The Traps of Gender
Is it possible to translate a book into Polish without really knowing the gender of the main protagonist? The translators of “Orlando ” by Woolf and “Written on the body ” by Winterson were confronted with such a question. Both works meet the criteria of the theory Cixous, as both experiment with gender. “Orlando ”, for example, is a novel about gender transgression when the main protagonist, in the middle of the narration, undergoes a sex change. Alongside the physical change, Woolf alters pronouns from he to she , so the reader knows it has occurred. The whole novel, still, takes androgynous overtones since Orlando’s sex remains doubtful throughout the narrative (Richter 2009:167). There is no doubt that the neutrality of certain grammatical rules in English help to maintain such sexual ambiguity, which is not the case in highly inflected Polish. Two translators, belonging to different habitus (two different strategies) Władysław Wójcik and Tomasz Bieroń, tackle this problem differently. What they have in common is that they both explicitly change the gender by swapping pronominal expressions from male on to female ona and by adjusting other grammatical forms. They differ in their approach to name. In Bieroń’s free translation, the male Orlando becomes the female Orlanda, while in Wóicik’s literal translation, the gender remains unaltered. Jerzy Jarniewicz (1996:332) argues that both solutions are unsatisfactory. Wójcik violates grammatical rules in Polish “since the male subject (Orlando) can say only powiedziałem [I said (M)] not powiedziałam [I said (F)] ” (Jarniewicz 1996:332). On the other hand, Bieroń correctly pairs subject with predicate but deprives the book of its androgynous tone. Altea Leszczyńska (2004:53) disputes this, finding Bieroń’s strategy irrational since Orlando is a male name in both English and Polish.
Helena Mizerska, the translator of “Written on the body ” was left with an even greater difficulty. The story of the book is told by the narrator with no name and gender about his/her love towards a married woman, Louise. The author, in doing so, fulfils the requirement of Cixous’ concept of bisexual writing where neither of the halves should be repressed. The first-person narration serves this ambiguity since in English it is less sex-specific than the third-person one. In her introduction, Mizerska (2000:7-8) recounts her initial choice of the male narrator because she believes that the protagonist manifests more male behaviour, such as the dream about castration. As the female markers, she considers, for instance, the poetic language of love. However, Winterson herself disagreed with her choice and eventually Mizerska translated again, changing the narrator to female and thus making it a lesbian story. Leszczyńska (2004:51) makes an interesting note: with the change of grammatical gender the translator changes the outfits of the protagonist, too - from shirts into blouses. In this way, she implicitly constructs a female character through the accessories of the everyday life. Białas (2006:55-56) points out that Mizerska falls into a trap of stereotyping, as women can also have dreams about castration, and a man can use the poetic language of love. This is another example of how a habitus of translator, this time in the form of a clichéd perception of certain behaviour, exerts its influence over the act of translation. Also, one may argue that Mizerska’s first choice of male narrator might have something to do with, as Fludernik (1999:154) defines it, “heterosexual default structure” and “since A (Louis) is a woman so B (the narrator) must be a man”.
Białas (2006:57), Jarniewicz (1997:332), and Leszczyńska (2004:51) claim that it is impossible to translate into Polish books like “Orlando ” and “Written on the Body ” without losing their core meaning and that androgyny can happen only in English. The lack of Polish experimental écriture feminine works in the national literary history may be the cause, for such works could serve as a language platform. I would like to summarise my views regarding the translation of sexual ambiguity into Polish by paraphrasing Freud’s citation I used at the beginning: Those of you who are Polish does not apply; You (your language) are, indeed, the problem.