Translating as a Feminist: Reconceiving Anna Margolin

Abstract

This essay examines several meanings and problems inherent in translating Yiddish poetry from a feminist perspective. Part One unpacks the assumptions about gender and culture that lie behind two conventional truisms about translation, and considers the effect of bringing an awareness of gender to bear on the choices that a translator makes in carrying a text from one language and culture into another. It argues that the very act of translation makes readers reconsider literary values and aesthetic judgments as culturally determined categories also influenced by gender and calls for multiple rather than definitive translations of Yiddish poetry. Part Two examines the question of "What is feminist translation?" through an analysis of two translators' efforts to translate into English a Yiddish poem by Anna Margolin, "Maris tfile."

We are all familiar with the conventional view in which a translation is considered a secondary work dependent on, and subservient to, the original text. One cliché, proclaiming, "Only one syllable differentiates a translator from a traitor," puns on the Italian words traduttore (translator, masculine) and traditore (traitor, masculine). The pun warns what a treacherous occupation translating is, for a mere slip of the pen can transform the whole effort of transporting a text from one language to another into a betrayal that reaches out from a single word to infect the entire culture. It seems significant that this pun works only in the masculine formation, and even more so, that my 1978, pocket-size Barnes and Noble English-Italian; Italian-English dictionary, which gives the feminine of "traitor," traditrice, offers no feminine form for "translator." Is the tourist more likely to encounter a traitress than a woman translator?

The cliché, in the context of the dictionary's omission, suggests how pervasively gendered are our assumptions about translation (and also about translators and writers). This gendered notion becomes explicit in yet another truism, "A literal translation is plodding, like a faithful wife, and a literary translation is free, like a loose woman." Likening a translation to a woman, this statement assumes, first, that an original text is like a man, and second, that the relationship between a text and its translation is like a hierarchical, heterosexual relationship between a man and a woman. In this textual or sexual relationship, the original text, equated to the man, determines a tyrannical dualism, which defines a translation (or a woman) as either literal or literary, tedious or thrilling, domestic or dangerous, too faithful or too free. As in the age-old paradox that binds women into the roles of virgin and whore, a translation, like a woman, can never achieve an appropriate balance. Thus, a translation lives an imperfect female version of the male original.

We find a prototype for this notion in the second story of Creation (Gen. 2:5-23), where God translates doubly: The Creator carries across the breath of life by transforming dust into a man, and then the man's rib into a woman. When the man proclaims, "She shall be called Woman because she was taken out of Man," his derivative naming of the woman (isha from ish; woman from man) creates the assumptions about translation upon which the clichés are based.¹ What the clichés do not acknowledge is that translation is transformation, as much the "changing of forms" as the "carrying across" from one language to another. The act of translating creates a text that is something "other," that lives on its own terms.

In this essay, I want to dispute such hierarchial conventions of text and of gender by speaking from my experience as a reader, a teacher, a scholar, and a translator of Yiddish poetry, especially Yiddish poetry by women. At the center of my argument is my belief that the act of translating is the supreme art of making choices. The translator must constantly negotiate between risk and compromise, originality and collaboration, individuality and community. Translation, though, transcends the dualism of these paired opposites. Rather than choosing to be either faithful or free, either a patriot or a traitor, the translator must create more terms, shape other terms, rearrange old...