{"title":"Regendered in Translation: From ‘Lyric I’ to Je lyrique","authors":"Ina Schabert","doi":"10.3366/tal.2024.0586","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"Whereas first-person speech is not marked for the speaker’s gender in English, in French particular linguistic forms identify a speaker as female. This conflicts with the intention of those female authors, poets in particular, who want to speak not from a gendered point of view but as human beings. A similar problem arises in translations of anglophone poetry by women into French. The routine method of rendering the generic ‘lyric I’ by a female ‘je lyrique’ does not reflect the implicit claim women poets often make to universal relevance. With regard to French versions of texts ranging in time from Emily Brontë to the present, this contribution shows how the original meaning of a poem can be narrowed or distorted by grammatical feminization. In some cases, however, the gender ambivalence of the English source texts has been successfully recreated in translation, and the spirit of egalitarian feminism thus kept alive.","PeriodicalId":42399,"journal":{"name":"Translation and Literature","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5000,"publicationDate":"2024-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Translation and Literature","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.3366/tal.2024.0586","RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"0","JCRName":"LITERATURE","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
Whereas first-person speech is not marked for the speaker’s gender in English, in French particular linguistic forms identify a speaker as female. This conflicts with the intention of those female authors, poets in particular, who want to speak not from a gendered point of view but as human beings. A similar problem arises in translations of anglophone poetry by women into French. The routine method of rendering the generic ‘lyric I’ by a female ‘je lyrique’ does not reflect the implicit claim women poets often make to universal relevance. With regard to French versions of texts ranging in time from Emily Brontë to the present, this contribution shows how the original meaning of a poem can be narrowed or distorted by grammatical feminization. In some cases, however, the gender ambivalence of the English source texts has been successfully recreated in translation, and the spirit of egalitarian feminism thus kept alive.
期刊介绍:
Translation and Literature is an interdisciplinary scholarly journal focusing on English Literature in its foreign relations. Subjects of recent articles have included English translations of Martial, Spenser''s use of Ovid, Eighteenth-Century Satire and Roman dialogue, Basil Bunting''s translations, Finnigans Wake in Italian, and the translation of haiku. Contributors come from many disciplines: * English Literature * Modern Languages * Literary Theory * Classical Studies * Translation Studies Translation and Literature is indexed in the Arts and Humanities bibliographies and bibliographical databases including the Modern Language Association of America International Bibliography.