Feminist, "Orgasmic" Theories of Translation and Their Contradictions

Abstract

The main goal of this essay is to examine some theoretical reflections on translation inspired by contemporary feminism and based on theories of language that are supposedly postmodernist as expressed mainly in a text by Susan Bassnett, "Writing in No Man's Land: Questions of Gender and Translation" recently published in a Brazilian journal. As I intend to argue, her proposal of an "orgasmic theory of translation" - which could transcend traditional, "colonialist" models - and also defended, in similar terms, by authors such as Lori Chamberlain, Barbara Godard and Susanne de Lotbinière-Harwood, among others, is not radically opposed to the "violence" of the theories she rejects and does, in fact, endorse some of the same strategies she criticizes in patriarchal conceptions. As I have defended in other texts, the major contribution that contemporary theories of language (usually associated to poststructuralism and postmodernisn) can offer to translation theory is precisely the notion that every translation - as any interpretive act -for being inevitably a form of re-writing, a form of interference which is basically authorial, will also be "violent", that is, will implicitly take over someone else's writing and will transform it from its own perspective, even if its only goal is the protection of the so-called "original". Thus, for a feminist theory of translation to be truly postmodernist it will have to recognize that the (female) translator's pleasure, as she takes over the text she translates and as she implicitly and explicitly interferes in its network of meanings, is more akin to authorial pleasure than to an allegedly nonviolent, "orgasmic" colaboration with her "original".