Translating Women

Contents

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Preface

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pp. 1-10

Almost twenty years have passed since the first work focusing on women translators and women authors in translation started to appear in North America, work that was usually couched in terms of gender and translation and was inspired by the many forms of feminism that had developed over the 1970s and 1980s. It came on slowly at ...

The Voice of Nature: British Women Translating Botany in the Early Nineteenth Century

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pp. 11-35

...me give them a second more attentive perusal.” “I then thought that they had considerable merit,” Martyn continued, “and translated into English, they might be of use to such of my fair countrywomen and unlearned countrymen as wished to amuse themselves with natural history” (ibid.). These were fine words of praise indeed from ...

A Dream of Light in the Eternal Darkness: Karolina Pavlova’s Translations from the German

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pp. 37-56

...highly esteemed, as such Russian contemporaries as Fyodor Tyutchev, Nikolai Yazykov and Evgeny Baratynsky, or such European coevals as Georges Sand and George Eliot. There are many reasons for this state of affairs. Some are literary (the rise of the novel as the dominant genre in the mid-1800s), and some are personal (Pavlova’s tenuous social ...

Helen Maria Williams’ Paul and Virginia and the Experience of Mediated Alterity

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pp. 57-70

...Weep at a Tale of Distress.” The author, who submitted the poem under the pseudonym Axiologus, was no other than the young William Wordsworth. It may seem intriguing that Wordsworth addressed his first published poem to the imaginary tears of a woman he never met, but he knew and admired her poetry and Helen Maria Williams ...

From “Alejandra” to “Susanna”: Susan Bassnett’s “Life Exchange” with Alejandra Pizarnik

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pp. 71-96

...is generally inside the book, in small print, “bien peu souvent sur la première page et presque jamais sur la couverture” (Talens 1993: 630). This, says Sherry Simon, is because translators are thought to contribute little to the book’s circulation (Simon 1989: 201). After all, explains Sean Golden “most readers are looking for what they will perceive ...

Re-vision and/as Translation: The Poetry of Adrienne Rich

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pp. 97-117

...is one of its most important leitmotifs, evident from its beginning, and continuing over the years. As I will try to show by examining aspects of her poetry and essays—and two poems in particular—translation has contributed in various ways to a poetry dedicated to personal and political change. In her more recent writing, Rich has herself drawn ...

“I like women”: Regarding Feminine Affinities in Translation

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pp. 119-134

In “I am the other. You are me,” from the volume Desglaç 1984–1988 [The Thaw 1984–1988], Maria-Mercè Marçal refers not only to relationships that are strictly erotic but also to those of love, complicity, debt, influence, guidance and relationships between women in general.² Almost certainly, in A Room of One’s Own, published by the Hogarth ...

Ulrike Meinhof: De-fragmented and Re-membered

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pp. 135-150

...armament and impassioned critic of postwar West German society, a journalist who was widely read in 1960s West Germany, were not available in English. They existed only in fragments, cited here and there in accounts of the left-wing and student movements of West Germany, and particularly with regard to the RAF, the Red Army Faction that ...

Why Philosophy Went Missing: Understanding the English Version of Simone de Beauvoir’s Le deuxième sexe

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pp. 151-166

...posthumous publications. More recently, the centennial of the author’s birth in 2008 sparked a new wave of research. This article’s primary concern is the translation of Beauvoir’s philosophy into English, specifically the translation of Le deuxième sexe. In hopes to provide new insights into circumstances surrounding the translation and Beauvoir’s ...

The Story of Ruth and Esperanza: Concepts of Translation in Ruth Behar’s Translated Woman

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pp. 167-182

...distinct yet overlapping ways. It puts into written form a collection of spoken conversations, and into English, words that were said in Spanish; it physically moves Esperanza’s life story across the Mexican–US border, with all the political displacement that implies; and it explores the lives of both ethnographer and informant as themselves “translated”: women ...

Sexuality and Femininity in Translated Chick Texts

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pp. 183-201

...Anglo-American cultural trend about, for and often by young women, informally known as “chicks.” As the quotes above illustrate, chick texts are marketed and often perceived as socially realistic and relevant, or in more academic terms as constituting “socially constructed knowledges of (some aspect of) reality. [They] provide versions of who does what ...

Echoes of Emily Dickinson: Male and Female French Translators Listening to the Poet

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pp. 203-238

...actually “do”? This is a primordial question, because what the translators “do” reveals something essential about their way of grasping and interpreting what the poems themselves “do.” A translator who tries to grasp meaning, seeks what is “essential” to the poem and tries to transpose it by “trans-forming” it. A translator who sacrifices a ...

Prefacing Gender: Framing Sei Shônagon for a Western Audience, 1875–2006

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pp. 239-261

Gender is central to McKinney’s project, which implicitly aims to redress what she sees as a prior tendency, intentional or otherwise, to misrepresent not only the women’s world at the heart of Japan’s Heian court, but also the lively voice of one who is arguably its single most personable author. While scrupulously avoiding any direct criticism of ...

Translating Gender/Traduire le genre: Is Transdiscursive Translation Possible?

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pp. 263-281

...intercultural exchange are worked through and made manifest—and that while some facets are foregrounded in translation, others are obscured. In the shuttle between languages, in the detour created as a function of the historical and structural dissimilarities between them, everything happens: tout se passe dans la traduction (including, of course, what ...

On Becoming in Translation: Articulating Feminisms in the Translation of Marie Vieux-Chauvet’s Les Rapaces

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pp. 283-303

...of the process of translating Marie Vieux-Chauvet’s Les Rapaces (1986)¹ from Haitian French into English. Is feminism simply a politics that informs, acting through textual representations, or does it go deeper, working at a formative level that is constitutive of the translation? I explain how I have come to see feminism not simply as a matter of ...

“Gender Trouble” in the American Translation of Tahar Ben Jelloun’s L’Enfant de sable

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pp. 305-325

...trained as a philosopher, he left his home in 1971 when the teaching of philosophy was Arabized.� He moved to Paris, where he pursued doctoral studies in psychology and worked as a journalist. His mother tongue is Arabic, and as is the case for many Moroccans of his generation, his education was bilingual. Tahar Ben Jelloun writes ...

Index

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pp. 327-341