Ch 4 Von Flotow – Rereading and Rewriting Translations

-READING EXISTING TRANSLATIONS

.Simone de Beauvoir’s Le deuxieme sexe (1949) was translated into English in 1952 by Howard
Parshley. Criticisms of the translation (Margaret Simons, 1983) are primarily based on unmarked
deletions of more than ten percent of the original material:

Sections of text recounting the names and achievements of women in history were cut
from the English version (The Second Sex). The lineage of influential women –so important
to feminist historiography- is broken through “patriarchal translation”.

Similarly, the translation deletes references to cultural taboos such as lesbian relationships
and to unwelcome realities such as the tedium of women’s everyday lives.

Simons insists that Parshley did not mark nor explain his deletions and the development of
Beauvoir’s thought is at times scrambled and she comes across as a confused, incoherent thinker.

Critic Yolande Patterson explains Parshley simplified and eliminated information to “lighten the
burden for the American reader”, as a publisher once said. The damage done by such edited
translations has other consequences as well. Later books published by women criticize Beauvoir
based on the “confused” English version of Beauvoir’s original text. Yet, the clichés may be due to
censorship by her (predominantly male) translators.

The 1956 English translation of another of her novels (Les mandarins) changed certain passages
“to attenuate the boldness of the sexual imagery or to strengthen the criticism of women who act
upon their desires”.

Another example of how Simone’s work was mistranslated and misrepresented is the editing and
rearranging of an interview she gave, published in 1972, that reached a wide academic public
unaware of the editing. Among the excluded information was a major sequence on capitalism
making her seem less anti-capitalist in the English than in the French version.

-REWRITING EXISTING TRANSLATIONS

.The Bible. Several sets of biblical texts have been retranslated as a result of feminist pressure. An
Inclusive Language Lectionary (1983) compiled readings for use over the church year and was
accompanied by a preface, footnotes and appendices, marking and explaining the translators’
motivations and interventions.

Earlier versions are full of male-biased language, imagery and metaphors in such language that
people can’t avoid thinking of god as a male person (Haugerud). The effect of the ponderous
weight masculine pronouns and the metaphorical language that casts both the history of the Jews
and the teachings of Christ in male terms has been to exclude women from full participation in
Christian belief. For example, when Jesus called his disciples to become “fishers of men”, were
women to be included?

Feminist revisions of the Bible do not seek to change the content of the text; they are concerned
with the language in which this content is expressed. Haugerud, for instance, rejects the use of
words such as “man” or “mankind” to include women. This takes several forms: male referents as
“brethren” or “king” have been replaced with more inclusive terms such as “brothers and sisters”
or more general terms such as “monarch” or “ruler”. Also, Haugerud uses neutral and plural
pronouns to eliminate male bias: “he who believes” into “anyone who believes”. “God the Father”
into “God [the Mother] and Father”, where “the Mother” is bracketed to emphasize the addition
hand make it optional in church communities unable to accept such innovation.

Eugene Nida criticizes these linguistic changes. He views them as impractical and as suggesting a
confusing reference for many Catholics and leading the readers to imply more that there is more
than one God. He poses that the problems are cultural, not linguistic, and suggests two possible
changes. First, he says the Bible needs to be read in the context of the chauvinist male-dominated
society in which it originates. Second, church leaders must radically readjust their views about
gender restrictions on church office.

Nida’s second point that an institution can reform itself without linguistic changes contrasts
sharply with the approaches of feminist translators who posit a close link between the language
used to describe God and patriarchal culture. In their view, linguistic change is an integral part of
cultural change. The Bible as a book used for contemporary religious instruction must speak to
young and old, male and female, and persons of every background.

Retranslation deletes male bias and patriarchal authority and seeks to establish a sense of
inclusive mutuality considered more appropriate to the context of the late twentieth century. The
fact that this text may be difficult to read says more about religious traditions and reading habits
than about the appropriateness of the translation.

COMPARING PRE-FEMINIST AND POST-FEMINIST TRANSLATIONS

.Sappho and Louise Labé. Diane Rayor (translator of Sappho) says that women’s texts are assigned
little authority and that in translation they have been subjected to substantial manipulation or
“patriarchal” corrective intervention. In dealing with the fragmentary nature of Sappho’s
manuscripts, she reproduced the original gaps as gaps, while most other available translations fill
in the many blank spaces, trying to master the poem or fix it. Gender issues arise when fragments
are “completed” with trivializing gendered material. For example, Lattimore changes the neutral
“whatever one loves” to “she whom one loves best”, making the poem it like a clichéd love poem.
This is an intrusion on the voice of the poem, perhaps a particularly masculine interpretation of
female voice, in which Lattimore presumes to speak for Sappho. Through translation carried out
according to a dominant aesthetic, Sappho’s name becomes synonymous with sentimental lyric.
Yopie Prins’ work on Sappho’s Fragment 31 and her translation analysis demonstrates the extent
to which gender can be a productive analytical category, helping to understand the many changes
that texts undergo in translation and through history. In her analysis, gender and the lyric genre
are linked in a demonstration of how translation practice is embedded in dominant literary
aesthetics.

Jane Batchelor’s approaches the translations of Louise Labé’s work. She examined pre and
postfeminist translations of the same poem. She implies that work done after 1975 is more likely
to benefit from post-feminist insights and avoid crude gender stereotyping, while earlier
translations reflect a more traditional view of women. In the latter, there are additions that stress
mental and physical decay, through the use of semantic items that connote obsessions, violations
of the body and attacks of hysteria. In the former, Jeanne Prine uses more active verbs underlining
the (poem’s) speaker voice and her awareness that she must live through her sorrow.

Tasks such as Batchelor’s and Prins demand acute sensitivity for minute changes in literary tone
and message, since the arguments hinge on word associations, word order and changes in rhythm.
Also on an understanding of the socio-cultural contexts and aesthetic norms in the times the
works were written and the translations were made.

RECOVERING LOST WOMEN TRANSLATORS

Hannay 1985 wrote Silent but for the Word, a collection of essays on Tudor women as patrons,
translators and writers of religious works. She describes women’s situation in 16 th century England,
when women were silenced except if they wanted to demonstrate their religious devotion by
using their wealth to encourage religious education and publication by men, by translating the
religious work of other (usually male) writers and by writing –though rarely- their own devotional
meditations.

Hannay claims that the restriction to religious writing had 2 results: first, the wealth of
noblewomen channel to such pursuits helped the Protestant church seeking their financial aid.
Second, women on occasion subverted the texts they were working with and inserted personal
and political statements. Examples: Margaret More Roper, Elizabeth I used translation and showed
anger towards the father figure, the Cooke SISTERS used translation in their private
correspondence to make confidential or private information inaccessible to spies and Mary Sidney.

Women translators are seen as “subversives” by reason of the fact that they dared to publish work
in an essentially hostile environment. Douglas Robinson views the feminized use of discourses of
courtly love, patronage and morality as a sign of subversive activity.

NINETEENTH CENTURY WOMEN TRANSLATORS

Susanne Stark rejects one particular concept that has fuelled much feminist theorizing of the 20 th
century: Virginia Woolf’s idea of Angel in the House. Woolf describes this “Angel” as a product of
19th century gender conditioning, as a “familiar species of woman in the last days of Queen
Victoria who was sympathetic, charming and unselfish, and whose purity threatened her [Woolf’s]
existence as a writer”. In Stark’s view, this “angel” had little hold over the 19 th century translator
she unearths; they travelled, learnt foreign languages, negotiated contracts and developed
entrepreneurial skills. Stark claims that women translators such as Marian Evans or Sarah Austin
were able to produce important work despite 19 th century social practices. She refuses to
speculate on the effects the translators’ social positions might have had on the translations.

Margaret Fuller translated Goethe’s Torquato Tasso. She highlights the female figures, framing the
drama in a way that releases the radical potential of women. Her interventions operate in
different ways: she intensifies the misogynist rhetoric that Tasso indulges in at the end of the play,
thus erasing the difference in the way he perceives the two female characters. She introduces
terms such as “captive” and “slave” where Goethe’s original uses neither. These semantic choices
considerably increase the tension and the issues of power between characters. She also gave the
play the simple title Tasso rather than Torquato Tasso, which distanced the play from the actual
historical character and connected Fuller more closely to the work.

La Malinche

Biographers describe her as a woman of Aztec origin who was sold into slavery as a child and later
became the interpreter and wife/mistress of Cortes in 16 th century Mexico. In conventional myths
she is considered responsible for causing the downfall of Mexico through her services as an
interpreter, a responsibility that resulted in the term malinchismo, used in Mexico today to denote
selling out to foreigners. But she has also come to symbolize the humiliation of conquest,
responsible for being mother of a bastard race. Mirandé and Enriquez’s feminist rewriting of this
translator figure approaches the issue from a psychological perspective. It presents the historical
details of Malinche’s life and tried to understand her options and her motives. Feminist rewritings
focus on her historical realities, her position and motivations, seeing her as a gifted linguist and
strategist, a mediator who sought to avert bloodshed, and an unfairly maligned cultural scapegoat.