Translating Women

“I like women”: Regarding Feminine Affinities in Translation

“i like Women”: regarDing feminine affiniTies in TranslaTion1 Pilar Godayol, Universitat de Vic Iwould like to begin with a poem by the poet, novelist, teacher, translator and militant Catalan feminist, Maria-Mercè Marçal, who defended, in words similar to those of Virginia Woolf, the domain of the relationship between women: I am the other. You are me: That part of me that rises up, To be expelled far off and that returns Made desire, song and word. Made desire, song and word I look at you. I am you. I do not know myself: I am the other. 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 Press sixty years before Marçal’s poem appeared, Virginia Woolf was one of the first women writers to discuss openly the question of friendship between women. “So much has been left out, unattempted” 120 Pilar Godayol (1992: 107), she complained, and proceeded to launch an essential debate that was to breach the established canon. “Suppose, for instance,” says Woolf, “that men were only represented in literature as the lovers of women, and were never friends of men, soldiers, thinkers, dreamers; how few parts in the plays of Shakespeare could be allotted to them; how literature would suffer! We might perhaps have most of Othello; and a good deal of Antony; but no Caesar, no Brutus, no Hamlet, no Lear, no Jacques—literature would be incredibly impoverished, as indeed literature is impoverished beyond our counting by the doors that have been shut upon women” (1992: 108–109). Writing in apparently inoffensive language and pouring praise on men and women novelists, both classical and contemporary, Woolf obliges the reader to reflect seriously upon why the feminine presence in world literature has been limited to love between a man and a woman, while a whole range of women’s sentiments and experiences have been abandoned between the lines, or, if expressed, then only in bare, laconic prose, consisting mainly of silences and ellipses. In Chapter 5 of A Room of One’s Own, the narrator picks up a recently published book, written by someone by the name of Mary Carmichael. With the idea of extracting all she can from the novel, entitled Life’s Adventure, she begins to analyse the plot, the characters and their relationships. “Chloe liked Olivia,” remarks Mary Carmichael, a comment that Woolf seizes upon to show that it is perhaps the first time in women’s literature that Olivia captivates Chloe, because, as she argues, if Octavia had captivated Cleopatra, Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra would have been very different. Woolf adds that it would have been interesting if between Octavia and Cleopatra there had been a complex relationship and not only one of jealousy, because in general the relationships between women in literature are too simple and dull. In A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf makes her universally famous demand: a room of her own and five hundred pounds (at that time, a year’s salary). The episode of Chloe and Olivia ends with a reference to this: “If Mary Carmichael knows how to write, and I was beginning to enjoy some quality in her style; if she has a room to herself, of which I am not quite sure; if she has five hundred a year of her own—but that remains to be proved—, then I think that “I like women” 121 something of great importance has happened” (1992: 109). Time and again, she argues that a woman writer needs a study of her own and an annual income in order to begin to create and to combat the social confinement that has been her permanent lot. Woolf’s urge to commit herself to the causes of women who feel the need to give rein to their literary inspiration leads her to establish premises and create a dialogue with different generations of men and women writers, while at the same time insisting on retrieving women writers such as Jane Austen and Emily Brontë from the past, women about whom she remarked that “they wrote as women write, not as men write...