Brian James Baer

Gender and translation ethics: Women translators in Russian women’s writing

This paper examines fictional works by several Russian women writers that feature literary characters who are translators. Among the works discussed are: Nadezha Khvoshchinskaia’s novella The Institute Girl, Alexandra Marinina’s detective novel Stylist, and Nina Gabrielyan’s Master of the Grass. I discuss these works as offering a complex re-thinking of the problem of gender and translation, addressing, specifically, the notion of ethics. The juxtaposition of male and female translators serves to critique the Romantic model of literary production, based on original genius. However, rather than rejecting the association of women with translation, which, as Lori Chamberlain asserts, has served since the advent of Romanticism in the West to construct translation as a secondary form of literary production – the defining other of original authorship – these writers seek to re-legitimate translation as both an aesthetic and an ethical practice, presenting translation as an alternative – not secondary – form of authorship.

Keywords: women translators, women writers (Russian), Russian literature, gender, Nadezhda Khvoshchinskaia

Biography

Brian James Baer is a Professor of Russian and Translation Studies at Kent State University, where he is a member of the Institute for Applied Linguistics. He currently serves as the Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Modern and Classical Languages. He holds a PhD in Comparative Literature (Yale), an MA in Slavic Languages and Literatures (New York University), and a BA in Comparative Literature (Columbia). His recent publications include: “Translating Daniel Stein: Where Post-Soviet meets Postmodern,” in Transfiction: Research into the Realities of Transfiction (2014) and “Oppositional Effects: (Mis)Translating Empire in Modern Russian Literature,” in Translation and Opposition (2011).