Gender in Translation: Cultural Identity and the Politics of Transmission by Sherry Simon (review)

HUMANITIES 149 a Canadian identity in a peaceable kingdom of culture. It would have been more consistent with his critical practice ifhe had spoken more specifically from his own position as not only professor and publisher but as Englishspeaking Quebecker. Lecker both denies and implies the possibility of discovering a national essence that transcends region and history; his longing that such an essence be given voice by those of us'who profess Canadian literature rings poignantly through his discussion. The concealing of his own position while emphasizing that of others justifies the :interpretation that he claims to possess that voice. (JULIE BEDDOES) Sherry Simon: Gender in Translation: Cultural Identity and the Politics ojTransmission Routledge. 196. $83.95 cloth, $26·95 paper Sherry Simon's Gender in Translation starts from the idea that 'translation is not simple transfer, but the continuation of a process of meaning creation, the circulation of meaning within a contingent network of texts and social discourses.' This idea, developed through the 'cultural turn' in translation studies over the past ten years, clearly moves translation away from utopian notions of 'fidelity' to some authoritative original text. Instead, it allows translation to be viewed as a form of re-writing within a specific historical, social, and cultural context, a re-writing that always also implicates the translator's subjectivity. Such a view conflates writing with translation and, as a result, challenges the long dominant theory of translation creating some kind of equivalence of fixed meanings. Gender, as defined and developed in the feminist movement, is the subjective and ideological influence on translation that Simon is concerned with. Showing how the growing influence of feminisms coincided with the developing interest in cultural studies and translation studies in the mid1980s , Simon's book explores the conjuncture of these relatively new fields of academic investigation. Gender in Translation is divided into five sections. A largely theoretical first chapter examines the project of 'feminist translation' as it developed in Canada in the 197os·and 1980s when experimental feminist texts from Quebec were translated into English. This chapter touches on feminist theories of language, on the traditionally sexist metaphorics of translation, and on the 'abusive' use of language by feminist writers such as Nicole Brossard and Louky Bersianik and their translators, Barbara Godard, Susanne de Lotbiniere-Harwood, and Howard Scott. It also develops the seminal notions of the translator's subjectivity and 'positionality' as important factors in the productive and creative labour of re-writing. In chapter 2, Simon discusses historically important women translators such as La Malinche, Aphra Belm, Madame de Stael, Margaret Fuller, Constance Garnett, Helen Lowe-Porter, Jean Starr Untermeyer, and Willa 150 LETTERS IN CANADA 1996 Muir, among others, focusing as much on their achievements as on a 'mapping of points of interdependence between the literary and the social fields.' She considers their work within a certain political and social continuum. Chapter 3 traces the displacement of French feminist writings in AngloAmerican translation, analysing important aspects of the translations terms deemed 'untranslatable,' for example - and examining the tensions characteristic of that particular transatlantic exchange. Simon discusses problems in the reception of this work that are a result of a number of 'translation effects,' among others, the time-lag between France and North America, the incomplete translations of an author's ceuvre (Cixous) and its resulting biased reception, the vastly differing social and intellectual contexts that mark the source and the translated texts. Simon shows that because most of this work was read in translation but discussed by critics as though it had been written in English, matters are made even more complex; she further develops the idea that this is characteristic of 'the insensitivity to translation common to members of all imperialist cultures' , in the last section of the book. Simon gives an overview and analysis of women-centred and feminist Bible translations in chapter 4, touching on late nineteenth-century efforts by Elizabeth Cady Stanton, new translations of the Song ofSongs, the issue of 'inclusive language' in contemporary work. The chapter ends with a brief discussion of the quandary that the translators ofsuch a key text face. Should they determine 'the message' and make it available in contemporary terms...