On the Translation of Otherness: The Univocal Case of Will Grayson, Will Grayson (original) (raw)
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Cadernos de Tradução, 2008
This paper is an exploratory study of how lexical choices and grammatical structures adopted in translation seem to carry ideological burdens that sustain, perpetuate and challenge existing power relations present in source texts and their transfer to target texts. Supported by Critical Discourse Analysis and Genre Analysis, this article suggests that the more gay translation wins apparent recognition in the target social system, the more it is seen as a minor literature subject to diverse interpretations. The data source analyzed was Angela Carter's The Passion of New Eve and its translation into Brazilian Portuguese. During the analysis some excerpts of the novel were chosen at random, in order to select some lexical and grammatical constructions of the way ideologies and power relations are represented in texts. Hence, this article aims at demonstrating that far from finding a favorable reception in the target culture, gay translation is likely to give rise to such a hostile reception which shows that minority issues are yet considered a subaltern subject.
Queer Rebels: Rewriting Literary Traditions in Contemporary Spanish Novels
Queer Rebels: Rewriting Literary Traditions in Contemporary Spanish Novels, 2022
‘Queer Rebels’ is a study of gay narrative writings published in Spain at the turn of the 20th century. The book scrutinises the ways in which the literary production of contemporary Spanish gay authors – José Luis de Juan, Luis G. Martín, Juan Gil-Albert, Juan Goytisolo, Eduardo Mendicutti, Luis Antonio de Villena and Álvaro Pombo – engages with homophobic and homophile discourses, as well as with the vernacular and international literary legacy. The first part revolves around the metaphor of a rebellious scribe who queers literary tradition by clandestinely weaving changes into copies of the books he makes. This subversive writing act, named ‘Mazuf’s gesture’ after the protagonist of José Luis de Juan’s ‘This Breathing World’ (1999), is examined in four highly intertextual works by other writers. The second part of the book explores Luis Antonio de Villena and Álvaro Pombo, who in their different ways seek to coin their own definitions of homosexual experience in opposition both to the homophobic discourses of the past and to the homonormative regimes of the commercialised and trivialised gay culture of today. In their novels, ‘Mazuf’s gesture’ involves playing a sophisticated queer game with readers and their expectations.
Queer Decorum: An Episode on Translation and Marginalized Sexualities
Latin American Literary Review, 2022
The queer aspect of national literary histories has been traditionally obscured, and although it is gradually being recuperated, the impact of translation has been so far overlooked. Using the example of modernist fiction from England translated into Spanish and published in Argentina, I argue that translation smuggles, purposely misappropriates and resignifies alternative sexual desires and gender identities, opening spaces for local literatures to further explore these possibilities. Translation episodes from the 1940s and 1950s in Argentina are key to reconstructing the obscured history of literary queerness and I focus on one example that is perhaps the earliest, a translation of Denton Welch’s “When I Was Thirteen” by José Bianco of Sur magazine which appeared as “Cuando tenía trece años,” published in September 1944. Rather than isolated instances, such translations served to slowly transform the sentimental landscape of Argentine literature in a context where the popular imagination was prescriptively heteronormative. This article exhumes this little-known episode as one of the first cornerstones in a queer chapter of literary history in translation. Strictly related to depictions of homosexual desires, I propose “queer decorum” as an approach that affects translation strategies and decisions, subsequently affecting the translated text as a result and somehow making its publication possible.
The Translator's Closet: Editing Sexualities in Argentine Literary Culture
TTR, 2007
This article attempts to draw a theoretical line between closeted (homo)sexuality and translation through the example of the translational activity of those who collaborated on the 20th-century Argentine literary journal SUR: J. Bianco, E. Pezzoni, V. Ocampo, and H. A. Murena. Through a critical reading of explicit and thinly-veiled discourses on homosexuality in works both written and translated in this period, especially when placed in the context of theoretical discourses on translation, gender and sexuality, it reveals a question all the more unavoidable for present-day discussions: Is translation a closet, and if so, when and how? Le placard du traducteur : l’édition d’identités dans la culture littéraire argentine Cet article vise à tracer une ligne théorique entre l’(homo)sexualité du placard et la traduction à travers l’exemple des activités traductrices de collaborateurs de la revue littéraire argentine du vingtième siècle SUR : J. Bianco, E. Pezzoni, V. Ocampo et H. A. Murena. Par une lecture critique des discours explicites et voilés sur l’homosexualité dans des oeuvres écrites et traduites pendant cette période, surtout dans le contexte des discours théoriques sur la traduction, le genre et la sexualité, une question s’avère encore plus incontournable pour la discussion actuelle : la traduction est-elle un placard, et si oui, quand et comment?
Hikma, 2021
A devastating Sunday in the tumultuous life of a 60-year-old transvestite, co-owner of a brothel with her/his virgin daughter La Japonesita, sets up a bloody storyline that takes readers to the Chilean town of El Olivo through the pen of José Donoso and his seminal work El lugar sin límites (1966). The novella unravels the internal struggles of the fictional town dominated by the patriarchal prominent landowner, Alejandro Cruz. The story provides an account of situations that transpire as a result of the actions of La Manuela, as s/he moves across traditional constructed sex/gender boundaries while becoming involved with a hypermasculine character, Pancho, who wrestles with homoerotic desires. A gendered reading of this novel takes into consideration the way in which sexual difference is inscribed discursively in the text, and how the translation into English by Suzanne Jill Levine's (Hell Has No Limits, 1995) exposes the interplay of gender and social control. The analysis conducted in this article is of a descriptive nature, and it intends to point out decisions taken by the translator in order to represent the multilayered and flexible gender identities shown in the Spanish text and how they are rendered into English in order to portray the fictional characters. A careful analysis of the renditions of key passages will bring to light the translator's perceptions of the gendered ideology within the novel. English is pushed to the limits in order to represent the sexual identities of this gender-laden Spanish text.
The gender and queer politics of translation: New approaches
Comparative Literature Studies, 2014
In recent years, we have come to understand translation as exceeding the exact reproduction of a text from one language into another and as intimately intertwined with new forms of textual and cultural production. Arguing against models of translation as pure fidelity to an original text, Walter Benjamin asserts in "The Task of the Translator" that translation is at best a contingent and provisional way of coming to terms with the foreignness of languages, given that even the most painstaking fidelity in the translation of individual words can never reproduce fully the meaning they have in the original text. 1 Far from merely transmitting subject matter or content, a translation addresses the mode of signification of the source text by touching, perhaps caressing, to add a slightly queer touch, "the original lightly and only at the infinitely small point of the sense, thereupon pursuing its own course according to the laws of fidelity in the freedom of linguistic flux." 2 Here Benjamin is asking us to allow the source text to touch and affect in new ways our own language, or the language into which we are translating, and to inhabit difference by and through language. This textual caress incites translation as an act of recreation, which produces in the target language an echo, not a mere copy, of the original, hinting at the utter impossibility of equivalent correspondence between the source and translated text. As Benjamin writes, the translator's task lies in "aiming at that single spot where the echo is able to give, in its own language, the reverberation of the [original] work in the alien one." 3 These echoes and their reverberations, and the multiple potentialities of translations and/as counter-translations as they intersect with the social, historical, and cultural conditions that produce them, remain at the heart of contemporary translation studies, of what Gayatri Spivak has referred to as the translator's task of tracing brought to you by CORE View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk
Hikma
This groundbreaking work is the first full book-length publication to critically engage in the emerging field of research on the queer aspects of translation and interpreting studies. The volume presents a variety of theoretical and disciplinary perspectives through fifteen contributions from both established and up-and-coming scholars in the field to demonstrate the interconnectedness between translation and queer aspects of sex, gender, and identity. The book begins with the editors’ introduction to the state of the field, providing an overview of both current and developing lines of research, and builds on this foundation to look at this research more closely, grouped around three different sections: Queer Theorizing of Translation; Case Studies of Queer Translations and Translators; and Queer Activism and Translation. This interdisciplinary approach seeks to not only shed light on this promising field of research but also to promote cross fertilization between these disciplines ...
Translating Transgender: English Pushed to the Limits in José Donoso’s El lugar sin límites
Hikma
A devastating Sunday in the tumultuous life of a 60-year-old transvestite, co-owner of a brothel with her/his virgin daughter La Japonesita, sets up a bloody storyline that takes readers to the Chilean town of El Olivo through the pen of José Donoso and his seminal work El lugar sin límites (1966). The novella unravels the internal struggles of the fictional town dominated by the patriarchal prominent landowner, Alejandro Cruz. The story provides an account of situations that transpire as a result of the actions of La Manuela, as s/he moves across traditional constructed sex/gender boundaries while becoming involved with a hypermasculine character, Pancho, who wrestles with homoerotic desires. A gendered reading of this novel takes into consideration the way in which sexual difference is inscribed discursively in the text, and how the translation into English by Suzanne Jill Levine’s (Hell Has No Limits, 1995) exposes the interplay of gender and social control. The analysis conducte...
Queer perspectives in translation studies: Notes on two recent publications.
World Literature Studies, 2022
After outlining the opportunities offered by closely bringing together queer theory and translation studies for an engaged application of trans- or postdisciplinary research, as presented in Brian James Baer’s Queer Theory and Translation Studies (2020), the article briefly discusses the structural reasons why queer theory has not been much applied to the study of Slovak translated or non-translated literature before the publication of Eva Spišiaková’s Queering Translation History. Shakespeare’s Sonnets in Czech and Slovak Transformations (2021). Subsequently, it provides a critical reading of Spišiaková’s volume. The concluding remarks argue that a greater degree of cooperation between agents situated in various locales is necessary.
2007
Salvador. For obvious reasons, including economic ones and the different status of gay and lesbian rights in both countries, the United States offers more space, especially the publishing industry, to queer texts, and one can safely say that the United States already enjoys a national queer literary "canon." Yet, it is currently a very ethnocentric one with very few foreign titles translated into English, and the movement of translated texts between the United States and Brazil has mainly been one-way, with works of North American English literature rendered into Brazilian Portuguese. In Scandals of Translation: Towards an Ethics of Difference, when discussing the asymmetries of commerce and culture to show the overwhelming domination of the English language, Lawrence Venuti informs us that, according to UNESCO statistics, in Brazil, "60 percent of new titles consists of translations (4,800 out of 8,000 books in 1994), as much as 75 percent from English...In sharp contrast, in the United States, 1994 saw the publication of 51,863 books, 1,418 of which were translations (1998:160)." Although these figures date back thirteen years, the situation has not changed much. In an email exchanged with Laura van Boekel Cheola on August 6, 2007, an editor with Editora Rocco in Brazil, she estimates that only 20% the books they sell are originally written in Portuguese, with translations from the English language accounting for the larger portion of their catalogue. As systems theorists remind us, translations sometimes play a pivotal role in the exchange and enhancement of literary systems across different cultures and languages,