In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Notes Introduction 1. Neil Forsyth, personal communication, summer 2011. Lorna Sage makes the rapprochement between Carter’s (self-)estranging experience of Japan and Barthes’s Empire of Signs in Angela Carter (26–28). Sarah Gamble also observes that “living in Japan, a country in which she was outlandishly foreign, also caused her to look back at her own European ancestry from the perspective of a foreigner. The experience of alienation was to shape her subsequent fiction” (Fiction of Angela Carter, 66). 2. Susan Rubin Suleiman reports that the novel was written “in three months, in a Japanese fishing village on an island where she seemed to be the only European” (Suleiman, in Sage, Flesh and the Mirror, 100). The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman can be seen as a fictional exploration of Gauthier’s feminist critique of the surrealist movement . Born into a working-class family in 1942 (and therefore of the same generation as Carter), Xavière Gauthier (pen name of Mireille Boulaire) is an important figure of the feminist movement in France. Her groundbreaking study Surréalisme et sexualité, based on her doctoral thesis, was published by Gallimard in 1971. Like Carter, Gauthier was polyvalent; an academic, writer, journalist, and editor, she founded the literary and artistic journal Sorcières in 1975. Her work deals with women’s sexuality and its representation and with the history of the feminist struggle for contraception and abortion rights. Gauthier contributed to the rediscovery of the proto-feminist activist and anarchist Louise Michel. No wonder Carter saw in Gauthier a kindred spirit. See Watz, “Angela Carter.” Carter later translated into English a short story by the French surrealist artist and writer Leonora Carrington, “La Débutante” (from La Débutante, Contes et Pièces), for her edited anthology of stories Wayward Girls and Wicked Women. 3. Carter refers to the collection as Contes du temps passé in “The Better to Eat You With,” but she uses the full title (in French) in the foreword to The Fairy Tales of Charles Perrault . Some of the stories that inspired Perrault for his collection were also known as Contes de ma mère l’Oye (Mother Goose Tales), as she also points out. Carter’s translation seems to be based on Perrault’s 1697 Histoires ou contes du temps passé, edited by Andrew Lang as Perrault’s Popular Tales (1888). Because Lang’s scholarly edition reproduces the seventeenth-century spelling and punctuation of Perrault’s French text, I have decided to refer to the slightly modernized (but authoritative) critical edition 304 notes to introduction of the contes by Jean-Pierre Collinet instead, to facilitate readers’ comprehension of the text. 4. Carter’s famous statement of intentions expressed in “Notes from the Front Line” (38) echoes almost verbatim her enthusiastic account of the gist of Perrault’s contes as “this world is all that is to the point” in “The Better to Eat You With” (453). 5. Carter had already used the phrase “new wine in old bottles” in the conclusion of her BA thesis, “Some Speculations on Possible Relationships Between the Medieval Period and the 20th c. Folk Song Poetry”: “These songs survived the centuries, being continually re-moulded to suit each new generation of country singers, but often retaining ancient features; and newly written or adapted songs were often, new wine in old bottles, cast in ancient forms” (98) (Angela Carter Papers, British Library, 1/116). 6. Zipes, “Remaking of Charles Perrault,” ix. 7. Benjamin, “Task of the Translator.” 8. Berman, Experience of the Foreign, 293–94. 9. Derrida, “What Is a ‘Relevant’ Translation?” 425. See also Derrida, “Les tours de Babel.” Derrida’s thoughts on texts as affiliated with but never simply belonging to one single genre is also relevant for Carter’s generic experiments (“La loi du genre”). 10. Venuti, Translator’s Invisibility. In Scandals of Translation Venuti addresses the political implications of translation as he explains the translator’s marginal status on account of her questioning the authority of dominant cultural values and institutions, especially national myths of autonomous development. 11. Jakobson, “Linguistic Aspects,” 233. 12. “Le terme de translation est suffisamment plastique pour décrire ce qui advient lorsque l’on passe de l’image au texte et vice-versa en une sorte de système de dialogue ou de réponses, en une opération de traduction ou d’interprétation . . ., un transport . . . un rapport plutôt” (Louvel, Texte/Image, 148). “Le processus dynamique de la...

Share