was treacherous, I wanted the poet to do battle with her. I wanted to

Vol 2 - Núm. 2 / Agosto 2004
was treacherous, I wanted the poet to do battle with her. I
wanted to be translating her defense not her dismissal, and
even though I respected the text for its ability to arouse such
a strong response, to create such a “present” absence, my
antagonism was stronger than my respect, for I suspected
that the text, busy as it was with its patriarchal birth, was
“unaware” that it could also engender a different, female
experience such as mine. (Maier, “A Woman” 7)
What are the possible “solutions” offered by the “feminist translator”
of today to texts such as the one Maier writes about? To questions about
the clash of aesthetics and politics, about the ethics of censorship in the
name of feminism, about the enticements of “resistive” or non-transparent
translation, and about the legitimacy of supplementing, subverting, and
appropriating a source text, there is, as we would expect from today’s
fragmented feminisms, a broad spectrum of answers.
At one end of the spectrum of those facing questions such as
these I would put translators such as Suzanne Jill Levine, who sees gender
politics as secondary to the politics informing translation as a whole.
Unlike Hitchcock’s outlaw heroines, I do not pretend to
plead “not guilty.” Though I have translated perverse stories
by Silvina Ocampo, ironic folk tales by Lydia Cabrera,
prose poems of despair by Alejandra Pizarnik, and even
a children’s story by Clarice Lispector, my main work as a
translator has been as handmaiden to the discourse of male
writers. But what is really the problematic issue here is this
catchword handmaiden, the gender-identified term and role
that has been assigned to translators, male, or female . . .
The translator is female, even if she is sometimes a male.
(183)
At the other end of that spectrum, I would put words like those of
Susanne de Lotobinière-Harwood, who speaks of the irreparable wounding
of the female translator by certain male authors.
Une femme peut-elle se mettre dans la peau du poète et
traduire du même point de vue? Ré-écrire d’où il a écrit?
Bien sûr. Notre dressage nous y encourage....
Mais une femme peut-elle traduire Angel Iceberg [a poem
by Lucien Francoeur] sans se blesser? Bien sûr que non.
Consciemment ou non. Même si je n’étais pas encore
féministe, c’est-à-dire consciente du danger, je n’ai pas
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