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  • The Gender and Queer Politics of Translation:New Approaches
  • William J. Spurlin (bio)

In recent years, we have come to understand translation as exceeding the exact reproduction of a text from one language into another and as intimately intertwined with new forms of textual and cultural production. Arguing against models of translation as pure fidelity to an original text, Walter Benjamin asserts in “The Task of the Translator” that translation is, at best, a contingent and provisional way of coming to terms with the foreignness of languages, given that even the most painstaking fidelity in the translation of individual words can never reproduce fully the meaning they have in the original text.1 Far from merely transmitting subject matter or content, a translation addresses the mode of signification of the source text by touching, perhaps caressing, to add a slightly queer touch, “the original lightly and only at the infinitely small point of the sense, thereupon pursuing its own course according to the laws of fidelity in the freedom of linguistic flux.”2 Here Benjamin is asking us to allow the source text to touch and affect in new ways our own language, or the language into which we are translating, and to inhabit difference by and through language. This textual caress incites translation as an act of re-creation, which produces in the target language an echo, not a mere copy, of the original, hinting at the utter impossibility of equivalent correspondence between the source and translated text. As Benjamin writes, the translator’s task lies in “aiming at that single spot where the echo is able to give, in its own language, the reverberation of the [original] work in the alien one.”3 These echoes and their reverberations, and the multiple potentialities of translations and/as counter-translations as they intersect with the social, [End Page 201] historical, and cultural conditions that produce them, remain at the heart of contemporary translation studies, of what Gayatri Spivak has referred to as the translator’s task of tracing “the very moves of languaging.”4 This complicates and transforms the original text, and creates new conditions of its reception in the target language, while simultaneously queering the target language and culture by both displacing and broadening its semiotic circuits and intertextual modes of signification.

The actual contingency of translation in terms of its varying and shifting relation to the source text beyond semantic equivalence and transparent communication, and the ability of the translated text to continue to accrue, as Laurence Venuti explains, meanings and values that may differ from those invested in the source text,5 expose translation not only as a socially mediated and ideologically constructed practice, but also as one that is potentially dissident and resistant to unimpeded correspondence between languages. Catherine Porter, in the introduction to the published versions of papers presented at the Presidential Forum on translation studies she organized at the Modern Language Association in 2009, reminds us that translation is a multidimensional site of cross-lingual correspondence on which diverse social tasks are simultaneously performed.6 This relational focus, what Emily Apter describes as “the places where languages touch,”7 indeed an echo of Benjamin, is not reducible to maintaining a hierarchical opposition between original and translated text, nor does it assume that languages are self-contained within, or limited to, discrete national borders. Translation not only crosses linguistic and national divisions, but, as Apter argues, also reveals their limits by giving us glimpses of languages touching in zones of non-national belonging, perhaps at the very edge of mutual unintelligibility;8 indeed, at the spaces in between and beyond discrete linguistic and national borders. As I have argued elsewhere, the work of translation crosses social categories as well, producing new, hybrid forms of meaning and new knowledge through these very encounters, even calling into question the very borders themselves, linguistic or otherwise, at the point at which they are crossed.9 Writing at the nexus of language, culture, politics, and translation, and speaking of hybridity as an effect of all translation work, Alfonso de Toro indicates that he prefers the term translation over the more commonly used term in French, traduction, since the latter...

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