79, 86, 87, 127, Caribbean’) 58
139 Campos, Haroldo de 73, 75, 76
Canada 117
B cannibalism 117
Babel, tower of 31, 44, 82, 83 Casanova, Pascale 140
Baker, Mona 15, 51, 54, 65, 66, 140 Celan, Paul 37, 38, 47
Bakhtin, Mikhail 33 Cesar, Ana Cristina 72, 74, 79, 83
Baldwin, James 22 Chance Encounters with Beautiful
Barthes, Roland 1 Women 99, 100
Bassnett, Susan 133, 137 Chancy, Myriam 53, 60
Bell, Beverly 56, 57 Charles, Carolle 53, 57
Bengali, Bangla 8, 127, 128, 129, 134, China, Chinese 94, 95, 97, 98, 99,
135, 139 112, 113
Benjamin, Walter 10, 40, 47 Chowdhury, Indira (translator) 130
civil rights 6, 7, 16 empower, empowerment (see also pow-

Cixous, Hélène 135 er) 11, 18, 56, 66, 114, 131, 140
colonial, colonialism 11, 12, 23, 26, engendering 14, 51, 54, 56, 135
55, 56, 67, 68, 107, 108, 116, 129, Eshleman, Clayton (translator) 38
132, 136, 137, 139 ethics, ethical 8, 52, 57, 64, 66, 72, 118,
Cottenet-Hage, Madeline 55 125, 137, 138
Cowdery, Mae 10, 14, 18 Ettinger, Bracha 52, 61, 62, 63, 68
Committee of Fourteen (COF) 17 Europe, European 15, 25, 29, 59, 74,
Conadep, National Commission on the 75, 80, 92, 105, 108, 116, 117
Even-Zohar, Itamar 137
Disappearance of Persons (Argen-
tina) 33
F
Cox, Renée 26, 27
The Faerie Queene 103
Creole, creoles (see Kreyòl) 23, 107
faithfulness, faithfully, fidelity 68, 92,
cultural turn 133, 136, 137 93, 108, 133, 139
cultural transplantation 26 Farmer, Paul 57, 65
Cummings, E. E. 47 feminine 36, 39, 40, 41, 42, 44, 45, 46,
Cuthbert, Marion Vera 14, 16, 18, 19, 48, 52, 62, 135, 139
20, 25, 26 feminist, feminism 2, 12, 13, 18, 19, 20,
50, 52, 56, 61, 68, 104, 106, 117
D Fénelon, François 92
Dash, J. Michael 59 Fire!! (US magazine) 13, 18
Debi, Ashapurna 8, 127, 128, 130, 131, foreignization, foreignizing 68, 115,
132, 134, 135, 138 118, 119, 120
Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari 46, Futabatei, Shimei (translator) 92, 93
74, 75 framed, frames, framing 21, 22, 121,
Dev Sen, Nabaneeta 131, 129, 136 125, 140
discourse analysis 132 Franco-American 123
disempower, disempowerment (see France, French 15, 51, 53, 55, 64, 66,
also power) 57, 67, 111, 114 67, 68, 74, 75, 106, 118, 119
domestication, domesticating 23, 36, French-Canadian 117, 123
111, 118, 119, 120, 123, 124
G
DuBois, W. E. B. 24
gay 2, 3, 4, 5, 17, 18, 20, 74, 80, 87, 88,
Dunbar-Nelson, Alice 10, 14, 17, 18,
113, 114, 121, 122, 123, 124
20, 21
gay and lesbian 2, 122, 123
Dutch 2, 3
gay-identified 2, 3
Duvalier dictatorships, the Duvaliers gay liberation movement 88
50, 51, 53, 58, 61 Gelman, Juan 7, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36,
37, 38, 39, 40, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46,
E 47, 48
Edo, Edo period (Japan) 91, 95, 96, 97, gender and sexuality 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 8, 9,
99, 100, 105, 108 11, 12, 27, 50, 73, 89
148 Index
gender disagreement, gender discord- I

ance 36, 41, 45 immigrant, immigration (see also mi-
gender identity, gender identification gration) 6, 8, 86
2, 14, 80, 82 India, Indian 8, 127, 128, 129, 130,
gender politics 91 131, 132, 133, 134, 136, 139, 140
gendered, gendering 2, 4, 7, 8, 12, 33, invisibility, invisible 16, 22, 64, 68, 81,
50, 53, 55, 57, 60, 127, 128, 129, 82, 117, 118, 121
132, 138 intralingual translation 113
Geertz, Clifford 139 intervention 50, 66, 86, 140
Gentzler, Edwin 117 Italy, Italian 7, 10, 11, 12, 21, 24, 25,
Gilbert, Sandra and Susan Guber 106 26, 27, 28, 29, 86
Gilroy, Paul 14, 15 Italian-American 11
globalization, globalizing 83, 89, 111, Iwamoto, Yoshiharu 104, 105
112, 114, 116 Izawa, Shinzaburo (translator) 92
Gora 136
Green, Nancy 26 J
Grimké, Angelina 10, 14, 18 Jacquemond, Richard 119
Jane Eyre 91, 103, 104, 105, 107, 108
H Japan, Japanese 7, 82, 91, 92, 93, 94,
hiv/Aids, hiv+/- 3, 4, 5, 72, 84, 85
96, 97, 98, 99, 100, 101, 102, 103,
Haiti, Haitian 7, 50, 51, 53, 54, 55, 56,
105, 108
57, 58, 59, 61, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68
Jean-Charles, Régine 60
Haitian Revolution 55, 56
Jim Crow segregation 18, 25, 28
Halliday, M. K. 132
Jogaku zasshi (Japanese magazine)
Harlem Renaissance 7, 10, 11, 12, 13,
104
15, 16, 18, 19, 20, 27, 28
Johnson, Georgia Douglas 10, 15, 18
Hatim, Basil and Ian Mason 132
Joris, Pierre (translator) 37, 47
Hattori, Seiichi (translator) 91, 92,
94, 95
K
Heckenbach, Ida Eve 55
Kim 136
Hermans, Theo 137, 140
Kipling, Rudyard 136
heterosexual, heterosexuality 23, 88,
Kitamura, Tokoku 105
96, 98, 113, 121, 122,
Kreyòl (see also Creole) 64, 67, 68
Hindi 134, 138, 139
Kristeva, Julia 43, 44, 45, 46
historiography 127, 128
Holmes, James S. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 9
L
homosexual, homosexuality 16, 17,
The Lady of the Lake 91, 92, 93, 97,
20, 72, 75, 78, 80, 87, 88, 111, 113,
98, 99, 100, 103, 107
114, 116, 119, 120, 121, 122, 124,
Laferrière, Dany 67, 68
125, 126
Larkosh (-Lenotti), Christopher 1,
Hull, Gloria T. 13, 21
11, 12, 72, 74, 117, 123, 124, 127,
Hutcheon, Linda 93
139
L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Poets 37 Morita, Shiken (translator) 92

Latin America, Latin American (see Morrison, Toni 10, 21
also South America) 6, 33, 38, 73, Mukherjee, Sujit 136
87, 89 multilingual, multilingualism 8, 52, 72,
Le, Hoang 113 73, 74, 76, 77, 78, 80, 83, 86, 89
Lecercle, Jean-Jacques 67, 68 Nardal, Paulette and Jeanne 15
Lefevere, André 133, 137
Leminski, Paulo 73, 74, 82, 83 N
lesbian(s), lesbianism 2, 4, 5, 7, 16, 17, narrative theory 65, 66
20, 21, 121, 122, 124 narrative(s) 3, 5, 11, 22, 23, 24, 27, 53,
Les Rapaces 51, 52, 53, 54, 57, 58, 59, 59, 65, 66, 67, 76, 77, 95, 96, 107,
61, 64, 65, 66, 67, 69 112, 117, 119, 120, 124, 128, 131,
lgbt 1, 5, 7, 8 134, 135, 136, 138, 140
Libya 11, 29 neologism(s) 32, 33, 36, 37, 38, 40,
Lindgren, Joan 46 43, 47, 48
Locke, Alain 12, 16, 20 New York Society for the Suppression
of Vice (SSV) 17
M Nugent, Richard Bruce 18, 20
Maier, Carol 64 N’Zengou-Tayo, Marie-José 58
Malabou, Catherine 52, 54, 55, 61,
62, 63 O
Manifesto Antropófago 81 Ocampo, Victoria 117, 127, 139
manipulation school 137 ‘Ole Man’ 24, 26
Manzi, Homero 34 Opportunity (US magazine) 13, 18, 19
Majumdar, Gopa (translator) 134, 135 Orientalism 119
marronage 55 Ortega y Gasset, José 133
Massardier-Kenney, Françoise (transla-
tor) 68 P
Marx, Karl 59, 60 paratextual materials 26
Mauro, Walter 25 Partners in Health initiative 66
McDougald, Elise Johnson 14, 18, 19, Perlongher, Néstor 7, 72, 74, 75, 76,
20, 24, 26, 27 79, 80, 81, 82, 83, 86, 87, 88
Meiji era (Japan) 91 Perón, Juan Domingo 34
Menarini, Giovanni 25 Poesía Buenos Aires (Argentinian
metramorphic 50, 52, 54, 55, 62, 63, Magazine) 34
64, 66, 67, 68 polysystem theory 137
michê 79, 80, 81 Portuguese 74, 75, 80, 87, 88,
migrant(s), migration (see also immi- power (see also empowerment, disem-
grant) 4, 11, 12, 28, 29, 73, 74, 75, power) 13, 17, 22, 23, 25, 26, 33,
83, 88, 89, 125 47, 56, 65, 68, 66, 78, 82, 87, 88,
Mizutani, Futo (translator) 103, 106, 112, 115, 116, 118, 119, 121, 132,
107 137, 140, 141
150 Index
plasticity 52, 54, 55, 61, 62, 63, 69 sexual identity 2, 3, 4, 8, 63, 78, 88,
post-colonial, post-colonialism 8, 61, 123
111, 115, 130, 131, 132, 133, 137, sexual consciousness 121
139 Showalter, Elaine 139
prostitution, prostitutes 17, 79, 80, 82, Snell-Hornby, Mary 2
91, 96, 100 sociolects, social class 23, 136
Pratt, Mary Louise 23 Solomon, Jon 51, 52
Proulx, Annie 8, 112, 114, 120, 121, South America, South American (see
123, 124 also Latin America) 73, 74, 75, 83
Puig, Manuel 86 Spanish 6, 7, 33, 34, 35, 36, 38, 39, 41,
42, 43, 46, 47, 48, 76, 87, 88
Q Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty 107, 131,
queer theory, queer theorists 1, 8, 56, 63 132, 138
Staël, Germaine de 68
R Subarnalata 127, 131, 132, 134, 135,
racist, racism 7, 19, 24, 25, 26, 27, 138
28, 57 subaltern, subalternity 10, 11, 23, 28,
Ray, Bharati 129 37, 72, 89, 131
re-engendering, re-engendered (see
gendering, engendering) 1, 4, 5, T
52, 54, 63, 68, 89 Tagore, Rabindranath 130, 136, 139
re-memory 11, 12, 21, 22 tango 34, 35, 46, 76
re-writing 5, 133, 48 Tanner, Laura 59, 60
Ricoeur, Paul 120 thick description 140
Rubião, Murilo 75 Tiwari, Hanskumar (translator) 134,
Ryan, Marleigh 94, 95 138, 139
Tokai, Sanshi 99
S Trai Nhay [The Dancing Boy] 113
Salerno, Michele 25 transcultural, transculturation 3, 4, 5,
same-sex marriage 6, 7 8, 72, 74, 89
Santo, Kyogen 99 transgender 5, 8
Scharfman, Ronnie 61 Tsubouchi, Shoyo (translator) 91, 94,
Schleiermacher, Friedrich 32, 118 95, 99
Scott, Walter 7, 91, 92, 94, 95, 98, 99, Turgenev, Ivan 93
7, 100, 101, 102, 103 tzimtzum 51, 63, 66
Sephardic 34,40, 45 Tymoczko, Maria 114, 117, 133, 137
Shioi, Masao (translator) 100, 101,
102, 103 U
Shread, Carolyn 52, 64, 66 United States, US (see also America) 6,
sexuality 2, 3, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 16, 17, 11, 12, 14, 15, 16, 22, 25, 28, 29, 53,
20, 50, 57, 73, 91, 96, 97, 98, 100, 58, 59, 66, 116, 117, 124, 125
121 Uruguay 78
V
Vallejo, César 37, 38, 40
van den Broeck, Raymond 3
Venuti, Lawrence 53, 68, 117, 118,
120
Videla, Jorge 33, 35
Vieux-Chauvet, Marie 7, 50, 51, 53,
54, 57, 58, 61, 66, 67, 69, 60
violence 5, 7, 13, 38, 42, 43, 46, 50,
51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 58, 57, 59, 60,
61, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69,
76, 78, 88, 118
Vrolijk (gay and lesbian bookstore) 2
Vietnam, Vietnamese 8, 111, 112, 113,
114, 115, 116, 117, 118, 119, 120,
123, 124, 125, 126
W
Wakamatsu, Shizuko (translator) 104,
107
Wall, Cheryl 13, 17
Wolof 68
women writers, women’s literature,
women’s writing 8, 10, 11, 12, 13,
14, 16, 17, 18, 20, 27, 28, 128, 130,
132, 133, 139
wordplay 34, 37, 40, 43
Y
Yokota-Murakami, Takayuki 96, 108
Yoruba 80
Z
Žižek, Slavoj 50, 51, 54, 55, 67

Reengendering Translation

Uploaded by

Document Information

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Reengendering Translation

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Re-Engendering Translation

Transcultural Practice, Gender/Sexuality

Published 2014 by Routledge

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

 Christopher Larkosh 2011

ISBN 13:  (pbk)

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Edited by Christopher Larkosh

Of interest to scholars in translation studies, gender and sexuality, and com-

Writing on Race and Sexuality in the Harlem Renaissance

Speaking to the Dead

The Creation of ‘A Lady’

Western Others (And ‘Other’ Westerns)

Gender, Historiography and Translation

Notes on the Contributors 144

my mother, a lifelong teacher and working woman, an example for

Providence, Rhode Island, 22 March 2011

Literature, Roland Barthes has suggested, is of two classes. In the first

number of mediating strategies related to both quotation and translation, and

[He] published translations of almost all [the] important Dutch and

easily be considered primary as any other: whether bisexual, hermaphroditic

seemed to signal a change in the tide: like that of an African-American man

citizenship, or expanded reproductive options. And if it appears in the end that

Abstract: This study uncovers a rich tradition of writing by

As Benjamin’s quote suggests, the recognition of the past inextricably depends

of writing by African-American women who were prolific, but ignored, during

The Gendered Side of the Harlem Renaissance

Virginia Mae Cowdery (1909-1953); Georgia Douglas robinson (1886-1966);

Experiencing and Writing on Sexuality

sance provides an exploration of points where ‘racial’ discourses meet ‘gay’

the negro woman been forced to submit to over-powering conditions.

the Anniversary of My one Perfect Day. My day last year in San

Translating African-American Women’s Writing: From

within a process of rememory as conceptualized by toni Morrison (198,

mainstream American English) and a variety of regional usages (e.g. African-

table since such helpful strategies as vernacular replacement, adaptation and

or other paratextual materials – i.e. prefaces, glossaries, etc. – in a translation

[the negro woman] is conscious that the ideals of beauty, built up in

on this account, a cross-cultural challenge can be undertaken when deal-

Conclusion: Re-Viewing Race and Gender in a Con-

us to a deeper understanding of the challenges and potentials of representation

Mcintosh, Peggy (1990) Interactive Phases of Curricular and Personal Re-Vision

Abstract: This article endeavours to reveal Argentine poet-

Gelman works as their ventriloquist to fuse their voices intertextually with

just as in dozens of thousands / of similar cases, the military / dicta-

an april autumn when your mystery opened

you speak of yourself / insides torn

losing me in your losing / unsheltered water

of permutations of words in combination or unorthodox grammatical forms.

bilingual version by Clayton Eshleman (Vallejo 007). An example of his

the second, a kenning to produce a visual image.13 ‘Musicanto’ is a compound

I used in the translation of other similar situations in order to create a pattern

how to retender you / tenderness silenced in

baby booty of yours taking its first steps upon /

sun that oxes for such helplessness /

you imagine so that man-sorrow might milkspring

“Man-sorrow may milkspring” constitutes a strident and even extravagant

am i not here to father you? /

against me? / will you show me what i may be? /

Poem ‘XVIII’ contains other allusions to infanthood, words deriving from a

textual experience reaches the very foundation of the social – that

These commentaries provide a rich basis on which to build a translation of

deterritorializing Spanish, he tries to reterritorialize it through ancient phrasing

ISBN 13: (pbk)