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Translation and the Construction of Identity: Abstracts
Date: 12-14 August 2004
Venue: Sookmyung Women's University, Seoul, Korea
Corinne Scheiner
On the surface, the distinction between the ethical and the erotic appears well
defined: in an ethical relationship, one acknowledges the other as subject,
while in an erotic relationship, one treats the other as object. Indeed, it is
precisely the semblance of such a clear division that provides Sherry Ortner, in
“Borderland Politics and Erotics” (n.d.; rpt.1996), with the means to defend the
use of the term, and the concept of “culture” in anthroplological discussions.
She argues that one need not use it “to efface internal politics/differences” or
to “make others radically Other”, but rather that one may employ “a sense of
culture with Otherness”, for “people across cultures are different, but not
necessarily radically Other”. In short, to remain ethical, one must recognize
that, despite differences, the other is a subject just like the self; to do
otherwise is to fall into the unethical and, hence, undesirable realm of the
erotic.
Panel 4: Translation and the Construction of Gendered Identity
Is the Ethical Antithetic to the Erotic? An Examination of the Collaborative Act
of Translation
The Colorado College, USA
These two distinct, and morally fraught, modes of intercultural interaction
appear to find their equivalents in the act of translation – an act that
engenders a cross-cultural relationship between the translator and the text to
be translated -, for the translator must decide how to approach the text to be
translated: will s/he treat it as subject and respect its cultural difference
(that is ethically) or as object and domesticate it (that is, erotically)?
However, in this paper, I call into question such a distinction, for it presumes
that the relationship between the ethical and the erotic is one of simple binary
opposition. Instead, like Gayatri Spivak and Luce Irigaray, I argue that to the
contrary, “within the ethics of sexual difference the erotic is ethical” (Spivak,
“The Politics of Translation”, 1992). Spivak contends that “it is not impossible
for us as ethical agents to imagine otherness or alterity maximally. We have to
turn the other into something like the self in order to be ethical. To surrender
in translation is more erotic than ethical”.
If the erotic is ethical, how is the translator to proceed? How is s/he to
negotiate the cultural differences between the source and target cultures? To
answer this question, I examine different modes and methods of collaborative
translation (for example, that of Suzanne Jill Levine and Cabrera Infante), in
particular the relationship between the translator and the author, to understand
the various ways in which the erotic and the ethical come together. Lori
Chamberlain suggests in “Gender and the Metaphorics of Translation” (1988) that
a feminist theory of translation “might rely, not on the family modal of oedipal
struggle, but on the double-edged razor of translation as collaboration, where
author and translator are seen as working together, both in the cooperative and
the subversive sense”. I argue that it is in this twofold action, at once
cooperative and subversive, that the ethical and the erotic merge.
© IATIS 2003