Read on Twitter
For #WITMonth month we are exploring questions that gender poses for the translator, & the vital part translation can play in discussing these questions. Over the week we’ll be sharing a selection of articles on #translating #gender – from Korean, Cantonese, Urdu and Arabic.
This is by no means an exhaustive overview but rather a selection of the ways different writers, poets and translators navigate questions of gender; and how the language we use can reject, as well as reflect, societal norms, opening possibilities for change.
These are all texts that made us think more about translation’s potential as a creative and collaborative space, foregrounding individual experience and challenging classifications, a space where binaries can be deconstructed and stereotypes challenged.
We’ll start with this extract from @lolaolufemi_’s recent book Feminism Interrupted, published by @PlutoPress. https://gal-dem.com/why-imagination-is-the-most-powerful-tool-that-feminists-have-at-our-disposal/
“The “answer”, if there was one, required us to place different feminisms in conversation and necessitated a radical flexibility in our organising [...] It proposed a new way of being that transformed the way I looked at the world” – @lolaolufemi_
Sensitive & informed translation plays a key part in facilitating such conversation – allowing us to address the way that gender is constructed, & create new, inclusive alternatives.
Yet too often we are presented with one single narrative, that assumes a narrow mainstream of consumers. This can dictate what is translated, how it is translated and how it is received.
“Getting more women translated into English can introduce a diversity of mature, nuanced feminisms to new readerships and linguistic-cultural ecosystems”
@deborah__smith in @koreanlitnow on the personal & professional levels where gender & tr meet https://bit.ly/3iDjYNZ
@deborah__smith in @koreanlitnow on the personal & professional levels where gender & tr meet https://bit.ly/3iDjYNZ
Both these articles are a reminder of the importance of questioning the other structural issues that are entwined in gender politics, as well as the importance of giving value to the voice of personal experience.
Today we’re sharing two articles that illustrate gender bias in the translation of classical texts, a topic more recently highlighted by @EmilyRCWilson in her English translation of The Odyssey, published in 2017.
This article by @bessrhmyers considers the different connotations of ‘fidelity’ for male and female translators of classical texts, the difference that shapes the material conditions for the translator, and biases that influence how they are received. https://eidolon.pub/women-who-translate-7966e56b3df2
“Investigating how identity can affect the way we read and interpret texts helps to resist the narrative that we live in a world without gender and color, a narrative which only further allows those with privilege to avoid their own biases.” – @bessrhmyers
In a close reading of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, @samccart1 illustrates how such entrenched biases have obscured of the rape of Leucothoe in English translation, or even transformed it into consent. https://electricliterature.com/rape-lost-in-translation/
“These translations echo our failure to trust women who say they have been raped, and they reenact how we downplay female victimization while exonerating male perpetrators.” – @samccart
There’s a vicious circle at play here – where the translator is subject to a “lack of adequate vocabulary” to describe the sexual violence, and therefore complicit in glossing women’s speech and interpreting their silence as consent.
In this essay, @nureonjongi talks about translating gender fluidity in Lee Jong San’s Customer, and the translator’s responsibility, “to prevent queer erasure and to make a point of presenting bold, embodied queer translations.” @wwborders https://bit.ly/31HatXa
As @nureonjongi points out: gendered pronouns in Korean were only recently propagated by translators to ‘accommodate the abundance of “he”s and “she”s in English’.
As this essay shows, translation can make a new space in literary language of English too, allowing the
language to evolve & express diverse identities.
language to evolve & express diverse identities.
We might compare the approach of the translator of @clara_ng's Meteors, who chose to assign he or she to the non-binary Indonesian pronouns used in the original, abandoning the gender fluidity intended by the author: https://bit.ly/3gQ92fh
The author’s response can be seen here: https://twitter.com/clara_ng/status/1108719905359032320
“...multilingualism offers a profound way of understanding the complex historical political and social contexts that have shaped who I am as a person”. – @maryjean_chan
How can growing up between two languages shape a sense of gender identity? This essay from @maryjean_chan investigates how inhabiting multiple languages can break down binaries, as well as impose them: https://modernpoetryintranslation.com/queerness-as-translation-from-linear-time-to-playtime/
“I am curious about what can or cannot be accurately translated, and what new meanings become possible in the translated text that were not obviously inherent in the source text.” – @maryjean_chan
Exploring a sense of self in translation, @maryjean_chan exchanges linear time, and its expectations of progress, for ‘playtime’. Discourse on translation, as with queer identity, is so often structured upon ideologies, and through terms, that oppose success and failure.
The idea of ‘playtime’ speaks to what we are trying to achieve in our workshops: showing that there is no single ‘right’ way to translate; avoiding narratives of progress (and the associated ‘failures’); and encouraging experiment… and fun!
#translating #gender #WITMonth
#translating #gender #WITMonth
We’ll end the week with the March issue of @wwborders, addressing the problems of canon when it comes to feminism and “the radical instability of categories like “Urdu feminist writing””. https://www.wordswithoutborders.org/article/march-2020-feminist-urdu-writing-new-approaches
Making a space for the voices written out of feminism for being “too feminine” or “too traditional” this collaborative work counters the recoding of ‘masculine values’, and
underlying colonial politics, that the canon has enacted.
underlying colonial politics, that the canon has enacted.
“What is revealed in this collection is true of Urdu feminist writing in general: that it has as many different faces, tones, concerns, and aesthetics as there are ways women have
learned to hold one another up.” @wwborders
learned to hold one another up.” @wwborders
In the same issue of @wwborders is a feature on life writing by women in Arabic, curated and introduced by SH collaborators @sawadhussain & @nariology as “diverse life experiences and varied contexts that have as much to set them apart as to unite them.” https://bit.ly/2FjoF0J
Rather than trying to draw a neat conclusion, or summarize the wide ranging articles that we’ve shared this week, we’d love to hear from translators, writers, linguists, teachers,
poets, publishers and readers on their experience of #gender in #translation.
#WITMonth @Read_WIT
poets, publishers and readers on their experience of #gender in #translation.
#WITMonth @Read_WIT
