Translating Women

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

TranslaTing genDer / TRADUIRE LE GENRE: is TransDisCursiVe TranslaTion PossiBle? Bella Brodzki, Sarah Lawrence College My essay takes as its point of departure that it is in and through translation that the most contentious and productive aspects of 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 we call “the untranslatable”). My general focus is the cross-cultural, geo-political transfer of theoretical terms and concepts: what happens to theories when they travel across time and space? I begin with a cursory overview of the distorting and generative role of translation in the global traffic of ideas that characterized the American importation of structuralism and semiotics, and, then, very briefly track the fortunes of French feminism(s) in English, in order to contextualize the specific paradigmatic cross-cultural translation problem that I shall address here: gender and/in translation. My approach to what I consider a troubling instance of interlingual and intercultural translation is, as Friedrich Schleiermacher delineated it, that of someone “who is familiar with the foreign language, yet to whom that language always remains foreign.” I am convinced that the privilege that comes from being an outsider with access to other languages has enabled me to detect or identify a translation problematic that would otherwise elude a monolingual native speaker. 264 Bella Brodzki I. Inventing French theory In 1966, American scholars were formally introduced to structuralist and poststructuralist theories at an international symposium sponsored by Johns Hopkins University. This amply-documented occasion, in which a group of French avant-garde critical thinkers then unrecognized in the United States—notably, Roland Barthes, Louis Althusser, Jacques Lacan and Jacques Derrida—presented, debated and expounded on a set of theoretical methods and aims and became identified with a movement that was diffused and transcended at the same time that it was invented. The proceedings from the symposium were translated and collected in a volume entitled The Structuralist Controversy: The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man, edited by Richard Macksey and Eugenio Donadio, signalling an epoch-making event on both sides of the Atlantic. When it came to theory thereafter—in the 60s, 70s and 80s—transcultural, transdiscursive exchanges between Francophone and Anglophone countries always moved in one direction: from French source texts to Anglo-American target audiences and texts. In this transatlantic movement, in which French dominance was assumed, if also often derided in the Anglophone world, to say “French theory” seemed already a redundancy; theory was French. French theorists reflected, produced and pronounced, and Anglo-American academics, depending on the constituency, received and also resisted the flow of ideas from Paris–selective pragmatic responses to a set of intriguing, foreign and to a great extent unassimilable conceptual frameworks. Since most American academics, whatever their predilections, were not capable of reading French theory in French, to reach the largest possible academic audience, this entire enterprise depended, of course, on translation. Because theory is especially time sensitive, the inevitable lag dramatically affected the transmission and reception of these meaning systems in ways impossible to account for at the time. In other words, context is all. Translation understood, then, not only as a means of transportation, but as a mode of transformation—as a perturbing and propelling element in a process that alters as a matter of course (Thomas 2006). Translating Gender / Traduire le genre 265 II. Travelling French theory It bears remembering that translation’s impact is not only linked to the character of the source literary and cultural theories but also to a great extent determined by the conditions under which they are presented to their different target audiences. Theories are canonized in translation, and by virtue of being translated, their cultural (and real) capital increases. What eventually happened to French theory in translation, on American shores, especially, rightfully belongs to the history of literary and cultural theory, and to translation studies as well. Arguably, the most interesting part of the story is how the US university presses gave French theory, for better and for worse, a new life and new status. Decidedly, this is a status passé in France, but one nonetheless recognized as phenomenal on its own terms: note the English title of...