Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Series Editors
Iris M. Zavala
Myriam Daz-Diocaretz
Volume 2
Myriam Diaz-Diocaretz
by
MYRIAM DAZ-DIOCARETZ
1985
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Daz-Diocaretz, Myriam.
Translating poetic discourse.
(Critical theory: interdisciplinary approaches to language, discourse, and ideology; v. 2)
Bibliography.
1. Rich, Adrienne Cecile -- Criticism and interpretation. 2. Rich, Adrienne Cecile --
Translations, Spanish. 3. Feminism and literature . 4. Poetry -- Translating. I. Title. II.
Series: Critical theory; v. 2.
PS3535.I233Z64 1985 811'.54 84-28245
ISBN 0-915027-52-6 (U.S. hb.)
ISBN 0-915027-53-4 (U.S. pb.)
ISBN 90-272-2403-X (European hb.)
ISBN 90-272-2404-8 (European pb.)
Copyright 1985 - John Benjamins B.V.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint, microfilm, or
any other means, without written permission from the publisher.
To the four of us and
to those who understand
the risks taken in these pages
Acknowledgments
Preface 1
I. Verbal Interaction Framework 7
1. Translation as Sign 8
2. Reader-Response Criticism 13
References 158
PREFACE
The major aim of this book is twofold: First, to bring to a focus the dual
activity of translator-function drawn from the semiotics of reading and writ
ing, in its two dimensions as a concrete subject outside the text and within
a given social context, and as a verbal presence traceable in the reading act
a text demands. Second, to explore some of the links between translating
and the study of feminist discourse through the analysis of the translator-func
tion in the recoding practice into Spanish of texts by the North-American
poet Adrienne Rich.
In the first chapter, the process of translating an aesthetic text is pre
sented within a dynamics of the verbal interaction between addresser and
addressee, encoder and decoder, in which the translator is the co-producer
of a pre-existent message. I have combined elements from the nature of the
verbal art conceived in terms of an interrelation between social reality and
literary text, from the works of Mikhail Bakhtin and Jan Mukaovsk, and
I have adapted features of Umberto Eco's Model Reader and aspects related
to textual strategies; reader-oriented interaction (in its variety of systems)
and reception-aesthetics have also proven useful. My objective is to propose
a theoretical model not of reading but of the notion of translator-function
in the dual performance of reader and writer whose receptive disposition
becomes manifested as a textual subject.
In the second chapter I examine further the translator-function in the
dialectics between text and receiver; moreover, I postulate that the translator
as 'omniscient reader' and 'acting writer' is a producer of a sign activated by
a given social interaction creating different types of relationships between
translator and text; this interplay acquires specific characteristics when trans
lating either subversive texts or texts which can be re-located and inserted
into extra-cultural spaces or re-oriented towards distinct groups, thereby pro
voking changed reception horizons within a given linguistic and cultural com
munity. Selected examples from the past are discussed in order to suggest
that the above mentioned phenomena are not rare occurrences, and they set
forth the possibility that translation theory and literary history are not only
2 TRANSLATING POETIC DISCOURSE
practical levels Translation and Women's Studies; this implies that the key
elements proposed here could be integrated to the problem of interpretation
and verification in contemporary women's poetry in English.
The translations into Spanish are not included in this volume. They
constitute a separate publication (Diaz-Diocaretz 1985b), therefore, they will
have their own social life in the Hispanic culture, with their own readership.
The present book, then, has two companion volumes the reader is referred
to for a general spectrum of my discoursive account related to the recoding
of the poetry of Adrienne Rich into the Hispanic culture. Each book covers
a different area, and may be read independently and received accordingly.
My notes towards understanding the different translating factors in the
context of feminist poetry began in 1975. Some isolated topics were presented
for discussion at different times and places in seminars, workshops and lec
tures, particularly at Stanford University, the University of California-Irvine,
State University of New York at Stony Brook, the University of Mississippi,
and in the Netherlands, the Winteruniversiteit Vrouwenstudies, and the Uni
versity of Utrecht.
Myriam Diaz-Diocaretz
Amsterdam
I. Verbal Interaction Framework
II
Everything we write
will be used against us
or against those we love.
These are the terms,
take them or leave them.
Poetry never stood a chance
of standing outside history.
One line typed twenty years ago
can be blazed on a wall in spraypaint
to glorify art as detachment
or torture of those we
did not love but also
did not want to kill
receptive disposition to the act of reading is the act of writing, and whose
discoursive production will be a new chain of significations and responses in
the RT that perhaps does not belong to the original response. Before examin
ing further the function of the translator in the dual activity of omniscient
reader and acting writer, it is necessary to take into account the mechanisms
of interaction that include poet and work and in our particular case, the
ideological implications in the translating process to be applied in the
subsequent chapters to feminist discourse as source.
It is important to start from the theoretical supposition that the meaning
of the text is not exclusively derivable from the semantic features. The reader
must recognize that a poetic text integrates a composite known as the poet's
personality which consists not simply of the individual who creates a given
number of texts but rather a sort of "common denominator", the "sum of
all the poet's writings" (Mukafovsky 1977:146). This corpus of work provides
the author with a specific position in the literary system, together with a
specific place in connection with other poetic individualities of the time. This
leads, naturally, to the poet's position in the development of a literary genre,
of its tradition and its evolution, and to the poet's association within or
without a literary movement or community; in other words, the poet's
relationship with society (p. 157), of particular importance in contemporary
writing by women and feminist discourse.
Poet and society are related to one another through the medium of
language in its poetic function;2 poetic language, Jan Mukaovsk argues
convincingly, requires focus on "the linguistic sign itself hence it is exactly
the opposite of a practical orientation toward a goal which in language is
communication" (1977:4). This is made more evident if it is remembered
that the goal of expression in a literary work is aesthetic production and
aesthetic effect. Here it is also worth considering Roman Jakobson's contribu
tion to the same aspect in his description of the poetic function as comprising
"the focus within the verbal message on the verbal message itself" (Jakobson
1960 in Waugh 1980:58). The unity of the two is produced by the totality of
the interpretative process: the strength of the expectations that will lead the
reader to look for some kind of organization, for poetic structure, within the
semiotics of reading.
It should be considered that the aesthetic self-orientation of poetic lan
guage is a generally acknowledged quality and an important theoretical prin
ciple for the study of poetics. However, language is in itself a system defined
within a framework of developmental changeability; its poetic function is
10 TRANSLATING POETIC DISCOURSE
2. READER-RESPONSE CRITICISM
criticism (Holub 1984), links the study of aesthetic reception to several impor
tant issues, which are worth considering for our proposal of the translator
as omniscient reader and active writer. Jauss' central concept is the 'horizon
of expectations, or "the set of cultural, ethical, and literary expectations of
the reader in the historical moment of a texts' time of appearance." It is in
reality a set of unconsciously held assumptions prevailing at the moment of
history when a text was created (1982b: 139-189). Jauss finds two levels of
understanding in the reception of the text; the immediate aesthetic experience
of the reader, and the ever-changing analysis of the interpreting scholar
(1982b). The structure and language of the text are thus important and reader-
response is considered as a process that creates meaning within the develop
ment of the text's reception.
If, in the light of Jauss's notion, a true relationship of literature and reader
has aesthetic and historical implications, the function of the translator as a
privileged reader mediating between literature and its receptor also has rele
vance; equally important for the study of the translator is the development
of the chain of receptions of certain works as object of inquiry for a better
comprehension of the sequence of literary works leading toward a more open
understanding of literary history (Jauss 1982b). The same author and the
same ST of a given national literature of a given period often has divergent
and distinct modes of receptions, and more often than not, there exists a
discontinuity in the spectrum of parallel histories; a translation, likewise, as
soon as it begins to circulate comes to exist within a new chain of receptions
which corresponds to that of the R culture and language. Given that a literary
text is not autonomous and it does not offer "the same view to each reader
in each period" (Jauss 1982b:21), translations quite rightly follow this rule.
Jauss's ideas are useful to our argument and can be further developed
in the framework of the translator-function, and not only within the study of
reception as a historical development in a series of interpretations, compared
to the concrete reception or reader-response, and as a process that creates
meaning in the RT. His approach of the reception of the text however points
to but one area in the semiotic process.
We emphasize the usefulness of adopting a criteria to account for trans
lation as a textual productivity actualized after the act of interpretation or
decoding. We are supposing that the production/reception of a specific liter
ary text, is determined by concrete conditions: the context which will be
decisive to judge about its concrete literary character. Since the translator
can determine the verbal and non-verbal context, it is important to assume
VERBAL INTERACTION FRAMEWORK 15
bility" (p.27).
In addition to the text-linguistics study proposed by Beeaugrande, we
believe that criticism focusing on the reader in translating can be quite illumi
nating from a sociohistorical perspective. One area would certainly include
the study of the role of translations in the development of the social fuctions
of language, and the function of both translation and translator in the expan
sion of the universe of discourse with respect to a given society.16
In the chapter 'The Role of Reading in Poetic Translating", Beaugrande
(25-37) stresses the need to consider seriously and in detail the translator's
"reading strategies" rather than the "writing strategies", since, he contends,
most of the errors in translation are due to "inaccurate reading" (e.g. rep
resentation in the translator's mind), rather than "inaccurate writing". In his
essential points Beaugrande also emphasizes the role of the translator in
introducing an equivalent text; for such a task the translator must "estimate
accurately the response of potential readers to the translation" (p. 27). Con
sidering the translator as reader, this is the very point at which Eco and
Beaugrande converge. For Eco (1979:7) "The author has to foresee a model
of the possible reader [...] supposedly able to deal interpretatively with the
expression in the same way as the author deals generatively with them." This
approach makes clear that author and translator encounter a similar task for
meaning assembly and sense production. Interpreting first, the translator
must also deal generatively with the text.
In my view, there are many advantages of this orientation and we can
extrapolate some relevant aspects particularly in reference to a paradigmatic
outline that defines the reader as an important component and determining
factor for the actualization of meaning in the process of textual cooperation.
Even the most elementary sketch reveals that the perception of a literary
work or an aesthetic text is a process that clearly calls for the interaction
of author/text/reader, contrary to the idea of the text as an autonomous
object, or "contrary to the notion of a crystal-like textual object" (Eco
1979:5). No doubt that in a literary text the reader's active function is not
totally metalinguistic, because the reader will unfold or discover the textual
clues in order to interpret what is implicit in the text (Iser 1978; Beaugrande
1978; Eco 1979).
In translation studies, one way of representing RT in a source oriented
approach is:
author text foreign reader
ST RT
VERBAL INTERACTION FRAMEWORK 19
Both 'decoding' and 'encoding' (in translation) are stages performed in con
secutive order, because a translator cannot 'recode' without having 'decoded'
a message. Therefore, within the act of 'recoding' we must consider the roles
of 'omniscient reader' ('decoder') and acting writer ('encoder'). Both are
functional roles for the translator as reader and co-producer of a literary
work set in pre-existence by another entity, its author.
The distinction between these two stages of translating are essential,
particularly if we take into account that in the interaction of author-text-
reader, centuries may pass between the time of conception of the work and
the reading of a translation. The implications of such an extensive interplay
are evident, since reading is an historically traceable process. Rezeptionss-
thetik has convincingly shown that the intelligibility varies for readers at
different periods. The situation is further complicated when we consider that
a translator often reads a text not from the original but from other translations
as ST. If the historical period does not coincide with that of the original, the
culture gap may influence considerably the translator's interpretation.
Another important problem is provided by Wilss (1982:144): "Frequently
the translator does not know, at least not personally, the author, on whom
he is working, and to make things worse, in many cases he does not know
the destination of his translation product either. Conversely, the TL (target
language) recipient normally does not know and does not even want to know
who is responsible for the translation he is reading". In conclusion, "close
collaboration between SLT author, translator, and TLT reader seems to be
rare." It is also relevant to remember that the communicative process
between ST and receptors' interpretation is not a continuous linear phenom
enon because it may often have interruptions and deviations eventually affect
ing equivalence. Numerous mechanisms can be clustered in this interplay of
textual and extra-textual components; in the pages that follow, I will concen
trate on the translator-function in his/her activity as 'omniscient reader' and
'acting writer' concerning the modes of utilizing and participating in some
specific properties of the verbal-interaction framework presented.
NOTES
1) The term "receptor'1 (language, text, culture, and system) will be preferred to "target" as
proposed by Nida (1964), yet not with an exclusive emphasis on the receivers, but within the
dynamics of author-text-reader interaction. The notion of "translation equivalence" will be under
stood as "reproducing in the receptor language the closest natural equivalent of the message of
22 TRANSLATING POETIC DISCOURSE
the source language" (Nida 1969:495). On the divergent conceptual ideas about the notion of
comparison of translations, I refer the reader to Wilss (1982:28).
2) "Function is not a property but a mode of utilizing the properties of a given phenomenon"
(Mukafovsky 1977:4).
3) Mukaovsky and the Prague Linguistic Circle follow Bohuslav Havrnek's definition of
"standard literary language": "The standard literary language (spisovny jazyk) is the vehicle and
the mediator of culture and civilization; it is an indicator of independent national existence. It
differs from the popular language of a given nation primarily in its function: its tasks are much
broader than those of the popular language, and they are above all, more precisely and deeply
differentiated (...) Furthermore, the norm of the standard literary language is more conscious
and more obligatory than the norm of the popular language, and the requisite of its stability is
more emphatic. Finally, public and written (printed) utterances predominate among the utterances
in the standard literary language" (Havrnek 1940:180, quoted in Mukaovsky 1977:7,n.9). Later
Roman Jakobson (1973) will develop his definition of "poetic language" from the notion of
"standard literary language"; cf. Lzaro Carreter (1980:153). By "national language" we under
stand "the traditional linguistic unities (English, Russian, French, etc.) with their coherent gram
matical and semantic systems." (Bakhtin 1981:430).
Several important propositions introduced by Bakhtin (1977; 1981), Mukaovsky (1977), and
Umberto Eco (1976, 1979) will be integrated in our framework; however, it needs to be said that
neither of these theoreticians have dealt with translation theory nor with the question of gender
linked to presuppositions in discourse, as it shall be explored in Chapters 3 and 4. On the pos
sibilities of relating Bakhtin's theories to feminist criticism, see also Booth (1982).
4) Beaugrande and Dressier (1981) offer a useful framework on the seven standards of textuality
considered fundamental from the viewpoint of text-linguistics; these are cohesion, coherence,
intentionality, acceptability, informativity, situationality, and intertextuality.
5) This important characteristic to a certain extent accounts for the fact that after a certain
period of time new translations of a given text are produced or required.
6) These functions are: (1) emotive (expressive) (2) conative (appellative) (3) metalingual
(metalinguistic) {A) poetic (aesthetic) (5) referential (cognitive, denotative) (6) phatic (Jakobson
1960; Holenstein 1976; Waugh 1980).
7) According to Jakobson (1960), the object of study of literary science is not literature but
"literariness", that is, a delimitation and definition of the methods and components of poetic
language. As an abstract property that provides singularity to the literary fact (Eikhenbaum 1965;
Todorov 1968:102), "literariness" is "a function of historical, ideological, esthetical, psycho-social
factors of which the formal literary properties are only a part" (van Dijk 1973: 96); therefore, it
is a function that varies according to a given culture and period (Greimas and Courts 1982:246).
8) For his notion of "model reader" Barthes (1973) suggests that the act of reading evokes the
erotic dimension of the literary experience; he also states that a text consists of multiple writings,
issued from several cultures, which enter into dialogue with each other or into contestation
(polemic texts) (Barthes 1972); the reader, for Barthes (1970,1979) is not an individual but a
function. Prince (1973, 1980) distinguishes between the "ideal reader" (one who understands the
text well and approves of it), from the "virtual reader" (the reader to whom the author is writing),
and the "real reader" (the persona who holds the book in hand), within the more general frame
of the "narratee". Fish's (1970,1980) "informed reader" is a necessary component of a speech
act; thus, he draws attention on the reader's cognitive activity experienced in the act of reading.
VERBAL INTERACTION FRAMEWORK 23
9) On intertextuality, see Kristeva (1969:255); Sollers (1968) Jenny (1976). In "Le Plaisir du
Texte" Barthes (1973:58-59) gives the reader unlimited freedom to associate texts as dictated by
cultural or personal idiosyncracies; we are clearly not referring to this.
10) For Marxist ciriticism emphasis on reception and the influence of reception are set in the
context of the work as a literary object within an aesthetics of production and representation of
a given structure in society. The addresser and addressee also become integrated in the mechanisms
of production. From this perspective the RT plays a crucial role in the history of literatures and
acquires a predominantly sociological function. A case in point is the USSRR where the role of
translations (RT) become a major implement for the construction of a national culture; to wit,
"It is necessary to identify the role of translations in the development of the social functions of
language in broadening the spheres served by the literary written language, in accordance with
the needs of the given society "(Iartseva 1981-1982:81). The implications of this theoretical position
cannot be overlooked since they point to the role of translations as ideological instrument, an
aspect we shall explore.
11) Iser (1974:275), "The convergence of text and reader brings the work into existence, and
this convergence can never be precisely pinpointed, but must always remain virtual, as it is not
to be identified either with the reality of the text or with the individual disposition of the reader. "
12) This was first developed in Eco (1962,1968,1976) and fully revised in (1979).
13) A code is "a system of signification, insofar as it couples present entities with absent units"
(Eco 1976:8).
14) Zavala (1983, and forthcoming) describes her 'omniscient reader' as one who uncovers the
writer's modes of reading and proves that the text is not a totally mysterious operation, but a
product of craft, with its own historical laws, produced under specific material relations. He/she
is a receptor who understands the historical coordinates and relying on a given code, reconstructs
the context and analyzes the communicative strategies of the poet. Zavala has developed this
concept while working with the manuscripts of Rubn Daro.
15) On shifts performed by the translator, see the bibliography and discussion in Wilss
(1982:139-140).
16) The recently developed polysystem theory by Even-Zohar (1978a, 1978b, 1978c, 1979)
and Toury (1978) and developed further by the Leuven group (Lefevere 1977; Holmes, Lambert
& van der Broek 1978; Lefevere and Lambert 1979; see also Lambert 1981 ; Levefere 1981) seems
to be the most feasible approach.
17) For Jakobson translation implies the existence of two equivalent messages in two different
codes (1963:80).
IL The Translator-Function
IV
It doesn't matter what you think.
Words are found responsible
all you can do is choose them
or choose
to remain silent. Or, you never had a choice,
which is why the words that do stand
are responsible
consequence, Montaigne did not reach the Spanish culture until 1899 in a
translation published in Paris.
The causal consequences of these suppressions cannot be underesti
mated, and literary history should undertake the reconstruction of these
silences. In other cases, an individual may wish to undertake translating an
already banned text, and may find it possible to make it circulate. Of consid
erable more interest are the suppressions performed by translators them
selves, in their dual activity as readers and writers. Especially significant in
this connection, is the role of the decoder and recoder who can anticipate
the reader's expectations and reactions. In this particular sphere, the trans
lator's own cultural codes predominate, since divergent messages may be
structured by supplying or eliminating the fragments, textual strategies,
semantic codes which are considered "dangerous" or inappropriate. The trans-
lator-function becomes normative, providing a "competently accepted"
interpretation which may result in a loss; this interpretation implicitly appeals
to canonized aesthetic or ideological norms (Bereaud 1971 is a useful starting
point). These facts reinforce our knowledge that the concrete readers of
different periods and cultures have been deprived of substantial parts of
content in innumerable works; this is of extreme importance in literary con
tinuity and authenticity. Yet another phenomenon related to this one, is the
number of additions performed by the translator, additions which may influ
ence the general structure of the work in terms of its ideological content.
In this context, mention should be made of the fact that, the motivation
for a specific choice may be dictated by the "horizon of expectations" of the
times of the ST; that is, options related to the translator's desire to conform
to the contemporary audience in cases in which the ST would not suit the
expectations of the receptors; in this sense, the relationship between translat
ing, aesthetic norms and canons of the period comes to surface, an issue to
be discussed further in the relationship translator/ST. However, it needs to
be said that the translator may also be guided simply by his or her own
motivations and world-vision, and instead of adapting to and accepting the
ST codes, may introduce significant changes by introducing units of personal
ideology. A case in point is Les Lettres Pruviennes by Mme. de Graffigny,
one of the major successes in eighteenth century French literature, translated
into Spanish and published in 1792 by Mara Romero Masegosa who modified
the constituents of the novel by altering passages related to the Spanish
cruelties committed during the conquest of Per. She also added a letter that
testified to the heroine's conversion into Catholicism (Dfourneaux 1962).
THE TRANSLATOR-FUNCTION 31
seras dcd, elle n'y pourra rien aussi, attendu que tu ne seras plus rien
du tout (Dolet in Cary 1955:20).
According to the censors this was a heretical action (well described in Cary
1955:20; Nida 1964:15-16). Leaving this theological heterodoxy aside, it must
be recognized that Dolet's ideology did influence his decision to erase from
Plato's text the possibility of immortality of the soul. Far from being a 'mis
translation' it is a product of interpretative procedures and subsequent recod-
ing dictated by ideological presuppositions, which illustrate my point.
Other examples are pertinent to my argument and can be evaluated
within the perspective of the semiotics of reading. Some interpretative con
ventions were characterized as forms of error, such as the polemic among
the translators of the Scriptures into English which provoked discussions and
accusations. They can, of course, be evaluated in that way (as "error") but
there is also the alternative of considering the ideological perspective. In
England the arguments were centered on the status of the word and its
prevalent usage, specifically regarding the treatment of ecclesiastical words
and their connotations. In 1582, the publication of A Discovery of the Man-
ifold Corruptions of the Holy Scriptures by the Heretics of Our Days, written
by Gregory Martin, one of the translators of the Rhemish Testament, pro
voked a strong controversy. William Fulke responded section by section in
his Defence of the Sincere and True Translation of the Holy Scriptures (see
Amos 1920:70). Significantly, this historical polemic demonstrates that trans
lating was at that time, an ideological interpretation with emphasis on
theological interpretation. Another example of a later period is the first
Hebrew translation of Goethe's Faust; the RT was intended for readers who
knew German and Hebrew and who were "interested in the re-enactment
of Goethe's work in terms of a crtain well-defined Jewish tradition which
they themselves accepted" (Forster 1958:10).
The complexity of the interpretative process is made clear in the oper
ations performed in the aforementioned illustrations. The translator, as
interpreter and reader of various codes that form the message, handles a
multileveled text with its variability, impelled by cultural and ideological
suppositions and presuppositions. What I want to stress here are the inter
pretative operations at work: as omniscient reader, the translator undertakes
a specific decoding to perform a re-arrangement of the original structuring
of the complexity of signification in the text. The divergences between two
or more versions of a R-text by different translators, close or distant in
history are not necessarily or exclusively caused by the different relations
THE TRANSLATOR-FUNCTION 33
author's text (from voice to aesthetic effect) emerges, and the translator's
own voice vanishes. However, it is precisely here where both voices must
converge at what Krieger calls "the center of the work" (1976:9-37), a con
vergence determining the boundaries of the texts, as original on the one
hand, as translator's contribution on the other; or as adaptations or other
derivative forms. In one form or another, the translator is, at this stage, the
bearer of the authorial point of view.
The conflict between the need to make a literary work exist for the
receptors in an accessible and intelligible form, and the desire to produce
an equivalent aesthetic effectiveness must be resolved by the acting writer.
It is in this stage that the translator recovers the communicative function by
means of a close, at first literal text which is then restructured.
Within the framework of the pre-established rules of the RL, the trans
lator's selections have enormous significance, and are guided not only by the
obligatory differences expressed in the SL-RL relationship, or through the
comparative stylistics of these languages. Selectivity will be made through
an organizing operation of addition or substraction of elements (stylistic,
rhetorical or formal), according to the components already available in the
receivers' tradition. By and large, this means, for example, that if a given
literary or poetic structure is not familiar or non-existent in the RL and
receiver's literary conventions, the translator may actually incorporate it;
such is the case of the rubiyt quatrain which became a new stanza form in
English from 1859, when Edward Fitzgerald published his version of the
Rubiyt of Omar Kayym (Savory 1957:44). The early Latin translators of
Greek plays were partially responsible for introducing the hexameter into
Rome; the birth of the alexandrin in France, as Savory describes it, is a more
winding path, since the Roman d'Alexandre (composed in Byzantium in the
II century), was translated into Latin in the IIIrd. ; around the XIth, Alberich
of Pisanon structured it in octosyllables into French, and since 1132 it
appeared in German and finally in the late XIIth century, it was re-translated
into French in endecasyllable verse (Savory 1957). These concrete examples
show evidence that innovations may be incidental, but one must note that
quite a number of aspects in literary history were incorporated as a result of
their initial use in the writing stage of the translator-function.
Finally, it is important to discuss in this theoretical framework of the
translator-function, the unity produced between the omniscient reader/acting
writer and the text itself. Semiotics of reading has made us aware of the part
readers take in the existence of a given text, which may provoke different
36 TRANSLATING POETIC DISCOURSE
writing stage, the representation of the possible addressee may play a crucial
role if the TF conceives not a source oriented but a receiver oriented trans
lation. The ways in which the translator organizes the information will affect
the new interpretative process. In any event, since facts of interpretation
constitute the point of departure of the TF, within the scope of a history of
reading, some four repeatable operations can be traced:
Didactic: favoring explanatory notes which can be marginal or inserted
within the text itself, assuming that the ST is obscure and should be made
clearer to the readers. Most translations of the XVth and XVIth centuries
reflect, in general rule, this particular way of elucidating an obscure passage
uncovering the pedagogic need to explain to the non-initiates certain matters
(see Glatigny 1980:83). The desire to clarify and give coherence may be
concomitant to the teaching of a moral. In the XXth century it is reflected
in the common practice of disambiguating certain elements of the text, pro
ducing as consequence a switching of poetic codes.
Corrective concerns the desire to adapt the interpretation to the reader's
'literary competence'. The French version of the Franco-Gallia by Franois
Hotman (attributed to Simon Goulart), was adapted to the non-Latinist
reader of the 1570's, namely, the average shepherd whose education was
limited (Glatigny:83). Another model of corrective attitude concerns the
standard of literary acceptability in terms of the norms and the reader's
expectations playing a central role in the receptor-oriented translations. Such
is the common practice in the literary relations between Anglosaxon countries
and France in the period of 1816-1830; for example, the English works being
translated were modified to a great extent according to the taste of French
readers, and adapted to the aesthetic principles and notions of the times:
Le got des Anglais n'est pas toujours conforme au ntre/.../ J'ai donc
suprim quelques dtails qui auraient pu paratre oiseux des lecteurs fran
ais et j'ai raccourci les portraits de quelques personnages qui ne sont aucun-
nement lis l'action (in Bereaud 1971:232).
Polemic attitude which may be provoked by certain portions of the message
in the ST which the TF anticipates will be in polemic with the taste and
cultural presuppositions of the reader. The text is modified to 'protect' the
reader from certain 'harmful' elements, and therefore accomodated to fit
acceptable norms (either stylistic features, themes, topics) and/or social con
ventions. Two examples in the Spanish tradition will be analyzed in detail
in Chapter III. However, polemic may also be due to the translator-function's
opposition, not to the ST but to the social context in which the RT will be
THE TRANSLATOR-FUNCTION 39
response. The functionality of the text depends on the strategies the trans-
lator-function constructs.
By considering all the possible reactions outlined above I shall attempt
to describe the process of reading and writing in a generalizable form, from
the interpretative operations at work in my own translations of the North
American feminist poet Adrienne Rich, a process I began in 1975. In the
course of translating her poetry I found it necessary to understand the poet's
tradition, her 'voice' and the different perceptions reflected in her own world
vision. This extra-textual path took me on a journey into the poet's literary
personality, which eventually resulted in a journey into the study of North
American feminist poetry and its more recently and consciously developed
form of lesbian/feminist discourse, which Adrienne Rich has helped generate
and expand in the last decade. Given my own Hispanic culture, and the
scarcity of such feminist discourse in the R system, and given the absence of
lesbian discourse as accepted norm of textual production, I had to consider
the nature of my function as translator within the Hispanic culture (my
attitudes and dispositions) vis vis the author's own aesthetic project.
Briefly described, these are the steps I had to follow: First as a reader
of the poet's work I outlined her author-function spectrum; second, I
analyzed the quality of dialogue and polemic in her writing, defining her
work in terms of her own readings of other texts (the intertextual crossings).
Third, as a writer of my own translations, I became aware of my own pros
pective influence upon the writer's voice in the texts in Spanish. All these
operations revealed important and vulnerable areas of feminist discourse as
performed from English into Spanish, directly related to the speech situation
in female-identified poetic texts. In the chapter that follows I shall briefly
discuss these interpretative proceedings.
The section that opens Chapter 3, developed from my 'translator's log-
book' is concentrated on the area of juxtaposition of the two cultures in
question. It is aimed at emphasizing the fact that seemingly obvious or unim
portant elements which native readers of English may easily overlook, may
be changed considerably. This description is not presented as normative, but
as empirical process toward elucidation of some distinctive features of a given
discourse (cf. on cognitive process, van Dijk 1980).
THE TRANSLATOR-FUNCTION 41
NOTES
1) For the use of this term I rely on Beaugrande and Dressier (1981:6-7) who on the notion
of coherence rightly maintain that a "Text does not make sense by itself, but rather by the
interaction of text-presented knowledge with people's stored knowledge of the world" (cf. Petfi
1974:24-40). The 'text-given world' shall be understood as the available content in a text.
2) 'Meaning' in this context is the potential of a language expression for representing and
conveying knowledge; 'sense' is the knowledge that actually is conveyed by expressions occurring
in a text (cf. Beaugrande 1981:84).
3) See Saenz (1936:369-389) on the importance of Montaigne in Spain.
4) The notion of 'knowledge of the world' corresponds to the 'commonsense knowledge' con
cerning "how the world at large is organized" (Beaugrande and Dressler 1981:25;cf. Petfi
1978:43). The interplay, then, concerns the interpretative movement of the translator's subjectiv
ity (which is 'dynamic' in the sense defined by Krieger 1976) between the knowledge of the world
and the one suggested by the text.
5) "Ideology" is to be understood as an idea-system (Bakhtin 1981:333-335); "it is semiotic in
the sense that it involves the concrete exchange of signs in society and in history. Every word/dis
course betrays the ideology of its speaker/.../ Every speaker, therefore, is an ideologue and every
utterance an ideologerne." (Michael Holquist, "Glossary" in Bakhtin 1981:429).
6) There are, of course, evidently a good number of cases, especially in work 'for hire', in
which the translator recodes following the author's design and suppresses his/her polemic readings.
777. Translating a woman's poetic discourse
V
Suppose you want to write
of a woman braiding
another woman's hair
straight down, or with beads and shells
in three-strand plaits or corn-rows
you had better know the thickness
the length the pattern
why she decides to braid her hair
how it is done to her
what country it happens in
what else happens in that country
The possible ways of approaching the authorial subject makes the reader/
writer activities (as outlined in preceding chapters) operate in certain
directions on the extratextual domain, which are directly linked with tracking
down references activating knowledge for the translator's comprehension of
the text. With this extratextual circumstance "the author's name is attached
to the text from the outside, and through its connotations it introduces specific
information and expectations into the reading of the texts" (Tynjanov in
Steiner 1984:133). Thus, every portion of knowledge that preexists the text
in the interpretative act will contribute to the reservoir of the reader's presup
positions. If the author is a man or a woman, the extratextual inferencing
provokes a priori different underlying frames, since, as feminist criticism has
demonstrated, the presuppositions toward women writers are far different
from those toward male writers in all respects.
Given the above mentioned phenomenon, the muted group framework,
first suggested by E. Ardener (1975) and S. Ardener (1975), and later devel
oped by Kramarae (1981) is quite suggestive for further study in our context.
Its basis is the notion that "The language of a particular culture does not
serve all its speakers equally, for not all speakers contribute in an equal
fashion to its formulation. Women (and members of other subordinate
groups) are not as free or as able as men to say what they wish when and
where they wish, because the words and the norms for their use have been
formulated by the dominant group, men" (Kramarae 1981:1). This applies
to women's written discourse as well, including poetry, as Kramarae suggests
(p.19-20).
While this muted group theory has been applied taking into considera
tion the production of speech in communication and written discourse in
general, it is also quite valid for an understanding of the reception of women's
work in connection with the terms set by Tynjanov which enables us to relate
the notion of production to that of interpretation within a problematics of
the text as part of a collectivity in which the text-reader-interaction
mechanisms are at work. Thus, the idea of women as a subordinated group
therefore "muted" may exist in the reader's consciousnes and in their
44 TRANSLATING POETIC DISCOURSE
paid in translations into English, from the viewpoint of the speaker and
addressee relation in a given text and the corresponding world vision, because
the gender specificity that may exist in a given source-text may disappear.
The poems by Chilean Nobel Laureate Gabriela Mistral (female speaker's
voice) and those of Marguerite Yourcenar provide two different cases.
Yourcenar, for example, writes in the first person singular masculine form
in "Sept pomes pour une morte". The question is to which extent the spe
cificity in Mistral's writing in the feminine, and of Yourcenar's in the
masculine, is transferred, and to which extent these components are left
indeterminate in an English translation? We cannot possibly undertake a
vast investigation, because it exceeds the limits I have set for this book, but
this is also pertinent for texts within a homosocial world vision by male poets.
As suggested above if a given text goes through a movement from deter-
minacy to indeterminacy in a given element in language use (e.g. person
deixis and gender markers) as we shall discuss in chapter 4, then the reading
of a translation is to be included not only as part of the reception process of
the author exclusively, but it must include the reception of the translator as
coproducer of the text and as generator of new meanings, since recoding an
aesthetic text, in these terms, results in a semiotic interaction.
Thus, a conflict such as the one presented in the section "A poem can
begin with a lie. And be torn up." is solved by the translator-function; a
considerable influence exerted on the receptor-text will be due to the cogni
tion acquired in a reading to find suitable codes, not only on the seman
tic, lexical, syntactic levels, but on extra-linguistic levels which will result in
the acting writer's linguistic choice. It is important to stress, however, that
the conflict should be formulated within the context of extralinguistic factors.
It is not simply a question of the poet's concrete circumstances (biography,
and so on) or the aesthetic tradition or literary conventions in which Rich's
work is inserted and evaluated; it is equally important to know the extent to
which thematic and formal elements may be vehicle for extra-aesthetic values,
and how these function as textual strategies (cf. Mukafovsky 1977:94).
I will begin the following section with the dialectic interaction between
the translator-function and a specific text in order to arrive at an elucidation
of the author-function. In order to render intelligible and significant a whole
body of already existing discourse, it is important to give meaning to the
foregrounded features functioning as textual strategies, namely, displace
ment of connotations, intertextuality. I shall start to explain in general terms
what sort of expectations a reader's cultural presuppositions bring to the
TRANSLATING A WOMAN'S POETIC DISCOURSE 49
text, and the intertextual relations the translator as reader may have to prior
texts. What I would like to stress are the hypothetical interpretative opera
tions at work which could result in an 'aberrant' recoding. In his/her trans
lator-function the reader must undertake various readings which will influ
ence the choice between alternative interpretative strategies.
The speaker declares the desire not to be part of that decaying, debased
lanscape. In that wish I hear, rather, the need to hide from that world, to
survive within and away from it, in a private and nurturing shelter where
"no one has imagined [them]."
No one has imagined them. But I as translator, want to imagine them,
to envision the speaker and the "you" implicit in the dual "we". Thus I begin
to leave Neruda's sequence behind, suspending the familiar in order to grasp
the unfamiliar world of Rich's poetic sequence. In poem II, the speaking
voice becomes more distinct, now as the represented T' who is at once a
poet, a dreamer, a lover. I follow the lyric stream, its rhythms, pauses, I
begin to feel the cohesion of that world, and I start translating what gives
me the most aesthetic pleasure, from poem II (1978:25):
You've kissed my hair
to wake me. I dreamed you were a poem,
I say, a poem I wanted to show someone...
and I laugh and fall dreaming again
of the desire to show you to everyone I love,
to move openly together ...
In my notes I write:
Me has despertado con tu beso
en los cabellos. So que eras un poema,
es decir, un poema que dese mostrarle a alguien...
y ro y vuelvo a soar
que deseo mostrarte a cuntos amo,
que avancemos libremente, juntos ...
I stop and embark on the will to have the poems present, represented in my
consciousness, on the search for a bridge between the objects as experience
of perception and the thoughts which that perception arouses; to reconstruct
the meanings of Rich's poems and to select the corresponding sense, I must
discover the 'truth' in each text. My background and culture are different
from Rich's; there may be gaps that might prevent me from inferring those
true meanings. Do I dare disturb the poet's universe? The line "no one has
imagined us" keeps resonating. To imagine the lovers, as I go on translating,
means also to look for textual clues defining further the speaker's and the
addressee's gender. The speaker in the sequence is a woman: in poem VIII
she is "Philoctetes/in woman's form"; poem XII presents the resemblance
between this speaker and the 'you': "and our bodies, so alike, are yet so
different." This image is apparenty clarified in the closure: "we were two
TRANSLATING A WOMAN'S POETIC DISCOURSE 51
refer the reader to conceive of the speaker and addressee's relationship within
the homosocial context, which in fact the twenty one love poems develop.
The connotative code indicates association with the word homosexual, and
more precisely "lesbian" by implication. This is an obvious interpretative
hypothesis I can anticipate the readers of my translation will carry out in
their decoding of the text.
The dictionary of the Real Academia Espaola, that dictates the norms
and accepted uses of words, has integrated, only in 1939 the term homosexual,
basing the standard of acceptance on the use of this term in twentieth century
texts, and it is described simply as sodomita 'sodomite', modified in 1970.8
The word lesbiano, lesbiana, with its accepted use in the masculine and
the feminine form is defined exclusively as follows:
1. adj. Lesbio. Apl. a pers., t.c.s.
Lesbio, bia (del lat. lesbius.), adj. Natural de Lesbos.
2. Perteneciente a esta isla del Mediterrneo.
The sole definition of lesbiana as an inhabitant of the island of Lesbos has
been extended to 'mujer homosexual' ('homosexual woman') only in the
1970 supplement of the Real Academia Espaola. The reasons for such a
late entry are, surely, moral codes. But my readers will not look up these
words in the dictionary, nor will they be informed of the meaning of the
word. In the interpretative reading, the ideological biases of their culture
and their own private codes will surely guide their inferences; the negative
contextual associations then, are inevitable. One evident solution for the
translator could be to avoid the equivalent for 'together' ('juntas', 'juntos')
which requires a choice in gender category, with a "safer" substitution of the
personal pronouns 'you and I' instead of the adjective together. It would
then read "que avancemos libremente t y y o " ; either this semantic solution
or the one which prefers the masculine plural form (generic) would leave
the line, the poem and the sequence, ambiguous as to speaker and addressee,
since the generic form is a conventional and grammatically accepted way to
indicate the plural for male and female subjects. However, if I selected the
neutral, ambiguous form (the plural), I would be cooperating with those who
have left what Rich calls the "half world" (1978:27) of silenced and unwanted
women "outside the law". Translating a structure of language, a sentence, a
phrase, does not imply necessarily translating a text with its correlations
organizing the aesthetic message as it was conceived by the poet. It can be
a grammatically correct translation, yet it would convey 'aberrant' presuppos-
TRANSLATING A WOMAN'S POETIC DISCOURSE 53
itions. I am also torn between the poet's message and the constraints tacitly
imposed by the RT culture, that is, constraints that limit the accepted norms
and conventions of a woman's poetic voice within the Hispanic literary tra
dition.
Very few historical analogies could be considered to underlie Rich's
discourse, with the exception of the Medieval and Renaissance cancion
d'amigo (Galician-Portuguese) and women's lyric Castilian poetry of the
fourteenth to the sixteenth centuries, whose specific topic is love (on this
type of poetry see Frenck Alatorre 1975), or else the addressee is normally the
mother or a girlfriend. Another more complex historical analogy would be
Sor Juana Ins de la Cruz, the Mexican XVIIthe century poet (who shares
with Ann Bradstreet the title of the Tenth Muse), whose speaking subjects
can be a woman, a man, or unidentified; the adressee can be masculine,
feminine, or unidentified (Fernndez forthcoming has important insights into
this author's love poetry). However, the context is not the same in either of
these examples, since the amado 'loved one' is clearly masculine, if ever
referred to (we shall return to this aspect in chapter four).
On the basis of the lack of substantial analogies, the translator is thus
confronted with the presuppositions inscribed in the receptor culture. Crucial
difficulties seem to be present here; in my omniscient-reader activity, I can
choose to actualize Rich's text by incorporating textual clues in such a way
that the poet's codes are not shifted, or betrayed. At this level we find a
commonground in translating and reading; the conflict to accept the author's
strategies, the implied system and its conventions, or to reject them for want
of more acceptable contextual interaction. Reader and translator are equally
immersed in this dilemma, yet the former may deviate or follow the message
in his/her own interpretation, while the translator, if willing to change the
codes, will initiate a new chain of inferences that will eventually influence
the readers in the R culture. The conflict between two attitudes, that of
fidelity or freedom, often accounted for in translation studies but seldom
from the point of view of semiotics lies in the core of the problematics pre
viously described. Eco's schema of the aesthetic text as a communicative act
provides a description of the translator's conflict, and seems feasible to ex
plain the dialectics in an interpretative reading:
On the one hand the addressee seeks to draw excitement from the ambiguity
of the message and to fill out an ambiguous text with suitable codes; on the
other, he is induced by contextual relationships to see the message exactly
as it was intended, in an act of fidelity to the author and to the historical
environment in which the message was emitted (Eco 1976:276)
54 TRANSLATING POETIC DISCOURSE
In translating, the omniscient reader being the addressee, the main conflict
may have a threefold outlet: to accept or reject the poet's codes, or the
translator's own, or those of the R culture. Not much substantial research
has been introduced in this area. The social context plays an important role
in this act of communication, and can rule in a significant way the situation
of utterance, its interpretation, for the expression to be meaningful.
Lorde, Judy Grahn). Those texts are speech acts against the paradigms of
oppression, particularly against patriarchal connotative components of lan
guage. What the poets perform is an emancipatory feminist speech act, by
virtue of the change they propose, that is to be realized in language itself,
and in the ways meaning is produced; this is an act of crucial importance for
the construction of their identity and for the foundation and establishment
of this particular homosocial community.
Before recoding any set of texts shaping a type of homosocial discourse,
it is necessary to decode the paradigms of oppression in all its traceable
manifestations for the study of diachronically and synchronically related com
ponents. Thus, in an account of the literary contexts, an awareness of ele
ments such as displacement of connotations along with studies of thematic
links, of concurrent use of images, or handling any other portions of content
can give us new insights into the writer's strategies, and into our own act
of reading and interpreting. Such an awareness leads to cognition, achieved
through close readings, and it is an important instrument to find the sources
and textual clues in what I shall call a homosocially arranged discourse (Diaz-
Diocaretz 1983b).9 Our findings in a given object of study often depend greatly
not only on what we read but on how we read; the interpretive process does
not end there; the critic, the historian, the sociologist, the theoretician write
about what they interpret, while the translator inscribes that very interpreta
tion. The search for strategic adjustments in conceptualization and handling
of lexico-semantic units impels the translator to embark fully on the discovery
and rewriting of new correlations that are being proposed against the forces
of the preceding codes (Corti 1976; Eco 1976). I would like to emphasize the
actual process of "re-shaping" language from text to discourse within the
framework of the forms of recognition of a homosocially arranged discourse
in the interpretative act. This refers to the interaction between reading and
writing, closely related to the development of what I denominate 'the suspi
cion of established discourse'.
A case in point is the 'aberrant' decoding of such homosocial discourse.
The translation of Virgil's Eclogues, especially of "Eclogue II", is such a
case of translation that has remained almost unnoticed in Spanish, or at least,
has been silenced. In this particular poem, the thematic center is the shepherd
Cory don's laments over his unrequited love for Alexis. This monologue, in
the translation by poet Juan del Enzina in the fifteenth century, is Christ
ianized, and the sorrow of Cory don is transformed into the intense shyness
of a poet-to-be ("que se transforma en timidez de poeta metido a panegirista
56 TRANSLATING POETIC DISCOURSE
novicio", Bayo 1959:27-28, 33-34). Thus, Alexis, the object of desire in Vir
gil's text, becomes the King Fernando el Catlico, and Corydon's deepest
feelings and emotions are directed toward serving the monarch.
The same Eclogue is translated in yet another aberrant way in 1829, by
Flix M. Hidalgo. His version undermines a significant factor, for which M.
Menndez Pelayo (a note Spanish scholar) praises him fifty years later in
the prologue to a 1879 edition. M. Menndez Pelayo stresses that Hidalgo's
translation may not always be the most faithful, since there are paraphrases
here and there, alterations, and suppression of some other elements, yet
one specific change, according to him, was inspired by reasons of moral
concern and finesse which dignify Hidalgo: Alexis, the shepherd, is substi
tuted by Galatea, the shepherdess for whom Corydon's love burns (M.
Menndez Pelayo 1879:xlvii):
Se abrasaba de amor por Galatea
El pastor Coridn: zagala hermosa
M. Menndez Pelayo's praise represents a significant way in which a
receptor culture imposes moral constraints. 10 Other translations which have
suffered such distortions and silences are the nineteenth century novelist
Juan Valera's version of Longus's Daphnis and Chloe and Carlos Riba's
anthology of the Greek poet K.P. Kavafis. In Hidalgo's translation, it is a
very specific choice that provokes a displacement from a homosocial to a
heterosocial world. This betrayal of the poet's codes is surely not unique in
the Spanish culture, and the Hispanic culture at large, where "moral" censor
ship still prevails a century after M. Menndez Pelayo's prologue. Texts by
men and women writers in the past remain to be studied from this perspective,
particularly in translations where substitutions have been imposed by
heterosocial conventions. In Hidalgo's version we witness the ideological
pressures by which heterosocial paradigms are inserted in a text and con
sequently produce an irruptive intervention into the textually-given homo-
socical world. Virgil's "Eclogue" has been manipulated by the presuppositions
of the translator as omniscient reader and acting writer in conjunction with
those of the receptor culture.
The next example is just a reminder that the heterosocial appropriations
of homosocial discourse are present not only in the act of translating, but
they can occur in the act of reading, even within the author's culture. There
are other kinds of ideological presuppositions that may lead the reader to
produce a deviant text. This example refers specifically to Adrienne Rich
TRANSLATING A WOMAN'S POETIC DISCOURSE 57
and a sample of the social life of her discourse as well as an instance of the
reception of part of her work in the United States, in which positive accep
tance does not necessarily coincide with the factual acceptance because
speaker and addressee rely on divergent norms and values (on this see van
Dijk 1977 who gives valuable suggestions).
In the New York Review of Books (May 1982), a few months after Rich
had published a recent volume of poetry, a woman placed the following
advertisement:
A WILD PATIENCE has taken me this far.
Literate female awaits hugs/epiphanies
with warm/cerebral male, 45-65. NYR,
Box 8515.
This short passage brings into focus an obvious misreading and most certainly
a deviant appropriation of Rich's discourse. The "literate female" as reader,
has made Rich's A Wild Patience Has Taken Me This Far (1981) her own,
treating the woman-identified/woman-addressed text-given world as an
extension of her own heterosocial reality. This variation of approach shows
that readers in general may propose different questions, and may construct
what are different types of texts. Rich's poetic texts impose constraints
through their textual clues, yet the readers concentrate on different codes
or conventions, hence change not only the structures and strategies but the
corresponding context of communication.
While it is true that in most cases Rich's poetry can be interpreted
according to her explicit codes, in others we can trace misreadings of her
message. A case in point is the female reader who chose to depend on the
rules and conventions of her culture and community, thus displacing the
codes in a direction not structured by Rich. It is pertinent to consider the
common pragmatic properties of The Dream of a Common Language and
A Wild Patience, together with the essay "Compulsory Heterosexuahty and
Lesbian Existence" (Rich 1980), an ensemble of texts which constitute a
female identified speech act addressed to female receptors. More particu
larly, the function of her speech act is a change of the reader who is part of
the social life of her discourse. If readers interpret her poetry in an aberrant
way, the speech act will ultimately fail its purpose and her literary communi
cation will fall into the norms of accepted cultural conventions. Rich is quite
clear on this issue: 'Two friends of mine, both artists, wrote me about reading
the Twenty-One Love Poems with their male lovers, assuring me how 'univer
sal' the poems were. I found myself angered, and when I asked myself why,
58 TRANSLATING POETIC DISCOURSE
of the poet's work; her shifts, purposes, are important factors the translator
cannot neglect. From text to author-function to discourse, the contextual
relationships in Rich's work reveal three stages in a chronological progres
sion. The establishment of these three stages, with subtle transitions, was
not done as a prescriptive operational mode, but simply as the result of
discoveries of a conjunction of several significant factors; it followed not an
external or an arbitrary set of rules, but paradigms were discovered in mul
tiple close readings and chronological tracings of all her poems, on at least
five levels besides the study of style and poetic language as such: (a) author-
function (b) dominant themes, particularly that of woman and language and
her relationship with the text-given world (c) the poetic argument toward a
feminist ideology that consistently denounces the role of the patriarchal word
and world as vehicle and major shaping agent of civilization, culture, and
social organization (as holder of power, and 'truth') which brings about specific
practice of textual strategies to oppose authoritative patriarchal discourse.
This is reinforced by the poet's constant reference to and exploration of
poetry itself within this project. The argument is carried out through the
displacement of connotations as a feminist textual strategy, (d) The intertex
tual factor in Rich's discourse makes manifest dominances of presence and
absence of patriarchal and women's alien texts on the one hand, and of the
disposition of polemic or congenial dialogue determining a given discourse,
e) Crucial decisions made by the translator-function (referred to in chapter
4): the speech situation in feminist and female identified and oriented poetic
discourse illustrates that in translating texts from the discourse in question,
ideologic motivations and aesthetic dominancies play a decisive role; these
five levels are relevant for feminist discourse, in which Rich's poetry
demonstrates a consistent pattern of variables.
Rich's poems explore the possibilities of an authentic expression of what
constitutes a woman's voice in a patriarchal world, and from this perspective
her relationship to language and society emerges. The poet's changing world
visions can be, for purposes of the present discussion, organized around four
dominant spectra: the first one consists of the point of view of the woman
growing up in a world that has been previously ordered and for which she
must be equipped to exist as a subordinated being; that is, she has "to take
the world as it was given" (cf. Daz-Diocaretz 1978a, 1978b). The woman
begins to perceive her individuality in a world in which her private experience
is defined by pre-established conventions and previously assigned definitions
about which there is little she can do (Rich 1951, 1955, 1963).
TRANSLATING A WOMAN'S POETIC DISCOURSE 61
Instances abound, yet I shall limit myself to two examples. The lines "the
silence burying unwanted children / women, deviants, witnesses in desert
sand" (Rich 1978:27), refers to the women who have been cast out from
'civilization' by an enforced set of norms exerted by the patriarchal world.
In Spanish the dictionary provides the following:
deviant a. desviado, descarriado, que no se adhiere a lo considerado normal
en un grupo o sociedad. s.persona cuya conducta difiere de lo establecido;
invertido, homosexual (Simon and Schuster 1973:185).
The four adjectives offered by the dictionary point to negative connotative
units, desviado and descarriado refer to the notion of outlaws, and invertido,
homosexual to sexual preference; therefore, any of such words used by the
translator would express negativity while in Rich this word is used to question
and challenge the conventional meaning. Descarriado also relates to the
semantic field 'madness', and desviado to 'degenerate'. A non-omniscient
reader who would select one of these lexical units would violate the poet's
textual strategies. A translator who wishes to write a more accurate meaning
and who wishes to put to practice the author-function spectrum would have
to consider the option marginadas, suggesting 'put on the border', or margi-
nated. "Deviant" is one of the recurrent adjectives Rich applies to women
in the twentieth century, as well as to women in the past, since it becomes
in her textual world a way of naming with an old word but with renewed
meaning those who have not followed the patriarchal constraints. "Heroines"
begins as follows: "Exceptional/'even deviant/ you draw your long skirts across
the nineteenth century" (Rich 1981:33). This illustrates the strategy of direct
use of a given word (e.g. 'lesbian', 'deviant'), yet it should be remembered
that the making of feminist discourse is actualized by the creation of contexts
where the multiplicity of possible semantic fields connected with allusions
to, definitions and assumptions about women and their relationships and
connections to one another, as well as to society and nature (Diaz-Diocaretz
1984a) interact.
As a counterforce to the authoritative and dominant discourse of patriar
chy, of the power of established literature as an institution handed down,
perpetuated, imposed to women, the feminist poet opposes the received
hierarchies through her poetic argument structuring her discourse with an
element of consistent self-referentiality to demonstrate how language,
because of its inherent transforming power, may fail to those who claim to
control it, and how it can serve, by virtue of this very power being reclaimed
polemically, to create new meanings. Thus, the metonymic relation of the
64 TRANSLATING POETIC DISCOURSE
Rich's implied readers and the actual readership are predominantly women,
as well as readers interested in women's 'culture' and in literature by women,
a fact which holds true for other feminist writers, to search out the true
nature of women's relationships, "both consummated and unconsummated"
(Bulkin 1977a:62). The poet and her readership will, ultimately, undergo
change in knowledge, with specific psycho-social consequences, as a starting
point to (re)examine those texts written by women that are still unknown,
or unimagined, and to sift through women's lives in their true meaning (trom
a woman-identified perspective) in order to discover their potential for
power. This silenced history is verbal and nonverbal, and it includes women
as heroines in history.
Rich and the feminist poet in general opposes the notion of woman
the female, feminine as a mere subordinate of shadow of man, and the
culturally assigned weakness and inferiority, the supposed flimsiness attrib
uted to women; in contrast, the poet sets forth the notion of woman as
center of inherent strength, as substance itself, as an empowered being inter
preting the world from the inner eye of woman. This textual world can be
explained as a synecdochical embodiment of language; for feminist writers
a woman's text is an integral part not a mere appendix of the general symbolic
text of human culture; strictly speaking, they assign specific properties to
their work.
It is most important to underline that Rich understands her texts as do
other poets in the same line, as part of feminist discourse (since 1971), a
speech act whose purpose is to develop a radical lesbian feminist approach
to culture, society, and identity. Poems such as "Women" (1968), "Trying
to Talk with a Man" (1971), "The Stranger" (1972), "Power" (1974), "Origins
and History of Consciousness" (1972-74) more particularly indicate this
request to the coming of consciousness and the purpose of creating a feminist
vision. This poetic stance is further developed on a theoretical basis in her
essay "Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence" (1980) which
can be understood as a private and political manifesto and a sort of exegesis
of her poetic work after 1974. Here she proposes the idea of the lesbian
continuum as a working concept and a strategic term to accomplish the nam
ing and description of a woman-identified experience outside the realm of
66 TRANSLATING POETIC DISCOURSE
patriarchal conceptions.
The specific question of the woman identified experience becomes
encoded in a new, liberating way moving from the previous feminist critique
of 're-vision' (Rich 1971) in the "act of looking back, of seeing with fresh
eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction," (Rich 1979b:35)
toward a world vision encompassing this continuum consisting of a polyphony
of women's voices in the past and present, fused in time, to explore the still
unnamed history and private stories "outside the law" of patriarchy and
conventions. Language is thus assumed to seek and to re-member the for
merly lost continuum; in fact the text becomes an integration of special
literary and aesthetic functions (Kramarae 1981; Rich 1981); yet language is
conceived as power, a power for women to embody texts. Feminist dis
course expands toward a possible discourse ad feminam (cf. Rich 1963:22).
The idea of text as power is exercised as the emancipatory act which takes
varying forms: it begins with conscious re-readings, and use of words in
feminist context, with enlarging the reservoir of received lexicon by coining
new words, by reclaiming words and connotations retroactively, especially
words "loaded with so much negativity" (Schwarz 1979; cf. Rich 1980:650).
On the basis of this substantial changing factor, writers (and especially
poets, since we are concentrating on poetic discourse) enact change in com
municative behaviour (see Kramarae 1981) in order to develop possibilities
of expression for women, outside the domain and value system of traditional
discourse. The usefulness of the operational definition of our term a
synecdochical embodiment of language is that it provides the explicit
account of a peculiar factor; lesbian texts can then be described as the verbal
constructs and expression of a woman-identified microcosm containing pri
vate/public, individual/collective portions of knowledge in which the T and
'we' as community of speakers is nearly always woman-identified. The writers
assume textually this identity from that location and re-orient the dialogues
and polemics which will concurrently indicate the movement of connotations
as described previously. Given these formulations, we can now state that in
traditional, non-feminist discourse these attitudes and semantic par
ticularities are absent. We might attempt to describe the difference and dis
tinctive properties of this discourse from Kramarae's introduction of the
muted group framework in communicative operations in which "the constant
attempts made to silence women mean that women, to be heard by men, try
to present themselves in speech forms recognizable and respected by men"
(1981:19). Note that Rich's first books A Change of World (1951), The
TRANSLATING A WOMAN'S POETIC DISCOURSE 67
Diamond Cutters and Other Poems (1955), and to a certain extent the poems
in Snapshots were produced within that framework of literary tradition and
values, as Rich has later confirmed. Independence from norms and values
for the speaker and addressee evolve later, and has its effects in the commu
nicative act and the poetic utterance itself.
and with language itself, since recognition of this first level may help distin
guish the parts of culture which are accepted, or else subject to correction
and modification.
The question raised by the rapport between the poet and the alien text
requires that we center our attention not only on language, but especially
on poetic structure. The purpose is to recognize how the author, as reader,
experiences textuality. Furthermore, this aspect projected to the frame of
semiotics of translating poetic language signals an operation of combined
mechanisms whose implications must be discussed.
Since the beginning of the recent development of the women's move
ment, critics have been exploring the representation of gender and female
sexuality in the arts. In poetry, a few studies have shown connections between
the uses of subject matter and sources (Carruthers 1979), mythological
themes and images (Ostriker 1982), psychological criticism (Gallop 1983),
fiction (Marks 1979), and a woman-generated writing. Attention on images
and themes, metaphors and myths will, no doubt, help to find the significance
of form and content; yet one must always refer to the question of structure,
the perception of poetry as a genre (Riffaterre 1978:115-163 gives pertinent
observations). The problem we face is a lack of a framework that would
analize feminist poetic discourse from this perspective, the literary norms to
which texts may be related and by virtue of which they become more mean
ingful and coherent. Intertextuality, in the terms that will be proposed in
this section, could contribute to answer the queries concerning the salient
features of what characterizes poems written, for example, from a feminist
orientation, and will help identify the components that are peculiar to a set
of texts that would comprise this category. It will enable us to approach
the constitutive conventions which relate this type of discourse to tradition,
or else deviate it from accepted modes and values.
The very concept of intertextuality poses some problems since its struc
turalist (Kristeva 1974) and post-structuralist development. It is not pertinent
here to discuss these problems, since previous studies can serve that purpose
(Communications 1968; Barthes 1970; Culler 1975, 1981; Potique 1976;
Rifatterre 1978). We shall focus only on the most suitable line of argument
for our purpose, related to poetry, namely, Kiril Taranovsky's notion of
subtext which can be further developed in our framework. His subtext is an
"already existing text (or texts) reflected in a new one". Four types are
distinguished (1976:18):
TRANSLATING A WOMAN'S POETIC DISCOURSE 69
(1) that which serves as a simple impulse for the creation of an image;
(2) zaimstvovanie po ritmu i zvucaniju (Borrowing of a rhythmic figure and
the sounds contained therein);
(3) the text which supports or reveals the poetic message of a later text;
(4) the text which is treated polemically by the poet.
The first two do not necessarily contribute to our better understanding of
a given poem. However, (2) may be combined with (3) and/or (4), and (3)
and (4) may, in turn, be blended.
A starting point is that for Taranovsky and some Soviet formalists the
subtext is "the source of the repeated element not the element itself"
(Rusinko 1979:20). In our analysis we will consider the definitions of these
four types, however, we shall not primarily identify 'sources' but the voice
of another as it becomes present in the poet's text. Therefore, the alien text
represents as a sign of an entire message or of part of it what is not
peculiar to the text itself.
We understand that the study of intertextuality provides a method for
discovering patterns in meaning for poetic texts; it may be useful to trace
correlations of opposed values. It not only consists of seeking the oppo
sitions, or how the writer makes use of the alien text, but it may serve to see
those relations the texts seem to accept or absorb. Focus on the presence of
the alien text is possible even taking into account a single word or lexical
unit that might signal an absorption or a transgression of a preexistent text,
and by implication, of a given discourse.18
A chronological reading of intertextual crossings in Rich's poetry as
strategy, confirms the three distinct aesthetic and ideological stages I have
outlined relying on my knowledge of her author-function (thematic units,
production and circulation) and the shifting of connotations. In Rich's par
ticular case (and the same is true for other feminist poets, see Daz-Diocaretz
1984a), identifying sources, concealing or revealing to the reader the alien
text's origin, is not the central interest, since at times the native context of
certain texts are provided in notes, or directly suggested in the poems. In
other instances, the alien inscribed voice is so fully integrated that the reader
of the poem can hardly realize it is not the poet's own. The latter is a complex
area of interpretation because the nature of its function is based on conven
tions which remain unexpressed since they are generally not explicit. What
seems to be clear is that the text may require a rather specialized knowledge
of particular codes and formal features, and the reader may be unaware of
them.
To read Adrienne Rich's work written after 1955 is to participate in the
70 TRANSLATING POETIC DISCOURSE
placent sur des plans diffrents, des distances diffrentes, par rapport au
plan des mots de l'auteur.
Non seulement le discours indirect libre, mais les diffrentes formes du
discourse tranger cach, demi-cach, dispers, etc. (in Todorov 1981:115).
Within this framework we shall analyze Rich's intertextual process in a syn
chronic way.
As it was described in the previous section, Rich's work from 1951 to
about 1955 (A Change of World and The Diamond Cutters) reveals a not
unexpected implicit integration of the poets that dominated the literary scene
and the readings of her formative years. These were the echoes promptly
identified by her critics. For Auden, their family tree is "confessedly related
to the poetry of Robert Frost" or to the poetry of Yeats (1951 in Gelpi and
Gelpi 1975:126). Randall Jarrell speaks of the influence of Rudyard Kipling
and Frost in The Diamond Cutters (1956 in Gelpi and Gelpi 1975:128). Robert
Boyers remarks that "The poetic echoes refresh the context by reminding
us of comparably moving treatments of similar themes" (1973 in Gelpi and
Gelpi 1975: 151); for Boyers it is a "poetry that can afford" those echoes be
it of Shakespeare, T.S. Eliot, John Donne. Helen Vendler also celebrates
those features (1973 in Gelpi and Gelpi 1975). The critics' perception of
Rich's 'models' in her first two books can be interpreted in the light of the
poet's acceptance of poetic conventions (mot bivocal convergent), of the
notion of a poem as a pre-determined structure in which images and feelings
and the intellect were put in a lucid frame of poetic craft, because the final
achievement was "formal order" (Rich 1964 in Gelpi and Gelpi 1975:89).
Rich welcomed in those structures the cadence of the iambic pentameter,
and through this she ventured occasionally for a freer verse, yet without
abandoning or wanting to separate her voice from the tradition upon which
the poems were grounded at that time. The subsequent change her poetry
experiences provides a meaningful function to those first echoes, especially
when the poems are put in retrospective. The external contexts the poet
assimilates are more than 'ornaments', because the relation of the alien text
and the ways these are integrated furnish further clues and reveal the tran
sitions and the changes forming the inner cycles in her work.
The reader will recognize in A Change of World and The Diamond
Cutters intertextual crossings "that serve as a simple impulse for the creation
of an image", and also of the "borrowing of a rhythmic figure" (Taranovsky
1976:18). Poems such as "Autumn Equinox" (1975:23) in connection with
Yeats's "Sailing to Byzantium" (Yeats 1962:95) are a good example. The
TRANSLATING A WOMAN'S POETIC DISCOURSE 73
poems are developed toward other texts and also from them, so that the
poet's encounter with tradition, her exploration of its roots goes back and
forth, yet never actually leaving the intertextual traditional paths. In The
Diamond Cutters, "Lucifer in the Train" refers back to Milton's Satan, and
"Living in Sin" to Eliot's "The Waste Land" (part II), and "The Diamond
Cutters", the title poem, with Stevens's "Imago", through the image of the
"fortunate stone". Above all, rather than inserted, the alien texts appear
totally fused in the poems, and there is no clear division for the reader to
detect the presence of other texts. The alien word still has not surfaced as
such, as an actual presence in her discourse, and it exists only in as far as
her readers can identify certain themes, a rhythmic unit, an image. Those
texts and the poet's own work are essentially providing a source of inspiration
of new meaning that contributes to an expansion of the poet's inherited
tradition. The borrowings of this first period are evidence that the poet is
shaping her own poetic model of the world, drawing her material from the
foundations of a literature she considers "universal". Reflecting on this early
period Rich comments in 1971:
Looking back at poems I wrote before I was 21, I'm startled because beneath
the conscious craft are glimpses of the split I even then experienced between
the girl who wrote poems, and defined herself in writing poems, and the
girl who was to define herself by her relationships with men (Rich 1979b:40).
In this early period there are no specific direct allusions or quotations from
other texts. This is quite significant, for her use of the alien text to reinforce
a textual strategy demonstrates her awareness of the textual possibilities it
offers, as well as the possibility of distance (irony and parody).
A fine example on the process of intertextual crossings is the poem
"Snapshots of a Daughter-in-law", written between 1958-1960 and published
in 1963, which makes the alien texts an integral constituent thus initiating
the strategy of using texts to create a congenial or a polemic dialogue with
other voices. "Snapshots" provides a key to understanding her subsequent
strategies (mot bivocal divergent) that resound as a double voiced word: her
own and that of the alien text. In the next fifteen years Rich's poetry will
intentionally have a constant countervoice of patriarchy.
The alien text in "Snapshots", written in ten sections, is conspicuous
through the margins of quotation marks, or by use of italics indicating their
foreigness, each text serving as an image and metonymic device through
which a former text in its totality is alluded to. This strategy has considerable
significance; the whole structure of the poems will reinforce this effect by
74 TRANSLATING POETIC DISCOURSE
making the reader aware of the intertextual factor. In the more general
ensemble of other components, this strategy stands in relation to all others
to compose feminist discourse. Given the split mentioned above, the accusa
tory tone is textually manifested in Rich's method of poetic pattern in the
resulting interplay of texts from the past. The reader will notice no random
or undirected distributional references, and will be led to make the connection
to the world of patriarchy as an antagonistic force. The position of the alien
text will play a role in the reaffirmation of female identity and the female
self from the emergence of "Snapshots" up to The Dream of a Common
Language. This is particularly distinctive since before Snapshots the poet
followed the persuasive force of the patriarchal word with the received ideas
and images without further distance or objectivation; meaning was, then,
ideologically grounded in agreement between the poet and those values and
norms.
This attempt runs parallel to the quest for a viable integration, for
although Rich had read a good number of women poets (Sappho, Ann
Bradstreet, Christina Rosetti, Emily Dickinson, Elinor Wylie, Edna St. Vin
cent Millay, H.D., Marianne Moore), they had inspired no special claim.
Rich herself explains that "even in reading these women I was looking in
them for the same things I had found in the poetry of men, because I wanted
women poets to be equals for men, and to be equal was still confused with
sounding the same" (1971 in Rich 1979b:39). It is important to stress that
Snapshots prologues a new trajectory. Rich begins not only to include alien
texts and provide clues to the reader, but also to reverse meanings and make
it evident that the world which was supposedly believed to be universal, is
far from being so.
A particular strategy Rich introduces in "Snapshots" is subsequently
adopted by feminist writers (e.g. Susan Griffin 1978; Mary Daly 1978; Moers
1978). It consists of the use of a lexico-semantic inclusion of a phrase or unit
from a literary, philosophical, political, rhetorical text to which the poet
inscribes a change in the gender explicit in that alien text. A pertinent example
is Baudelaire's line "mon semblable, mon frre!" which is subverted to "ma
semblable, ma soeur!"; irony, parody and dialogization become apparent.
The poet not only creates a diachronic relation between a voice in the past
and her own, but also proposes a reversal of values in order to create an
internal polemic with the alien text. This specific reformulation of literary
tradition, norms, and values is an essential characteristic to describe the
feminist intertextual factor: there is a sub/version of form and content.
TRANSLATING A WOMAN'S POETIC DISCOURSE 75
The reader will find that Rich's dialogic relation with preexistent texts
confers the networks for a mosaic of literary references and inferences whose
centre of coherence is the speaker's voice. The contrast is clear in "Snap
shots", where several indicators ('shifters') are introduced to signal the use
of explicit intertextual bonds. Now the texts are no longer a dialogue within
tradition nor is this tradition freely incorporated in the poems. The alien text
is made to stand in its intratextual difference for the reader's possible interpre
tation in this new context.
It is important, at this point, to explain the range of markers used by
Rich: direct allusions, references, or quotations, information in the form of
notes giving the source; also, rapport by anthroponymy or toponymy. The
functions of theses texts are basically (1) to illustrate, support or reinforce
the speaker's poetic argument (e.g. the inclusion of E. Dickinson's and Mary
Wollstonecraft's voices), and (2) to establish a polemic with the alien text
(e.g. with Baudelaire, Horace, Thomas Campion, Diderot, Samuel Johnson,
Shakespeare).
Traditional practices are deviated and set in a contemporary context for
the effects of parody and contrasts, and irony, in a hyperbolic frame, as in
section 5 of "Snapshots":
Dulce ridens, dulce loquens
she shaves her legs until they gleam
like petrified mammoth-tusk.
By placing a quotation in the first line of the section, Rich establishes an
argumentative moment with her own images and her twentieth century voice
to oppose that of Horace, through his line from Ode XIX, "Integer vitae",
II, 23-24 (for the source I rely on Gelpi and Gelpi 1975:13,n.3). The contrast
is not simply between what is, according to established conventions, supposed
to be poetic (Cicero's line) and what is defined as non-poetic (Rich's next
two lines), but it is also included there to show how women exist cir
cumscribed by patriarchal suppositions. The ordinary scene of the woman
falsifying her nature, trying to please and look the way she is expected to is
a contemporary image that emerges as anti-poetic especially because of the
neighboring voice of Horace. The unifying effect of this brief section is an
ironic criticism from the poet to the belief that women are essentially "sweet".
The argument is further developed in the next lines, section 6 of the
same poem:
When to her lute Corinna sings
neither words nor music are her own;
76 TRANSLATING POETIC DISCOURSE
(f) the borrowing of a rhythmic figure that grounds the text in the poetic
tradition.
In numberous instances, the alien texts change their function from non-
aesthetic to aesthetic, as in the social text la va del tren subterrneo les
peligrosa, taken from the New York subway (Rich 1975:202) or "Angel loves
Rosita" (Rich 1975:126), or even Cortot's brief commentary for a musical
piece by Chopin that becomes an important detail to set the atmosphere in
the opening of "Snapshots". All these examples point to the simple fact that
as an encoder of her poetic messages, Rich directs attention to her addressee's
possible reactions. The reader must recognize the expressive device that may
alter the content; it is a strategy to create a new perception of the included
text and to de-familiarize the reader with the already-read. 21 Rich's shifters
function as recognition strategy to identify the clues, as part of the project
to handle expression into de-privileging the patriarchal word. 22
I have attempted to characterize the various levels of the alien text
particularly the one originating from patriarchy and have tried to show how
it was brought into contact with Rich's poetic arguments. The changes con
cerning the function of the alien text correspond to the semantic development
in her poetic world. However, one must distinguish yet another intertextual
crossing that will make Rich's own textual world intelligible. If in The Dream
of a Common Language the woman-identified world begins to take shape in
a language that allows its existence, in A Wild Patience Has Taken Me This
Far the use of the alien text reveals a double voiced world of women; such
discourse places the action of women as dominant intertextual poetic net
works. The alien text is implicitly recognized by Rich (1981:60-61) in her
"Notes". They consist of references to diaries, letters, epigraphs, speeches,
messages, phrases, fragments from feminist articles, pamphlets, essays, and
monographs (literary, historical, sociological).
The poem "Turning the Wheel" is described as follows: "The letter is
a poetic fiction, based on a reading of Virginia Grattan, Mary Colter, Builder
Upon the Red Earth (Flagstaff, Ariz.: Northland Press, 1980)" (Rich
1981:61).
The range of these cultural and historical references takes many forms.
Another text purposely indicated in Rich's notes to the same book is about
the epigraph for the poem "For Julia in Nebraska": "Quoted from the Willa
Cather Educational Foundation, Historical Landmark Council, marker at
the intersection of Highways 281 and 4, fourteen miles north of Red Cloud,
Nebraska" (p. 60). This epigraph is a social text which serves as an 'impulse'
78 TRANSLATING POETIC DISCOURSE
for the creation not simply of an image, but of the poem itself. On the
thematic level, the poem suggests what the marker does not say about Willa
Cather. The actual social text is reproduced as epigraph; here Rich also
develops a polemic with the statements that are supposedly universal:
Here on the divide between the Republican and the Little Blue lived some
of the most courageous people of the frontier. Their fortunes and their loves
live again in the writings of Willa Cather, daughter of the plains and interpre
ter of man's growth in these fields and in the valleys beyond.
in the perception and elucidation of the ST and in the construction of the RT.
The intertextual feminist factor is not only important for the translator
as omniscient reader but it determines the characteristics of the poet's use
of verbal language and the strategies pertinent for the translator as acting
writer. Consideration of the poet and the alien text in intertextual correlations
has a double function because the translator, while reading Rich's poetry is
able to delineate in which ways the poet herself is a reader of other texts, the
presence of this act of reading becomes a reference on which to rely for the
structuring of the poems. Thus, the translator-function reads a given literary
work in the double dimension in which a register of resonances of other
authors, voices, messages underlie the poetic discourse being translated.
Likewise, the design of the source-text with its intertextual components
provides the translator with horizons of prospective underlying structures in
the receptor-text. These intertextual structures are to be distinguished from
the obligatory and optional components on the level of the linguistic codes.
For the intertextual factor, the aesthetic function dominates, as well as the
expressive movements of the discourse in relation to the poet's perception
of her social and cultural world, and the conventions followed harmoniously,
and those with which she polemizes.
The translator needs to distinguish between the dominant devices and
to understand the external contexts whose relevance cannot be denied or
ignored; to read through Rich's own 'readings' and recognize her particular
networks of alien texts prove quite fruitful if the interest is to produce and
convey equivalent networks of meanings, and in order to create an equally
firm discoursive basis on which to ground the text in question. The attempt
to produce the same change of codes in the translation or to produce parallel
shifts of the intertextual factor can be seen in the more functional and rela
tional framework intended to produce an equivalent response for the inter
pretative operation in the RT. For this it is necessary to adduce the poet's
contexts by reading each poem as a specific temporal act poetically structured
at a specific time in history (cf. Culler 1975) to understand the textual strat
egies which the poet uses directly or obliquely by recreating or refuting
models. This procedure would be useful if incorporated within the interpre
tation of the poem. Finally, the function of intertextuality can be exercised
by the translator within the constraints of expected coherence so as not to
dismantle the general aesthetic argument of congenial or polemic dialogue
within the poet's discourse.
TRANSLATING A WOMAN'S POETIC DISCOURSE 81
NOTES
10) Moral constraints are not restricted to the Hispanic culture alone. Marguerite Yourcenar's
novella Alexis, published in 1929, deals with the subject of homosexuality. Yourcenar wrote a
Preface thirty-four years later stating how much the book was still applicable:" /.../ Alexis's
intimate problem is hardly less anguishing or secret today than it was formerly /.../ the drama of
Alexis and Monique /.../ doubtless will go on being lived out so long as the world of sexual realities
remains shackled with prohibitions, perhaps the most dangerous of which are those of language"
(quoted in Fisher 1984).
11) "Displacement of connotations" is used here to indicate the act of displacing an emotional
connotation as a result of an ideological operation performed by code-switching (Eco's term
1976:288-289). Code-switching, however, has been left aside in order to avoid confusion with its
application in Linguistics, for example, by Labov (1972:188-189) as "dialect mixture" or an alter
nation of variants that "are said to belong to different systems /.../ and in which the speaker
moves from one consistent set of co-occurring rules to another."
12) In this sense one can also apply Dolezel's (1969:14-17) typology on the three types of
writers and their relationship to context: context-free, context-bound, and context-sensitive writ
ers; they vary thus from the most to the least innovative and original.
13) Rich's crucial notion was proposed as follows: "Re-vision the act of looking back, of
seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction is for women more
than a chapter in cultural history: it is an act of survival. /.../ A radical critique of literature,
feminist in its impulse, would take the work first of all as a clue to how we live, how we have
been living, how we have been led to imagine ourselves, how our language has trapped as well
as liberated us, how the very act of naming has been till now a male prerogative, and how we
can begin to see and name and therefore live afresh (1979b:35). For a discussion of the
programmatic implications in feminist discourse originating from Rich's definition, see Diaz-
Diocaretz 1984a).
14) Many of Rich's poems appeared, among others, in Chrysalis, Amazon Quarterly, Field,
Heresies, The Little Magazine, Moving Out, New Boston Review, 13th Moon, Conditions, Iowa
Review, Maenad, Sunbury, Massachusetts Review, indeed a wide variety of literary journals. Her
work has been translated into Dutch, French, German, Italian, Japanese, and Spanish; quite
interestingly, in each one of the implied cultures, Rich has been attributed a different image
within the feminist spectrum; this image depends greatly on the work that is translated and the
modes of circulation. For example, while in Japan Adrienne Rich was introduced as a feminist
poet, in the Netherlands Dutch readers know, up to 1984, only her lesbian texts Twenty-One
Love Poems, and the essay "Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence" (Rich 1980),
besides Of Woman Born; therefore she exists only as a lesbian writer; in 1985 a translation of
selected poems from 1951 will give the Dutch readership a more comprehensive perspective; in
Spain, also up to 1984, her prose books are known (Rich 1976, 1979) yet no poem has been
available in translation; in 1985 the first anthology will appear (Diaz-Diocaretz 1985b). An
interesting aspect of Rich's author-function to be studied in the future is the 'social life' of her
discourse in other cultures.
15) In "Compulsory Heterosexuality" Rich (1980:650) writes: "As the term 'lesbian' has been
held to limiting, clinical associations in its patriarchal definition, female friendship and com
radeship have been set apart from the erotic, thus limiting the erotic itself. But as we deepen and
broaden the range of what we define as lesbian existence, as we delineate a lesbian continuum,
we begin to discover the erotic in female terms: as that which is unconfined to any single part of
the body or solely to the body itself, as an energy not only diffuse but /.../ omnipresent /.../ and
in the sharing of work."
TRANSLATING A WOMAN'S POETIC DISCOURSE 83
16) The word 'ideation' is taken from Iser's definition (1078:137): "the nearest English equiv
alent to the German vorstellen, which means to evoke the presence of something which is not
given." Iser distinguishes between "perception and ideation as two different means of access to
the world: perception requires the actual presence of the object, whereas ideation depends upon
its absence or nonexistence."
17) Julia Kristeva (1974) who introduced the term intertextualit, writes that it is the transpos
ition of one or more systems of signs into another, accompanied by a new articulation of the
enunciative and denotative position (see also Kristeva 1980:5). Kristeva (1969) explains it as the
phenomenon in which every text takes the mosaic of citations, and every text is the absorption
and transformation of other texts; the notion of intertextuality comes to take the place of inter-
subjectivity. Roland Barthes (1979:77) believes that "Every text, being itself the intertext of
another text, belongs to the intertextual, which must not be confused with a text's origins: to
search for the 'sources of' and the 'influence upon' a work to satisfy the myth of filiation." Since
Kristeva's introduction this term has been re-defined from different perspectives. For seminal
discussions in intertextuality see Esprit: Lecture I, L'Espace du Texte (1974:774-833) and Potique:
Intertextualits (1976). Other critics are in favour of the notions of allusion, citation (cf. Rabinowitz
1980:241-242). Jonathan Culler (1981:139-140) calls it vraisemblance; Robert Rogers (1982:31-46)
prefers the term "intertextual crossings"; Grard Genette (1979) proposes "transtextuality",
"metatextuality", "paratextuality", and "archtextuality". For a more detailed discussion of inter
textuality in feminist discourse I refer the reader to Diaz-Diocaretz (1984a:32-38). For additional
discussions see Culler (1976); Ben-Porat (1976) and the special issue on 'le vraisemblable' in
Communications (1968); Bennani (1981) links translating and intertextuality.
18) I believe that intertextuality can be linked to Bakhtin's idea (1973:411 passim) of the
dialogy of poetic language. By dialogical discourse the Russian theoretician means a verbal pro
cess; a word, discourse, language or culture undergoes "dialogization" when it becomes
relativized, de-privileged, aware of competing definitions for the same thing. Un-dialogized
language is authoritative or absolute. This is the central concept for Bakhtin in his study on
Dostoievsky (see also Mukaovsky 1973).
19) The intertextual factor in poets writing after 1960 shows that within the spectrum of
"feminist" writing there are substantial differences among poets such as Anne Sexton, Diane
Wakoski, Susan Griffin, Judy Grahn, June Jordan, Audre Lorde.
20) cf. "polmique cache ou ouverte", Todorov (1981:107-114).
21) I use "de-familiarize' in the sense attributed to this term by Shlovsky (1965), Erlich (1954),
Eco (1976).
22) A significant example in Rich's prose is the main title of her Of Woman Born: Motherhood
as Experience and Institution that sets an open polemics with Shakespeare's "Macbeth", where
the witches' prophecy that "none of woman born/Shall harm Macbeth" dominates in Acts IV and
V until the dnouement.
IV. The Speech Situation in Female Identified Discourse
The masks of a gender identity, of the lyric speaking voice present dif
ficulties to interpret the poem referentially; the reader cannot rely on previ
ous inferencing operations. When a woman poet in the Spanish language
chooses to follow the norms of the dominant tradition, therefore to work
within the domain of 'male'discourse, and decides on the male speaking
subject as a textual strategy, this feature surfaces through the units related
to the speaker and the semantic field surrounding the persona, because of
88 TRANSLATING POETIC DISCOURSE
the specificity required for gender: the reader interprets the poem by recog
nizing the gender references. This striking feature functions in Portuguese
and in French as well.1 The best way to illustrate this point is with a poem
by Marguerite Yourcenar; when the speaking voice is male, the gender mar
kers act as shifters:
Je suis plus vendu qu'un esclave,
Et plus qu'un pauvre, abandonn,
Je suis l'eau cleste qui lave
Le sang que pour vous j'ai donn.
from Quia Hirtolamus Esset (1982:90)
Yourcenar can choose yet another literary code, now as a female speaker:
Je suis pareille la servante de la ferme;
Le long de la douleur je m'avance d'un pas ferme;
Le seau du ct gauche est plein de sang;
from "Le pome du joug" (1982:48)
I am similar to the maid at the farm;
As pain runs along with firm step I advance;
The bucket on the left side is filled with blood;
(my translation)
Or (like Sor Juana), she can purposely structure an ambiguity of both speaker
and addressee, by creating the expressive opposition le or la (masculine and
feminine article respectively) that corresponds to the semantic opposition
male/female:
Toi le frlon et moi la rose;
Toi l'cume et moi le rocher;
Dans l'trange mtamorphose,
Toi la Phnix, moi le bcher.
stylistic and technical device. The speaking voice, the T is verbally concerned
to speak, to activate the relationship between sexuality and textuality, a
strategy facilitated by the basic structure of the French language. Such a
poem can be equally structured in Spanish, with an equivalent set of oppos
itions, without considerable semantic variation, since this morphology is a
common denominator of Romance languages in general. The situation is
altered in the English linguistic code (as in other non-Romance languages);
the question of a poet's use of persona and of the specificity as strategic clues
for the reader becomes more diffuse, hence our expectations may be altered
because the effects of deictics and shifters vary (Culler 1975:165). Personal
pronouns belong to a complex category where code and message may overlap
each other; furthermore, the amount of information needed or emerging as
redundant varies because "languages differ essentially by what they must
express, and not by what they might express" (Jakobson 1963:84). Within
this frame we shall discuss some aspects of person deixis and gender markers
in their structuring function for the speaker and addressee relation in poetic
verbal sequences produced by a woman poet.
the text substantially. Even with a more literal translation like los que
habitamos 'those who live', I would have to consider the speaker's gender
and the co-referents. This is but one of the numerous instances in which the
pronoun in English with its absence of gender in the syntactic form
must be made specific, disambiguated, in Spanish; furthermore, the required
concord in Spanish involves, at times, several other elements in the sentence.
This virtual nature of Spanish does not allow bringing specific examples of
pronouns and adjectives into our discussion, since they cannot be separated
from other morphological agreements. The very transition into Spanish trig
gers the need for different types of syntactic concordance.
Since most of the poems in A Change of World are written from a similar,
objectified perspective, and the same is true for the Diamond Cutters, the
corresponding form used for 'we' is the masculine plural. In the poem "The
Middle-Aged" 'Los de edad madura', the same semantic relation is per
formed to deduce gender in the only adjective in Spanish in which the oblig
atory choice refers either to masculine or feminine persona (emphasis mine) :
Signs of possession and of being possessed,
We tasted, tense with envy.
Signos de posesin y de ser posedos
Que sentamos, tensos de envidia.
The decision to use the masculine plural form, even though it supports the
'patriarchal' structures of language use, will allow the Hispanic reader to
discover the contrasts in Rich's work from this traditional 'we' to the sub
sequent stages of the 'we' in the feminine plural defining semantically her
lesbian discourse. This is a choice that belongs to the translator alone, for
one may recode the texts all in traditional form, or apply the inferences from
A Dream and A Wild Patience restrospectively and anachronistically,
and consequently suppose and impose additional feminist codes upon earlier
texts where they did not exist.
The split between poet and persona is not only in the practice of the
objectified 'she', 'he', 'they' and 'we', but also in texts where the poet uses
the persona of a man. "The Loser" (Rich 1963) is presented through a first
person singular speaker, a man who "thinks of the woman he once loved;
first after her wedding, and then nearly a decade later", as the epigraph
explains (Rich 1975:45). In another poem, "Orion", from Leaflets (1969),
the speaker, also an T', but now a woman, is talking to the "fierce half-
brother", therefore the adjectives and pronouns referred to the addressee,
96 TRANSLATING POETIC DISCOURSE
which now she sees from a woman's perspective. Her direct critique now is
against the "oppressor's language" as she had written in "The Burning of
Paper Instead of Children" (1968) and in "Our Whole Life" (1969).
Diving into the Wreck (1973) can be considered a book of transition
from feminist to lesbian discourse. While the texts are invariably woman-
identified, the addressees include the previously used undetermined 'you';
the male companion of "Trying to Talk with a Man" (1973:3-4) also appears
in "Waking in the Dark" (pp.7-10); the poem "When We Dead Awaken"
(pp.5-6) containing the dual feminine 'we', also "The Mirror in Which Two
Are Seen as One" (pp. 14-16), "Translations" (pp.40-41), as well as "Rape"
(pp.44-45) are addressed to a woman; "Incipience" (pp. 11-12) and
"Dialogue" (p.21) express a feminine 'we' of solidarity; in "Burning Oneself
In" (p.46) the same woman-oriented solidarity exists with the additional
opposition of "they" that is clearly masculine plural (see also "For a Sister",
p.48):
Pieces of information, like this one
blow onto the heap
They keep it fed, whether we will it or not,
another summer, and another
of suffering quietly
in bookstores, in the parks
however we may scream we are
suffering quietly
We have previously recognized that the trajectory of the poetic T in
the speech situation of Rich's poetry reveals that the speaker traverses several
identities that vary from the undefined addresser to the female identified
speaker. 7 Within this framework, "The Stranger" in Diving into the Wreck
(1973:19) posits an interesting and complex translation problem connected
with the thematic constituents, since it is structured on the idea of androgyne.
The concept of the androgyne makes any gender classification inadequate
and thus raises complexities in the making of meaning. Yet the difficulty lies
not only on the term itself, but on the title of the poem. The speaker in this
text designates a "synecdochical voice for both male and female" (Stimpson
1980:178), and brings into play a new set of expectations, since it stands at
the threshold between patriarchal and feminist discourses. This is a strong
point and a strong confirmation that the ambiguity can be kept in English,
and in contrast the possibilities Spanish offers must be recognized as inaccu
rate. "The Stranger" may become: el extrao, la extraa, el extranjero ('the
THE SPEECH SITUATION IN FEMALE IDENTIFIED DISCOURSE 99
and of the poet's strategies in the communicative act. This decision acquires
coherence in association with the choice of the masculine form equivalent
to 'we' as discussed earlier. "Diamantistas" 'The Diamond Cutters' is a case
in point, in which the first line of the last three stanzas begin with an impera
tive followed by an adjective. I limit myself to including the initial phrase in
each case:
Be serious/.../ S formal/.../
Be hard of heart/.../ S distante/.../
Be proud/.../ S orgulloso/.../
Formal and distante do not require the syntactic agreement because they
have the same form for both masculine and feminine; orgulloso, is here used
with its masculine word ending .-o, the choice of gender being obligatory;
moreover, the second person singular was chosen in the imperative, for the
intended close rapport with the reader referred to above (the option of the
plural is equally valid but establishes a distance). Similar decisions were
taken in other cases, such as the poems "The Blue Ghazals" and "Pierrot Le
Fou" from The Will to Change (1973) in which the speaker is a woman and
the addressee an undefined 'you' (tu).
Essentially, in the first books (Rich 1951,1955,1963), the addressee is
mostly unspecified. In her textual strategies, Rich prefers a sort of imperson
ality and detachment between the 'we' and the 'you'. This non-specificity and
its function cannot be taken for granted; whenever the impersonal unknown,
or generic addressee apears, the Spanish equivalent consistently selected is
the masculine plural, as in "The Diamond Cutters" and "Ghost of a Chance".
Both poems assert their context with the generic form (e.g. "you intelligence/
so late dredged up from dark" (1975:32), "you see a man/trying to think."
(p.64)). However, in later texts like "The Blue Ghazals", "Trying to Talk
with a Man", and "The Phenomenology of Anger" the addressee is more
clearly the oppressor, the male world, man in patriarchy. Those poems give
shape to Rich's feminist poetic discourse, and therefore a reference must be
constructed; definitely the t leaves no ground, its connection is the male
world. The discoursive situation in the feminist texts clearly identify the
addressee with the otherness of the patriarchal world.
There is yet another step female-identified and addressed instance,
the 'female each other' of lesbian discoursewhich as I suggested previously
(Diaz-Diocaretz 1984a) begins with the poem "From an Old House in
America" (1974), whose last line is: "Any woman's death diminishes me."
THE SPEECH SITUATION IN FEMALE IDENTIFIED DISCOURSE 101
women have been confined to write within patriarchal conventions, and have
normally adopted the male persona in all its complexities. In contrast, male
poets in general tend to follow their own self-expression; the poets who have
gone beyond their gender/culture oriented persona are exceptional. In the
near past one can mention Walt Whitman in America, and the Andalusian
Federico Garca Lorca. Only when it is a convention within a genre, as in
mystical poetry, has the male poet adopted the female speaking-subject
perspective, such as San Juan de la Cruz (1542-1591). The arguments on this
exceed the limits set for this study but deserve closer attention.
The theoretical orientation proposed proves useful in Rich's poetry
whose properties make it possible to grasp the degrees of self-awareness in
texts by other poets, and the inferencing act which ultimately defines the
choice of specific gender markers in Spanish. My basic schema is as follows:
in a 'traditional' text the lyric T is not necessarily and not often female-iden
tified and often gives expression to the voice of a persona. If it is explicitly
a woman-speaker, the semantic level tends to follow the prevailing cultural
order; 'we' and 'you' unless explicit, are generic or unspecified when seman-
tically used in the plural (when 'we' is not dual and 'you' not singular). In
this type of discourse my option for the Spanish equivalent is the generic
nosotros (masculine) and the addressee ('you') is the masculine plural or
singular. When I say 'we' or 'you' it is to be understood as a metonymic
device, that is, representing the appropriate and relevant series of units that
must be put in concordance within the text. The 'traditional' text, quite
evidently, constitutes the largest category and is the most frequently used
model; it should, therefore, be studied separately. One of the major difficul
ties encountered is to decide on an appropriate equivalent for the speaker
T produced by a woman poet who does not provide other reliable gender
clues, thus leaving her texts open for extratextual speculations, and as such,
moreover, the linguistic choices are left to the interpreter.
One might still consider another question: how to determine when the
poet is conceiving a lyric T' with a voice in the masculine. The fact that a
poem was written by a woman cannot always account automatically for the
woman's voice in the text; the references in Sor Juana Ins de la Cruz, and
Marguerite Yourcenar are illustrative examples of explicitness but in English
these become problematic.
There are reasonable grounds to consider that in a feminist text the
speaking T' refers to a female self; 'we' may be either the dual male/female
or the plural inclusive of both genders, or even inclusive only of female
108 TRANSLATING POETIC DISCOURSE
The three adjectives stressed here suffice to indicate in Spanish that the text
is female identified, just following the internal structure of the poem itself
which provides the major context.
Pursuing those manifest characteristics of the nature of the text, it seems
preferable not to denominate a poet 'feminist' or 'lesbian'; their ideological
stand and/or sexual preferences in real life are to be distinguished from their
poetic discourse. The fact that a feminist poet identifies herself as such is
part of her author-function, but textual strategies may lead to other abductive
inferences. Conversely, a poet such as Diane Wakoski, who in her author-
function activity does not include herself in the sector of feminist text produc
ers, shows a considerable number of texts that indeed are part of 'feminist'
discourse (as opposed to 'traditional' texts) thematically in her recurrent
polemic with the male lover as addressee and her self-assertion as a woman
subordinated to his world (see especially The Motorcycle Betrayal Poems,
1971; Waiting for the King of Spain, 1977, and The Man Who Shook Hands
1978). The ambivalence in Wakoski's poetry originates in her awareness of
dependence on the male-dominated relationship but it is this very cognizance
that maintains her consistent polemic. This involves the distinction to be
made between what the poet says and the type of texts she produces.
At this point, I mean to stress that in the act of interpretation it is
necessary to identify the strategies or any specific textual property used as
device to produce an expressive effect. Provisional as it may be, the outline
of deictic clues is meant as a working framework to trace relevant features of
internal differentiation in the speech situation within poetic discourse by
women. There appears to be a predominant pattern (of inclusive, not exclu
sive factors) which in cases of indeterminacy provides a guideline to build
the referential components in a given text. Discussions are open in this seman
tic actualization of textual strategies, because the problems are numerous.
The constitution of the lyric T' in women's discourse needs to be studied
more extensively in order to reach a more complete understanding of the
lyric T' in general, since the causes that induce a woman poet to include an
indefinite or non determinate speaking T' originate in the different spatial,
temporal and personal frameworks, even though they may respond to the
same historical and cultural conventions, norms and values to which male
poets respond.
These operations and complexities are not restricted to the domain of
poetic discourse alone, but to women's writing in general. I shall give a few
representative examples from contemporary American writers.
no TRANSLATING POETIC DISCOURSE
This image of the self unfolding from within can have at least four versions
in Spanish, each one simply produced by shifting the gender in the words in
italics. One would include all the qualifiers for the T and 'you' in the
feminine, interpreting Griffin in a context of actual dichotomy of the self
into two female selves, corresponding thus to the woman as speaker/woman
as author correlation.
Another version can be created by using the masculine for all above
emphasized words. Although this possible translation seems farfetched, it is
not impossible for the translator to create this deviation purposely and effec
tively. It would move the text into 'traditional' writing, making explicit an
internalization of male oriented norms. A third possibility would also take
Griffin's text beyond her own design; the terms related to the 'you' could
be in the masculine thus making the antagonistic roles represent patriarchy
within herself, as the "male facets" that have been internalized, so that the
T would be in the feminine; the interesting feature of this option is that the
feminine and the masculine selves would conflict within:10
Un da 't' es el regan, el dictador, el experto
en tiempo y cambios, el jefe, el destructor, y en
ese da 'yo' soy la soadora, la buscadora, la poeta,
la pensadora visionaria,
la osada interrogadora
que sin embargo se aterra de ese otro.
And a fourth hypothetical version would have the 'you' in the feminine and
the T' in the masculine:
Un da 't' es la regaona, la dictadora, la experta
en tiempo y cambios, la jefa, la destructora. Y en
ese da 'yo' soy el soador, el buscador, el poeta,
el pensador visionario, el osado interrogador
que sin embargo se aterra de esa otra.
woman poet whose self-identification is male, and who has an internal quarrel
with a negative female self. Each interpretation produces a different writing
reflected in a semantic shift activated by the interplay of gender markers
centered around the speaker and addressee factor performed by the trans-
lator-function.
There are still other variations to which the translator needs to be atten
tive, concerning the different semantic relations in deictics and the speaking
subject which I will illustrate with Susan Sherman's closure in "First and Last
Poem" (1979:2):
we grow smaller as we grow
as things empty themselves of us
and we of them
it is so deep this thing between us
no name can contain it
even time trembles at its touch
The first three lines refer to a generic "we" in the source-text and even
though by ellipsis this pronoun is not included in Spanish, some other words
need concordance, for which the masculine plural is the only accurate form.
In the last three lines of the poem, however, Sherman takes the poetic con
struct back to the implicit dialogue with Violeta Parra (Chilean folk singer
and poet), to whom the text is dedicated, and by whom it was inspired, so
that the second semantic correlation implicitly expressed as a 'we' yet actually
present in the text as "between us" surfaces in a more evident way in Spanish:
empequeecemos al crecer
a medida que las cosas se vacan de nosotros
y nosotros de ellas
es tan profundo esto entre nosotras
que ningn nombre lo puede contener
con su tacto incluso el tiempo tiembla
(Daz-Diocaretz 1983c: 12)
Therefore, in the same text the Spanish directly points to the changing refe
rents, and the movement is made from the general nosotros to the particular
nosotras, the latter defining the poem as woman-identified and woman-
addressed.
Margaret Randall's "Standing Guard in Managua" offers another exam
ple, with its opening personal pronoun which could give voice to a personal
statement. Only the first line of the poem would require specificity in Spanish,
namely, in the word "alone":
112 TRANSLATING POETIC DISCOURSE
(1982:79) about the sexual identification of the following poets she charac
terizes: H.D.'s orientation in Helen in Egypt is 'heterosexual'; Susan Grif
fin's, in Woman and Nature: The Roaring Inside Her, 'lesbian'; and Anne
Sexton's, in Transformations, 'asexual'. This is not meant to criticize
Ostriker's views but to comment that such a 'reading' does not seem to be
centered on the texts. An interpretation of these books from the framework
I am proposing e.g. dominant textual strategies in discourse by women,
would lead to conclude that H.D.'s text is feminist, Griffin's is both feminist
and lesbian, and Sexton's feminist. I have suggested that translation problems
can help postulate the dimensions of discourse by women since it gives aware
ness to complexities surrounding the speaking subject and the persona or
subject-construct who is the source of the poetic or literary utterance. What
is being called in question here, for instance, is whether the classification
"heterosexual/lesbian/asexual" is applicable in a more general category of
women's writing; or other questions such as, what constitutes "asexual writ
ing" in a woman poet and in discourse in general? Which are the textual or
discoursive frontiers of "heterosexual" and "asexual" writing? In view of
these categorizations, can there exist a writing that is "sexual"? My argument
is that the semantic and stylistic problems a translator encounters can offer
clues to systematize and isolate some textual categories, and they can help
to put to test their actual functionality as a concrete work is transferred to
another culture or another linguistic system; a correlation between thematic
and linguistic components is an indispensable area for an effective link
between translation and criticism in Women's Studies.
A single example from an Indo-European, Indic language will show the
difficulties when referential uncertainties pose obstacles. A brief but concise
comment of Gayatri Ch.Spivak to her English translation of the Bengali
short-story "Draupadi" by Mahasveta Devy, explains the performance of a
fertile inference (1981:392); Spivak demonstrates that in her decision to trans
late a personal pronoun she was guided both by contextual pressures and
her own ideology (congenial to that of the author) to decode and recode a
'her' instead of 'his' in an instance of indeterminacy, since modern Bengali
does not distinguish between either gender forms. Examples are sure to
abound of similar cases of indeterminacies, and other feminist texts may not
be interpreted in a satisfying or accurate way in the receptor-language; most
importantly, the resulting translation may deviate meanings in such a way
as to dis-assert the existence of female speaker or addressee. These are of
course, not hypotheses about the conventions of readings only; the reverse
114 TRANSLATING POETIC DISCOURSE
NOTES
1) It should be observed that this obligatory feature is not exclusive of the Romance languages.
For example, the same applies to Russian. Jakobson (1963:83) remarked, in the comparison of
Russian grammatical forms and those of English that in order to translate correctly the English
phrase I hired a worker a Russian needs supplementary information, e.g. to distinguish between
masculine or feminine rabotnika or rabotnicu. "Si, un Anglais qui vient d'noncer cettephrase,
je demande si l'ouvrier tait un homme ou une femme, il peut juger ma question non pertinente ou
indiscrete, tandis que, dans la version russe de cette phrase, la rponse cette question est
obligatoire.'' He concludes that the information required by different grammatical systems varies,
therefore the translator who works with a phrase in isolation can deprive a message from its initial
content (meaning).
2) cf. Beaugrande (1978:25-37). See chapter I in the present study, and Daz-Diocaretz (1984c).
3) I shall restrict myself to the question of gender markers having a semantic function in the
speech situation in the poems. I refer the reader to studies of gender on aspects I shall not consider
here but that bring to light complementary issues: Lakoff (1975); Stanley and Robbins (1978);
on generic terms in English, see Morton (1972), Bodine (1975); Martyna (1980); Kramarae (1981);
on language patterns and sex differentiation, see Gould and Wartofsky (1976); Vetterling-Braggin,
Elliston and English (1977); see also Miller and Swift (1976).
4) For the definitions of these terms see note 2, Chapter 2.
5) As an initial study, I suggest, for example, a critical reading of comparison of specificity in
the poems included in the anthologies edited by Bankier, Cosman et al (1976), Jacquez Wieser
(1979), and Crow (1984).
6) Some of my translations of Rich's work have appeared in Diaz-Diocaretz (1978b, 1980a,
1980c, 1983a, 1983c, 1983d). The anthology (Diaz-Diocaretz 1985b) includes a comprehensive
selection of poems in translation, from 1951 to 1981, with a preface by A.Rich.
7) Gardiner (1981) analyzes female identity as a process, from the perspective of feminist
psychology; Ostriker (1982:88) discusses briefly the nature of the T and the 'we' in women poets,
especially the speaker of Rich's "Diving into the Wreck"; she concludes that identity in women
poets is "more often fluid than solid," as it is a "divided self" in women's revisionist mythology.
8) Female identity and definitions of the female self are central issues in feminist and lesbian
perspectives. See Juhasz (1976); Showalter (1977); Carruthers (1979); Gardiner (1981); Stimpson
(1981).
9) I agree with Eco (1976:66) that "Every attempt to establish what the referent of a sign is
forces us to define the referent in terms of an abstract entity which moreover is only a cultural
convention." This is quite relevant for the ideation of speaker and addressee in feminist discourse.
10) In this version, the translator has the option between poeta and poetisa for the feminine.
While the first one is a contemporary, non-traditional use practised by women poets themselves
or feminist critics, the second one is the form accepted by the Real Academia Espaola, and has
wide use among traditional women poets and critics. Poetisa still has a much more frequent.use
that its corresponding 'poetess'.
11) For examples and discussion of other changes made by the translator in Roig's short-story,
see the notes on a comparative description and enumeration, followed by an interview with the
author on those points in Perramn and Ma (1982:47-55). I owe the information pertinent to
my discussion to their article; however, I am responsible for placing it in a semiotic context.
V. Prosody, Rhythms, Intonation, and the Acting Writer
origin from which her language moves into freer rhythmic lines. The aesthetic
effectiveness of the poem is achieved not only in the depth of experience
expressed in an original poetic form, but in the "unstated" tone of presenti
ment, of restrained fear, and the suggestion of controlled emotions,
actualized syntactically by long sentences, abstract images interconnected
and articulated by the measured line that seeks to free itself, and by the
emphatic alliterative echoes; the first stanza is as follows:
1 The glass has been falling all the afternoon,
2 And knowing better than the instrument
3 What winds are walking overhead, what zone
4 Of gray unrest is moving across the land,
5 I leave the book upon a pillowed chair
6 And walk from window to closed window, watching
7 Boughs strain against the sky
Images of the objective, of the external world of what is apparently
independent from personal reality the weather, the instrument to measure
and interpret it, the house itself and its surroundings articulate the
speaker's intuition about the coming storm, the warning about the external
world, external power. Before this imminent danger arrives, the 'powerless'
speaker enacts a ritual of defense in an intellectualized manner. The "glass",
"the instrument", "winds", "zone", dominate visually in the poem, and the
speaker's presence is suspended, mentioned for the first time only in line 5
of the stanza. The speaker is hiding both from the storm in the house, and
from visibility in language, as if avoiding exposure.
The image "What winds are walking overhead, what zone..." becomes
closely linked with line 7 by means of the alliterative cluster, "And walk
from window to closed window, watching"; this alliteration of /w+ vowel/
also sets the contrast between the speaker and the sky. The freedom of the
natural elements is made evident by the opposition to the confinement of
the speaker, who can only "watch." Several clusters of words create
sequences of alliterative and semantic characteristics, especially the constant
use of /w+ vowel/ throughout the poem. Stanza 2 has "inward toward..."
"waiting," and the repetition of "weather." This sound sequence is carried
over into stanza 3 with "weatherglasses," "wind," in "the wind will rise";
and the last stanza gathers the previous echoes in the image "the insistent
whine/of weather."
For our purpose I shall analyze different versions of "Amenazas de tor
menta" ('Storm Warnings') which show differences in objectives and method.
PROSODY, RHYTHMS, INTONATION, & THE ACTING WRITER 121
Spanish is even more evident in the last stanza of the poem. While the English
text has five iambic pentameter lines (1-2-3-4 and 6) and one iambic trimeter
line,
1 I draw the curtains as the sky goes black
2 And set a match to candles sheathed in glass
3 Against the keyhole draught, the insistent whine
4 Of weather through the unsealed aperture.
5 This is our sole defense against the season;
6 These are the things that we have learned to do
7 Who live in troubled regions.
the Spanish reads,
of
syll.
(14) Corro las cortinas al ennegrecerse el cielo
(16) Y acerco una llama a las velas envainadas en cristal,
(18) Amparndolas de la corriente, el insistente plaido
(16) Del tiempo que penetra en la abertura desellada.
(15) Esta es nuestra nica defensa contra la estacin
(14) Estas son las cosas que hemos aprendido a hacer
( 7) Aquellos que vivimos
( 9) En regiones atormentadas.
After counting the average syllabic pattern of the entire text, I realized the
lines in my text ranged in length from 11 to 20 syllables; consequently, I
revised and eliminated some redundant expressions, in an attempt to achieve
a certain rhythmic regularity. The 1977 version was untouched for some time,
until a new revision or series of revisions was undertaken fours years
later. The version presented in my forthcoming anthology is a product of a
most recent re-writing (1981):
line of
syll.
1 (14) Corro las cortinas al ennegrecerse el cielo
2 (14) Y enciendo las velas envainadas en cristal
3 (14) A espaldas de la corriente de la cerradura,
4 (6+11) Insistente gemir, tiempo cruzando el ojo desellado
5 (14) Este es nuestro nico amparo de la estacin.
6 (14) Esto es lo que hemos aprendido a ejercitar
7 (7) Aquellos que habitamos
8 (7) Areas atormentadas.
124 TRANSLATING POETIC DISCOURSE
The first hemistich would have nineteen syllables, and the second, eight:
comes from the lock (cerradura), then the latter is of a type in which there
is a hole through which the wind will enter. Line 4: The 1977 version reads
el insistente plaido; trying to shorten the lines, the change from plaido to
gemir does not introduce too important a variation in meaning. Gemir 'moan'
here used as a noun conveys the image of a prolonged wailing, the difference
is that the wind becomes personified, whereas with plaido 'wailing' it
remains an object. The caesura is introduced here to eliminate a word {del
tiempo) 'of weather', and to separate the two metaphors related to the
weather so that the hemistichs that in English were in line three, appear in
line 4 in Spanish. Then, the entire line of the original becomes the second
hemistich of line 4:
The 1977 version had la abertura desellada. In the 1981 version, the image
of the keyhole that had been modified in the previous line, is now completed
with the word ojo implying not eye but the aperture of the lock, since ojo
often translates 'hole'. In this way, what could have been a simple use of a
dead'metaphor had I chosen el ojo de la cerradura is made more poetic
because the image is extended throughout the two lines:
3 A espaldas de la corriente de la cerradura
4 Insistente gemir, tiempo cruzando el ojo desellado.
Line 5: Amparo (1981 version) creates stronger connotations of need for
shelter and protection, while defensa (1977 version) is too charged a word.
Amparo emphasizes an awareness of a certain powerlessness. Line 6, "These
are the things that we have learned to do," has two versions:
=Estas son las cosas que hemos aprendido a hacer (1977)
Esto es lo que hemos aprendido a ejercitar (1981)
The change from the literal phrase Estas son las cosas 'These are the things'
to Esto es 'This is' provides more conciseness. 'Things' in this context in
English is an empty morpheme that is best translated by the neuter esto. "To
do" is a polysemic word, it comprises the ritual performed while the speaker
gets ready for the storm. It implies "knowing", "thinking" and consequently,
performing the necessary acts; to "do" is precisely the experience told in the
poem, the ritual of self-defense against the weather "in the heart and abroad."
The corresponding verb hacer 'to do' is much more indefinite in Spanish;
the line was diffuse since hacer translates not only 'do' but 'make'. The verb
126 TRANSLATING POETIC DISCOURSE
tion on the other hand, can be found in the following lexical units:
lines SOURCE-TEXT RECEPTOR-TEXT
(1) fallingall barmetro-estado-bajando-
(2) toda-s-instrumentos
(3) what-winds-walking qu-vientos-caminan-qu
(4) zona nebulosa
(5) mullida
(6) walk-window-watching ventana-ventana-cerrada-observo
(7) strain-against ramas
cielo
(1) again nuevo-pienso
(2) inward-toward-waiting- interna-espera
silent
(3) single-time-traveled
(4) secret corrientes
(5) weather tiempo
(1)
(2) elementos
(3) weatherglasses barmetros
(4) time-time tiempo-tiempo-manos-dominar
(5) shattered restos
(6) wind-wind viento-viento
(7) shutters resta
(1) corro-cortinas-ennegrecerse-cielo
(2) set-match-sheathed-glass enciendo-velas-envainadas
(3) whine corriente-cerradura
(4) weather insistente-tiempo
(5) sole-defense-season este-es-nuestro-estacin
(6)
(7) regions atormentadas
The possible assonance in Spanish could also lead to a rhyming scheme
not suggested in the original. The Spanish version is structured in such a way
as to set words in contact with one another by means of reiterations and
internal rhyme. The recurrent /e-o/ and the consonant rhyme /ento/ are the
main units of speech and organization in Spanish used to create a continuity
in an interaction of semantic spheres. This is further emphasized by the
130 TRANSLATING POETIC DISCOURSE
decision not to use clima 'climate' for weather but tiempo, a synonym that
dominates the poem, since 'weather' and time are central images in the
original; in the translation, tiempo 'time' and 'weather', is used in its
polysemy.
The poem acquires its own rhythm, framed by polyrhythmic tetra-
decasyllabic lines, a metre characteristic of contemporary Spanish poetry,
and one of the forms established by Ruben Daro and the poetas modernistas
in the literature in Spanish:
Amenazas de tormenta
tinuity of the slowly created image. Without omitting any image, the Spanish
follows its "former structure" in terms of the semantic units and the aesthetic
effect of subordination on the syntactical level. It also follows the rhythmic
function of the hemistichs, the actual presence of pauses as the speaker
remembers the past and the silence of the elders:
The reminiscence of a Christmas party
Of fourteen years ago all memory,
Signs of possession and of being possessed,
We tasted, tense with envy. They were so kind,
Would have given us anything; the bowl of fruit
Was tilled for us, there was a room upstairs
We must call ours: but twenty years of living
They could not give. Nor did they ever speak
Of the coarse stain on that polished balustrade,
The crack in the study window, or the letters
Locked in a drawer and the key destroyed.
All to be understood by us, returning
Late, in our own time how that peace was made,
Upon what terms, with how much left unsaid.
Like "Amenazas de tormenta", "Los de edad madura" was written predomin
antly in variations of fourteen syllable lines, with a combination of octosyl
labic and heptasyllabic hemistichs:
Los de edad madura
Seguros como un interior
De azulejos holandeses y de alfombra oriental,
Con la frutera siempre colmada irguindose
la luz de la plcida tarde, sus rostros,
La mesura de sus voces,
Sus siluetas en movimiento en el jardn dominical
Para servir el t afuera o podar las plantas,
Sus rostros, angustiados nos rondaban. Porque ser
Joven era siempre vivir en el hogar de otros
Cuya paz, si la ansibamos, haba sido forjada por ellos,
Y era nuestra, pero de segunda mano, y por poco tiempo.
La rutina era de aquella casa, no nuestra, el sol
Empalideciendo las cortinas fortunistas azul argentado,
Recuerdos de una fiesta navidea
De catorce aos atrs... todo reminiscencias,
Signos de posesin y de ser posedos,
Que disfrutbamos, tensos de envidia. Eran tan amables,
Nos hubiesen dado cunto quisisemos; la fuente de frutas
Colmada para nosotros. Haba un cuarto arriba
PROSODY, RHYTHMS, INTONATION, & THE ACTING WRITER 133
Yet beneath that glitter is a man in rags, wounded, who needs to be saved.
The third stanza posits the question "who will unhorse him..." suggesting
that defeat is necessary to save him.
As compared to "Storm Warnings" and "The Middle-Aged" this poem
has a different prosodic structure which gives it a faster tempo. If there is a
contrast between the first two poems in English and this one, the Spanish
too must show a parallel contrast between the three poems. Therefore the
metric pattern in Spanish must be shorter than the one used in the poems
"Amenazas de tormenta" and "Los de edad madura" (fourteen-syllable line).
After looking for correlations in semantic fields, I begin to reduce the syllabic
length of the lines, and to eliminate any component that might be unneces
sary. The shortest metrical pattern available to me is decasyllabic lines,
decaslabo polirrtmico, and decaslabo dactilico, less common than the tet-
radecasyllabic lines in Spanish, but used, for instance, by Federico Garca
Lorca in Balada de Santiago and in some passages of Espigas e Idilios, as
well as by Csar Vallejo in Redoble fnebre a los escombros de Durango
(Navarro Toms 1974:483). I alternated the decaslabos with the endecaslabo
134 TRANSLATING POETIC DISCOURSE
meldico.
Some of the metrical combinations are, in the first stanza:
Chance'' with "Novella" (Rich 1963) we can observe the different selections
the poet makes for aesthetic effect. In "Novella", subordinate clauses are
almost absent; short, simple sentences support the division of the poem into
equally short lines. The rhythmical division involves the length of words as
well as their meaning: the poet carefully avoids words that have more than
two syllables.
The absence of syntactical transitions, or links between one sentence
and the other, emphasizes the sense of separation of the couple, their quarrel,
their tensions:
It gets dark outside.
The children quarrel in the attic.
She has no blood left in her heart.
The man comes back to a dark house.
The only light is in the attic.
He has forgotten his key.
He rings at his own door
and hears sobbing on the stairs.
The lights go on in the house.
The door closes behind him.
Outside, separate as minds,
the stars too come alight.
(1975:65)
The brevity of these statements, containing, except for the last two lines,
factual information, represents what will be an occasional structure used for
purposes of emphasis in her subsequent poetry. The distinct syntactical
articulation of the sentence by means of syntactic stresses and pauses as
in "The Middle-Aged" begins to be avoided, in Necessities of Life (Rich
1966), as in the closure of "The Trees", written in 1963:
Listen. The glass is breaking.
The trees are stumbling forward
into the night. Winds rush to meet them.
The moon is broken like a mirror,
its pieces flash now in the crown
of the tallest oak.
As Rich develops and explores her own poetic voice, transitions that were
formerly necessary in the use of subordination and superordination as part
of aesthetic effectiveness become suppressed (Mukaovsky 1977:13). Despite
the lack of syntactical equivalence between English and Spanish, in my acting
writer function I try to keep the syntactical peculiarities used by the author,
PROSODY, RHYTHMS, INTONATION, & THE ACTING WRITER 139
6.
Grabar
para ver
si sabes cmo termina el cuento
para qu contarlo
Grabar
para olvidar
la superficie es siempre transparente
y mis sombras estn bajo la piel
Grabar
para controlar
el ojo de la cmara
no llora lgrimas de sangre
Grabar
porque eso es lo que se hace
subiendo tus escaleras, una y otra vez
me aprend de memoria las paredes desnudas
as if powerless, as if up against
a force of nature
1.
Una conversacin se inicia
con una mentira. Y cada
3.
Una mujer reflexiva se acuesta con monstruos.
Ella se convierte en el pico que la agarra. Y la Naturaleza
aquel todava incmodo arcn
de tempora y mores
se atiborra con todo eso
[...]
1978b: 113). Pulsar did not exist in standard bilingual dictionaries of English
and Spanish for astronomy. The Spanish speaking astronomers who used
that word informed me that they would use it "in English". Their answer,
of course, was motivated by a simple fact: English has become the standard
language for, or the source from which to borrow most of the terms of
technology and the advanced sciences. In English it is a common practice to
introduce a neologism taken for the Latin, as is the case of radio (Lat. radius
and radium). Relying on these general conventions I decided to take the risk
of introducing the neologism in Spanish: pulsar, thinking of its Latin root.
But the incorporation of this word into Spanish in the poem created another
problem. Given the standard denotational meanings of the verb pulsar in
Spanish quoted above (see Real Academia Espaola: 1946), the semantic
context containing latidos 'heartbeat' and corazn 'heart', pulsar could be
reduced by the reader's interpretative act to only one semantic field, leaving
out the word's associations with the field of "astronomy"; to prevent the
reader from performing that displacement or from thinking that pulsar was
redundant (in the semantic field of corazn 'heart'), I decided to place the
word in italics. This italicization of the word gave visual emphasis to the
image, adding an intonational element not present in the original. The word
pulsar contributes to the ambiguity of the Spanish (in my translation used
as noun) and supports the sound sequence, creating a euphonic effect with
the line that follows, through the echo of impulso.
No doubt the problem produced by 'pulsar' could have been avoided
by my use of a paraphrase like fuentes galcteas or pulsos de radiacin, or
several other variants to suggest the meaning in astronomy. But my willing
ness to accept Rich's codes on the one hand, and the flexibility of Spanish
on the other hand, led me to decide on a semantic neologism and to introduce
the new sense, emphasizing it with italics. The chronology of the way the
process unfolded is relevant in this particular example. In 1981 the revised
edition of the Spanish dictionary Pequeo Larousse Ilustrado eventually
included a word with the definition corresponding to "pulsar" as used in
astronomy. The entry says:
Pulsar m. (de la expr. ingl. pulsating star, estrella con pulsaciones). Astr.
Fuente de radiacin radioelctrica, luminosa, X o gamma, cuyas emisiones
son muy breves (50 ms) y tienen un perodo de aproximadamente un segundo.
(Garca-Pelayo y Gross 1981:852).
Interestingly enough, in this dictionary the origin indicated for the word is
English (de la expr. ingl). Even though the Real Academia Espaola still
148 TRANSLATING POETIC DISCOURSE
has not included this meaning in its dictionary, which for many people indi
cates the official incorporation of a word in Spanish, I have left the word in
italics, with the spelling pulsar, as in 1978. I have chosen this example to
show the close interrelation of lexico-semantic choices that also affect
polysemy, and intonational elements (graphic and phonological). It also
makes evident, as I have attempted to demonstrate, that problems of this
type make the translator aware, in a very practical way, of the importance
of inferences and suppositions, and of the limitations in the usefulness of
dictionaries, and most of all, of the nature of language as a changeable
phenomenon.
Syllabic composition of words is an important component that also deter
mines intonation and has an influence on meaning. The obligatory change
in rhythm in the translations from English into Spanish is, as I have indicated
earlier in this chapter, an unavoidable restriction. When certain texts present
a particular type of syllabic composition of words, the semantic correlations,
the tempo, the rhythm are emphasized. Monosyllabic words accelerate pro
nunciation, the pauses suspend it. In English, a monosyllabic unit can actually
be a word, a fact that happens with much more frequency than in Spanish.
Rich's poetic exploitation of the syllabic composition of words is effectively
seen in "The Phenomenology of Anger", a poem in ten sections, each with
its own tempo. In section 4 Rich writes:
4. White light splits the room.
Table. Window. Lampshade. You.
My hands, sticky in a new way
(Rich 1975:199-200)
My translation, following the intonational peculiarities suggested by the orig
inal, is:
4. El cuarto se hiende con la potente luz.
Mesa. Ventana. Pantalla. T.
Mis manos estn pegajosas de un modo diferente.
Even though Rich does not make use of a specific meter for effects of
rhythm in her later poems, she creates shifts of tone by varying the regularity
of word length, and this causes subsequent intonational nuances. "The
Phenomenology of Anger" posits an interesting problem. Since maintaining
the same number of syllables in Spanish would have been impossible, I
experimented with the Spanish version of this poem by attempting to keep
the same number of strong stresses in each line. See, for example, the follow
ing:
PROSODY, RHYTHMS, INTONATION, & THE ACTING WRITER 149
I hate you.
I hate the mask you wear, your eyes
assuming a depth
they do not possess, drawing me
into the grotto of your skull
the landscape of bone
I hate your words
they make me think of fake
revolutionary bills
crisp imitation parchment
they sell at battlefields
(Rich 1973:29)
In Spanish "Fenomenologa de la ira" reads:
Te odio.
Odio la mscara que usas, tus ojos
que fingen una profundidad
que no existe en ti, que me arrastran
hasta el antro de tu crneo
un paisaje de osamenta
Odio tus palabras
me hacen pensar en falsos
bonos revolucionarios
crujiente imitacin de pergamino
en venta en los campos de batalla
In both texts, the pattern in the number of strong stresses is the following:
1, 4, 2, 3, 2, 2, 2, 3, 2, 3, and 3. Although it may be argued that English and
Spanish do not function with the same method of scansion, an acoustic
analysis of both texts would show similar rhythmic patterns, in spite of the
differing number of syllables in the source and receptor language. This exam
ple of poetic rhythm has been presented to stress the importance of the perfor-
mance of poetic texts, which in translation constitute an interesting subject
for comparative studies in both translation theory, acoustics, and poetics.
Capitalization, punctuation, syntax, and semantic divisions of the sen
tence are used by the poet in such a way that each element fulfills more than
one function for the composition of the intonational line in each poem. For
the translator, the conflict between freedom and fidelity (from the point of
view of semiotics) entails the knowledge of the poet's linguistic code, the
components of the poet's style. This knowledge is acquired during the act
of reading, a process I have already discussed as the act of cognition of the
author-function spectrum. In the translation of a poetic text, the textual and
150 TRANSLATING POETIC DISCOURSE
NOTES
by women and the actual factors that appear to be peculiar to this type of
writing. For example, in texts by women, an important distinction exists
in black North American poetry after 1969 (see Daz-Diocaretz 1985a),
where the speech situation is predominantly linked with revolt and self-affir
mation; it is the expression of a collective and socially, ethnically determined
T , 'we', and 'you', not simply a metaphorical device or an abstract or exclu
sively personal construct.
What we have to explore further are the many bridges between Trans
lation and Women's Studies (Diaz-Diocaretz 1983f). Valuable conclusions
can be reached through the contrastive analysis of texts by women as they
have been translated in different cultures and periods. For example, the
speaker and addressee interaction, at a textual level, can only be understood
in the light of studies on the pronouns of address and the complexity of the
categories of grammatical gender; this line of discussion leads to the more
general question of gender in language and its origins, still to be solved in
linguistic science, and also concerns the awareness of gender constraints in
language as proposed by scholars in Women's and Feminist Studies. Each
one of these topics is connected to the question of social structures and
ideology since the semantics proposed in texts by women varies according
to the socio-cultural context.
As a preliminary, one of the main tasks of this book has been to propose
systematic attention and to illustrate from the translator's activity, that the
two fields we are discussing are deeply interwoven. The meeting of Transla
tion and Women's Studies is a crossroads, therefore, quite a number of
problems have been set out and remain at several stages, and only the
development of future systematic studies can provide the formulation of a
wider description of possible applications to these areas. By way of summary,
I shall briefly enumerate a few propositions:
1. The act of reading critically in a feminist context can begin with an
analysis of what has already been translated in order to outline the
woman's presence/absence as translator (as coproducer of meaning), as
character (textual component), as reader (extra-textual), and with a
historical understanding of her function in the corresponding cultures.
2. When a text reaches a new tradition, a different cluster of relationships
is established. The reading community of a translation does not corres
pond to that of the source. A study of reception of translated texts by
women provides us with further information on the presuppositions and
expectations within the context of the muted group framework, at a
TRANSLATING POETIC DISCOURSE
I. Adrienne Rich
Rich, Adrienne (Cecile). 1951. A Change of World. New Haven: Yale University Press.
. 1955. The Diamond Cutters and Other Poems. New York: Harper and Row.
. 1963. Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law. New York: Harper and Row.
. 1966. Necessities of Life: Poems 1962-1965. New York: Norton.
. 1967. Selected Poems. London: Chatto & Windus.
--. 1969. Leaflets: Poems 1965-1968. New York: Norton.
--. 1971. The Will to Change: Poems 1968-1970. New York: Norton.
--. 1973. Diving into the Wreck: Poems 1971-1972. New York: Norton.
. 1975. Poems: Selected and New, 1950-1974. New York: Norton.
. 1976. Twenty-One Love Poems. California: Effie's Press.
. 1978. The Dream of a Common Language: Poems 1974-1977. New York: Norton.
. 1979a. On Lies, Secrets, and Silences: Selected Prose 1966-1978. New York: Norton.
-----. 1979b. "When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Revision" (1971). In Rich 1979a: 33-49.
-----. 1979c. "The Antifeminist Woman" (1972). In Rich 1979a: 68-84.
. 1979d. "Power and Danger: Works of a Common Woman". Intr. Judy Grahn. 1978. The
Work of a Common Woman. New York: St. Martin's Press. In Rich 1979a: 247-258.
. 1980. "Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence." Signs 5/4: 631-660.
-----. 1981. A Wild Patience Has Taken Me This Far: Poems 1978-1981. New York: Norton.
. 1983. Sources. Woodside, Calif.: The Heyeck Press.
. 1984a. The Fact of a Doorframe: Poems Selected and New 1950-1984. New York: Norton.
. 1984b. "Notes Towards a Politics of Location." Lecture for the first session of the Utrecht
Summer School of Critical Semiotics, June 1st, University of Utrecht. In M. Diaz-Diocaretz &
Iris M. Zavala (eds.), Women, Feminist Identity and Society in the 1980's: Selected Papers.
Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1985.
Broumas, Olga. 1977. Beginning with O. New Haven: Yale University Press.
. 1979. Soie Sauvage. Washington: Copper Canyon Press.
Giovanni, Nikki. 1968. Black Judgement. Detroit: Broadside Press.
. 1970. Black Feeling, Black Talk, Black Judgement. New York: William Morrow.
. 1972. My House: Poems. New York: William Morrow.
. 1973. Ego Tripping and other Poems for Young People. New York: L. Hill.
. 1980. Cotton Candy on a Rainy Day. New York: Morrow Quill Paperbacks.
Grahn, Judy. 1978. The Work of a Common Woman. New York: St. Martin's Press.
H.D. 1961. Helen in Egypt. New York: New Directions.
Jordan, June. 1969. Who Look at Me. New York: Crowell.
. 1977. Things That I Do in the Dark: Selected Poetry. New York: Random House.
. 1980. Passion New Poems 1977-1980. Boston: Beacon Press.
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Lorde, Audre. 1968. The First Cities. New York: The Poets Press.
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