Revisiting Gender and Translation in the eighteenth century (France and the Low Countries)

For a long time and for different reasons, women writers have been predominantly neglected by literary historians both in terms of visibility and regarding the critical assessment of their work. These past few decades, however, interest in their literary agency has increased, often challenging assumptions on gender, in relation to literature as a creative process and to the mechanisms of canon formation. In my lecture, I propose to further engage with this increasing interest in female literary agency, by extending it to their role as translators. Focusing on some eighteenth-century women from different cultural contexts (France and the Low Countries) who were both writers and translators, I will combine concepts of (among others) feminist translation studies (Von Flotow; Simon; Hayes) and sociology of literature (Meizoz) to examine why and how these women used translation as a negotiation space, in order to actively shape what I call their “transla(u)t(h)orial posture”, in terms of a relational and a dynamic process of self-definition and self-affirmation.
In this regard, it will be important to look at the discursive strategies they adopted in their (often elaborate) paratexts, as well as study the (private) correspondence in which they reflected on their personal choices and literary ambitions as translator. Bringing these “public” texts and (inter)personal archives into dialogue allows for a more nuanced, intertextual reading these women’s continuous (re)positioning as a “translauthors”.