Translation, Semiotics, and Feminism

Selected Writings of Barbara Godard

Eva C. Karpinski, Elena Basile, Eva C. Karpinski, Elena Basile

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000471809
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Lingue e linguistica
• Subtopic: Linguistica

Translation, Semiotics, and Feminism: Selected Writings of Barbara Godard brings together 16 of the most important essays by the influential Canadian scholar, situating her thinking in relation to feminism and translation studies from the 1980s through the 2000s. Godard's lasting contributions helped to advance several areas in translation studies such as feminist theories and semiotics.The collection includes two previously unpublished essays and two essays that have so far only appeared in French.

The book is organized into four thematic parts covering feminist theories, comparative cultural studies, semiotics and ethics, and embodied praxis of translation. Each part is accompanied by specifically focused introductory essays, written by the editors, elucidating the material presented in each section. Topics range from translating and sexual difference and feminist discourse to translation and theatre and the ethics of translating.

This timely book is key reading for scholars, researchers, and advanced students of translation studies, comparative literature, gender studies, and cultural studies.

PART ONE
Theory and praxis of feminist translation studies

DOI: 10.4324/9781003049296-1

This section focuses on Godard’s central role in developing a feminist theory of translation through a methodology that brings together feminist thought, feminist theories of language and writing, and Godard’s own practice as a translator of Quebec women writers including Nicole Brossard, France Théoret, and Antonine Maillet. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, Godard’s conceptualizations of the relationship between gender and translation evolved at the borders of diverse influences fusing radical lesbian feminism from Quebec, English Canada, and the United States; feminist linguistics and narratology; poststructuralist feminism and deconstruction (most notably, Teresa de Lauretis and Judith Butler); French feminism of sexual difference (Luce Irigaray and Hélène Cixous) and Julia Kristeva’s semiotics; and postcolonial theory and transnational feminist cultural studies.

Inspired by the deconstruction of patriarchal language in Anglo-American radical feminism (e.g., by Mary Daly and Dale Spender) and French poststructuralist feminism, both anglophone and francophone Canadian second-wave feminist debates on women’s exclusion from the patriarchal symbolic order and language have given rise to metaphors of women as living in translation, forced to use man-made idioms and inhabit discourses that are not their own. From the early 1980s Godard was instrumental in making available radical feminist thought from Quebec to anglophone readers in Canada and beyond. She pioneered early definitions and concepts of feminist translation in her talks at the Women and Words/Les femmes et les mots conference in Vancouver in 1983 and in the 1984 and 1986 conferences on translation in Montreal. She practiced and encouraged the translation and dissemination of francophone women’s writing, through publishing venues such as the Coach House Quebec Translation Series and the bilingual feminist journal Tessera, which she co-founded with Daphne Marlatt, Kathy Mezei and Gail Scott in 1982. In particular, she tirelessly promoted the work of Nicole Brossard, one of the most influential and theoretically driven avant-garde feminist writers in Canada. Over the years, Godard had developed a longtime friendship and collaboration with Brossard, and eventually published four book translations as well as a number of critical essays and biographical entries on Brossard.

As a result of this collaborative push involving an entire generation of experimental women writers and scholars, we can see in the mid-1980s the emergence of what Godard liked to refer to as the Canadian school of translation studies (under its auspices, she even organized a conference at Glendon College in 1998), the core of which was formed by feminist translation studies. It was (and still is) an unprecedented phenomenon that could occur due to the serendipitous materialization of favorable conditions, including Canada’s official bilingualism and the government’s support of translation programs as part of its multicultural mandate; the flourishing of experimental feminist writing in Quebec and English Canada; the presence in academe of feminist scholars as cultural brokers; and the vibrant national scene of feminist cultural production, including feminist conferences and journals that sustained the anglophone-francophone exchanges.

Godard was not the only feminist translator working in Canada since the 1980s. Other practitioners active in the field who either translated feminist texts or self-consciously identified as feminist translators included Linda Gaboriau, Marlene Wildeman, Patricia Claxton, Susanne Lotbinière-Harwood, and Louise von Flotow. Like Godard, Lotbinière-Harwood and von Flotow are also feminist translation theorists whose contributions, next to those of other prominent scholars such as Kathy Mezei, Sherry Simon, and Annie Brisset, have helped to shape the discipline of Canadian translation studies. Godard has subsequently elaborated a feminist theory of translation in several essays, four of which are reprinted in this section. In her approach to translation, she always takes a gendered, politicized angle and works on translation in its multiple modalities as theory, institution, process, and craft.

In general, feminist theories of translation articulate the critiques of masculinist models, privilege female subjectivity, and emphasize female agency. The special alliance between feminism and translation is apparent in their shared commitment to critical interrogation and rejection of universal standards of truth and value; their common challenge of traditional gender constructions and hierarchal gender roles; and their shared focus on re-making language and discourse as historically marked by oppressive systems of (hetero)sexism, racism, and colonialism. Feminist discourse is viewed as always already double and translative, both in its recuperative thrust to inscribe women’s experiences that have been erased or mis-represented within the dominant discourse and in its deconstructive thrust to expose patriarchal stereotypes and images of women’s lives. Godard recognizes this translational aspect of feminist discourse, specifically in the practice of fiction-theory, conceptually elaborated by the members of the Tessera collective (Ch. 7). As “a dual activity of reading and (re)writing” (Ch. 3), fiction-theory blurs the boundaries between critical and creative discourse and becomes a dynamic site of feminist inscription and poiesis transforming dominant systems of representation. The feminist translator’s political and ethical stance is manifest in transgressive and sometimes controversial practices of confronting the translated text in order to conform it to the translator’s agenda or, alternately, in the eroticized embrace merging the author-translator functions. Such feminist appropriations of the text are consistent with the role of translation as ideological interruption where translation theory complements fiction-theory.

By challenging several traditional tenets of mainstream theories, feminist translation theorists and practitioners replace the concept of equivalence and fidelity to the original, used to maintain the hierarchical relationship between source and target texts, with a freedom of invention and intervention into the text in the process of translation as dialogical re-writing (Ch. 3). Flaunting her presence, “the translator as she” projects herself as an active reader becoming a writer, a co-producer of meaning rather than a passive amanuensis. In foregrounding the visible effects of translation, she leaves behind the dualism of source-target texts as bounded entities and moves away from mimetic theories of transparency, instead opening up interstitial and productive intersubjective border encounters. On many occasions in her writing on feminist translation, Godard espouses her definition of translation as “creative transposition” or re-writing in the feminine and insists on the notion of translation as both a necessary betrayal and necessary fidelity to both languages.

1
THE TRANSLATOR AS SHE

The relationship between writer and translator (1983)

DOI: 10.4324/9781003049296-2

This early essay already contains the kernels of Godard’s material-semiotic theory of translation, as it recognizes and celebrates the “puzzling” nature and challenges of translation: the simultaneous entanglement of translation in multiple systems (both semantic and formal, like discursive and generic conventions, vocabularies, rhythm, sound, etc., but also contextual, linked to production and reception); the special relational bond between writer/translator, a bond that is both respectful and subversive; and the continuous productivity of the process of “translation/creation/invention.” In gendering the translator as “she,” Godard significantly departs from the historical devaluation of the feminine in Western conceptualizations of translation critiqued by such scholars as Lori Chamberlain (1988). At the same time, while speaking from a gendered standpoint, Godard distances herself from an “anti-theoretical” view of translation as mechanical substitution or approximation in pursuit of equivalence. Turning to linguistic and literary theories of dynamic communication, she re-defines translation as “creative transposition,” based on the model of reading as decoding and active recoding of meaning that necessarily changes the original and fails to produce equivalence. She then explores the libidinal investment – what she calls “the illicit pleasures” – of translation, discovered in her own practice of translating Brossard and Maillet. She endorses a theory of translation as an act of reading and interpretation that entails multiple pleasures stemming from a fascination with language, its infinite generative power, its rhythms and wordplay. In the process, she unpacks several analogies applied to the translator as a puzzle-solver, monster, and ventriloquist.

I want to talk briefly about the illicit pleasures of translating. Before expanding on what I mean by illicit pleasures, I’d like to clarify what I understand by the word translation. Generally, translation is conceived as involving the rendering of a source language (sl) text into the target language (tl) so as to ensure that the surface meaning of the two will be approximately similar and that the structures of the sl will be preserved as closely as possible but not so closely that the tl structures will be seriously distorted. In this view, translation is perceived as a secondary activity, as a mechanical rather than a creative process. A general anti-theoretical tradition in the Anglo-Saxon world has perpetuated the view of such a “servant-translator” (Bassnett-McGuire 1980: 3).

No study of translation graces the pages of the Literary History of Canada; only in the last four years has one been included in Letters in Canada. This latter occurrence indicates a revalorization of translation, which is now being granted the dignity of original (rather than subsidiary and derivative) work.

For a long time there coexisted an opposite view of translation, one stressing the preeminence of the translator’s creative freedom. In earlier periods translation was regarded as a serious and useful method for helping a writer explore and shape her own style. Contemporary tendencies defining translation as an art, not a craft or science, draw sustenance from new work in linguistics by Russian formalists and semioticians. More than just a transference of “meaning” from one set of language signs to another through competent use of the dictionary and grammar, the process of translation involves a whole set of extra-linguistic criteria. The translator is an active participant in the creation of meaning, there being a substitution of tl meanings for sl meanings (Catford 1965: 32–37). In this view, translation becomes one of the most difficult tasks that a writer can take upon herself. An entire culture and system of aesthetic features must be interpreted for a new audience. Consequently, “a translation is not a monistic composition, but an interpenetration and conglomerate of two structures” (Levy qtd. in Bassnett 1980: 5). The translator becomes a co-creator with the writer in a relationship that may be described: Author-Text-Receiver = Translator-Text-Receiver (ibid.: 38). Like the author, the translator sends a message to the reader to be decoded, but this translator is simultaneously reader of another’s message which she is decoding in order to recode. Limits to the translator’s creative freedom are extended in this act of reading to the boundaries of the original text. At the same time, however, the reader is stimulated to greater activity, encouraged to become an active producer of meaning, through the equation of reading/translating. Contemporary reader-reception theories postulating an active reader of literary texts encourage this. As George Steiner (1975: 27) suggests,¹ any act of reading is an act of translation, for we are continually crossing linguistic boundaries in our own language, making leaps through time and space in order to approach the Metaphysicals or Shakespeare, traversing the frontiers of sexuality in order to interpret the work of Hemingway or Mailer. The essence of language is its translatability or it would not function as a system of signs. Comprehension involves the translation of a work into our own idiolect, putting ourselves into the place of the speaker. The case for the creativity of such activity has been well formulated by writers. All texts, Octavio Paz (1971, qtd. in Bassnett ibid.: 27) writes, are “translations of translations of translations”:

Every text is unique and, at the same time, it is, the translation of another text. No text is entirely original because language itself, in its essence, is already a translation: firstly of the non-verbal world and secondly since every sign and every phrase is the translation of another sign and another phrase. However, this argument can be turned around without losing any of its validity; all texts are original because every translation is distinctive. Every translation, up to a certain point, is an invention and as such it constitutes a unique text.

It is against the background of such theories of dynamic communication that my own translation practice has evolved. In the course of translating the works of women writers, I have been pushed into an active relationship with their words. For these are writers consciously attempting to find new sources of meaning for women within language, meanings heavily dependent on the cultural context of their being women and speaking the language of a minority excluded from the encodings of culture in our systems-grammars and dictionaries. In no way could their works be translated with the simple help of a dictionary, for the meanings I was to recode were not to be found there.

The search for and invention of ways to communicate these new meanings are the source of the pleasures I obtain from translation, and from them I gain not just a sense of the riches of the writers’ texts but also a deeper understanding of the resources of my own language and my own experience. By probing the differences between my experience and that found in the texts of writers such as Nicole Brossard, Louky Bersianik, Yolande Villemaire, to name a few of the more challenging explorations of language I have attempted, I discover that unknown other that is wit...