There is no difference between the translation policy of the publishing house Des femmes and an editorial project that was itself originally part of the strategy of the Women’s Liberation Movement (MLF), organized around Psychanalyse et Politique, and is now part of the strategy of the Women’s Alliance for Democracy.
1 Or, rather, the only difference is that the field covered by our translation policy is more specific, while that of the movement is broader.
One of my first preoccupations as a political activist was to organize an international colloquium (at La Tranche-sur-Mer in June 1972). It seemed to me that, in the years to come, Europe would find its true place among women. At the time, I was interested in establishing an original movement, as opposed to America’s “women’s lib,” which was too outwardly oriented, too concerned with winning equality at work and with struggling against discriminatory laws and actions. We needed a European movement that could draw upon the wealth of contemporary ideas, a cultural, civilizational, and intellectual movement that was in touch with the emotions, interiority, and identity of the subject and that was concerned with the personal and private realm. We needed not just to raise consciousness but to discover the unconscious; we needed a
revolution of the symbolic, to use the expression I employed at the time—I would now speak of a
reinvention of
ethics. The time was at hand, it seemed to me, for Rimbaud’s prophecy to be fulfilled: freed from their age-old servitudes, women would become the translators of the real, messengers of the impossible, and poets.
Founding a publishing house in 1973 was a way of formulating these multiple demands, of making part of the dream of abolishing linguistic frontiers come true, and of reaching a new stage in our liberation. No literature and no writing will ever be alien to Des femmes. Two of the first three books we published were translations. Even now, only half the titles in our catalogue were written directly in French. Let me use an anecdote to illustrate this geo-politico-poetico-editorial policy. During a “feminist” trip to England, Françoise Ducrocq introduced me to her friend Juliet Mitchell, whose thought and activity were close to those of the antipsychiatrists associated with New Left Review. We had a long discussion about the importance I attached to psychoanalysis for theorizing and advancing the women’s movement. Juliet Mitchell does not speak French, and my English is poor. Even though we could not really understand each other, we managed to get a few questions across. Our political moorings are perceptibly different. Shortly afterward, Juliet Mitchell paid me a long visit in Paris, and I spoke to her at length again about Lacan, Barthes, Derrida … A few months later, she began her analytic training and wrote Psychoanalysis and Feminism. We published it, in a translation by Françoise Ducrocq and others. Echoing our psychoanalytic and political work, the essay traces an original path for the entire women’s movement; it met with international success. A further stage, our collection La Psychanalyste (the female psychoanalyst) led to an encounter with women who had explored the unconscious; they came from the four corners of Europe and beyond. Margarete Mitscherlich, Hanna Segal, Joan Riviere, Margaret Little, Lou Andreas-Salomé, Karen Horney, Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel, and many others attest to this multifaceted movement and to the complex exchanges and textual interplay that took place between women and psychoanalysis.
A translation policy can, in my opinion, be based only upon analytic thought and poetic creation. The real is the object of both; the motive behind them is wish fulfillment; their work is that of translation, and their common source is the “trance.” In my view, the prefix
trans- presides over the loving trade known as publishing. Like a dream, a text is translation, trans literation, transaction, transport, transfer, transference, literally a metaphor: translation of unconscious thoughts, transfiguration of the unfigurable, translation of the relation of unknown, transliteration of the lost letter, transaction between translator and author, between author and translator, transference from one state to another, and transport from a body to a text. A publishing house is thus the transitional space where these transformations take place, the matrix for such transpositions. Gestation, or the capacity to think, welcome, and be with the other, strikes me as the paradigm of the linguistic and
fleshly hospitality known as poetry, thought, translation, and publishing.
I forgot, though, that texts, dreams, and translations inevitably involve transgression. Because they resist the language of Creon, which Barthes audaciously describes as “quite simply fascist,”
2 dreamers, poets, and translators, who are all perverse polyglots, free us from its stereotypes. A dangerous and vital transgression takes place between the flesh and the word, between the idiom and the law. Elementary captives of the mother tongue and lexical virtuosos alike will need more than one language, familiar or unfamiliar, heterogeneous or original, phallic or maternal, if they are to be born into the world of their own texts. Writing, translating, or being a woman always implies at least two genitrix languages. Most poets are translators, and many translators are poets, but the majority of translators are women. Thinking writers recall the maternal idiom; women of letters (I love that expression) know that they are consubstantial with the father. Sibilla Aleramo, Lou-Andreas Salomé, Natalia Baranskaïa, Chantal Chawaf, Hélène Cixous, Assia Djebar, Hilda Doolittle, Jeanne Hyvrard, Denise Le Dantec, Clarice Lispector, Nata Minor, Irmtraud Morgner, Anaïs Nin, Nelida Piñon, Sylvia Plath, Amrita Pritam, Michèle Ramond, Nawal El Saadawi, Emma Santos, Duong Thu Huong, Yuko Tsushima, Virginia Woolf, Maria Zambrano, Friderike and Stefan Zweig and many others are witnesses to a living present.
While any writer worthy of the name is part of the (r)evolutionary promise, many revolutionaries have had an international destiny thanks to their books. The dissidents imprisoned by Franco (Eva Forest, Lidia Falcón …), the feminists hunted down by Communism (Tatyana Mamonova, Julia Voznesenskaya), and the democrats persecuted by the Burmese junta (Aung San Suu Kyi) are also in the resistance; translating them opens up the world of books to solidarity and symbolically frees these rebel women from Creon, especially when literary creation and political analysis are closely entwined, as in the case of the Vietnamese writer Duong Thu Huong.
Not so long ago—it was in 1978—Laure Bataillon was astonished when I suggested that I should interview her: “I might say that it’s very unexpected, almost unlikely, for a translator to be asked to express her views; translators are usually asked to keep quiet at all costs, and to make absolutely sure that they do keep quiet, their approach and function are usually ignored.”
3 While I travel the world in search of writers and women engaged in struggles, our women translators, working at home and crossing borders at the same time, propose to “liberate”—sorry, “publish”—a secret text that had been forbidden to enter the country and that has long been repressed by publishers. This happened with Viviane Forrester and Virginia Woolf’s
Three Guineas, with Sylvie Durastanti and Clarice Lispector’s
La paixão Segundo G.H., and with Nicole Casanova and Lou Andreas-Salomé’s
Fenitschka and
Rodinka.Des femmes is a small publishing house that has sought to remain apart from both the national and artisanal regression and the lying poker games of the industrial publishers who create “best sellers.” Our ambition is at once modest and modern: to create an ensemble or set, in the musical, mathematical, and convivial senses of the words, where the individual can flourish within a group, where a singular destiny can echo a shared destiny, and where the polyphonic translators known as dissidents, dreamers, poets, and women can recognize one another, understand one another, and forge an alliance.
Reading sets the voice of the text free and allows us to hear it. This is not the voice of the author. This is a matricial voice that is inside the author, in the same way that the genie is inside the bottle in fairy tales. This is a genius-voice, a genital voice that generates text. I am not sure that Nathalie Sarraute’s
Childhood doesn’t come from Madeleine Renaud’s reading of
Tropisms, which succeeds in recapturing a child’s voice.
5Read Proust, listen to Proust. The primal scene is not the one with the madeleine. It is the one before: “I had not then read any real novels” said the narrator when his mother read him François
le Champi.6 His mother’s voice, which he associates with his grandmother’s, returns, moreover, at the end of
La recherche du temps perdu, at the point where he decides to write the novel—which is in fact almost finished. This becomes all the more interesting when we notice that François
le Champi is a novel about a search for the body, for the voice of the other, and that the name of its heroine, François’s adoptive but still “incestuous” mother, is Madeleine. George Sand, a woman of letters with a masculine name, plays subtly on genres and genders: masculine and feminine, oral and written, body and name, flesh and pen. When read by these two women,
François le Champi is the latent, manifest, matricial novel of
La recherche that has been lost and found again, perpetually
in statu nascendi. This is the origin, the alpha and omega, of Proust’s writing. Proust the writer saw himself as a pregnant and parturient female who was giving birth to a text that was permanently in gestation.
Female writing rather than “feminine” writing. The love between women that fascinated him was not so much lesbian homosexuality—even though he analyzes perversion better than anyone—as his own homosexuation to the mother, a
native, naive
homosexuality. He was born as a writer to the female couple constituted by his mother and his grandmother, rather than as a son born to his parents, to a father and a mother. The voice of these women was the one that told him, dictated to him, that he had a vocation to become a writer; this is the Orient of his text, its birth, its fleshly trace.
The voice orients the written word, from the oral to the genital, from the genital to the oral, toward the old back country, toward primal thought. The voice is fecundity, conception, gestation, and promise. It makes a gift of the text to the world to come.