Variables con impacto en la migración

In view o f lexical problems, the difficulty o f translating the wordplay in Cixous’s texts attracted relatively more attention than the translation o f new terms. It was noted that Cixous’s language “delighted” in puns arising from connotations in French, that she “unsettled” the language through “sheer playfulness” and “poetic and highly metaphoric style” (e.g. Lydon 1995:100; MacGillivray 1993), that the “gathering connotative force” o f her wordplay “resists any word-for-word equivalence” (Carpenter-Jenson 1991:194- 195). The wordplay in her work was declared as “not fully translatable” although it was “an important technique for changing the focus o f discourse, hence making and finding new discourses, letting the repressed come into language” (Wing 1986:164). What allegedly disappeared in the translation o f “Le Rire de la Méduse”, for instance, was this “element o f linguistic play that had been (as it remains) intrinsic to the ‘feminine’ as Cixous was attempting to represent it” (Lydon 1995:100).

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The prominence o f the wordplay in Cixous’s writings has its roots in her Lacanian heritage. Cixous uses wordplay “to subvert the univocal, patriarchal meanings that have constituted the authority o f language” (Wing 1986:164). Anglophone psychoanalysis, however, has often “dismissed the current Parisian equivalent as unserious word-play, mere punning” (Gallop 1982:139). Americans often wanted to know whether something was ‘play’ or ‘serious’. They seemed

to have the idea that if it is not one it must be the other. But for Lacan himself, wit, word games, jokes, mythology making, the materials o f the poet, are all part o f a kind o f play that is inseparable from what is most serious about the psychoanalytic enterprise. If the analyst does not subvert the line between work and play, he is doing neither science nor poetry, and if the analyst does not subvert the line between science and poetry, he is not a psychoanalyst at all (Turkle 1979:240)^^“.

The ‘play’ element, and the questioning o f seriousness it brings forth, were suspicious and inappropriate for those Anglo-American feminists who believed in the urgency and gravity o f the women’s movement. The wordplay in Cixous’s writings would be another source o f ‘otherness’ for many Anglo-American readers. Therefore, although the translators wished “to follow, imitate or reproduce the wordplays and slippages o f the original, without reducing the text to its communicative content”, more often than not they “have not followed the defamiliarizing strategy which Cixous herself illustrates” (Simon 1996:99). Barbara Godard gives the following examples for possible strategies

which could have been used - and indeed, some o f which were used - by translators in

order to cope with the wordplay translation in French feminists’ writings:

Various compensatory strategies o f non-translation have been deployed by

Catherine Porter in her later translation o f This Sex Which Is Not One [by Luce

Irigaray], notably the addition o f a glossary which gives a detailed explanation o f the multiple signifieds for the signifiers in question. Another such strategy which foregrounds the polysemy in the act o f reading is to cite all the possibilities at each textual occurrence [...]. Neologisms might be introduced

Turkic elaborates on Lacan’s talk given at the Massachusetts Institute o f Technology School o f Engineering in 1975: “When Americans heard Lacan speak o f Borromean knots, Greek science, paranoia, the concept o f number, o f symptoms, o f phonemes, o f spheres, and elephant shit, they were baffled. They tried to find a code to decipher the communication. They may have missed the point. Lacan wants his audience to enter into the circle o f his language without trying to understand it from the ‘outside’. Lacan takes his structuralism seriously. If you assume that man is inhabited by language, then the suggestion that you relate to a psychoanalytic discourse, in particular his, by letting it inhabit you makes sense. And as in psychoanalytic experience, there should be no expectation tiiat things will happen quickly. [...]”

“i^mericans often fear that when style is stressed, it is stressed at the expense o f substance. Lacan the stylist was mistrusted, seen as fnvolous and uninterested in ‘getting a message across.’ Lacan was trying to get a message across, but he was trying to do it across an ocean o f differences in cultural and intellectual traditions’’ (Turkle 1979:239).

to foreground such work on the signifier, as with ‘knowing herself cunt birth’ for ‘re-con-naissance’ [...]. Or polysemy might be introduced where such possibilities present themselves in the target language as in ‘booby trapped silence’ for ‘silence piégé’ [...]. This is the strategy o f translating by ‘lapse and bounds’ as Betsy Wing puns in English to reproduce the signifying effect o f

Cixous’s text in The Newly Born Woman. ‘Winging it’ in order to ‘voler’

language (1991:116).

However, these suggestions were often found quite difficult to follow by the translators themselves:

Where the author o f the source text is unmistakably exploiting the possibilities o f word play, the translator has to try to work out - and then work in - all the possible meanings, either by finding an equivalent polysémie term (which is often simply impossible), by adding a paraphrase (which is generally awkward, and is bound to spoil a joke), or else by renouncing the word play entirely (this is often the only choice, and it is usually regrettable) (Porter 1987:42).

5.3.3. Consequences

During the travels o f French feminist theory to Anglo-America, the recognition o f the translation effects was “rare” compared to “the sheer mass o f commentary which accompanied” the theoretical texts (Simon 1996:90). In almost all o f the cases, “translations o f single texts by the French feminists [wejre accompanied by explanatory

articles, rather than buttressed by translator’s notes” {ibid.)\

To the extent that translators o f the French feminists chose not to draw attention to their task, not to encumber their translations with notes or other visible signs o f ‘interference’ with the text, they reproduce conventional attitudes toward language transfer. They choose an ideal o f fluency over disruption, o f immediacy and transparency over density. But in so doing they create a clearly false assumption o f easy access to the text. [...] What is

principally neglected in such translations is the full import o f context, both

intellectual and rhetorical. There has been no lack o f written commentary to fill this gap - thousands o f pages o f analysis o f these texts have been written. Yet the very disparity between the abundance o f commentary and the ‘self-evident’ nature o f the texts themselves as they appear in English is striking (Simon

1996:108).

I would contend that the reason why the discussion about translation issues took place outside the translations themselves - and thus relegated to the margins or largely ignored - is because French feminism was seen as an extension (tropes o f universality), or a variant (tropes o f solidarity), o f the more politically oriented Anglo-American version o f feminism. For this version, the emphatically language-bound nature o f the French texts, like the psychoanalysis and continental philosophy that go into them, was set aside as irrelevant. There was a great concern that “French theorizing on the

subversion o f the Logos” was tending “to replace, and not merely to supplement, the kind o f political activism which Americans consider[ed] crucial to their self-definition as feminists” (Stanton 1980:80). The ‘deproblematisation’ o f the Cixous translations, and the accompanying erasure o f the differences in her texts was necessary for her assimilation into pragmatic Anglo-American feminism, to the extent that her work could fit into it. In Chapter 3, we have seen how French feminist thought was often presented by Anglo-American critics as ‘nothing new ’, and at the same time, how it was tested for its usefulness for Anglo-American purposes. Cixous’s reception in Anglo-America, therefore, reminds one o f the “w^-system” in Jacques Derrida’s “La mythologie blanche”, “that is, the chain o f values linking the w^ual, the woeful, and common linguistic wsage” (Lewis 1985:40). As for the aspects o f Cixous’s writings which did not

fit into this scheme, such as those related to jouissance and écriture féminine^ they were

presented as the French, the other, the ‘they’ confronting the ‘us’ o f the «5-system.

Consequently, no real need was felt for retranslations in Cixous’s case. Yves Gambier observes that retranslation can take place when there is less resistance or more tolerance in the receiving language and culture towards the imported discursive elements (1994:416). Similarly, Antoine Berman notes that retranslations wait for the

most favourable time (kairos) to come (1990). It seems that although the time was ripe

for so-called ‘revaluations’ and ‘retranslations’ of, and ‘revisits’ to French feminism in general (e.g. Fraser and Bartky 1992; Huffer 1995; Spivak 1993), they did not open up

the road to actual retranslated texts.

5.4. Conclusions