WE TRANSLATE what the American women write, they never translate our texts." This quotation from Helene Cixous is the opening sentence of New French Feminisms, an anthology of translations from the French, the first major effort to translate what the" French women" write. Some pages later, in a footnote to an introduction, the editors, Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron, tell us:" The verb jouir and the substantiveljouissance occur frequently in the texts of the new French feminisms. We have constantly used the English words' sexual pleasure'in our translations." 1 Thus, among other things, what the French women write is the word jouissance, which the anthology translates, consistently. In an article subtitled" The Language of French Feminist Criticism," Michele Richman writes, in a note:" It is impossible to give an adequate translation of jouissance." 2 In a footnote to her translation of Julia Kristeva's" Women's Time," Alice Jardine writes:" I have retained jouissance-that word for pleasure which defies translation? 3 And, working in a British context, Parveen Adams, in a note to her translation of Michele Montrelay's" Inquiry into Femininity," bluntly asserts:" The word jouissance is impossible to translate." 4 Richman, Jardine, and Adams, as well as many others involved in various ways in the importation of what the French women write, choose not to translate the word jouissance, not to assimilate it, but to retain its foreignness.

In a recent feminist issue of the journal Diacritics, Jardine stated that" those American feminists... whose reading habits have been deeply changed by contemporary French thought must remain attentive to what are, ultimately, some very complex problems of translation-in the most literal sense of the word as well as in its broader and more difficult sense, as the inter-cultural exchange of ideas. 9'5