Gender and the Metaphorics of Translation
Gender and the Metaphorics of Translation
Author(s): Lori Chamberlain
Source: Signs , Spring, 1988, Vol. 13, No. 3 (Spring, 1988), pp XXXXXXXXXX
Published by: The University of Chicago Press
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GENDER AND THE METAPHORICS
OF TRANSLATION
LORI CHAMBERLAIN
In a letter to the nineteenth-century violinist Joseph Joachim, Clara
Schumann declares, "Bin ich auch nicht producierend, so doch
reproducierend" (Even if I am not a creative artist, still I am re-
creating).' While she played an enormously important role repro-
ducing her husband's works, both in concert and later in preparing
editions of his work, she was also a composer in her own right; yet
until recently, historians have focused on only one composer in this
family. Indeed, as feminist scholarship has amply demonstrated,
conventional representations of women-whether artistic, social,
economic, or political-have been guided by a cultural ambivalence
about the possibility of a woman artist and about the status of wom-
an's "work." In the case of Clara Schumann, it is ironic that one of
I want to acknowledge and thank the many friends whose conversations with
me have helped me clarify my thinking on the subject of this essay: Nancy Armstrong,
Michael Davidson, Page duBois, Julie Hemker, Stephanie Jed, Susan Kirkpatrick,
and Kathryn Shevelow.
Joseph Joachim, Briefe von und an Joseph Joachim, ed. Johannes Joachim and
Andreas Moser, 3 vols. (Berlin: Julius Bard, XXXXXXXXXX), 2:86; cited in Nancy B. Reich,
Clara Schumann: The Artist and the Woman (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press,
1985), 320; the translation is Reich's. See the chapter entitled "Clara Schumann as
Composer and Editor," 225-57.
[Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 1988, vol. 13, no. 3]
?1988 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved XXXXXXXXXX/88/ XXXXXXXXXX$01.00
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Spring 1988 / SIGNS
the reasons she could not be a more productive composer is that
she was kept busy with the eight children she and Robert Schumann
produced together.
From our vantage point, we recognize claims that "there are no
great women artists" as expressions of a gender-based paradigm
concerning the disposition of power in the family and the state. As
feminist research from a variety of disciplines has shown, the op-
position between productive and reproductive work organizes the
way a culture values work: this paradigm depicts originality or crea-
tivity in terms of paternity and authority, relegating the figure of
the female to a variety of secondary roles. I am interested in this
opposition specifically as it is used to mark the distinction between
writing and translating-marking, that is, the one to be original and
"masculine," the other to be derivative and "feminine." The dis-
tinction is only superficially a problem of aesthetics, for there are
important consequences in the areas of publishing, royalties, cur-
riculum, and academic tenure. What I propose here is to examine
what is at stake for gender in the representation of translation: the
struggle for authority and the politics of originality informing this
struggle.
"At best an echo,"2 translation has been figured literally and
metaphorically in secondary terms. Just as Clara Schumann's per-
formance of a musical composition is seen as qualitatively different
from the original act of composing that piece, so the act of translating
is viewed as something qualitatively different from the original act
of writing. Indeed, under cu
ent American copyright law, both
translations and musical performances are treated under the same
ru
ic of "derivative works."3 The cultural elaboration of this view
suggests that in the original abides what is natural, truthful, and
lawful, in the copy, what is artificial, false, and treasonous. Trans-
lations can be, for example, echoes (in musical terms), copies o
portraits (in painterly terms), or bo
owed or ill-fitting clothing (in
sartorial terms).
The sexualization of translation appears perhaps most familiarly
in the tag les belles infideles-like women, the adage goes, trans-
lations should be either beautiful or faithful. The tag is made pos-
sible both by the rhyme in French and by the fact that the word
traduction is a feminine one, thus making les beaux infideles im-
possible. This tag owes its longevity-it was coined in the seven-
2This is the title of an essay by Armando S. Pires, Americas 4, no XXXXXXXXXX):
13-15, cited in On Translation, ed. Reuben A. Brower (Cam
idge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 1959), 289.
3United States Code Annotated, Title 17, Sect. 101 (St. Paul, Minn.: West Pub-
lishing Co., 1977).
455
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Chamberlain / TRANSLATION
teenth century4-to more than phonetic similarity: what gives it the
appearance of truth is that it has captured a cultural complicity
between the issues of fidelity in translation and in ma
iage. Fo
les belles infideles, fidelity is defined by an implicit contract be-
tween translation (as woman) and original (as husband, father, o
author). However, the infamous "double standard" operates here
as it might have in traditional ma
iages: the "unfaithful" wife
translation is publicly tried for crimes the husband/original is by
law incapable of committing. This contract, in short, makes it im-
possible for the original to be guilty of infidelity. Such an attitude
betrays real anxiety about the problem of paternity and translation;
it mimics the patrilineal kinship system where paternity-not ma-
ternity-legitimizes an offspring.
It is the struggle for the right of paternity, regulating the fidelity
of translation, which we see articulated by the earl of Roscommon
in his seventeenth-century treatise on translation. In order to guar-
antee the originality of the translator's work, surely necessary in a
paternity case, the translator must usurp the author's role. Roscom-
mon begins benignly enough, advising the translator to "Chuse an
author as you chuse a friend," but this intimacy serves a potentially
subversive purpose:
United by this Sympathetick Bond,
You grow Familiar, Intimate, and Fond;
Your thoughts, your Words, your Stiles, your Souls agree,
No longer his Interpreter, but He.5
It is an almost silent deposition: through familiarity (friendship),
the translator becomes, as it were, part of the family and finally the
father himself; whatever struggle there might be between autho
and translator is veiled by the language of friendship. While the
translator is figured as a male, the text itself is figured as a female
whose chastity must be protected:
With how much ease is a young Muse Betray'd
How nice the Reputation of the Maid!
Your early, kind, paternal care appears,
By chast Instruction of her Tender Years.
The first Impression in her Infant Breast
Will be the deepest and should be the best.
4Roger Zuber, Les "Belles Infideles" et la formation du gout classique (Paris:
Li
airie Armand Colin, 1968), 195.
5Earl of Roscommon, "An Essay on Translated Verse," in English Translation
Theory XXXXXXXXXX, ed. T. R. Steiner (Amsterdam: Van Gorcum, Assen, 1975), 77.
456
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Spring 1988 / SIGNS
Let no Austerity
eed servile Fea
No wanton Sound offend her Virgin Ear.6
As the translator becomes the author, he incurs certain paternal
duties in relation to the text, to protect and instruct-or perhaps
structure-it. The language used echoes the language of conduct
books and reflects attitudes about the proper differences in edu-
cating males and females; "chast Instruction" is proper for the fe-
male, whose virginity is an essential prerequisite to ma
iage. The
text, that blank page bearing the author's imprint ("The first Impres-
sion . . . Will be the deepest"), is impossibly twice virgin-once fo
the original author, and again for the translator who has taken his
place. It is this "chastity" which resolves-or represses-the strug-
gle for paternity.7
The gendering of translation by this language of paternalism is
made more explicit in the eighteenth-century treatise on translation
by Thomas Francklin:
Unless an author like a mistress warms,
How shall we hide his faults or taste his charms,
How all his modest latent beauties find,
How trace each lovelier feature of the mind,
Soften each blemish, and each grace improve,
And treat him with the dignity of Love?8
Like the earl of Roscommon, Francklin represents the translator as
a male who usurps the role of the author, a usurpation which takes
place at the level of grammatical gender and is resolved through a
sex change. The translator is figured as a male seducer; the author,
conflated with the conventionally "feminine" features of his text,
is then the "mistress," and the masculine pronoun is forced to refe
to the feminine attributes of the text ("his modest latent beauties").
In confusing the gender of the author with the ascribed gender of
the