Translating the Unconscious: Aleramo's and Delmar's A Woman

Sibilla Aleramo's novels, especially Una Donna, 1906 (A Woman), engage the reader in powerful modernist texts that anticipate some of Freud's discoveries in the same period, Virginia Woolf's novels by about ten years, and Simone De Beauvoir's The Second Sex by about forty (Ferme 1999). Una Donna, 1906 (A Woman), merits a re-examination of its relevance for a better understanding of psychoanalytic writing, feminism, and Translation Studies.

My reading of this novel will focus on the unconscious desires and fears connected to sexuality and gender. I will refer to the Italian and English versions by the British feminist, Rosalind Delmar, originally published by Virago Limited in 1979, and, to a lesser extent, Maria Lansdale's translation by Putnam's Sons in 1908. Delmar's and Lansdale's translations of Aleramo enable one to better decipher the spirit of the original Italian by providing good but different interpretations to compare with one's own. This comparative, historical method is at the heart of recent developments in literary translation, which now emphasize a text as variable, changing with the mentality and resources of the translator and his or her formation.

Internationally recognized scholars such as Emily Apter (Professor of French at NYU), Pascale Casanova (was Associated Researcher at the Center for Arts and Language and Literary Critic in Paris), and David Damrosch (Professor of Comparative Literature and Chair, Department of Comparative Literature, Harvard University) have written cogently about the increasingly important and innovative role of translation in the study of literature and in the institutions that produce knowledge in the humanities. The emerging translation studies discipline is different from translation as it has been studied for instance, in the 1960s. At that time scholars often thought of a translated text as a literal and equal representation of the original and ignored for the most part the wide range of choices at the translator's disposal, choices that give different and often acceptable meanings to words that put into play a number of possibilities. Translation studies now understands more clearly that important texts in world literature rendered in another language are different from the originals, manifesting the variety of cultural practices and the richness of linguistic, literary, and philosophical phenomena across linguistic and national borders.

Literary translation is thus an interdiscipline drawing on the translator's formation and other historical, material conditions in which she or he lives. Based on the opposition "self/other," to the degree that one normally reproduces in one's own or target language an original or urtext from a foreign tongue, Translation Studies engages, for example, in psychology via psychoanalytic literary criticism—in fact, it has already done so in the work of Antoine Berman (1992) and others. Emily Apter, for instance, connects Translation Studies, in the context of psychoanalytic theory and group psychology, to foreign policy and efforts to promote world peace. She states that "mistranslation in the art of diplomacy thus comes to signal an intractable non-translatability between nations, a condition of catastrophic blocage that inspires paranoid projection and the moral calculus of the zero-sum game (in which whatever benefits one side is assumed to hurt the other). She gives a specific example of how mistranslation led to, if not the Franco-Prussian War, at least to a symptom of the "impossibility of dialogue constitutive of the truth of Franco-Prussian relations" (Apter 2006, 20-21). In this way, Berman's and Apter's work builds on the parallel established by Paul Ricoeur between the repression of fears and desires within the psyche, on the one hand, and censorship/banishment in groups or nations, on the other. Our contemporary period may be apparently more open to emotions considered taboo in the past, like the bisexual desire of Aleramo and her narrators. Yet increasing conflicts within individuals and between nations indicate, I would argue, as does Apter, a need to confront them.

Scholars and non-academic readers in the United States and abroad often overlook Aleramo's seminal text in Italian and English, not to speak of the unconscious drives operating at the...