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How can modern translators and approach queercoding in pre-queer French literature? Literature Review Introduction It is practically impossible to read any piece of academic writing dealing with historical representations of sexuality or gender without encountering reference to Michel Foucault's Histoire de la sexualité, in which he states that homosexuality as a psychological or psychiatric category did not exist before 1870.1 This passage has formed the basis for thousands of works by historians and queer theorists alike. Remarkably, Queer Theory has, until recently, made virtually no impact on the field of translation studies, and there remains a dearth of research on translating "queer" before the conception of queer identities. This literature review will begin by examining the divided interpretations of premodern sexuality and gender (that is to say, presentations of queerness from before the constitution of queer identities, a process which began, as Foucault says, in 1870, and which is still ongoing today), and by comparison with methods proposed by translation scholars will evaluate the extent to which these interpretations may be applied to the rendering of foreign texts. It will not, for the most part, include new analyses of existing translations, but will rather concern itself with secondary opinions on strategies used.

Historicism or Queer Theory

1

Michel Foucault, Histoire de la sexualité I: La volonté de savoir (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1976), p. 59.

In her introduction to a 2016 issue of the Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, Ari Friedlander describes the division in approaches to premodern nonstandard sexual practice that has sprung up in the wake of Foucault. On the one hand, the approach which she calls the 'historicist method' interprets his assertion of the nineteenth century as the birth of homosexuality to mean that, while people before this date certainly did engage in acts which would nowadays be associated with a queer identity, they cannot be described in these modern terms, as such notions are anachronistic and someone living before this date, or before such identities became part of common life, would not have been able to fathom them, much less identify with them.2 Under this model, to use a wellknown historical figure, Philippe d'Orléans, brother of the Sun King, cannot be described as a homosexual or queer man, despite the well-documented accounts of his intimate relationships with men and of his cross-dressing. His actions cannot be ascribed to any identity because he himself lacked the language to do so. In opposition to this is what Friedlander describes as 'unhistoricism'; a more recent school of thought among Queer Theorists which sees it as more productive to align historical figures with modern labels in order to make them more accessible to a modern audience.3 For them, Philippe d'Orléans is a definitely queer figure, not simply because of historical accounts of his "queer" relationships, but because, they would argue, he would have almost certainly identified as queer were he born in the modern era, or if his own society had possessed the same descriptive terms. This rejection of historicism seems, on the face of it, to fit squarely with translation, since this is a practice which is founded in rephrasing a text's contents to make it comprehensible from outside the source culture. To suggest it is unfaithful to a source text to describe a male character who sleeps with other men as queer is tantamount to saying one cannot ever translate, say, the Russian голубой (goluboy) or синой (sinoy) as blue, because Russian does not contain a word which is wholly equivalent to the English concept. However, the difference, which Friedlander implies in her article,

2

Ari Friedlander, 'Desiring History and Historicising Desire', The Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, 16:2 (2016), p. 1. 3 Ibid., pp. 1-2.

is that, while it is possible to speak to Russians and decide whether or not blue is an apt translation in context, it is not possible to interview authors from the nineteenth century and before to gauge how they would describe their text in the target culture. As such, it must be down to the translator to use historical clues to guide them, and then make a judgment as to the most appropriate terminology. Friedlander does not point out that the two approaches detailed above are, at their core, representative of different sides of the medicalised debate around gender and sexuality: the former claiming that these factors are dependent on society, and the latter that queerness, or lack thereof, is an inherent part of a person which exists without any societal norms. Similarly, this review will not concern itself with texts which themselves attempt to unravel this debate, as this is not the purview of a translator. However, this is a key factor in Queer Theory, and the translator must be sensitive of where on this debate they situate themselves. Furthermore, Friedlander's examples are also diametrically opposed; she does not allow any space for texts—in any field of study—which take account of both sides of the argument. For the translator of older texts, who is necessarily engaged in modernising so the target text may be understood by a reader of today, this tension between historicity and modernity is inextricable from the work: In many cases, if a reader of a translation of such a text were to come across words such as 'queer', 'lesbian', or 'transgender', for example, they would see it as jarring and anachronistic. This is likely because of the great leaps which have been made with regards to queer freedoms within recent memory, leading a target reader to presume such terms are also recent additions to the language even when their origin is much earlier. As such, a translator may choose to resort to more archaic terms than the language of the target text as a whole, to preserve a sense of historicity, and thus framing their translation within the historicist model by avoiding relating a character's sexual behaviours with a modern perception of identity. On the other hand, due to the necessity of most Early Modern authors to conceal any reference to queerness in their work so that it might be ignored by everyone but a very small community, there are invariably no non-expert readers who will pick up on the innuendo. This

means that if a translator does not wish to lose queer subtext, they are forced to highlight it in some way, in order to make the double entendre perceptible to the entire target audience, perhaps by using more recent cultural cues and thus placing a queer identity on the character which may be lacking, or at least not explicitly stated, in the source text.

Queer bias and Speaking Silence In Western cultures, specifically the United Kingdom though much less in the United States, censorship of queer identities has been minimal in recent decades, but this does not mean that the topic is not taboo. For Sergey Tyulenev, translators who are themselves queer are more likely to be oversensitive to these taboos, making them more damaging to the subtext than cisgender, heterosexual translators. He describes how C.K. Scott Moncrieff chose to remove more explicit references to Proust's homosexuality in À la recherche du temps perdu, due to fears that it would reflect back on his own sexuality, causing offence and 'outing' him to the world.4 Though the motivations may have changed with greater acceptance of queer people, Tyulenev shows how it is still the case today that a queer translator will attempt to downplay or even erase queer subtext for fear of having the work labelled a 'queer translation', advancing a political agenda at the expense of translational integrity. Through decades of a prevalent historicist approach to pre-modern sexuality, even the most explicit of texts from this era have variously been subjected to academics attempting to claim that their content is not queer, but merely indicative of different interpersonal relationships between people at the time, even in the face of considerable contextual evidence to the contrary. Even in texts which have escaped this treatment, it remains that even when one is looking for it, queerness can only be found in most older texts in the most deeply veiled of innuendo. Thus, against a backdrop of academic 'straightwashing,' Tyulenev's assertion that this precise lack of

4

Sergey Tylenev, 'Speaking Silence and Silencing Speech', Queering Translation, Translating the Queer: Theory, Practice, Activism, ed. by Brian James Baer and Klaus Kaindl (New York, NY: Routledge, 2018), pp. 120-121.

queerness in translation in fact highlights the source text's queerness5 is partially correct. However, by his own admission, in order for a reader to notice Moncrieff's silence on the subject, a reader would have to know about Proust's sexuality, Moncrieff's sexuality and the original French text.6 In short, they must already be so well informed on the book's queer subtext that they do not require a translation. Certainly, there is value in translating as a literary exercise for those already familiar with an original, as a critique of the original, but for an ignorant reader, monolingual and likely without detailed prior knowledge of the authorial context, this suppression of the source text's queerness is simple erasure. Such is the case in G.H. McWilliam's 1995 translation of Bocaccio's Decameron, though in later editions his erasive language is qualified with footnotes,7 as well as Leonard Tancock's version of Diderot's La Religieuse8 which, though published earlier, is still a vital indicator of how society has changed and how a translation must necessarily reflect that.

Projecting Queerness Not only must a translator unpick often-impenetrable queer subtexts, they must also then choose whether to situate these undertones exclusively within the era of writing, or whether to domesticate them; to bring them forward and make their implication accessible to a modern-day audience. For Marc Démont, this latter constitutes an example of minoritising translation,9 in that it illuminates subversive sexual practice at the expense of other elements of the text. For him, this style of translation 'serves... identity politics at the expense of queerness.'10 Thus, by making explicit what is implicit in the source text, one clumsily makes a character more relatable—or palatable—to

5

Ibid., p. 121. Ibid., p. 121. 7 Giovanni Bocaccio, The Decameron, trans. by G.H. McWilliams, (London: Penguin, 1995). 8 Denis Diderot, The Nun, trans. by Leonard Tancock, (London: Penguin, 1974). 9 Marc Démont, "On Three Modes of Translating", Queering Translation, Translating the Queer: Theory, Practice, Activism, ed. by Brian James Baer and Klaus Kaindl, (New York, NY: Routledge, 2018), pp. 159163. 10 Ibid. p. 163. 6

a modern audience, but in so doing removes the characteristics which alienated them from the source culture: queerness, in its most essential form. Démont speaks most highly about the mode of queer translation which, despite the name, takes a more historicist approach to translation by focusing on equivalence of effect of the queer elements in a text.11 He does not want queerness to be unduly stressed, but nor does he want it submerged by evasive techniques. It is unsurprising, then, that he fails to present in detail any translation which does not fall short of his ideal: An historicist method of translating texts far-removed by time and culture is an unattainable goal, as it does not allow for the intercultural dialogue inherent to the practice. To accurately (as far as one may be certain of such things) historicise both the content and the estrangement they would have induced in the source audience is impossible within a British context at least, and without doubt in most all other Western countries. One must sacrifice one for the other, or adapt the text to highlight its queerness—in both senses of the word.

This is precisely the method outlined by Emily Rose in her analysis of her own translation of the Mémoires de l'abbé de Choisy habillé en femme, who takes a post-modern approach to the unusual use of gender markers in the memoirs.12 Not only does it bring out extant subversive elements of the source text, it constructs its own, entirely outside the bounds of standard English, in order to make the gender play in the original inescapable for the reader. It does not aim to provide a fluent, convincing reproduction of the source text (indeed, a reader of hers would have difficulty assuming that an 18th-century text might contain alchemical symbols or epicene pronouns), rather it creates of itself an intentional palimpsest; highlighting the original precisely as her strategies cover the word forms used. It is true that a general public would likely find the text impenetrable, but the strategies of foreignisation, though not native to French or any other language, may be adapted in more subtle, palatable forms to impress upon the reader the subtext. This is an area in which

11

Ibid. pp. 163-167. Emily Rose, 'Revealing and concealing the masquerade of gender', Queer in Translation, ed. by B.J. Epstein and Robert Gillett (Abingdon: Routledge, 2017), p. 38. 12

translation can break from the commonly-held belief that it is merely reproductive: while a modern French reader would surely notice the unusual vacillation around gender markers, and probably have enough historical knowledge to know that their employment would have been seen as transgressive at the time, in a modern world where queer identities are, to a greater or lesser extent, known to most all the population, they would not be able to experience the weight of that transgression at first hand. This English translation, however, is jarring in a way that perverts dogmatic use of language, and therefore succeeds in reproducing the singularity of Choisy's memoirs in a way now inaccessible in the source text.

Conclusion There is clearly much more exploration that needs to be done in order to find a functional method of translating subversive sexual and gendered themes in a world which viewed them in a way diametrically opposed to the prevailing thought of the modern day. Friedlander provides a useful entry-point to begin contextualising the modern debate around interpretation of history, and the ideas she summarises lend themselves naturally to a translator's purposes. However, as the examples of Tyulenev, Démont and Rose suggest, the theory surrounding their application to the adaptation of texts is severely underdeveloped, and as such polarises itself as either historicist or queer politicist. Only Rose's example attempts to take a synthetic view of the two ideas, but the text she produces as illustration of her method is wholly unreadable compared to the source text. Furthermore, each of these approaches focuses on the appropriate method for only a specific text, rather than a more general context. While queer theory is still developing at a rapid pace, the task of producing any sort of methodology which may be pertinent to any translation of pre-modern sexuality for a modern audience seems a daunting one, but by combining analysis of contemporary

ideas in Queer Studies with existing theories of feminist and marginal translation, it is certainly not an insurmountable one.

Bibliography Baer, Brian James and Klaus Kaindl, eds, Queering Translation, Translating the Queer: Theory, Practice, Activism, (New York, NY: Routledge, 2018) Bocaccio, Giovanni, The Decameron, trans. by G.H. McWilliams, (London: Penguin, 1995) Diderot, Denis, The Nun, trans. by Leonard Tancock, (London: Penguin, 1974) Epstein, B.J and Robert Gillett, eds, Queer in Translation, (Abingdon: Routledge, 2017) Foucault, Michel, Histoire de la sexualité I: La volonté de savoir, (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1976) Friedlander, Ari, "Desiring History and Historicizing Desire", Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, 16:2 (2016), 1-20

Annotated Bibliography Tools Used Lecturer recommendations Recommended reading for other related modules Books already owned Following citations from works already found Looking through University Library at titles near works found online academia.edu bnf.gallica.fr encore.lib.warwick.ac.uk jstor.org muse.jhu.edu scholar.google.co.uk Search Terms Used (All searched on Encore, then Scholar and finally ProQuest depending on breadth of results) translat* queer, tradu* queer, *sexualit* queer early modern queer, "early modern" France OR French French Renaissance homosexuality French Renaissance transgender, transvestite, transsexual Renaissance France queer, *sexualit* Madeleine de l'Aubespine, queer, *sexualit* Marguerite de Navarre queer,*sexualit* Pierre de Bourdeille, Pierre de Brantôme

Academia: Following Carla Freccero, Queer Times, Gary Ferguson Following new issues of Renaissance Quarterly, Modern Language Quarterly, L'Esprit créateur and Journal of Sexuality Specific document names for works found through citations, or for multiple translations of a source text, not listed individually here, but sources mentioned below.

Primary Texts Aubespine, Madeleine de l', Selected poems and translations: a bilingual edition, ed. and trans. by Anna Kłosowska (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2007) This is the only edition of Madeleine's poetry I have been able to secure, and so the only one included here. However, I will endeavour to find more critical editions for my dissertation for comparison. Madeleine is unusual as a female writer under Ronsard, who wrote erotic poetry, and this edition shows how she played with gender and sexual innuendo do mock or celebrate the bonds between different figures at court. Found on ProQuest, through Encore search Bibliotèque nationale de France: Gallica, Dupuy 608-613, The oldest complete manuscripts of the works of Brantôme, from which the Lalanne edition was created with some editing. This is the closest I can get to the original, and in this context also provides paratexts such as marginalia through which the manuscript editor explains passages and thereby gives them greater historical context. Found on Gallica Brantôme, Pierre de Bourdeille, seigneur de, Œuvres complètes, ed. by Ludovic Lalanne (Paris: Renouard, 1864-82) A critical edition of the works of Brantôme, though certainly a rather old one. Brantôme's queer identities within his works have been examined many times, though not in translation, and this text has been edited with a very Victorian sensibility. I will use this as an easy-to-obtain reference point, but also compare it heavily with the Dupuy manuscripts held at the Bibliotèque nationale, and any other sources suggested by my reading. Found in University Library Choisy, Abbé de, The Transvestite Memoirs, trans. by R.H.F. Scott (London: Peter Owen, 2008) I have not been able to access a copy of this without buying it, but I certainly will do so for my dissertation as it is the only translation of the Mémoirs in English, and as such I will definitely

use it to inform my research into translating queer gender identities within the period. The publisher is one which has produced various critical works, however this does not mean that either the translator or the work itself could be described thus. This will be easier to ascertain once I have the book, but it makes little difference if it is not as my dissertation will include research into noncritical and non-academic translations. Found on Amazon.co.uk Choisy, François Timoléon de, Mémoires de l'abbé de Choisy, ed. by Georges Mongrédien (Paris: Mercure de France, 1996) Despite there being a number of editions of the Abbé de Choisy's work, this is the only one cited in any academic text which I have been able to find, though it will be necessary to purchase as I do not have access to the full text. This autobiography about Choisy describes a person who variously wears male and female clothing, acts as a male and female to others, and addresses themself as male and female, but not necessarily with any congruence between them. As such, it is a fascinatingly unusual text and has been examined by various writers in this list. I will use their analyses and approaches, as well as acquire as many translations and editions as I can, to inform my research into how modern translators may approach the themes therein. Found on fnac.fr, after the above listed search tools did not produce a suitable full text. Navarre, Marguerite de, Heptaméron, ed. by Renja Salminen (Paris: Librairie Droz, 1999) As what we often call a proto-feminist text, Marguerite often tests the bounds of sex, even if she does so to reinforce societal traditions. In some of the stories (e.g. 30) she describes relationships which now may seem to be queer-coded and different translations take slightly different stances on portraying the nature of said relationship. This will be a central text for analysis. Already owned an edition of Heptaméron, but have sought out a better critical edition to compare different manuscripts. Navarre, Marguerite de, The heptameron, trans. by P.A. Chilton (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984) This is a respected critical edition of Heptaméron, and useful to include in my examination of different translations as Chilton has written many publications on politicised language, both in and out of translation. Additionally, as he has links to the University of Warwick, I hope to be able to contact him about the differences between translating this text now and 30 years ago. Found in University Library

Secondary Texts Baer, Brian James and Klaus Kaindl, Queering Translation, translating the queer: theory, practice, activism (New York, NY: Routledge, 2018) In my opinion, all the articles in this book are useful in widening my knowledge of queer theory in translation, but especially the Tyulenev and Gombár chapters, which deal with prenineteenth-century queerness and how to adapt it for the modern day. The issue with it is that the book is edited in the US, and so it will be necessary to not apply foreign concepts to a British context. Found on Encore Baker, Mona, Translation and Conflict: A Narrative Account (London: Routledge, 2006)

A much-cited work using social narrative theories. Though she focuses on war, her use of modern cultural theories makes her arguments still relevant to me, and applicable to my topic, with some modification. Recommended reading Epstein, B.J. and Robert Gillett, Queer in Translation (London: Routledge, 2017) A recent book which I have included as it examines the practicalities of merging the two disciplines of Translation Studies and Queer Studies, both in the same innate way other texts have, but also in a more political, intentional manner. Found on ProQuest via Encore search, cited in Mazzei review Ferguson, Gary, Queer (Re)Readings in the French Renaissance: Homosexuality, Gender, Culture (Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2008) An unusual text in that it deals not only with male sexual expression, but also queer female and androgynous identities. It references numerous Renaissance texts from which I can extract examples to use to answer my question, as well as general themes which I can use to centre my argument. Found on Google Scholar Foucault, Michel, Histoire de la sexualité, tome 1 : La Volonté de savoir (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1976) Foucault's definition of homosexuality as a 19th-century construct is reiterated in many texts and will be useful to assist with placing and defining the concept of queer identities within both a modern and Renaissance context. Referenced in Seifert, found in library Freccero, Carla, 'Reading the Heptaméron: Feminist and Queer Approaches', in Teaching French Women Writers of the Renaissance and Reformation, ed. by Colette H. Winn (New York, NY: Modern Language Association, 2011), pp. 191-205 This work provides interesting insight into how the linguistic choices of Marguerite can be interpreted through the lens of Queer Studies. She also uses the Chilton translation for her examination, and though much of what she writes would not be useful, there are certain aspects which can be extended and applied to a translation context. Found on Academia Freccero, Carla, 'Reviewed Work; Queer (Re)Readings in the French Renaissance: Homosexuality, Gender, Culture by Gary Ferguson', Renaissance Quarterly, 62.2 (2009), 504-506 This review of Ferguson is exhaustive, and has been itself well-received by other scholars. It brings up interesting points about the masculine perspective when writing which will be useful to my examination of modern male translators' process. Found on Google Scholar by looking at 'cited by' and 'related articles' Gilbert, Claire, 'Social context, ideology and translation', in The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Culture, ed. by Sue-Ann Harding and Ovidi Carbonell Cortés, (Abindon: Routledge 2018), pp. 225-242 A very recent chapter on the importance of deciding what to domesticate and what to foreignise in terms of what is culturally appropriate in the TC, which specific reference to Renaissance Europe. It seems in some ways a direct descendent of Simon, allowing me to critically analyse her earlier work within up-to-date theories. Found on Google Scholar

Gray, Floyd, Gender, rhetoric and print culture in French Renaissance writing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000) The fifth chapter of this text examines how the rise of female voices during the Renaissance also allowed space for queer ideas to flourish without ever being openly stated. I hope this work as a whole will help me to gain a greater understanding of subtextual clues in Early Modern French writing which might have been picked up be sympathetic readers and therefore be better able to see how a translator can approach this. Furthermore, the chapter addresses Brantôme specifically, which is one of my primary texts. Found on Encore Kłosowska, Anna, 'Erotica and Women in Early Modern France: Madeleine de l'Aubespine's Queer Poems', Journal of the History of Sexuality, 17:2 (2008), 190-215 This appeared far down in my first search, and so I did not see it until recently. The author is also the translator of the only English edition I have been able to access, and her analysis here of how Madeleine uses innuendo to examine the sexual closeness of homosocial bonds between men will be invaluable in critiquing her translation. I will also expand upon her detailed list of euphemistic language to build on my own theories of approaching queer themes in translation and see how they might be applied to other texts from the period. Found on ProQuest Maira, Daniel, 'Des tribades et des godemichés: mollesses viriles dans le Recueil des dames de Brantôme', French Studies, 70.4 (2016), pp. 503-518 Although there is no English translation of Brantôme after the 1960s, before Translation Studies became an academic discipline, Maira's look at queer themes within various works of Brantôme will allow me to use his work to develop and explain my own theories of translating from a time when there was no 'queer context' to write about, into a time when sexuality and gender expressions are both much freer and much more strictly labelled. Found on Google Scholar Mazzei, Christiano A., 'Reviews: Queer in translation; Translating the queer: body politics and transnational conversations', Translation Studies, 11.1 (2018) pp. 108-111 This review takes a theoretical approach to the two texts, which I suspect I would have missed alone, and certainly would not have necessarily made such a detailed comparison of the two together. Found on ProQuest, after using Scholar 'cited by' and 'related articles' O'Brien, John and Malcolm Quainton, Distant Voices Still Heard: Contemporary Readings of French Renaissance Literature (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2000) I suspect this sort of text will give my research an angle which I have not seen in many other works. That is, while one has to be a scholar to translate an Early Modern work from another language, it may well not be only those interested in literary criticism who read it. As this book says, most people engage with Renaissance literature in an almost exclusively educational context, and as such any queer themes within translation would be best examined, not from an academic point of view, but from the perspective of a student. Found on Questia Poirier, Guy, L'homosexualité dans l'imaginaire de la Renaissance (Paris: Honoré Champion, 1996)

An older but still much-cited book on the conflict between Greek homoerotic tradition and Christian prudishness, which I can use in the same way as other authors to help provide a better explanation of the context of queer themes in the Renaissance Referenced in Ferguson, Freccero and Seifert Seifert, Lewis C., Manning the Margins: Masculinity & Writing in Seventeenth-Century France (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2009) The second part of this book details various examples of writing from and about 'queer' literary figures, and contextualises the legal and cultural meanings of various key terms. As well as providing literary examples, it excellently historicises both female identities and non-conforming male identities, if with little crossover. Found in University Library Simon, Sherry, Gender in Translation: Cultural Identity and the Politics of Transmission (Abingdon: Routledge, 1996) One of the first books looking at the crossover between feminism and translation, containing interesting insights on gendered perspectives within translation which I think will either be directly applicable or can inform my own theories Recommended by lecturer Vernqvist, Johanna, 'Negotiating Neoplatonism and the Androgyne Metaphor in Heptaméron 70 and 19', L'Esprit Créateur, 57 (2017), pp. 93-104 This article examines the linguistic choices of Marguerite which subtly go against gender norms of the time. The article only looks at the French, precisely because it focuses on units of text which are very particular to French grammar, and which have no direct equivalent in English Found on Project Muse