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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. 454-472 Published by: The University of Chicago Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.com/stable/3174168 REFERENCES Linked references are available on JSTOR for this article: http://www.jstor.com/stable/3174168?seq=1&cid=pdf- reference#references_tab_contents You may need to log in to JSTOR to access the linked references. JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact
[email protected]. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at https://about.jstor.org/terms The University of Chicago Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Signs This content downloaded from �������������132.210.83.21 on Tue, 10 Nov 2020 01:54:40 UTC������������� All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms http://www.jstor.com/stable/3174168 http://www.jstor.com/stable/3174168?seq=1&cid=pdf-reference#references_tab_contents http://www.jstor.com/stable/3174168?seq=1&cid=pdf-reference#references_tab_contents 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, 1911-13), 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. 0097-9740/88/1303-0011$01.00 454 This content downloaded from �������������132.210.83.21 on Tue, 10 Nov 2020 01:54:40 UTC������������� All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 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 current American copyright law, both translations and musical performances are treated under the same rubric 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 or portraits (in painterly terms), or borrowed 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. 9 (1952): 13-15, cited in On Translation, ed. Reuben A. Brower (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1959), 289. 3United States Code Annotated, Title 17, Sect. 101 (St. Paul, Minn.: West Pub- lishing Co., 1977). 455 This content downloaded from �������������132.210.83.21 on Tue, 10 Nov 2020 01:54:40 UTC������������� All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 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 marriage. For les belles infideles, fidelity is defined by an implicit contract be- tween translation (as woman) and original (as husband, father, or author). However, the infamous "double standard" operates here as it might have in traditional marriages: 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 author 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: Librairie Armand Colin, 1968), 195. 5Earl of Roscommon, "An Essay on Translated Verse," in English Translation Theory-1650-1800, ed. T. R. Steiner (Amsterdam: Van Gorcum, Assen, 1975), 77. 456 This content downloaded from �������������132.210.83.21 on Tue, 10 Nov 2020 01:54:40 UTC������������� All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Spring 1988 / SIGNS Let no Austerity breed servile Fear 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 marriage. The text, that blank page bearing the author's imprint ("The first Impres- sion . . . Will be the deepest"), is impossibly twice virgin-once for 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 refer to the feminine attributes of the text ("his modest latent beauties"). In confusing the gender of the author with the ascribed gender of the