Fidelity, Betrayal, and the Gendered Politics of Translation

Traduttore, tradittore: translation has long been considered a “betrayal” of an original text’s incommensurable meaning. My project asks why the ways we talk about translation so often revert to gendered conceits of fidelity and betrayal. Scrutinizing the archives of four queer or woman translators of canonical texts - Eleanor Marx (Gustave Flaubert); Constance Garnett (Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky); Silvina Ocampo (Emily Dickinson); Langston Hughes (Gabriela Mistral), I make the case for examining translation’s gendered metaphors as a literary-historical problem: one that has inflected the texts read and taught across the Anglo-American literary tradition, even if that labor remains relatively unseen. 

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