Tongue and Groove

In her essay “Theorizing Feminist Discourse/Translation,” from 1989, the Canadian critic Barbara Godard reframed translation as a feminist intervention into society’s dominant discourses. With The Translating Subject, Melissa Tanti expands on this idea as she examines how a “translating subject” emerges from the space where “languages encounter each other.”

Analyzing works by the Montreal writers Erín Moure and Nicole Brossard along with the American punk virtuoso Kathy Acker, Tanti explores textual multilingualism, including the experimental use of unfamiliar languages. A research fellow at Coventry University, in the United Kingdom, with a doctorate from McMaster University, she suggests that these authors participate in a larger “queer feminist knowledge project.” Moure’s approach to translation, for example, is compared to Judith Butler’s depiction of the body, which refutes the “erotics of mastery” that informs “Western humanist philosophies of the self.” A devotee of deconstructionism, Moure views both identity and meaning as dependent on an ever-changing context. Such radical contingency, however, positions facts as indiscernible from beliefs and raises ethical concerns of moral relativism. If all truth is always becoming, the values that underpin international human rights become elusive and unstable. Moure, Tanti explains, provides an alternative by connecting the role of the individual with a larger responsibility; as subjects, we must be keen, inquisitive observers who ground our choices and actions in our values.

In her discussion of “world knowledge production,” Tanti illustrates how “more-than-English speaking” researchers are relegated to “the isolation of linguistic peripheries.” Tanti draws on Jacques Derrida, Hélène Cixous, and other critics in her assessment of how Brossard, Moure, and Acker challenge patriarchy, Western humanism, and an “Anglo-hegemony” that dominates “from cyberspace to outer space.”

Like the avant-garde thinkers before them, these three artists eschew the idea that language is neutral; they maintain that it constructs the actual conditions of life. “No new world without a new language,” Acker has written. “When you write you are making reality.” Brossard, for her part, believes feminist literature originates in the female body. Tanti parallels embodied writing with erotic gratification through her examination of Brossard’s term “stextuality.”

Tanti delves into the way Brossard shifts attention to the fertile ground between languages. Invoking the French semiotician Julia Kristeva, she looks at how Brossard’s spatial poetics and imagery acknowledge erased female subjectivity, which exists in “the distance between things that language is trying to capture.” Tanti is at her best when offering an illuminating and comprehensive study of Brossard’s Mauve Desert, from 1987. In the novel, which Tanti calls a “lesbian linguascene,” desire is sparked by the erotic interplay of text and subject. The protagonist, Maude Laures, experiences a strong urge to translate a used book that she finds, by an unknown writer. Her physical attraction to the publication is, indeed, stextual; through the textual body, it generates a new work.

Another compelling section looks at Acker’s Blood and Guts in High School. Published in 1984, the novel follows Janey, a young girl imprisoned in an incestuous relationship with her father. Acker’s use of multilingualism is integral to her jarring, skillful critique of phallocentrism, racism, and imperialism. Tanti rightly observes that learning Farsi, which is gender-neutral, liberates Janey, who writes herself “out of English” in a successful act of rebellion. Tanti gives an informative history of the Arab conquest in the seventh century and offers astute commentary on how Persians resisted assimilation by preserving a language rooted in poetry. But she makes bold assumptions about the impact Farsi has on Acker’s readers. When perusing the original, I experienced the initial disruption and admired the unfamiliar script but swiftly passed over most of it. Without Tanti’s perspicacious, extensive explanation, the formal jolt would have failed to produce much introspection or discomfort.

Tanti argues that multilingualism in writing can “reroute desire across the body” and activate sensory experiences that “unleash embodied knowledges.” She suggests that Moure urges her audience to engage with texts using their “libidinal skin.” Such abstract, cryptic imagery may hinder the reading experience for those already struggling with complex theory. Clearly, the queer feminist focus on somatic knowledge counters a heady patriarchal dualism and attempts to mitigate totalizing abstract truths and values. But at the same time, Tanti’s veneration of a cognizing female figure risks reproducing the stereotype that women are essentially a body.

That Moure, Brossard, and Acker make for arduous reading may go without saying. Tanti explains that the writers “have always been invested in difficulty as aesthetically and politically productive.” Because of her high regard for her subjects, she sometimes comes across as an uncritical enthusiast. She quotes Moure, who has said, “Accessible reading prepares us for reading the newspaper and going to vote. . . . It doesn’t help us to interrogate or look at our own experience in any different way.” This devaluing of texts that help us make informed choices as citizens comes across as prescriptive and, at times, smacks of intellectual elitism.

Tanti also avoids some key contradictions. Moure embraces both “sound and touch” to argue for an intuitive approach to translation. Her tactic, she reveals, “is to listen to the text of departure” and allow it to speak — a method that raises questions about honouring source material. As a feminist poet fluent in English and Italian, I’ve had my work rendered into words I can and cannot read. While I applaud her agency and creativity, I wonder about Moure’s emphasis on the instinctual, felt aspects of language (like her spontaneous realization of an ability to use Portuguese). The necessary “mangling” when we enter each other’s tongues that Moure describes could undermine both the integrity of the original texts and the mutual respect that this kind of exchange demands.

Still, Tanti offers a significant contribution to cultural theory and women’s studies with The Translating Subject. Her insights into the role multilingualism plays in reshaping identity, ethics, and literature invite renewed scrutiny of translation’s transformative potential.