The object of this TfL special issue is to explore the figuration of sex and gender in translated and internationally circulated literature. To this end, we first ask how matters of sex and gender affect literary translation – considering, for instance, how gendered and sexualized terms are translated from one language to another, and how gender hierarchies in society impact the consecration of translated fiction. But importantly, recognizing that literature plays vital roles in the “writing of culture” and that “there is no gender from the start,” we also ask how the translation of literary texts takes part in the construction and dissemination of social, political and sexual categories.1 And as the following pages testify, the connections between these two concerns are equally relevant when studying the cross-cultural migration of ancient texts as the finer workings of the contemporary book market.

In the field of translation studies, questions of sex and gender have played important roles for decades, particularly in connection to feminist theory.2 A famed example has to do with the translations of Simone de Beauvoir’s Le deuxième sexe, published in French in 1949 and exceptionally important for second wave feminism. Beginning in the 1980’s, critical examinations have shown that the bowdlerized English version from 1953 significantly misrepresented Beauvoir’s thinking – particularly on matters of sex.3 Another example is Mona Baker’s reminder in 1992 that the Arabic didn’t have a neutral word for “homosexuality,” and that (homo)sexuality therefore should be considered an important problematic for translation studies.4 More recently, connections between translation and sex have led to an increased awareness of previously neglected materials, as well as to reconsiderations of established translations. In a 2014 special issue of Comparative Literature Studies, for instance, scholars raised questions of how to appropriately translate supposedly gender-neutral terms in older texts (e.g. the French “homme” in 17^th century treatises), and how literary translation ties in with the construction of sexual identities – historically and in the present.5 Similarly, studies on the translation of erotic literature (by José Santaemilia, for example) have stressed both the stylistic nuances within texts that inevitably arise when translating sexually explicit materials, and how such texts have effects outside themselves, particularly as they shape perceptions of sexuality.6

Important advancements have also been made in connections between translation studies and queer theory. On the one hand, scholars like Marc Démont have (re)examined translations of queer texts, mapping both strategies for translating queerness and the effects resulting from homogenizing and “straight” translation.7 On the other, notions of queerness have led to reconsiderations of the pregiven categories and concepts of translation studies, not least by problematizing binary pairs like source and target culture, or original and translation. In Queer Theory and Translation Studies (2021), Brian James Baer argues that this is particularly important as translation studies have tended to define “the other” in cultural and linguistic terms – not sexual or social. Considering translation in tandem with queer experiences and epistemologies, he contends, is therefore key in any attempt at a “counterhegemonic rethinking” of how language and the cross-cultural migration of texts affect gendered and sexual identities.8

Somewhat surprisingly, questions of how gender and sex affect translation (and vice versa) have figured far less prominently in research on World Literature – despite its dramatic surge since the turn of the millennium.9 Part of the explanation has to do with the systemic and structural approaches by scholars like Casanova, Heilbron, Moretti and Sapiro, where the formative relations between the center and peripheries of the world literary sphere have taken precedence. But one should also recognize that efforts to move beyond the center/periphery-divide have tended to highlight geography, culture and language rather than gender or sex – not unlike the linguistically marked “other” of translation studies. This is not to say that recent scholarship on World Literature (and the world’s literatures) is flawed or misconstrued. Quite the contrary: much has been gained by increased awareness on the dynamic between vernacular and cosmopolitan literature, for example, or how literary migration ties in with cultural mobility and conceptions of nationhood. And yet the general silence on matters of gender and sex is easily perceived. In a sense it echoes what Derrida once called Heidegger’s “stubborn mutism” on the same issue.10

By connecting the exploration of sex and gender in translated literature to translation studies, queer theory and scholarship on world literature, we hope to highlight and establish new lines of inquiry and interdisciplinary collaboration. Remo Verdickt’s opening essay about James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room is exemplary in this regard: it tracks the novel’s transformation across a range of European languages to understand the strategies different translators have employed to handle Baldwin’s sexually explicit prose, how those strategies reflect historically situated notions of (homo)sexuality, and what the host of both older and recent editions of Giovanni’s Room imply regarding Baldwin’s stature as a world literary figure in the 21^st century. Similarly, in the second essay of the issue Milan Vukašinović and Lilli Hölzlhammer explore the long translation history of the Old Indian fable collection Panchatantra, detailing its “prismatic translation.” Drawing on theories of untranslatability, they particularly emphasize how notions of gender have been shaped by the text’s transpositions from Sanskrit to Middle Persian, Arabic, Byzantine Greek, Old Slavonic, Serbian and English – owning both to strictures of grammar and the idiosyncrasies of individual translators.

Turning from details in individual translated texts (albeit with far-reaching implications for the politics of gender and sex), Marcus Axelsson’s contribution examines gender hierarchies in the paratexts of translated fiction on the Scandinavian book market. With a corpus of more than 300 titles, he shows how review excerpts on book covers are configured through an interplay between genre, target and source culture relations, and the gender of both reviewers and prospective readers, thus stressing the importance of sex and gender as analytical categories for the sociology of translation. Keeping the focus on reviews and paratexts, in the issue’s fourth essay Berit Grønn and Britt W. Svenhard analyze the Norwegian reception of Disney’s Encanto. They show that the film’s close connections to Gabriel García Márquez Cien años de soledad and Colombian notions of matriarchy was downplayed in Norway, with reviewers instead stressing its portrayal of a modern (potentially feminist) Disney-princess. While clarifying Encanto’s reception in Norway, Grønn and Svenhard also outline more generalized patterns of how notions of gender and genre are transmitted across languages, culture and media – thereby laying the grounds for further research. In a sense turning back towards textual minutiae, Oscar Jansson’s essay then analyses the implications of untranslated terms of endearment in Violine Huisman’s The Book of Mother and Sang Young Park’s Love in the Big City, arguing that the aesthetics of translation ties in with an ethics of reading translated literature.

Following these five essays, the issue turns to a close with Anna Hultman’s conference report from the 2022 Komplitt symposium “Translation/Transmission/Transgression,” held at Lund University, where several contributors to the special issue presented papers. Hultman’s report is key in the sense that it clarifies some of the backgrounds for the special issue’s rationale – and parts of the institutional collaborations between Lund, Leuven, Østfold and other universities that have given the issue momentum. And importantly, Hultman’s report also exemplifies how the questions raised at both the symposium and in this special issue might be explored in the future, in continued and renewed collaborations and projects.

Oscar Jansson

Lund, 2023