Translators and the Making of History: Gertrude Stein’s Paradoxical Relationship to France
- "Translators and the Making of History: Gertrude Stein’s Paradoxical Relationship to France"
- lecture video
- December 1st, 10 am
- Salón de Actos, Facultade de Filoloxía e Tradución (FFT).
- Judith Woodsworth, University of Concordia (Montréal).
- Organized by: NETEC & Dpto. de Filoloxía Inglesa, Francesa e Alemá
Abstract
This year marks the twentieth anniversary of the publication of Translators through History. When compiling the first edition in 1995, Jean Delisle and I chose to shine the spotlight on translators and the ways in which they have shaped history. This decision to concentrate on the translator and other agents, rather than the process or the product, was not an obvious choice in a discipline that had hither to been so focused on the text. For centuries, for example, discussions had dealt with how faithful a translation was to the source text or, on the other hand, the way in which translations were made to fit the norms of the target culture. In this book (and particularly in the latest English and French editions), translators are examined in the social, political, economic or religious contexts in which they worked.
In the intervening years, there have been many studies in the field of translation history; it is an area that has thrived, even exploded, although significant gaps remain. My recent work addresses one such gap by looking at writers who translate – at their motivation to translate and at the specific, often complex, tensions that arise with regard to their status as author/translators.
My talk delves into a particular case study, that of writer Gertrude Stein, for whom the act of translation is related to a paradoxical relationship to France and the French language. There was always some degree of non-translation in her translation projects: her alleged, possibly fictitious, translation of Flaubert; her problematic translation of and eventual dispute with a surrealist poet; and her aborted translation of the speeches of Vichy leader Maréchal Pétain. Despite her notoriety as an avant-garde writer and supporter of modern art, Stein the translator was moulded by the events she experienced. To use the words of Martin Luther King, she was among those who were ‘made by history’, as opposed to other translators who could more accurately be described as ‘makers of history’.