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 Published 2014 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business  Christopher Larkosh 2011 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Notices Knowledge and best practice in this field are constantly changing. As new research and experience broaden our understanding, changes in research methods, professional practices, or medical treatment may become necessary. 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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 This page intentionally left blank 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