post-colonial_translation

148 Rosemary Arrojo
published translation of the Brazilian writer’s texts which would
prevent readers from having access to that which she finds so essential
in Lispector. In such circumstances, how does one teach an author
whose texts are written in Brazilian Portuguese to students who are
not familiar with this peripheral language According to Cixous, by
means of a careful ‘word for word’ translation strategy which she
undertakes with students in her seminars (Cixous 1991a), and which
seems to follow a similar rationale as current post-colonial textual
strategies such as Tejaswini Niranjana’s option for ‘literalness’ in order
to avoid ‘homogenizing’ the original (ibid., p. 185) and Lawrence
Venuti’s conception of foreignizing translation aimed at preventing
the process from ‘overpower [ing] and domesticat[ing] the foreign
text, annihilating its foreignness’ (ibid., p. 305).
Obviously, particularly from Cixous’s perspective, the plot of this
productive encounter between a reader and a writer has a lot in common
with a successful love affair. After having ‘wandered ten years in the
desert of books – without encountering an answer’ (Cixous 1979b, p.
10), Cixous found in Lispector’s texts all that she had apparently lost
and could not quite see anywhere else. It is a myriad of all the positive
feelings which such a joyous ‘discovery’ brought to the French thinker
that is emotionally expressed in the recurring, lyrical metaphors of the
apple and the orange particularly developed in Vivre l’orange, a lengthy,
loving celebration of this fertile encounter between two women, a reader
and an author, happily brought together allegedly to undo all the evils
of patriarchy. The ‘apple’ which Cixous finds in Lispector comprises
not only references to Eve’s fruit and all its implications for the
relationship between women and the law, but also to one of Lispector’s
novels, A Maçã no Escuro (1961). It is the finding of such an affirmative,
feminine ‘apple’ that allows Cixous to recover (and to rewrite) a longlost
‘orange’, which synthesizes references to her very origins and
individuality – her birth town (Oran, Algeria), combined with the
personal pronoun Je – and to all the associations related to the flowing,
life-giving elements that she has identified with a ‘feminine’ approach
to reality (Shiach 1989, p. 160). This apple turned into an orange which
has brought fruition to Cixous’s writing, saving her ‘deserted hands’,
is, therefore, also the outcome of her learning experience ‘at the school
of Clarice’, ‘a woman with athletic eyes’ who ‘should teach us how to
think in the direction of a thing, a rose, a woman, without killing another
thing, another woman, another rose, without forgetting’ (Cixous
1979b, p. 98).