This blogpost aims to reflect on feminist translation practices from my perspective as a translator working out of my heritage languages into English and championing a transnational approach. In recent years, I have translated works by women authors hailing from Romania that span the experience of several cultural communities: in addition to writers representing the majority Romanian population also including German, Hungarian and Romani artists. I am adamant to promote an intersectional approach and to draw attention to voices from minoritised backgrounds (as women belonging to ethnic, religious or racial minorities, or combinations thereof), and also to offer equal opportunities for late starters or emerging writers.
I translate across multiple literary genres, with an affinity for drama – closely connected to my academic research – and for writing that straddles generic boundaries. In fact, I have an affinity for work that defies norms in some way or other, and I actively look out for voices that bring a fresh perspective on constructing a character or handling narrative structure for instance. In conjunction with this, I seek out texts with strong female protagonists (even when written by men at times), and I have a particular interest in the trope of women’s lineage and mother-daughter relationships. This has been recurrent in my drama translations, such as Elise Wilk’s powerful plays Disappearing and Alaska that explore the haunting of the past across generations and shed light on the complexities of this experience on Romania’s ethnic German population. Alexandra Badea’s Exile is similarly a play with strong maternal lines, addressing the issue of belonging and displacement in the context of Romania’s long-standing cultural connections with France. Both playwrights deal with transgenerational trauma as they pinpoint sensitive aspects of women’s experience. Translating them into English and trying to find outlets for production, my aim is to make women’s presence visible by drawing attention to the feminist aspects inherent in the text.
Translation is never absolute but contingent on context, and I consider carefully the conditions in which a particular interlinguistic transfer takes place. In other words, the destination for a given translation is a primary consideration, and this also has an impact on the extent to which I get involved in the text and carve out a path for myself as the co-creator of the target language version. My philosophy is that translation is a creative art form that is interventionist and activist, and I insist on acknowledging that translations have an origin in a foreign language rather than camouflaging this process and/or striving for excessive domestication with a view to easier consumption or integration into the target culture. To this end, I believe it is essential to be open about the interventions within the translation process, as this is likely to increase its credibility and impact.
Of course, not all situations are conducive to these kinds of revelations, and only some publishers have an interest in creating such spaces for translators. I am extremely grateful to Ugly Duckling Presse for not only allowing but actually inviting me to include a translator’s note in their edition of MyLifeandmylife by Romania-based Hungarian-language author Melinda Mátyus that I translated for them. I was given free rein to contextualise the work and they also created an opportunity for the inclusion of an afterword by an established critic to further appraise the work. This was additionally important because the publisher has taken a rare leap of faith and commissioned an English version prior to the existence of translations into other languages, and even prior to the author’s first book-length publication in the original language. Moreover, the volume includes the original text along with the translation, again celebrating their parallel existence rather than sidelining one for the benefit of the other. To further mark the publication, my translator’s note was reprinted on the online platform Reading in Translation, itself a major champion of women’s work as translators as well as writers in multiple languages, and the publishers put me in touch with Mayday magazine where a shorter companion text by Mátyus was also published in English.
By translating an iconoclastic author such as Melinda Mátyus, I am also extending an invitation to readers to be mindful of literary models other than dominant patterns in the Anglo-American norm. Her writing often invokes an oral tradition, including unusual turns of the phrase, as well as extensive repetitions and reduplications, which have become a trademark feature of her style. In MyLifeandMyLife, class and education dynamics are mapped out in parallel to gender dynamics and power relations, as the work explores the sexual exploitation of women and examines the female body as a commodity. MyLifeandMyLife looks at the consumption of art and the commodification of women side by side, but even though the work features detailed references to instances of modern art, it is not a form of ekphrastic writing. Instead, art becomes a means of refuge for the protagonist, and a means to reclaim agency in conditions when agency is precisely what is denied to her by the stifling patriarchal system she inhabits.
While the focus on a female, albeit unnamed, protagonist could not be more obvious in MyLifeandMyLife, in my translation of Home by Andrea Tompa (published by Istros Books, 2024), one of the major challenges has been to deal with the ambiguity around the gender of an equally unnamed protagonist. The author defers the revelation of this aspect until well over a hundred pages into the book, and due to the nature of the Hungarian language, this can be achieved without creating an unusually opaque or awkward situation by using gender-neutral pronouns and referring to the character via the various contextual situations afforded by the narrative.
In trying to do justice to this strategy, I consulted the author, and spent time considering a range of alternatives and assessing their respective consequences before making a conscious decision, from finding ways of avoiding the revelation of the protagonist’s gender or, in alignment with the conventions of most writing in English, simply revealing it from the very beginning. Whilst doing so, I was mindful of the implications of these options, seeing that systematic avoidance was likely to be interpreted as cumbersome – and hence a hindrance to readers’ enjoyment – and possibly inviting negative criticism for a supposedly ‘un-English’ translation, whilst an instant revelation would have the potential to remove the sense of anticipation and suspense inherent in the original and introduce a drastic stylistic shift.
In the end, I opted for avoiding the use of generic pronouns in the opening quarter of the book, and found ways to identify the protagonist with reference to the various activities and situations discussed in the respective chapters. The essayistic structure was of great help in this regard, as the book isn’t a conventional linear narrative, and there were relatively few gender-related ambiguities in the case of the other characters. We agreed with the author that by the time the pronoun ‘she’ was introduced, an observant reader would have already gained a pretty good idea about the protagonist’s gender anyway; therefore, we were aiming for an understatement rather than a grand revelation to create a big fuss.
I elaborated on these considerations in a short piece prior to the publication of the full translation, as they were foundational to the entire process. In this reflection, I address the close detective work needed to survey intimations in various parts of the book, as well as the need for drawing conclusions from contextual clues. I believe this approach is an example of gender-conscious translation adequate for purpose, and complements the author’s parallel strategies in terms of a fragmented narrative and deliberate avoidance to pin down tell-tale personal names or geographical locations. There is no actual place tied in with the main plot detail – a class reunion through which all the characters are connected in some way or other – and only a few episodic figures are situated in specific geo-cultural contexts.
All these strategies are examples of feminist creativity and perhaps it should not be surprising that a male reviewer questioned their legitimacy and expressed his doubts about whether such ‘universal[ising]’ tendencies can make the book ‘sellable’ in English-speaking countries. He also felt the need to explicitate locations he supposedly identified simply by having some knowledge of the author’s personal background and actual birthplace. Such mansplaining and resistant reading of feminist work is missing the point in the best case, and in the worst, it is a sheer refusal to acknowledge that dominant patriarchal and sexist structures can be questioned as part of feminist macro-strategies (cf. Luise von Flotow, ‘Feminist translation strategies’, Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies, eds. Baker and Saldanha, 2019: 181). Moreover, such a critique implies drawing a direct parallel between the person of the author and the protagonist of the book (as it happens also a writer, who readers learn in due course is a woman), in essence refusing to engage with the operation of feminist meaning-making per se, in literary creation or in translation alike.
This is why expanding on such issues in footnotes, prefaces, translator’s notes as well as platforms such as the FTN is absolutely necessary and have to be part and parcel of the political act of feminist translation and publishing. In addition to paying aclose attention to how gender issues and ideologies are conveyed via the textual features of the source text, pondering on options and weighing up consequences, and lastly finding solutions in the target language, it is equally important to explicitly draw attention to these creative processes, in order to make feminist interventions visible and women’s voices audible.
Jozefina Komporaly, University of the Arts London