Abstract
Our whole life a translation. (Adrienne Rich)
In today’s world of global connections Adrienne Rich’s poem ‘Our Whole Life a Translation’ can be seen not simply as a beautiful metaphor for the untranslatability of human experience but very much as a reality for many women who live mobilities. If ‘our whole life is a translation’, we cannot help wondering: what then is the original? Is it another text, another experience or another reality? Many years ago Walter Benjamin defined translation as ‘a mode’, i.e. simultaneously a condition and a form of movement between texts and cultures, reminding his readers that ‘a translation issues from the original’ and ‘it comes later than the original’ (1999: 72). Therefore translation is not simply a linguistic movement of words and texts from one language into another but a movement of selves in/through language to other places, cultures, selves and positions – a signal of dynamic processes of continuation, change and transformation.
By employing the whole gamut of ambiguity in the concept of ‘translation’, this special issue of the European Journal of Women’s Studies explores the complex connections between words and worlds, between self and Other(s), between the translating subject and the object/context of translation from a gendered point of view. At the same time, the lens of translation offers alternative modes and scenarios for interpreting women’s lives and identities – from the quotidian aspects of living, education and work to the more exceptional aspects of female creativity, subjectivity and expression in another language. The articles that follow raise multiple important and provocative questions: What does it mean to live in translation? How is femininity constructed, deconstructed, and reconstructed when transmitted from one language/culture to another? Is stereotypical understanding of femininity/masculinity reinforced or obliterated in the movement from one historical and social context to another? How do gender binaries and hierarchies travel in translation and what effects do they have on the translation process? And vice versa – how is gender reconfigured in the movement from one linguistic and cultural environment to another? What strategies can make women more visible in/through translation?
Of course, many similar questions have been raised previously by scholars in women’s studies, translation studies as well as in other disciplines in the humanities and social sciences. In the last three decades translation studies as an ‘interdiscipline’ (Snell-Hornby, 2006: 72) has moved away from the linguistic aspects of translation as text-based towards translation as culture and politics, exploring the role of various social categories in translation such as gender, ethnicity, class, ideology, history and tradition. It has drawn insights from sociology, anthropology, literary and postcolonial theory, cultural studies, philosophy, psychology and many other areas. For example, postcolonial scholars have shown how translation practices are always embedded in structures of power and knowledge, often imposing particular values and norms or masking inequalities (Bhabha, 1994; Rodriguez, 2008; Spivak, 1992). Along similar lines Lawrence Venuti equates these processes with doing violence:
The violence of translation resides in its very purpose and activity: the reconstruction of the foreign text in accordance with values, beliefs, and representations that pre-exist in the target language, always configured in hierarchies of dominance and marginality, always determining the production, circulation, and reception of texts. (Venuti, 1996: 196).
Commenting on her own struggle to unlearn internalized principles and norms when translating late 18th-century Bengali poetry, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak also suggests that translation is not an innocent act: ‘I must overcome what I was taught in school: the highest mark for the most accurate collection of synonyms, strung together in the most proximate syntax. I must resist both the solemnity of chaste Victorian prose and forced simplicity of “plain English” that have imposed themselves as the norm’ (1992: 178). Yet, in the very next sentence Spivak dissipates the violence of neo-colonialist construction with love, claiming that translation is ‘the most intimate act of reading: I surrender to the text when I translate’ (1992: 178). Thus translation can be many different things: violence, imposition and appropriation, but also intimacy, loyalty and empathy.
While translation studies has shifted from an exclusively linguistic focus to attending to the social, the social sciences and humanities have come to recognize that translation is a central feature of everyday practices in globalized and mobile lives. Thus, language brokering, including children’s language brokering, is increasingly the object of empirical study for its effects on family relationships, identities and acts of citizenship (e.g. Orellana, 2009). Translation as metaphor is also used to help illuminate intersectional social-historical relations. This is evocatively exemplified by Susan Bordo (2008), who links gender and racialization in a discussion of her daughter Cassie’s hair:
Ayana Bird and Lori Thorps [sic], authors of Hair Story, emphasize that the quest for straight hair [by black women] has never just been about ‘conforming to the prevailing fashions’, but a recognition that ‘straight hair translated to economic opportunity and social advantage’, both within slavery and after.
The texts which follow approach ‘living in translation’ from diverse angles: as a process of positioning in relation to exile, as appropriation or transculturation, which allows both resistance and accommodation between hegemonic and marginal cultures and languages; as a social practice that is historically located, has political consequences and is imbued with power relations; as a process of reinventing the self and as a process of reflection and self-reflection.
This special issue pays attention to feminist translation theory and scholarship, which has contributed enormously to breaking down the barriers between hegemonic positions/languages and those of the marginalized and the oppressed, and to constructing a more integrated approach to translation studies (Chamberlain, 1992; Maier and Massardier-Kenny, 1996; Massardier-Kenny, 1997; Simon, 1996; Von Flotow, 1997). In keeping with the interdisciplinarity of EJWS, however, the special issue represents a range of academic disciplines, including cultural studies, film and media studies, philosophy, psychoanalysis, Quranic studies, sociology and systemic psychotherapy. This cross-cultural interdisciplinarity allows it to consider the ways in which translation in the social sciences and in pedagogic practice reveals how the language and experience of the marginal or the Other often lead to deeper insights and understanding about realities – for example, in cases of racial prejudice, ethnocentrism or forced migration as well as greater sensitivity to cultural and linguistic difference. It also illustrates how a focus on the process of translation itself can illuminate social power relations of gender, social class, ethnicity and nationality.
The articles provide a kaleidoscopic picture of ‘living in translation’ by bringing translation and women’s practices into view in various configurations and patterns across space and time. The experiences discussed in the articles below – in/of translation – speak of different languages (including Arabic, Chinese, English, French, German, Hebrew, Polish, Shona, Spanish and Urdu) and diverse locations (Argentina, Australia, Europe, the Middle East and North America). The material analysed moves between different media and genres: from oral interviews and memoirs through film, TV and popular cultural products to fiction and philosophical treatises. They are also methodologically diverse, blending case studies from translation practice with reflections on pedagogic processes, empirical research and feminist theory.
It is fitting that the discussion on voicing and inscribing women’s lives and practices in translation opens with a conversation with the writer Eva Hoffman, since the special issue was partly inspired by her memoir Lost in Translation: A Life in a New Language (1989) and it is a touchstone for some of the articles that follow. For Eva Hoffman, translation is the overall metaphor of the first four decades of her life, expressed in the language of family and childhood, of education and friendship, of love, gender and a changing, globalized world. Looking back at her experience in-between languages and continents, she comments on the different ‘psychological trajectory of immigration’ in today’s intermingled world, where the force of cultural difference has been recognized and ‘cross-national movement has become the norm’. As a translingual author she still cherishes distance as a necessary vantage point in writing, but also the desire to write ‘within unitary subjectivity’ – within that part of oneself which ‘has absorbed and processed experience, and has become receptive’. In a similar manner, she cautions against romanticizing or over-emphasizing cultural difference and reconsiders the established meanings of exile, nomadism and cultural relativism. She suggests a new kind of cosmopolitanism that does not come from a few centres of importance but ‘proceeds from everywhere’, and is ‘out of exile’ rather than exilic.
The article that follows establishes a direct connection with Eva Hoffman’s writing by taking her memoir as a starting point. Helma Lutz discusses the relevance of Hoffman’s focus on language as an identity issue for migration researchers who need to consider the practical implications of language as an instrument for data collection in interviews with transnational migrants. Lutz argues that researchers need to recognize that the everyday lives of transnational research participants involve ‘dis-appropriation’ and the denial of recognition and belonging in social hierarchies that are highly politicized. This recognition requires the analysis of hybridity and of the interaction between hegemonic discourses and their integration into, or exclusion from, biographical narratives. In analysing these biographical narratives sociologically, the article makes it clear that it is important not to be seduced by participants’ narratives into treating gender as binary. It is equally important not to detach the narratives from the power relations inherent in the relations between different languages and hence, their speakers. Lutz advocates an intersectional approach to addressing multiplicity.
The tensions in multilingual living are echoed in Charlotte Burck’s article on translation as a tool in shaping gendered subjectivity and forms of relationships. Like Lutz, she discusses immigrants’ narratives in different linguistic contexts but this time from a psychological and systemic psychotherapy perspective, complemented by narrative theory and feminist critical theory. Drawing upon a corpus of interviews with migrants into the most multilingual city in the world (London), she discusses the challenges and opportunities that living life in more than one language raises for individuals and families. She documents their different experience of self in their old/new, first/second and other languages. Burck raises serious questions about cultural and linguistic frontiers, about learning the dominant language as a process of reinventing oneself (again referring to Hoffman) or how language intersects with the asymmetrical relations of colonialism or international relations. Her argument that the concept of ‘mother language’ may have some positive impact on women’s sense of entitlement to mother in their first language, but has deleterious effects on fathers’ predilection to speak to their children in their first language, is thought provoking and suggests that it is a term that would best be avoided.
In her article Sanja Milutinović Bojanić uses translation as a tool to discuss changing interpretations of the desire for knowledge (and power) in philosophical thought over the centuries. Here the concept of translation is understood in broader metaphorical terms – not simply as a movement from one language to another, but as a transformation which carries a change in the forms of life – i.e. as creative power or what Derrida calls ‘transgression’ or ‘carrying over’ (as in: ‘only in the carrying over from one to the other translation and metaphor take place’ [Derrida, 1983: 214]). Along these terms the transformation of the passion for knowledge (libido sciendi, known also as Faust’s quest) ‘carried over’ into the passion for life (libido amorandi) is analysed as a translation process, which occurred at the end of the 20th century in writings inspired by feminist theory of ‘sexual difference/différence’. The author pays particular attention to women writers and philosophers (especially Hélène Cixous) and their attempts to transform/translate destructive energies into life-respecting creativity.
The next two articles in the special issue address gender and women’s issues from a translation studies point of view. Anne-Lise Feral explores the French audiovisual texts of the popular American series Sex and the City in terms of cultural adaptation and (self-)censorship. She analyses specific examples from the original related to issues of feminism in the USA and how they are rendered in French. Her analysis reveals how subtitles and dubbing carry social class connotations in their linguistic translations. She finds that the subtitles retain most US references and appear to be aimed at a middle-class audience. In contrast, the dubbing texts reveal a marked tendency to delete, weaken and tone down references to American feminist culture, female achievements in the public sphere and feminist ideology as well as to the rhetoric of gender equality. The author demonstrates how feminine voices are often adapted or ‘naturalized’ in audiovisual translation in order to meet the gendered expectations of the French audience as well as the sociocultural and ideological constructions of ‘femininity’. The changes in the dubbed versions (targeted at a more general audience) raise questions about the intersection of gender and social class as well as the role of cultural adaptation and censorship in the social practice of translation.
Translation and feminist location politics surface again in Mercedes Bengoechea’s article, which compares and contrasts two Spanish translations of Virginia Woolf’s essay ‘A Room of One’s Own’ (written in 1929 and clearly directed at women). More precisely, the author traces how the gender neutral pronouns ‘you’ and ‘we’ are rendered into Spanish (a language that, unlike English, has formal marking of gender). The analysis makes clear that translation is not simply a linguistic choice but a political and cultural issue since the translator’s choice can subvert or enhance the meaning of the original. The author adopts a feminist stance in line with contemporary ideas of feminist translation theory. She discusses Jorge Luis Borges’ translation solutions as part of the social, linguistic and political context of Argentina in 1936. However, she criticizes his choice to subsume the feminine into the generic masculine, resulting in the devaluation and exclusion of the feminine. In contrast, the contemporary Spanish translation by Rivera Garretas (2003) uses feminist translation strategies and reinforces sexual/gender difference in the source text, thus recovering and recuperating the original message and legacy. This case study powerfully shows how the translator’s position can be instrumental in neutralizing or muting women’s voices.
The three essays in the Open Forum place the discussion of women’s lives and practices in translation into an enlarged world context, including Australia, North America and Europe. The title of the first text – ‘Subjects through translation’ – plays with the distinction between, and the blurring of, ‘subjects’ as disciplines and ‘subjects’ as individuals, thus signalling from the start the huge impact translation has on the apprehension of meaning. Drawing on her experience of teaching feminist philosophy at an Australian university, Lucy Tatman asks provocative questions straight from the classroom: ‘What is it like to read text after text in translation? How do familiar words become so strange? How to express the dizziness, the blurring, the sharp and sometimes painful dislocations of meaning, sense?’ In her highly poetic piece Tatman provides a ‘lesson’ in using translation as a pedagogical tool to unravel meaning, to confront the pleasures and frustrations of linguistic and cultural crossings and to discuss philosophical and social processes of inclusion and exclusion. She illustrates how translation produces intertextuality in practice – in the work of Simone de Beauvoir, Adriana Cavarero, Hélène Cixous, Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva and other European women theorists and coincidentally, the poetics of Adrienne Rich introduced at the beginning of this editorial. The text draws attention to language as the medium for class work in higher education – a subject that is not often considered. We hear the voices of students and see pedagogic processes in action so that translation becomes an instrument to reimagine content and ideas, to interrogate meaning in ways made possible through translation and, most importantly, to change ‘subjects’ in the process.
Laleh Bakhtiar’s text illuminates yet another significant aspect of translation – not simply as a linguistic, cultural and social practice but as a political act. As translator of the first critical translation of the Quran into English by a woman in the United States, she studies in microscopic detail Chapter 4 Verse 34 of the Quran, which has had serious consequences for the lives of Muslim women. Through her close readings of the Quran, Bakhtiar argues that for fourteen centuries many Muslim men have misinterpreted this verse of the Quran (4:34) in ways that allow them to beat their wives. The Sublime Quran corrects this error and the contradiction, not inherent in the Quran itself, that it has created. She studies the existing translations of the Quran; compares specific words, imperative forms in Arabic, Persian and Urdu, and analyses the intervention of commentators and jurists from a woman’s point of view. As a result her translation constitutes an empowering and liberating act in practice – one that would seem to fit well with current demands for changed power relations that characterize the ‘Arab spring’. Bakhtiar’s article demonstrates that translation is far from innocent, but has political consequences and can perpetuate or challenge historical taboos, misconceptions, misinterpretations and injustice.
The last piece in the Open Forum considers translation as adaptation, combining diverse forms of intertextuality, intervisuality and intermediality. More precisely, it analyses the adaptation of Francoise Davoine’s book Mère folle into the documentary film A Long History of Madness (Cinema Suitcase, 2011) by Mieke Bal and Michelle Williams Gamaker. The authors of the essay (the filmmakers themselves) consider the film a trope for multicultural Europe as it is spoken in twelve languages, ranges across six centuries, and was shot in five countries. The major idea behind the film is to provide a theoretical translation of madness – ‘the most radical form of discrimination’ – by presenting madness ‘from strangeness and foreignness into a visual language that people can understand and share’. Bal and Gamaker create a multilingual world where actors from different countries enact stories in their own languages (English, French, Hungarian, German, etc.) – yet, they seem to understand each other. Thus the Babel world of language dispersal becomes a utopian space which creates the ‘possibility to communicate against all odds’: across the boundaries that separate the sane from the mad, the past from the present, one cultural and linguistic community from another. The filmmakers employ a rich arsenal of movements between different media: from text to image, from written to oral, from stage to screen, from written figures to performing actors, relying on a variety of non-verbal languages such as costume, space and the body. The engagement with all these ‘other’ languages allows a multi-discursive ‘translation’ – not a literal translation (‘the hallmark of bad translation’ in Walter Benjamin’s words [1999: 70]) but a erformed and visualized translation of madness. The essay ends with a provocative rhetorical question: ‘Babel may well be the best place to be?’ Indeed, the many stories Bal and Gamaker incorporate from the Renaissance to contemporary times suggest a reconceptualized Babel as a space of diversity. The film and the article suggest that the multiplicity of languages and cultures are indicative of the new opportunities and pitfalls for women living in translation in the 21st century.
The articles that follow in this special issue bring together multiple disciplinary and cultural perspectives in a mutually productive dialogue. On the one hand, they demonstrate that women can be ‘rediscovered’ in/through translation in diverse ways: by digging out and transcribing women’s written and oral stories, reinterpreting women’s experiences, providing greater visibility for women writers and translators and commenting on various practices and theories of translating women’s words. On the other hand, they reveal that women’s experience and feminist theory are centrally involved in the debates and developments of translation theory and practice, and can expand critical horizons and knowledge production.