Feminismus,
Gender und
Uebersetzungswissenschaft
4
Plan:
• Translating Women: 2011
• Presentation and Inspirational summaries
• Bella Brodzki: « Translating Gender/Traduire le genre »
• Flotow: « Ulrike Meinhof: De-fragmented and Re-membered”
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Translating Women 2011
•
Time to talk about women again…
•
Because of :
•
silence around women in Translation Studies from 2000 onward
•
period inhabited by gay identity politics and translation
Keith Harvey, Keenaghan, Larkosh
•
rise of queer terminology, and censorship effects
Introduction
• Engages with :
History of „women“ as a focus of translation studies 1970s till 2000
Butler‘s socio-critical approach to binary genders of
feminism:„according dignity“ to other ways of living one‘s
sexuality
Gender is a performance: a ‚stylized repetition of acts‘ always
performed under duress, that can be performed differently;
But discourse is the actual limitation on creativity and innovation:
any gender performance is an „act that has already been going
on before one arrived on the scene.“
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Butler‘s performative gender:
Driven by Discourse
• Performing gender is comparable to different actors performing
the same script;
• The script does not change… only the performance
• Humans live out „existing directives“ since gender identities
predate and precede any human subject;
• The human subject is in fact the „object“ of discourse;
• This is ‚the performative‘ within which we can move: the social
straitjacket of discourse.
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Sedgwick and Parker
• Strong focus on ‚living out‘ homosexuality in USA
Optimistically, their human subject ‚does things with words‘;
It is not predated by and created by discourse:
- any discursive intervention is valuable
- words (and actions) enter and affect ‚interlocutory space‘
- this ‚explicit performative‘ has political impact and value
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Uses of ‚performative‘ for
women and translation
• 1. Socio-critical aspects: always useful to work on women
authors, women translators in order to balance the story: text
choices for translation, treatment of textual aspects that are
gender/women-focused, all the questions around women‘s
cultural work and representation.
• 2 Struggle around ethnocentricity in translation – ability and
willingness to engage with and reflect difference: seen in notions
of „discourse as a social straitjacket: translation of texts and
presentation of gender may well be related.
• 3. Taking up ‚interlocutory space‘ : for women‘s interests.
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The Voice of Nature: British Women
Translating Botany in the early 19th
century
• - study of women as (rare) translators of works of science;
• - 18th century rise of women included in science and scientific
investigation
• - though kept away from botany in 19th century Victorian
England because of the ‚sexual‘ connotations of the field;
• - How do these women translators position themselves in regard
to the texts they translate from French?: La botanique historique
et litteraire: Madame de Genlis (ambitious self-promoter)
• - Translator: Eliza Reid: self-effacing but intensive scholarly
footnoter and scientific ‚domesticator‘
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A Dream of Light in the Eternal
Darkness – Karolina Pavlova‘s
Translations from German
• Tom Dolack
• Sketch of Pavlova‘s biography;
• Study of her translation of other literatures (Die Glocke/Schiller)
as a way to transcend personal defeat;
• Exploring the active role translation can play in raising female
poets from the ‚subjugation of the secondary world into the
freedom of the first‘
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From “Alejandra” to “Susanna”:
Susan Bassnett ’s “Life Exchange”
with Alejandra Pizarnik
• Madeleine Stratford:
• Study of ‚sisterly affection‘ between translator and author:
Susan Bassnett and Alejandra Pizarnik
solo un nombre
alejandra alejandra
debajo estoy yo
alejandra
Susan susanna
lying below
susanna
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Sexuality and Femininity
in Translated Chick Texts
Anne-Lise Feral
Translation of Anglo-American film/TV series into French:
- retrograde and cliche-confirming
• ENG:
• Why fuck the girl in the skirt if you can fuck the girl in the ad for
the skirt?
• FR:
• Pourquoi baiser une fille avec une jupe, alors que la fille se
laissera de toute facon baiser pour faire la pub de cette jupe ?
• [Why fuck a girl in a skirt when the girl will let you fuck her
anyway to be in the ad for the skirt?]
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Chick Lit 2
• ENG:
• Where does it say that women can’t act like men sometimes? I
saw a piece of cute meat so I said to myself: “You only live
once! Be a man!”
• FR:
• Il est ecrit quelque part que les filles n’ont pas le droit de reagir
comme des mecs ? Et puis j’ai vu un morceau de chair
appetissant. J’ai pense : on ne vit qu’une fois, prends ton pied !
• [Is it written somewhere that girls are not allowed to react like
guys? And so I saw a yummy piece of flesh. I thought: You only
live once, have fun!]
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Chick Lit 3
• ENG:
• We’re women. We have double standards to live up to.
• FR:
• On est des femmes. On a ete fabriquees pour faire fantasmer
les hommes.
• [We are women. We were created to make men fantasize].
• (Ally McBeal, Episode 12, “Cro-Magnon”)
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Other texts:
• Echoes of Emily Dickinson: Male and Female French
Translators Listening to the Poet (James Underhill)
• Prefacing Gender: Framing Sei Shônagon for a Western
Audience, 1875–2006 (Valerie Henitiuk)
• “Gender Trouble” in the American Translation of Tahar Ben
Jelloun’s L’Enfant de sable (Pascale Sardin),
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Translating Gender/Traduire le genre:
no French word for ,gender‘
• Bella Brodzki : the distroting and generative power of translation
in the geo-political transfer of theoretical terms
1997: Anglo-American ‚gender specialists‘ at Le Centre Georges
Pompidou: Les études gai et lesbiennes, ed. and tr. Didier
Eribon (why ‚gai‘ – with études (f.pl.) Gay International lexicon?)
• „Gender Trouble“ : Le trouble dans le genre; “études des
genres,” “études sur le genre;” “Etudes Genre;” “la théorie des
genres”
genre: literary or musical form, grammatical gender (m. or f.)
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Ulrike Meinhof:
De-fragmented and Re-membered
• Flotow: Translation as memory work: reconstituting the work of
an important and influential woman writer and thinker
• Translation as memory: “an enquiring attitude towards
the past and actively (re)constructs this” – Meinhof’s work from
1950s to 1970
- De-fragmenting
- because Meinhof’s present reputation is dominated by 2 years in
RAF
- She is known for a few obscure citations:
Die Wuerde des Menschen ist antastbar
Alle reden vom Wetter… wir nicht!
Protest ist, wenn ich sage, das und das passt mir nicht, Widerstand
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wenn
dafuer
sorge,
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das
was mir nicht passt, nicht
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Meinhof 2
Die Wuerde des Menschen ist antastbar
Alle reden vom Wetter… wir nicht!
Protest ist, wenn ich sage, das und das passt mir nicht, Widerstand
ist, wenn ich dafuer sorge, dass das was mir nicht passt, nicht
laenger geschieht. Protest ist, wenn ich sage, ich mache nicht
mehr mit. Widerstand ist, wenn ich dafuer sorge, dass alle
andren auch nicht mehr mitmachen.
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