pu revêtir la peau du poète sans m`aliéner profondément. Car pour

(M)othering the Textor The Feminist Critique of Translation
pu revêtir la peau du poète sans m’aliéner profondément.
Car pour la traduire je devais à mon tour—déformation
professionnelle oblige—occuper son poste d’observation et
regarder le corps de cette femme-ange avec ses yeux à lui:
faire mien son mépris, retourner contre moi (puisque c’est à
elle que je m’identifie ici) sa violence verbale. Me faisant une
violence que, soit dit en passant, aurait été tout aussi réelle,
bien que d’un genre différent, si j’avais eu à traduire l’écriture
d’une non-féministe. (16-17)
Alongside Lotobinière-Harwood, and equally vocal in their political
views, I would place translators and writers such as Sherry Simon, Barbara
Godard, Nicole Brossard, and others from the group of writers and
translators working in Quebec.
In 1979 when Elaine Showalter wrote “Toward a Feminist
Poetics” she lamented women’s role as “mere” translators,
editors, and interpreters.Whereas male critics in the twentieth
century have moved to center stage, openly contesting for primacy with
writers, establishing coteries and schools, speaking unabashedly (to quote
Geoffrey Hartman) of their “pen-envy,” women are still too often translators,
editors, hostesses at the conference and the Festschrift, interpreters. To
congratulate ourselves for working patiently and anonymously for the
coming of Shakespeare’s sister, as Virginia Woolf exhorted us to do in 1928,
is in a sense to make virtue of necessity. (128)
These words are a far cry from the words we are hearing today
from feminist translators. In a contemporary echo to Ellen Moers’ early
recognition of the multiple manifestations that “heroinism” may take, today
a recognition of the untapped potential for shifting the locus of power is
occurring not only in translation but also in other areas such as editing,
book reviewing, and anthologizing. With this recognition, politics becomes
practice as many editors, reviewers, and translators refuse to sit quietly
behind the text. Silence and invisibility are no longer considered appropriate
behavior; instead, immodest, wanton delight is taken by the feminist
translator in flaunting her presence.
The feminist translator, affirming her critical difference, her
delight in interminable re-reading and re-writing, flaunts
the signs of her manipulation of the text. Womanhandling
the text in translation would involve the replacement of the
modest, self-effacing translator. Taking her place would be an
active participant in the creation of meaning who advances
a conditional analysis. Hers is a continuing provisionality,
77