Re-Engendering Translation: Transcultural Practice, Gender/Sexuality and the Politics of Alterity

158 Pages·2016·2 MB·English

by  Christopher Larkosh (Editor)

Re-Engendering Translation
Transcultural Practice, Gender/Sexuality
and the Politics of Alterity
Edited by
Christopher Larkosh
First published 201(cid:18) by St. Jerome Publishing

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 Christopher Larkosh 2011
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Re-engendering translation : transcultural practice, gender/sexuality and the
politics of alterity / edited by Christopher Larkosh.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-905763-32-0 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Translating and interpreting--Social aspects. I. Larkosh, Christopher.
P306.97.S63R44 2011
418’.02081--dc23
2011035940
Re-Engendering Translation
Transcultural Practice, Gender/Sexuality and the Politics
of Alterity
Edited by Christopher Larkosh
Of interest to scholars in translation studies, gender and sexuality, and com-
parative literary and cultural studies, this volume re-examines the possibilities
for multiple intersections between translation studies and research on sexuality
and gender, and in so doing addresses the persistent theoretical gaps in much
work on translation and gender to date. The current climate still seems to pro-
mote the continuation of identity politics by encouraging conversations that
depart from an all too often limited range of essentializing gendered subject
positions. A more inclusive approach to the theoretical intersection between
translation and gender as proposed by this volume aims to open up the discus-
sion to a wider range of linguistically and culturally informed representations
of sexuality and gender, one in which neither of these two theoretical terms,
much less the subjects associated with them, is considered secondary or subor-
dinate to the other. This discussion extends not only to questions of linguistic
difference as mediated through the act of translation, but also to the challenges
of intersubjectivity as negotiated through culture, ‘race’ or ethnicity.
The volume also makes a priority of engaging a wide range of cultural and
linguistic spaces: Latin America under military dictatorship, numerous points
of the African cultural diaspora, and voices from South, Southeast and East
Asia. Such perspectives are not included merely as supplemental, ‘minority’
additions to an otherwise metropolitan-centred volume, but instead are integral
to the volume’s focus, underscoring its goal of re-engendering translation stud-
ies through a politics of alterity that encourages the continued articulation and
translation of difference, be it sexual or gendered, cultural or linguistic.
Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Re-Engendering Translation
Christopher Larkosh 1
Writing on Race and Sexuality in the Harlem Renaissance
Translation as Retelling and Rememory
Annarita Taronna 10
Speaking to the Dead
Juan Gelman’s Feminization of Argentine Poetics as a Politics
of Resistance
Lisa Bradford 32
Transformations of Violence
Metramorphic Gains and Plastic Regeneration in
Marie Vieux-Chauvet’s Les Rapaces
Carolyn Shread 50
Two in Translation
The Multilingual Cartographies of Néstor Perlongher
and Caio Fernando Abreu
Christopher Larkosh 72
The Creation of ‘A Lady’
Gender and Sexual Politics in the Earliest Japanese Translations
of Walter Scott and Charlotte Brontë
Takayuki Yokota-Murakami 91
Western Others (And ‘Other’ Westerns)
Translating Brokeback Mountain into Vietnamese Culture
Loc Pham 111
Gender, Historiography and Translation
Tutun Mukherjee 127
Notes on the Contributors 144
Index 146
Acknowledgements
Many of the intellectual gestures of thanks I wish to offer here are made
clear in the introduction, the contributions themselves, and the readings they
encourage. That said, any other dedications or acknowledgements on my part
would necessarily include:
my mother, a lifelong teacher and working woman, an example for
compassion and generosity in the face of personal adversity and social
injustice, and the provider who made my life as I know it possible, who
passed away at the age of 71 around the time that this book began to
be put together;
the rest of my family, friends and loves across the world, some of
them also gone, but none of them forgotten;
my supportive professional colleagues, past and present, who
continue to believe in and value my work;
and to all in the cultural, linguistic, sexual minority and activist
communities that I have been fortunate enough to consider myself
part of over the course of my life.
They all know who they are and what they mean to me, even if most of them
will not be among those who will eventually read this book.
At the same time, this book also goes out equally, if not more so, to those
with whom I presumably have little or nothing in common, whose languages
and cultures I can never fully experience or completely understand, whose
difficulties and aspirations I cannot even begin to comprehend, and whose
lives may appear to be, and may well remain, irreconcilably separate from
my own.
Providence, Rhode Island, 22 March 2011
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Introduction
Re-Engendering Translation
Christopher Larkosh
Literature, Roland Barthes has suggested, is of two classes. In the first
place there is the class of poetry, fiction, and drama, in which a writer
uses language to, as he says, “speak about objects and phenomena
which, whether imaginary or not, are external and anterior to lan-
guage”. Besides this there is a class of writing that is a class of writing
which “deals not with ‘the world’, but with the linguistic formulations
made by others; it is a comment on a comment.”
(Holmes 1970:91)
the state of the art of translation studies is better than ever before. it
is not good. There is so much still to be done.
(Holmes 1984/1998:110)

With these two epigraphs in mind – the first, itself the kind of “comment on
a comment” that the author sets out to discuss, the second, a simple yet frank
assessment of the field of translation studies – let me posit another deceptively
simple statement, this one in the form of a question: How and why does each
of us quote others, and do we translate for many of the same reasons? If it is
still possible to take the meaning of this or any other quote at face value, one
might assume that I either agree with, seek support in and wish to strategically
ally myself with the author’s statement, or else that I disagree and prove it false
through my own subsequent arguments or those of others. Less common than
these two approaches, however, is a strategy of quotation that both encourages
an awareness of the semantic ambiguity of such re-contextualized statements
such as those above, and underscores both their inherent ambiguities and un-
derlying, often irreconcilable contradictions, in order to provoke a discussion
of the very utility of such strategies of quotation themselves.
Such a nuanced understanding of quotation – and by extension, translation
– as well as their ever-evolving roles in cultural critique, will be instrumental
for a volume that aims both to reexamine and diversify understandings of the
relationship between translation studies and studies in gender and sexuality:
not only in relation to women’s studies, lgbt studies and/or queer theory, but
also to other conceptualizations of gender and sexual intersubjectivity in trans-
lation studies. The articles compiled in this volume, both individually and in
the multiple intersections suggested by their inclusion here together, offer a
 Introduction
number of mediating strategies related to both quotation and translation, and
thus expand potential discussion of this topic over a broader range of gendered,
sexual, and intersecting linguistic and cultural positions.
While the works of feminist scholars, most often focusing on primarily
‘women-oriented’ projects in relation to questions of gender identity,
have by now established themselves for many as central, unquestioned
and thereby unavoidable points of reference in the discussions of gender
in translation studies, it could still be argued that other approaches to
questions on gender and sexuality beyond the limits of a single primary
gender or sexual identity have been circulating at the heart of translation
studies since its formal academic inception in the early 1970s. To give one
example: the author quoted above, the US-born Dutch academic James S.
Holmes, is still considered to be among the most important foundational
figures of translation studies. While characterized by one contemporary as
an “independent and innovative spirit moving in two such separate worlds,
both in the academic and geographical sense”, mainly on the basis of his
professional collaboration on both sides of the iron Curtain (snell-hornby
2006:41), such a description of Holmes’ commitment to transiting cultural
spaces still does not begin to tell the whole story. perhaps precisely because
he was an out, gay-identified man active in the burgeoning leather scene
of Amsterdam of the mid-20th century, a foundational figure in a second
academic discipline, known in Dutch as ‘homostudies’, and a co-founder
of the Amsterdam gay and lesbian bookstore Vrolijk (Keilson-Lauritz
2001), Holmes was hardly someone who needed to be ‘outed’ by his fellow
scholars in more explicit terms. This may shed some light on what now
appears as a somewhat disquieting silence about his sexual orientation by
translation studies scholars who have written on his contributions to the
field. One emblematic example can be found in the collection of articles
compiled in Amsterdam after a conference held there in his honour in
1990. Aside from a comment in the introduction by the volume’s co-edi-
tor, who notes that some of his university colleagues “did not approve of
his life-style” (van Leuven-Zwart 1991:7), and another that refers to his
life partner Hans van Merle in a footnote as Holmes himself often did, as
his “co-translator” (Levie 1991:58), without any further insight into the
multifaceted nature of this relationship, there is no explicit mention of
the possible connection between Holmes’ pioneering work in translation
studies and his equally pioneering work as a gay activist. Nonetheless, the
photo of Holmes on the volume’s cover seems to communicate in visual
terms what the book’s contributors choose not to: the casual attire of jeans,
leather jacket, flannel shirt and hoop earring, as well as the still-discernable
Christopher Larkosh 
pink triangle pin on his lapel and the gaze of Holmes himself, smiling as he
looks directly (one might even say defiantly) into the camera.
One exception to this less researched dimension of his life by translation
studies scholars is a seemingly discreet comment by his colleague Raymond
van den Broeck in the introduction to a posthumous 1988 collection of Holmes’
papers after his death from Aids in 1986:
[He] published translations of almost all [the] important Dutch and
Flemish poets. He also translated such Latin poets as Catullus and
Martial, being attracted in particular to the homoerotic element in their
work. Not least, he wrote poems of his own, at one moment under the
transparent synonym of Jacob Lowland (using bound verse), at another
moment under the more familiar name Jim Holmes (using free verse).
of his epic Billy the Crisco Kid, a narrative poem in ottava rima in-
tended to comprise ten cantos of 800 lines each, he was not even able
to complete two cantos. (1988:2)
Holmes’ confluence of life and work had always been a crossroads of work
in translation, gender and sexuality, and especially if his pseudonyms and
often sexually explicit literary output are any indication, one in which his
awareness as a mediator of Dutch-language culture in the English-speaking
world actually transformed the way he understood and configured his own
understanding of identity, not only as a gay-identified man, but also as a mi-
grant and translingual subject committed to the further, if always incomplete,
dissemination of poetic voices: whether ‘his own’, those ‘like himself’, or
of ‘others’. At times, as with Catullus and Martial, one may well perceive
some overlap with his own homoerotic poetic projects, and yet, as the oblique
reference to a specific sexual practice – that of fisting – that the title of his
epic poem suggests, all initial perceptions of commonality in gender, sex and
sexual identity must eventually give way at some point to difference, with
any and all unitary preconceptions of what sex ‘is’ or ‘represents’ in language
and culture no longer delimited by normative boundaries or assumptions of
commonality. It is thus in the specifics of sexual practice that one’s sexuality,
like gender, is always fundamentally distinct from that of any other, and thus
invariably transcultural. It is in this candour with regard to the specificities
of his own sexual life and practices that Holmes was a true pioneer; not only
did he appear on Dutch television to discuss his predilection for anonymous
and public sexual encounters, he did so without any sense of shame or apol-
ogy, aware of his public role not only as a academic theorist, but as a living,
human sexual subject (Holmes 1985).
it is thus by way of such candid reassertions of the often overlooked details
of Holmes’ sexuality into his work in translation studies that I go back to reread