Living in translation: Voicing and inscribing women's lives and practices
European Journal of Women's Studies, 18 (4):
331--337 (2011)DOI: 10.1177/1350506811415190
Abstract
Our whole life a translation. (Adrienne Rich) In today's world of global connections Adrienne Rich's poem 'Our Whole Life a Translation' can be seen not simply as a beautiful metaphor for the untranslatability of human experience but very much as a reality for many women who live mobilities. If 'our whole life is a translation', we cannot help wondering: what then is the original? Is it another text, another experience or another reality? Many years ago Walter Benjamin defined translation as 'a mode', i.e. simultaneously a condition and a form of movement between texts and cultures, reminding his readers that 'a translation issues from the origi-nal' and 'it comes later than the original' (1999: 72). Therefore translation is not simply a linguistic movement of words and texts from one language into another but a move-ment of selves in/through language to other places, cultures, selves and positions – a signal of dynamic processes of continuation, change and transformation. By employing the whole gamut of ambiguity in the concept of 'translation', this spe-cial issue of the European Journal of Women's Studies explores the complex connections between words and worlds, between self and Other(s), between the translating subject and the object/context of translation from a gendered point of view. At the same time, the lens of translation offers alternative modes and scenarios for interpreting women's lives and identities – from the quotidian aspects of living, education and work to the more exceptional aspects of female creativity, subjectivity and expression in another language. The articles that follow raise multiple important and provocative questions: What does it mean to live in translation? How is femininity constructed, deconstructed, and recon-structed when transmitted from one language/culture to another? Is stereotypical understanding of femininity/masculinity reinforced or obliterated in the movement from one historical and social context to another? How do gender binaries and hierarchies Editorial by guest on January 12, 2016 ejw.sagepub.com Downloaded from 332 European Journal of Women's Studies 18(4) travel in translation and what effects do they have on the translation process? And vice versa – how is gender reconfigured in the movement from one linguistic and cultural environment to another? What strategies can make women more visible in/through translation? Of course, many similar questions have been raised previously by scholars in wom-en's studies, translation studies as well as in other disciplines in the humanities and social sciences. In the last three decades translation studies as an 'interdiscipline' (Snell-Hornby, 2006: 72) has moved away from the linguistic aspects of translation as text-based towards translation as culture and politics, exploring the role of various social categories in translation such as gender, ethnicity, class, ideology, history and tradition. It has drawn insights from sociology, anthropology, literary and postcolonial theory, cul-tural studies, philosophy, psychology and many other areas. For example, postcolonial scholars have shown how translation practices are always embedded in structures of power and knowledge, often imposing particular values and norms or masking inequali-ties (Bhabha, 1994; Rodriguez, 2008; Spivak, 1992). Along similar lines Lawrence Venuti equates these processes with doing violence: The violence of translation resides in its very purpose and activity: the reconstruction of the foreign text in accordance with values, beliefs, and representations that pre-exist in the target language, always configured in hierarchies of dominance and marginality, always determining the production, circulation, and reception of texts. (Venuti, 1996: 196).
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