The Canadian feminists’ translation project: between feminism and postcolonialism

In this article, Canada and Quebec are taken as case studies providing some interesting examples of inter-linguistic but intra-national translation, texts presenting features which can be addressed under the broad rubric of postcolonialism, especially as far as the power relations between the English and French languages in Canada are concerned. As a matter of fact, the socalled politics of translation appear only too clearly if we analyze the texts which are translated across the border between Canada and Quebec. Within this context, there has been a group of writers and scholars from both linguistic areas who have been willing to meet on a different ground – the ground of feminist writing and translation. Among the most important women in the group, Barbara Godard and Sherry Simon, as well as writers such as Nicole Brossard and Daphne Marlatt, deserve to be mentioned for the visibility their works have achieved in the past decades, and for the issues they raise.

Gdy autorka staje się tłumaczką, a tłumaczka autorką

When an Author Becomes a Translator and a Translator Becomes anAuthor. Nicole Brossard’s Le désert mauve Translated by Susanne deLotbinière-Harwood The article aims to describe the space of translation understood as a spacefor dialogue and mutual influence on the example of a novel by Nicole Brossard, Quebec writer and feminist translator, entitled Le désert mauve (1987), and its English translation (Mauve Desert, 1990), by Susanne de Lotbinière-Harwood. The first part of Brossard’s novel was written by a fictional writer, while the second part is a translation of the first part, also in French. The “original” and its “translation” are separated by the description of a translation process by a fictional translator, showing primarily how the original is interpreted. Brossard’s novel is a literary illustration of a translation as a creative act that requires invasion to the original.The English translation of the novel by de Lotbinière-Harwood shows in practice the process of interpretation and invasion, as it is based on the idea of re-writing a literary text, so called “re-creation”, very present in the Canadian context.

Gender’s ontoformativity, or refusing to be spat out of reality: reclaiming queer women’s solidarity through experimental writing

In this article, I argue that queer women – especially cis and trans lesbians – have more in common than contemporary fissures either allow for or acknowledge. Lesbians who recognised their queer sexuality in the 1970s have in common with trans women the shared condition of being, in the words of the 1970s radical feminist Marilyn Frye, ‘spat summarily out of reality’. We also share the experience of refusing to accept this condition. I make this argument by manoeuvring away from questions of gender identity and focusing instead on gender’s ontoformativity: the astonishing, welcome and transformative fact that new social realities are brought into being by new social practices. I turn to experimental writing to explore this matter. Through this medium, the cis lesbian poet Nicole Brossard and the trans lesbian poet Trace Peterson wrote themselves into worlds, languages and social orders that refused to acknowledge their existence. Brossard was writing in 1970s Montreal, Peterson in early twenty-first-century New York, but what they have in common, indeed what radical lesbian theory from the 1970s shares with contemporary theorising by trans women, is the insight that identifying with men is expected. It is in identifying with women that we are most at risk.

Lesbian Poetics

Inspired by women’s emotional and sexual desires, lesbian poetics offers a passionate and lyrical tradition of prose, poetry, experimental literatures, and critical analysis that both celebrate women’s relationships to women and consider the patriarchal, heteronormative pressures that have silenced lesbian art and expression in dominant cultures. As an aesthetics addressed to women by women, lesbian poetics combines art and politics as an aesthetic practice that expresses fervor, devotion, passion, resentment, and a sense of pushing back against oppressive institutions. Emerging during the second wave of feminist activism in the 1960s and 1970s, the work of such writers as Rita Mae Brown, Monique Wittig, Adrienne Rich, Audre Lorde, Nicole Brossard, Judy Grahn, Dionne Brand, Olga Broumas and others linked a specifically lesbian aesthetics of cultural critique simultaneously to the investments of the women’s movement and to a more overt declaration of the presence and power of lesbian desire. Inheriting a tradition of modernist lesbian expression from such writers as Natalie Barney, Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein, Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette, Djuna Barnes, Radclyffe Hall, and Violette Leduc, the lesbian writers from the latter part of the twentieth century more openly celebrated a specifically lesbian set of aesthetic and cultural concerns, extolling lesbian existence and developing modes of narrative, poetics, and criticism that combined lyricism, a consciousness of struggle, and an expansion of the possibilities of literary forms as a means for proclaiming lesbian intensity and liberation. Ever mindful of both the women’s community and the pleasures of broad connection, lesbian poetics avoided iterating the limiting binaries that sustained heteronormative ways of thinking, offering instead multiplicity, diversity, and a variety of new ways of thinking and expressing the ardent, erotic, and communal relations among women.