《Rosemary Arrojo - Fidelity And The Gendered Translation》.pdf

Fidelity and The Gendered Translation1 Rosemary Arrojo Feminism comes to be defined here almost inadvertently, as a bond of reading: a bond of reading that engenders, in some ways, the writer — leads to her full assumption of her sexual difference: a bond of reading and of writing which, however, paradoxically precedes knowing what it means to read as a woman, since this very bond, this very reading, is precisely constituted by the recognition that the question what is a woman? has not yet been answered and defies, in fact, all given answers. What Does a Woman Want? Reading and Sexual Difference, Shoshana Felman While tradition ha s generally viewed translation as a transparent, impersonal activity which is expected to recover — and to be blindly faithful to — the supposedly stable meanings of an author, contemporary, postmodern theories of language are beginning to A preliminary version of this paper was presented at the conference Woman, Text, Image, sponsored by the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures, Binghamton University, New York, U.S.A., on April 16, 1994. It is part of a research project sponsored by CAPES (Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior), of the Brazilian Ministry of Education and conducted at the Department of Comparative Literature of Yale University from October of 1993 to September of 1994. 1 thank my colleague Paulo Ottoni for his help with the French version of my abstract.