Judith Woodsworth

An American in Paris: Translation and non-translation in the work of Gertrude Stein

Having spent more than half her life in Paris, in a community of expatriate writers and artists, Gertrude Stein stands out for her double affiliation and hybrid identity, which play out not only in her writing, but also in her alleged, aborted and actual translations. This paper will focus on her so-called translation of Flaubert’s Trois Contes – described as a preparation for Three Lives – which was more than likely a kind of pseudotranslation. Stein originally intended to publish it under a pseudonym, and included what is probably a pseudo-epigraph attributed to Jules Laforgue. In telling the story of the composition of her début work, some thirty years after the fact, is Stein constructing a myth, highjacking the notion of translation? In each instance of translation in the career of Gertrude Stein, a certain degree of “non-translation” is involved and the relationship with the original author is problematic.

Keywords: Gertrude Stein, hybrid identity, translation and modernism, pseudotranslation

Biography

Judith Woodsworth is a Professor of Translation Studies in the Department of French Studies at Concordia University. She is a former president of Concordia and of Laurentian University, a bilingual university in Sudbury, Ontario. Her research has focused on French literature, translation theory and history, and literary translation. She has translated a novel, entitled Still Lives, by award-winning Quebec author Pierre Nepveu. She is most noted for Translators through History (with Jean Delisle), which has been translated and reprinted several times, and is currently working on a study of writers who translate. She was founding president of the Canadian Association for Translation Studies, of which she is an honorary member.