translating the female oriental other. introduction to a research

© 2008. Pieter BOULOGNE (ed.). Translation and Its Others. Selected Papers of the CETRA Research Seminar in Translation Studies 2007. http://www.kuleuven.be/cetra/papers/papers.html

Translating the Female Oriental Other.

Introduction to a Research Project1

Marta PACHECO PINTO

University of Lisbon

Abstract

This article corresponds to an initial draft or introduction to an interdisciplinary research project focused on the study of the Oriental woman in the literary production of two turn-of-the-century Portuguese writers, namely Wenceslau de Moraes and António Feijó. It presents a set of notes that put forward a descriptive proposal for analysing thatgendered cultural Other – particularly as far as translated literature is concerned –, as well as the cultural and translational implications of her literary construction to the nineteenth-century understanding of cultural diversity. Target-oriented, this research project draws from the culturalist approach advocated by Toury and from the comprehensive concept of cultural translation. To raise – mostly unanswered –questions and to put forward a set of working hypotheses are the main goals of the article here offered.

1. Introduction

Translation can be interpreted as a strategy to consolidate the cultural Other, a process

which implies not only the fixation of prevailing ideologies and of cultural filters but also

the blocking of any autonomous dynamics of cultural representation. (Wolf 2002: 188)

Translation, far from involving a simple transfer between/among/to-and-fro linguistic

boundaries (this limited perspective has long been contradicted and outdated by the

1980s cultural turn in Translation Studies),2 is a process of both negotiation between

cultures and problematisation of those cultures and their cross-cultural contacts. Within

1 As mentioned in the abstract of this article, it is not our purpose to fall into question/ answer arguments, but mostly to raise questions. This article merely provides an introduction to a research project that we have recently started digging into, so many of the questions it poses might seem naïve to those who are into the subject discussed. To us they are part of an ongoing intellectual exercise that seeks to cause reflection and debate. 2 Michaela Wolf has recently drawn translation scholars’ attention to a sociological turn in Translation Studies, which had its roots in the 1980s cultural turn but only recently has it come to the fore of academic discourse.

Marta PACHECO PINTO. “Translating the Female Oriental Other.Introduction to a Research Project” 2


this frame of cultural dialogism, translations have long been invested with the task of

transmitting or implementing a given representation of a particular culture. Of both

anthropological and ethnographic value, the ensuing cultural images become collective,

iconic “types” of an alterity that may change over time. That is why these images are

important textual sources for studying cultures, their alien subjects and behaviour. As

Michaela Wolf states:

In ethnographies as well as in translation in the traditional sense of the word, the cultural

Other is not verbalized directly but only indirectly, and filtered and arranged through the

ethnographer’s or translator’s consciousness. (2002: 181)

Wolf rightly equates ethnography with translation in the sense that translations are

cultural or culturally-manipulated/-manipulating filters. It goes without saying that these

“filters” result from the interference of translators’ beliefs and (pre)conceptions about

otherness, obviously shaped by socio-political, ideological and cultural constraints

(norms).3 As product of an inherently human activity or “consciousness,” translation

may indirectly (or directly, we would add and underline) but greatly influence the

images a nation may produce of a given Other. The study of such networks of cultural –

and rather mainstream – representations of the Foreign in literature evokes what Daniel-

Henri Pageaux or Jean-Marc Moura (just to mention a few) defined as “literary

imagology.” Since Imagology concerns the study of idealised images of an Other, it

opens up the possibility of understanding the connection between stereotype, social

imagery, literature, culture, and society.4 Though these images are subjected to a biased

or personal assessment of – and expectations about – the Other, they can become

particularly widespread by means of literature and its (literary) translation.

Translation may perpetuate stereotypically constructed images as clear-cut

instances of a manipulation process that puts into circulation certain cultural

representations. On this matter it is worth mentioning Walter Lippmann (considered to

be the first theorist of stereotypes) who states that stereotypes “mark out certain objects

as familiar or strange, emphasizing the difference, so that the slightly familiar is seen as

3 See Even-Zohar’s law of interference: 1990. “Laws of literary interference”. Poetics 11 (1): 53-72.4 On the emergence of national or cultural stereotypes and their literary expression/ expansion, see a rather interesting collection of 120 articles followed by a list of keywords on the subject: Manfred Beller and Joep Leerssen. 2007. Imagology. The Cultural Construction and Literary Representation of National Characters. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi.



very familiar, and the somewhat strange as sharply alien” (1922: 59). But how alien can

strangeness be conceived of? Is there a degree of strangeness? What is the Self’s

empirical basis for that “sharply alien” construction? What are the deontological

challenges such a deliberate act of cultural manipulation poses to translators?

Taking this sociological and ethnographic framework into consideration, it is our

aim to provide a possible plan of action for a translation research project. Focusing on

both translated and non-translated literature, we broadly aim at decoding the discursive

and hypothetically exotic representation of the female Oriental Other in 19th- and 20th-

century Portuguese literature (and by Oriental we are spatially referring to China and

Japan). We intend to address the way that female Oriental figure was deterritorialised,

transposed, imported, re-contextualised, reconceptualised, and perceived in the

Portuguese literary system by Portuguese male writers/translators, but more often than

not under a French-mediated insignia. We are therefore dealing with the topoi of literary

representation and formation of cultural identities, thus entering into the field of

Imagological Studies. The literary devices and translational strategies employed either

to preserve the foreign identity of that female Other or, on the contrary, to domesticate

that cultural image are also being handled. It is then our claim that source, mediating,

and target texts provide invaluable data for studying cultural identities and images.

Understanding how translators turn translation into a(n) (un)conscious manipulation

and/ or construction of cultural images, how translators turn literary translations into

exoticised or orientalised texts is our goal. It is also our aim to provide an

anthropological-like approach and/ or ethnographic insight into literary translation

through the study of the socio-political and cultural relevance of translational activity,

as well as its role in conceiving of and generalising stereotypes. So we are also

interested in finding out where stereotypes stem from and how they are maintained in

both translated and non-translated texts. What is then the role of writers and translators

in this game of textual distortion and manipulation?

1.1. Terminological framework

Any effective and coherent research project must be embedded in a well-defined set of

conceptual tools. As regards the project here drafted, it relies at least on four key

concepts: Orient, orientalism, exoticism, and cultural translation.



If by Orient we are specifically referring to a literary, political, cultural, social

construction created by the Western world (Said 2003 [1978]), then orientalism and

orientalising translate a dynamic process which creates and promotes a particular image

of that Orient.5 Although it is not our purpose to merge China and Japan into “the

Orient” category thus falling into a reductionist pitfall – especially because there are

other countries that also fit into this label –, the Far East on focus is a remote reality to

the average 19th-century European audience that oversimplifies its cultures and their

differences by fixing them as “the Orient.” Departing from this homogeneous

conception, reception, and experience of the Orient in Europe, we intend to question this

homogeneity and show that, despite their commonalities, there are relevant differences

that define each culture’s character. Why then does European literature, especially

Anglo and Francophone and those literatures living under their shadows (as is the case

of Portugal), cling to homogeneous images of the Orient? What was happening in

Europe at the time? To what extent can those representations be related to one’s national

way of contacting and relating to a foreign Other?

From Latin exoticus and Greek exôtikos, exoticism or exotic etymologically mean

foreign, different, strange (Carbonell 1996; Parrilla and García 2000). It is a particular

perception of, or an ideological, stylistic or literary discourse on, the cultural Other that

characterises both romantic and post-romantic 19th-century literatures (again,

particularly those of French and Anglo-Saxon origin). Frequently evoking an exotic

space as refuge or escape from reality, this textual tool turns an author, an overall poetic

text, a narrative, a character, a landscape, a feeling into a foreign construction.

Orientalism is then a particular form of exoticism, of intercultural contact, of

foreignising, expressing, and stating cultural difference. The strangeness it implies is

always defined in relation to the defining subject’s (Self’s) reference system and

background (ideas, values, prejudices); hence a relativist perception of cultural

otherness. If the exotic involves contact(s) between cultures, it must also necessarily

imply a self-motivated interest in those alien cultural systems, which are portrayed and

5 “[…] I shall be calling Orientalism, a way of coming to terms with the Orient that is based on the Orient’s special place in European Western experience. […] Orientalism expresses and represents the part culturally and even ideologically as a mode of discourse with supporting institutions, vocabulary, scholarship, imagery, doctrines, even colonial bureaucracies and colonial styles. […] Orientalism is a style of thought based upon an ontological and epistemological distinction made between ‘the Orient’ and (most of the time) ‘the Occident.’ […] Orientalism can be discussed and analyzed as the corporate institution for dealing with the Orient – dealing with it by making statements about it, authorizing views of it, describing it, by teaching it, settling it, ruling over it: in short, Orientalism as a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient” (Said 2003: 1-3).



filtered by the subjective and hardly ever non-avoidable ethnocentric eye of the Self’s

culture.

“[…] Exotisme: qui n’est autre que la notion du différent; la perception du Divers;

la connaissance que quelque chose n’est pas soi-même; et le pouvoir d’exotisme; qui

n’est que le pouvoir de concevoir autre” (Segalen 1978: 22): as Victor Segalen puts it,

exoticism is a particular aesthetic experience and assimilation of cultural diversity,

therefore translating the (Self’s) ability to conceive of diversity. How writers and

translators approach cultural otherness can be explained under the viewpoint of cultural

translation. This concept is highly operative within this context, since it helps describe

the rewriting of that alien experience in/ into the Self’s culture. That is why cultural

translation emerges as a particular way of appropriating and thus gaining control over

(rather than actual insight into) the cultural Other, the alter mundus. It involves cross-

cultural transfers which, in spite of delineating boundaries between cultures, are always

filtered, mediated through the Self’s subjective awareness. So a cultural translation is,

according to Trivedi, “a reader-oriented or ‘domesticating’ translation” (2007: 10) and,

for Talal Asad, the “tendency to read the implicit in alien cultures” (1986: 160): cultural

translations make the implicit explicit, almost converting that implicitness into the

picturesque symbolic feature of a given cultural representation. This clearly confirms

Claudia Egerer’s claim that the otherness we (believe to) perceive fits into “pre-existing

categories of European thought – reducing the exotic to a domesticated other” (Egerer

2001: 26) or, at least, an expected Other. In this sense, exoticism is a construct or

foreignising effect stemming from European imagination and targeted at European

audiences. This effect is what readers expect to find when dealing, for instance, with

travel literature. However distant an exotic text sounds, its distance eventually displays

readers’ expectations and preconceived images about otherness. Since readers are the

ones to attribute meaning to any act of writing and since exoticism is created for them

(even when the writer and reader categories overlap, as is the case of personal journals),

it becomes paradoxically synonymous with domestication and acceptability. Since

explicitation is “the technique of making explicit in the target text [culture] information

that is implicit in the source text [culture]” (Klaudy 2001: 80), exoticism as explicitation

is target-oriented. So, at least the way we consider it, literary exoticism goes hand in

hand with domestication. Hence the emergence of domesticated cultural representations,

in which the Other becomes the Self’s own biased representation of him/ herself, a



“subjective domestication by means of which the Other loses its identity or personality

when ‘changed’ into the Self’s affective language” (Buescu and Duarte 2007: 177).

1.2. Corpus

This conceptual frame can help us study the presence of alterity in both translated and

non-translated texts, as well as the particular contribution of translation to the

importation of cultural identities within a process of negotiation of asymmetrical

relationships between cultures and within a Western world known for its receptivity to

“things Oriental.” Although for the purpose of this article we are mainly interested in

successfully drafting a research method in Translation Studies, we must first refer to the

overall corpus of this research project, which includes authors from different

backgrounds, geoculturally distant, and with different practice of translation, but

nonetheless bonded together under the concept of cultural translation.

One of the authors of our corpus is the poet António Feijó (1859-1917) whose

Cancioneiro chinês [Chinese Songbook] (1890), the poetic Portuguese translation of

Judith Gautier’s Le Livre de jade (1867),6 more concerns us here. Gautier’s Livre is a

collection of poems by different but equally famous classical Chinese poets translated

directly from Chinese into French, a translation that marked out the opening of France

to Chinese literature and culture. Cancioneiro chinês is its partial translation into

Portuguese, since there was a careful selection of the poems to be translated, most of

which revolve around the beauty of Chinese female subjects (always portrayed in strict

harmony with Nature). Originally written by male poets, their poetic voices are mostly

male as well, and they explore female beauty and nature as inextricable alterities. With

regard to this Cancioneiro, we are mainly interested in tackling questions related to the

reception of those target texts in both target cultures and intermingle them with literary

translation concerns: if for a translation to be considered a literary text it must occupy a

particular position within the target literary system, then translating poetry – a subtype

of literary translation considered to be the best way to understand not only the mode of

importation of literary models, but also the poetic tradition or peculiarities of a target

culture (Keating 2005: 47) – will comprise all those translated texts which are produced, 6 Le Livre de jade was Gautier’s first translation, thus signalling the beginning of a successful literary career. It had such an impact on and a general acceptation in the French cultural system that it was repeatedly reprinted (in 1902, 1908, 1928, 1933, and more recently 2004) with several corrections and additions.



published, received, and recognised in the target culture as poetry. Furthermore, as

Casanova maintains:

since poetry is associated much more strongly than other literary genres with national

traditions, it has typically been regarded as evidence of a special national purpose, with

the result that no attempt has been made to relate the development of poetry to any larger

transnational history. (Casanova 2004: 53)

On the other hand, our study also comprises the overall literary production (most

of it non-translated literature) by the Portuguese interpreter of Japan, Wenceslau de

Moraes.7 Ethnographer or cultural interpreter of the Japanese reality, Wenceslau de

Moraes (1854-1929) dedicated his life to studying this cultural Other through first-hand

observation. His literature on the Orient and more particularly on Japan provides us

with an empirical, anthropological, ethnographic, and didactic insight into that Oriental

culture. The Japanese female figure plays a crucial role within his orientalist project

since she iconises Japan – part of its local colour, she gathers its more positive features.

The musume in particular stands for a cultural model that is repeatedly exalted in

opposition to Europe and, within the so-called Oriental geopolitical horizon, to China.

Moraes is the only author in our corpus to have truly experienced his object of study (he

lived in Macao for 10 years and then moved to Japan in 1898, where he lived until his

death). Camilo Pessanha (who will be referred to later in this article) is another case in

point that needs to be brought to light: poet, translator (from Chinese into Portuguese),

and sinologist, his in loco experience in Macao turns him into a necessary bridge

between Wenceslau de Moraes and António Feijó.

While António Feijó is regarded as one of the few Portuguese Parnassian poets

(Cancioneiro chinês being considered his most Parnassian work of art), Judith Gautier

(1845-1917) – daughter of one of the leaders of the French Parnassian movement,

Théophile Gautier – is also epitomised as “a remarkable literary figure, who was so 7 See Armando Martins Janeira. 1966. Um Intérprete português do Japão – Wenceslau de Moraes. Macao: Imprensa Nacional/ Instituto Luís de Camões. From Wenceslau de Moraes’s overall production, let us mention those works that will be given more thorough attention: Wenceslau de Moraes. 1897. Dai-Nippon (O Grande Japão). Lisbon: Imprensa Nacional; 1929. O Bon-Odori em Tokushima (caderno de impressões íntimas). Porto: Companhia Portuguesa Editora; 1987. O Culto do chá. Preface by Armando Martins Janeira. Macao: Instituto Cultural de Macau; 2006. O-Yoné e Ko-Haru. Introduction by Tereza Sena. Lisbon: Imprensa Nacional-Casa da Moeda; 1906. Paisagens da China e do Japão. Lisbon: Livraria Tavares Cardoso; 1973. Relance da alma japonesa. [s.l.]: A. M. Pereira, Lda.; 1983. Relance da história do Japão. Lisbon: Parceria A. M. Pereira; 1973. Serões no Japão. Lisbon: Parceria A. M. Pereira; 1971. Traços do Extremo Oriente – Sião, China e Japão. Lisbon: Parceria A. M. Pereira.



immersed in the Parnassian milieu that she was even referred to by some

contemporaries as the only female Parnassian” (Rubins 2002: 146). This female

parnasse8 verbalised in her translation the 18th-century orientalist vogue for things

Chinese (the so-called chinoiserie tendency) at a time when audiences were growing

more interested in Japanese culture and art. Still, her anthological volume came out in

the perfect time, and it was openly welcomed and praised by the 19th-century French

audience. Its translation into Portuguese appeared twenty years later.

Both Judith Gautier and António Feijó depict a Chinese culture with which they

did not empirically contact, because they were never in China (although Gautier was

educated by a Chinese tutor to whom she dedicated the first edition of her French

renditions, Tin-Tun-ling) or, in the Portuguese poet’s case, not even in Macao. The

absence of a first-hand experience – however shaped by some degree of sensitivity and

empathy towards their cultural subject matter – might have led them to convey

stereotypical images around the female figure (always with “black eyebrows/ [which]

Resemble […]/ The subtle antennae of butterflies” (Feijó 2004: 184; my translation)),

embellished by their preconceived ideas on the Orient and their Parnassian imagination.

Let us not forget that, as translators, each one chose the poems they wanted to translate.

On what basis did they make such a decision? And why did not Feijó translate all the

poems of Le Livre de jade? Could his textual memory or reading background of French

travel writers and others have exerted any kind of influence on his choice?

Cancioneiro chinês is, moreover, the result of indirect translation, in which

French is the intermediary language (to whose interference the Portuguese target system

was very tolerant, since the French culture, language, and literature added prestige to

literary peripheral systems). But is French merely the mediating language and main

point of accessing the Orient? What kind of relationship do Portugal and France share

as regards the Orient in view of the travel literature widely produced throughout the 19th

century by French travellers and explorers on both China and Japan (such as Pierre Loti,

Léon de Tinseau, Emile Gallé, André Bellessort, Paul Claudel)?

According to Carbonell, “[T]ranslation as a bridge between cultures may also be a

source of separation when it reaffirms received stereotypes” (1996: 83). Positively

conceptualised as a link, a bridge, a mediator between cultures, translations can also be 8 Judith Gautier could indeed be defined in exactly the same terms she defines Loïe Fuller concerning the musical show she brought to Paris during the 1900 World Exhibition: “Elle seule semble avoir compris que, pour réussir, il suffisait de donner au public quelque chose d'absolument nouveau et original. Elle a le succès. Elle a la vogue. C'est justice” (Gautier 1900: 5).



misleading when translators allow cultural dogmas to interfere with and govern the

translation process. Since Wenceslau de Moraes had the empirical knowledge of a

cultural microcosm to which the Portuguese culture had main access via French

writings and their translation into Portuguese, we can, in contrast, presume his work to

lack in stereotypical representations or, otherwise, to suggest new stereotypes. So do the

different geocultural positions of these authors in relation to the Orient influence the

way they portray that Oriental reality? Is there any kind of connection between those

different positions other than the fact that they illustrate cultural translations? Can we

associate their literary productions with specific translation strategies pointing to

different orientalising effects (and “translation” here covers a wider range of meanings,

such as the simple act of verbalising into one’s language the foreignness one’s eyes

perceive)?

1.3. Theoretical and methodological framework

As has already been suggested, this interdisciplinary research project draws on

theoretical and methodological approaches from the fields of Comparative Literature,

Translation Studies, Cultural Studies, and Gender Studies. So our corpus will be studied

on the basis of a comparative method divided into three interrelated moments: a

contextual, a macrostructural and a microstructural analysis.9 Notice that this micro-

level approach will involve the use of specific categories of textual analysis (yet to be

determined) intended to illustrate the presence of different types of literary exoticism10

(stylistic, rhetorical, lexical exoticism...) that may equally underlie the representation of

Chinese and Japanese women in the texts under study. These will then be related under

the viewpoint of the exotic configuration of that Oriental woman in order to understand

not only how the Portuguese cultural and literary system broadly perceived the Oriental

Other, but also how it perceived and accepted/ rejected otherness in general.

9 See José Lambert and Hendrik van Gorp (1985): “On describing translations”. In The Manipulation of Literature, Theo Hermans (ed). London and Sydney: Croom Helm. 42-53 (special emphasis on pages 52 and 53).10 On exoticism and on the exotic literary construction of characters, see: Francis Affergan. 1987. Exotisme et alterité. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France; Victor Segalen. 1978. Essai sur l’exotisme, une esthétique du divers (notes). Montpellier: Editions Fata Morgana; Jean-Marc Moura. 1992. Lire l’exotisme. Paris: Fayard; Jean-Marc Moura. 1998. La Littérature des lointains. Histoire de l’exotisme européen au XXe siècle. Paris: Champion; Jean-Marc Moura. 1998. L’Europe littéraire et l’ailleurs. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.



The historical period under analysis – end of the 19th century and beginning of the

20th century – was not chosen at random either. It can be described as a time span that

saw the revival or renewal of interest in things oriental, much enhanced by European

expansion into Asia. Widely known as the time of Orientalism in general and Japonisme

in particular (in the words of the French art critic Philippe Burty),11 the 19th-century

attraction for Japanese cultural items became particularly fashionable after both the

London (1851) and the Paris (1867) Universal Exhibitions, as well as after the opening

of Japan (and the slow widening of China’s intercultural connections) to the West

through the 1854 Convention of Kanagawa. Interestingly enough, this 19th-century

Orient was commonly associated with, and has recently been perceived as, a female

figure in opposition to Europe’s central, male, dominant position:

The projection of the oriental Other as female is a figuration of 19th-century social and

political crises in sexual language and rhetoric – the crisis of authority in the instability of

monarchy, the crisis of class hierarchy in a bourgeois age, the crises of family, gender,

and social structure in an age of rapid industrialization, urbanization, emigration and

immigration, and social change. All are figured in the concerns with the centrality and

coherence of masculine individualism over and against a feminine Other. […] sexuality

becomes the privileged field of reference in the 19th century; the 18th century’s cultural

Other of the Orient becomes the 19th century’s sexual Other. (Lowe 1986: 45)

The “projection of the oriental Other as female,” as Lisa Lowe theorised it, is

central to our discussion, since we claim that the Orient is perceived as a woman in the

texts that make up our corpus. Although Lowe’s theoretical approach is based on a clear

opposition between coloniser (Europe) and colonised (the Orient), we do not consider

the Orient under analysis as a colonial possession in relation to Portugal, as testified by

the historical and commercial relationships linking Portugal to China and Japan. Macao

is an exception in this frame of relationships, due to its status as international outpost of

Portuguese settlement and commerce in China. Moreover, if we are to consider, as

Lowe suggests, the Oriental woman as the embodiment and projection of European

contemplation, imagination and (sexual) desire, we will have to equate this feminised

foreign figure with Michael Cronin’s “invitation to discover, to engage with, the

11 “In 1872-73, Burty used the term Japonisme in a series of articles on Japan for La Renaissance littéraire et artistique” (Weisberg 1969: 277).



otherness […] even if there is always the attendant risk of exoticization” (2006: 67).

Our corpus illustrates then the 19th-century centrifugal movement (or decentring

Europe) towards things oriental based on a particular conception of the Oriental female

identity. Judith Gautier’s translation and both António Feijó’s and Wenceslau de

Moraes’s writings provide us with a cluster of images associated with those erotised and

sensualised representations that link this European imagery to a gender-oriented reading

of Oriental otherness.

Our interest in the 19th century is, on the other hand, also related to its intense

translational activity, chiefly indirect12 or French-mediated translation (France was both

a cultural and literary model to follow and “Paris was the capital of the Orientalist

world” (Said 2003: 51)). In fact, the 19th-century Portuguese so-called orientalist

literature has received so very little attention from the academia that only now has it

become an emerging discipline. It has so far never been studied under the viewpoint of

indirect translation or cultural translation or even of a “feminine Other” (Lowe 1986:

45). No wonder academic research on the interface between Portuguese culture and

literature and oriental cultures and literatures – with all the mediating cultures it

involves –, as well as between the Portuguese literary canon and exoticism/ orientalism

is scarce.

As regards the specific case of translated literature, following the tenets of

Descriptive Translation Studies (DTS) and Even-Zohar’s polysystem theory (1990

[1978]), we have been proposing a target-oriented, contrastive analysis of source and

target texts based on the culturalist model put forward by Gideon Toury. Since we are

not familiar with the Chinese language and indirect translation is our object of study, we

will not take into consideration the original Chinese poems13 so as to prove that second-

hand translations are a “culturally relevant phenomenon,” as well as “more than a mere

legitimate object for research” (Toury 1995: 130). We are not thus interested in

unveiling translation problems nor the strategies adopted to overcome them:

[...] concrete texts in languages other than the target’s are not part of necessary equipment

for launching research [...] even if none is used, the study will still pertain to Translation

12 See, for example, Susan Bassnett’s (2002) Translation Studies (London and New York: Routledge), as well as Gideon Toury’s (1995) Descriptive Translation Studies and Beyond (Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi), in particular chapter 7 – “A Lesson from Indirect Translation.” 13 So far, I have found no evidence of António Feijó having had access to the original Chinese poems.



Studies as long as the assumptions of their temporal preexistence and logical priority are

taken into account. (Toury 1995: 34)

It is still relevant to mention Edward Said’s “strategic comparatism,” which

encompasses two categories that help understand the functioning of polysystems:

strategic location – “[…] which is a way of describing the author’s position in a text

with regard to the Oriental material he writes about […]” (2003: 20) – and strategic

formation – “[…] a way of analyzing the relationship between texts and the way in

which groups of texts, types of texts, even textual genres, acquire mass, density, and

referential power among themselves and thereafter in the culture at large” (2003: 20).

These strategic approaches correspond, respectively, not only to the author’s or

translator’s position in relation to the textual material he/ she deals with (as we have

discussed in the previous section) but also the position translated and non-translated

texts play in wider literary systems. Understanding these relationships is necessary to

map all the networks of meaning and power at work in all the cultural systems involved

in this research project.

2. A case study: Le Livre de jade and Cancioneiro chinês

Although the poetic texts under analysis are both translated texts and thus target texts,

Cancioneiro chinês will be called the target text and Judith Gautier’s Le Livre de jade

its source text. The originals (the texts without which these subsequent translations

would have been impossible) will be considered all the Chinese poems Gautier selected,

collected, and translated.

Chinese poems ------- source text ------- target text

Judith Gautier’s Le Livre de jade

António Feijó’s Cancioneiro chinês

Resulting from indirect translation, António Feijó’s translation (or adaptation)

raises the question: “Which is really the source culture?” On the one hand, the culture at



stake is the Chinese culture and its literature; on the other, Feijó’s translated text

imported the 19th-century context of the French society.14 Gautier’s literary work must

have been greatly shaped or at least influenced by the literary conventions at work at the

time of her translation (let us mention Baudelaire’s formal experimentations and Catulle

Mendès’s – whom Gautier had just married to – Parnassian concerns) and by target

readers’ expectations. Readers expect to find what they – the receiving culture – believe

to be the cultural Other or what they associate with remote alterities. When the image

readers encounter goes against their expectations, they may reject translations and

translators.15 In its turn, and in addition to reproducing features specific to the

Portuguese literary context, the text Feijó translated reflects and intermingles the

Portuguese, French and Chinese poetics and culture, thus creating a threefold

transcultural space. Therefore, though Le Livre de jade is our source text, our source

culture is both the French and the Chinese ones, in fact a hybrid culture.

Translators’ power to conceive of identity, especially that of an Oriental female

Other, makes it necessary to understand the reasons (aesthetic-oriented or not) why the

Portuguese poet António Feijó translated that particular text, especially in view of the

fact that Portugal was a less cosmopolitan and autonomous16 place than France and,

therefore, less receptive to the influence of external literary movements, precisely

because literary innovation lay outside Portuguese mainstream literature. Two major

hypotheses stand out: (1) things Oriental being extremely fashionable in the 19th century

and Feijó being a Parnassian poet, who like most Parnassians was interested in exotic

and orientalist motifs, his translation of Le Livre de jade is an attempt to enrich his

literary production and guarantee both his greater status as a poet and prestige within the

Portuguese literary system and the overall acceptance of his poetry. (2) On the other

hand, his translation of Le Livre de jade could have been a strategy to expand on his

14 Curiously enough, the Brazilian writer Machado de Assis had published in 1870 a poetic volume (Falenas) containing eight poems translated from Le Livre de jade. In spite of Feijó’s translations being (visibly) different, he could have been inspired by this endeavour coming from a former colonial overseas possession. This hypothetical influence would be worth exploring since this is a clear example of a colony exerting power over the former mother-nation or, in rather simplistic terms, a metropolis copying its colony’s literary models, a periphery influencing the centre (of course, at the microsystem level). 15 It is important to mention Gideon Toury (“The nature and role of norms in translation,” 1995 [1978]) and his description of translators as social/ cultural agents: translators play a specific social role, since they are responsible for fulfilling society’s expectations as far as the translation “activity, its practitioners and/ or their products” (1995: 53) are concerned. See also: Michaela Wolf and Alexandra Fukari. 2007.Constructing a Sociology of Translation. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins.16 “In France […] the literary domination exerted over the whole of Europe from the eighteenth century onward so uncontested (and indeed incontestable), that it became the most autonomous literary space of all, which is to say the freest in relation to political and national institutions” (Casanova 2004: 87).



own skills as a poet. In addition to acquiring poetic skills, this translation would have

been a way of subtly introducing innovation into his own production and, more widely,

into the Portuguese literary system.

Though the critics and literary circles were at the time aware of the translational

nature of Cancioneiro chinês, it was quite often neglected as a translation and advocated

or referred to as an original text born out of the poet’s creativity and sensibility (cf., for

example, Lemos 1959). If we pay careful attention to its paratext (i.e. cover and editor’s

page) and more specifically to its epigraph17 and preface (written in French18 by

Tcheng-Ki-Tong, author of Les Chinois peints par eux-mêmes), we notice there is no

explicit mention to the word “translation.” The need to maintain this identity as

(pseudo)original might suggest that translation occupied a marginal position within the

Portuguese literary system. Therefore, translators or anyone associated with their

activity shared that same status. As regards Le Livre de jade, its subsequent editions

include a prelude which, though not signed, might be assigned to Judith Gautier. It

addresses readers directly, and it summarises the volume and contextualises its poets

and both their poetic skills and lyrical tradition. Contrary to what one may find in the

1867 edition, this prelude acknowledges the translational nature of that work by

exploring the features of classical Chinese poetry (through concrete examples) as if in

an attempt to guide readers through this literary translation:

[…] la césure; la rime; la division en strophes de quatre vers.

Dans un quatrain, les deux premiers et le dernier vers riment ensemble; le troisième ne

rime pas. Pour exemple, cette pièce, traduite plus loin, et intitulée […] Un effet, d’un

charme très original, et qui n’appartient, celui-là, qu’aux vers chinois, résulte de la nature

idéographique des caractères; il vous frappe par le seul aspect de l’écriture et vous donne

une brusque vision de l’ensemble du sujet […]. (Gautier 1933: 8-9)

In the first edition of Cancioneiro chinês, readers can however find in the index

page at the end of the book the name of each original Chinese poet between brackets.

The non-innocent need to ascribe authorship (or preserve it like Judith Gautier did in

17 “… quelques extraits de ce délicat Livre de jade dont l’exotique parfum de ginseng et de thé se mêle à l’odorante fraîcheur de l’eau qui babille, sous un clair de lune, tout le long du livre” (Feijó 2004: 152). Notice the use of the determiner ce, which clearly identifies Cancioneiro chinês with Le Livre de jade, without however stating the translational nature of that connection. 18 It is important to understand what kind of readership the translator-author had in mind when he ordered the French preface.



her Livre) to those poems only at the end of the volume is strategically curious. This

index functions similarly to a postface which, according to Genette (1997: 238-237),

plays a didactical role and holds the task of simultaneously complementing and

rectifying readers’ reading. Readers are free to choose whether to read or not this kind

of paratextual information. Such freedom ends up devaluing that piece of additional

information that is concealed from readers throughout the act of reading, and which they

only become aware of when they happen to consult the index. This choice eventually

dissimulates the fact that when a poet translates another poet’s poetry (even if that

poetry is itself a translation), these translations risk becoming mingled with the poet’s

own literary production. Sometimes these translations gain autonomy not only inside

the poet’s repertoire, but also within the literary system, thus becoming independent

works in their own right. Yet, some may be taken aback incautiously seized by the

sudden inclusion of those foreign names – who are they and what is the meaning of the

brackets accompanying them?

The non-transposition of this authorial element from the source text to the

Portuguese translation exemplifies a case of “zero replacement” (Toury 1995: 82). By

omitting or denying a foreign, external authorship to “his” poems, the Portuguese poet

and translator becomes their author. Feijó incorporated this work – widely claimed as a

great poetic achievement – into his own literary production. This overlapping of

authorship and translationship cannot be an unconscious decision on the part of the

Portuguese translator, hence highlighting a strategy of radical domestication. This

domestication could then justify some of the embellishments we come across in Feijó’s

translated poems. The Bakhtinian metaphor of the carnivalistic uncrowning of the

authority seems to underlie this gesture of uncrowning the original Chinese authors and

the French source translator in order to crown himself, the translator, as legitimate

author. This self-crowing of António Feijó tells us that “[I]n the world of carnival the

awareness of the people’s immortality is combined with the realization that established

authority and truth are relative” (Bakhtine 1984: 256). The authority Gautier once

exerted is replaced by Feijó’s; his Cancioneiro chinês, his afterlife product, becomes

labelled with his immortal name.

Feijó’s Cancioneiro is not, however, crowned with any kind of “textual asides”

(commentaries or footnotes), which may imply four different situations: (1) Feijó

clearly attempts to omit the translational nature of his book (therefore confirming its



status as pseudo-original and making it read as if it had been originally written in

Portuguese); (2) the absence of any textually manifested cultural bridge between the

target reader and the supposed source culture (China) might point to an adequacy

strategy; (3) Feijó thinks he has achieved such a high level of formal perfection that no

notes are needed to explain or justify his translation decisions, or (4) the translator

optimistically equates translation with a process of only gains and no losses so that no

complementary information is needed (or, should it be needed, it would introduce some

kind of unwanted disruption in the text). Nonetheless, throughout his career Feijó

translated other poems from Le Livre de jade, published in literary magazines and

journals or posthumously (so he did not have the chance to revise them), some of which

abound with footnotes. Does this mean that publication outlet influences translational

strategies even when translators have already an established status? Or does it illustrate,

on the contrary, a shift of perspective regarding the translation process?

Camilo Pessanha (1867-1926), António Feijó’s contemporary symbolist poet (and

Wenceslau de Moraes’s fellow co-worker at Liceu de Macau in Macao), was himself a

translator from Chinese. Unlike Feijó’s Cancioneiro, Pessanha’s Oito elegias chinesas

[Eight Chinese Elegies]19 (from the Ming dynasty) were directly translated from the

source language and were published in a literary journal as a bilingual edition. If, on the

one hand, he exposed himself and his translation skills through this bilingual edition,

which simultaneously makes it difficult for translators to manipulate meanings (though

at the time not many people fluently spoke both languages); on the other hand he drew

readers closer to classical Chinese poetry. Pessanha’s only published translation is also

full of descriptive endnotes, which aim at enlightening/ guiding the reader and function

as a link between readers’ cultural background and the Chinese cultural system. Clearly

there is no attempt at omitting the translational nature of these poems, in which the

translator assumes a didactic and visibly socio-cultural role. Their explicit and

explanatory nature point to acceptability, although were those poems to be read without

that initial apparatus, the reader would hardly make any sense out of it (so the adequacy

strategy would become unfeasible unless comprehensibility was a goal). In comparison

to Camilo Pessanha, António Feijó guarantees the legibility of his translations by means

of a thorough assimilation of the source text, thus acquiring visibility through his

interference in the text and by acknowledging himself as its author. This poet/

19 See Camilo Pessanha (trad.). 1999. As Elegias chinesas. Lisbon: Gradiva.



translator/ co-author hardly attempts to recreate the source cultural difference or

distance – like Camilo Pessanha or, for example, Ezra Pound tried to do through

specific textual strategies –, thus leading to a faint shadowy presence of otherness in his

translated poetry. Since the poems selected for Cancioneiro chinês are much about an

idyllic nature that mirrors the beauty of Chinese women, this female figure embodies

Feijó’s conception of Chinese otherness. A domesticating construction of the Oriental

woman as a mirror-image of the receiving culture is expected to find, because

perceiving the Other as Other is always a self- or nation-centred perception. Once more,

we can rely on Said when he compares Orientalism to a theatrical representation:

The idea of representation is a theatrical one: the Orient is the stage on which the whole

East is confined. On this stage will appear figures whose role it is to represent the larger

whole from which they emanate. The Orient then seems to be, not an unlimited extension

beyond the familiar European world, but rather a closed field, a theatrical stage affixed to

Europe. (2003: 63)

Within this staging of power, images, identities, discourses, and otherness, let us

now look more closely and attentively to the way the excerpts below (see Figure 1)

formally stage the Orient in two different European systems:

Les Perles de jadeTchan-Tiou-Lin

J’ai vu passer la première épouse du grand Mandarin Lo-Wang-Li; elle se promenait à cheval près du lac, dans l’allée où la lune blanchit les feuilles de saule.

En se promenant elle a laissé tomber de son cou quelques perles de jade ; un homme, qui se trouvait là, les a ramassées et s’est enfui très joyeux.

Mais moi, je n’ai pas ramassé de perles, parce que je regardais seulement le beau visage de la jeune femme, plus blanc que la lune dans les feuilles de saule, et je m’en suis allé en pleurant.

(Gautier 1933: 75-76)

As pérolas de jade

Vi passar uma vez perto de mim,Dos arbustos na álea verdejante,A primeira mulher do mandarimLo-Wang-Li, radiosa e triunfante.

Quando o cavalo a trote caminhavaJunto do lago onde passou primeiro,– Ao clarão do luar esbranquiçavaAs reluzentes folhas do salgueiro, –

Caíram-lhe do seio, como estrelas,As pérolas dum fio alvinitente...Alguém foi logo pressuroso erguê-las,E guardou-as, partindo alegremente.

Mas eu só via o seu perfil radioso,Como o salgueiro, de luar tocado,E em vez de níveas pérolas, ansioso,– Parti, levando o coração golpeado!

(Feijó 2004: 162-163)

Figure 1. Comparing verse selection in ST and TT



The decision concerning the most suitable verse form to adopt in poetry

translation is a preliminary decision that determines all the subsequent translation

process, so it must be consciously and carefully taken.20 One of the most striking formal

differences between the above source and target texts consists precisely in the lack of

prosodic agreement regarding the (ideal) verse form to translate classical Chinese verse:

if Judith Gautier prefers prose, António Feijó choses the verse form.21

Gautier’s conscious preference for “poèmes en prose” (i.e. a kind of poetry with

no line breaks that was against the strict rules and conventions of French

Neoclassicism), which became widely spread after Baudelaire’s Petits poèmes en prose

(le spleen de Paris),22 mirrors the poetic repertoire the poet-translator draws from.

Inspired by Aloysius Bertrand’s Gaspard de la nuit, Charles Baudelaire epitomises his

Spleen de Paris as “le miracle d’une prose poétique, musicale sans rythme et sans rime,

assez souple et assez heurtée pour s’adapter aux mouvements lyriques de l’âme, aux

ondulations de la rêverie, aux soubresauts de la conscience” (Baudelaire 1998: 26).

Judith Gautier seems to be contributing to this prosodic shift and challenge to

modernism (and Mallarmé’s “crise de vers”), much evoked by romanticists who

paralleled prose to poetry and which was also much associated with the French

parnasse. Note that many of Baudelaire’s prose poems had firstly been published in

Catulle Mendès’s Revue fantaisiste, founded in 1861 for disseminating the Parnassian

movement. Nonetheless, in Portugal, translating poetry into prose would be a rather

atypical behaviour that readers would easily reject. Moreover, Portuguese

Parnassianism cultivated rhymed verse, and very few poets (modernists especially, as is

the case of Almada Negreiros) did actually try to cultivate prose poetry without,

20 According to Toury’s translation norms, this structural choice would stand for his initial norm: “[…] the relations which do exist have to do with the initial norm. They might even be found to intersect it –another important reason to retain the opposition between ‘adequacy’ and ‘acceptability’ as a basic coordinate system for the formulation of explanatory hypotheses” (Toury 1995: 60). 21 For further discussion of classical Chinese literature and its translation (or “crossing borders”) into European languages, see Leo Tak-hung Chan’s (2003) One into Many. Translation and the Dissemination of Classical Chinese Literature (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi).22 Prose poem or “the modern cadence,” as Ezra Pound suggested in (1954) “The prose tradition in verse”. In Essays of Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot (ed). London and Boston: Faber and Faber. 371-377 (374). Antoine Berman, in La Traduction et la lettre ou l’auberge du lointain (1999), refers to: “[…] une traduction dans ce qui va s’appeler à partir de Baudelaire la ‘prose poétique’. […] Hegel, dans son Esthétique, estimait que la poésie pouvait être ‘traduite’ en prose; c’était aussi l’avis de Goethe. […] Peut-être la traduction-en-prose doit-elle être considérée comme un possible de la traduction de la poésie pour certaines œuvres” (1999: 104). It should be added that prose poetry had its first Anglophone enthusiast in Oscar Wilde (Poems in Prose, 1894) who in the late 1870s established himself as a spokesman for the Art for Art’s Sake Movement.



however, establishing a strong trend.23 Prima facie António Feijó shows some

resistance to formal innovation (since going against the norms may severely damage

translator’s reputation), but the extent to which it introduced thematic innovation needs

further discussion. This modernist structure was not welcomed as a subverting genre,

and António Feijó’s translation policy mirrors that literary context. Born out of the Art

for Art’s Sake Movement in the second half of the 19th century, Parnassianism

emphasised poets’ craftsmanship (in opposition to Romantic poets’ claim of divine

inspiration) and poetry’s visual aspect, apart from rejecting romanticist egocentrism and

sentimentalism. Since classical Chinese poetry cultivates the visual, suggestive impact

of Chinese characters, it becomes more than just a valuable object of translation for

Parnassians and importation into European cultures.

Both verse forms under discussion illustrate different translation strategies which

are, nevertheless, in accordance with the literary aesthetics at work at the time of the

translation process and which point to domesticated translations. In this regard, we

claim that there is a direct link between the formal structure adopted and the exotic

content of the poems, since, as we have repeatedly argued, exoticism as a synonym for

foreign is constructed on the basis of one’s (domesticated) conception of foreignness.

Gautier adopted one of the French accepted norms of verse translation – prose, which

might however reveal a disregard for the artistic quality of her source texts but a higher

concern with content –, whereas Feijó preferred to sing the attributes of Chinese female

beauty by means of verse. Prose was translated into verse, a(n) (unusual) structural shift

that results in a condensed poetic form (mostly groups of four-line stanzas) involving a

deliberate exercise of interpretation of the source lines. To go further, this discussion is

unlikely to occur within the Chinese literary tradition where the distinction between

prose and verse has no relevance whatsoever:

23 Eça de Queirós, with his “Notas marginais” in Prosas bárbaras (1866), was the actual founder of this genre in Portugal. If António Feijó chose not to follow this recently developed genre, either he was against it or Queirós’s “poèmes en prose” simply had little impact on the overall 19th-century literary repertoire. Although António Feijó’s translation did not contribute to reinforcing this poetic genre, one cannot however mention prose poetry without referring to translation. As Susan Bernard explains in her seminal work Le Poème en prose. De Baudelaire jusqu’à nos jours, translation played a crucial role in introducing 18th-century French audiences to “l’idée d’une poésie en prose” (1959: 23). The French translations of Ossian’s poems, as well as of classical authors such as Homer, Fenelon, and Milton created the urge to return to lyricism by means of a confessional structure, prose, which Aloysius Bertrand and Charles Baudelaire would successfully follow through in the 19th century.



Il est d’autant plus important de prendre conscience de l’inexistence du clivage prose-

poésie dans la théorie littéraire chinoise classique que cette distinction tend à disparaître

dans la littérature occidentale moderne elle-même. (Détrie 1991: 134)

Whether prose or verse, translators felt the need to follow target literary

conventions in order to guarantee the acceptance of their texts within their receiving

culture. Feijó did not, however, follow the tendency set by the literary centre of the 19th-

century Western polysystem. So, at least as far as this Parnassian translation is

concerned, the Portuguese literary system acquired an autonomous and independent

status from the French literary dominance. We can then assume Feijó’s translation of Le

Livre de jade to have played an aesthetic role within his overall literary production by

underlying his Parnassianism and attempt to be at the service of a national poetic

movement. But did Feijó’s translation serve any aesthetic end like its French source text

or introduce any substantial innovation into its corresponding literary system (since

oriental motifs remained peripheral to poets’ main literary concerns)? How do

translations and translators – as ethnographers or cultural interpreters – contribute to the

general acceptance of a given cultural product? Can we actually claim an othering or

orientalising effect for António Feijó who accessed the Oriental Other through the

intermediation of a Western language and culture? Which place do the Chinese poetic

conventions occupy in our translated corpus? How can one relate poetry translation of

“things Oriental” to the evolution of a given poetics, as well as to the emergence of a

particular type of intercultural and trans-historical documentation of the Oriental Other?

Has the Portuguese author and translator tried to create a poetic of his own through a

mixture of elements from both French (central canon) and Chinese (marginal literary

system) traditions? Is not, then, Feijó’s translation hybrid in nature? Can the Portuguese

culture be also hybrid, since the connection of Portugal to the Orient was much shaped

by the interference of the French culture? Can the translated texts under analysis still be

called “translations”? After all, what is a translation?



3. Conclusion

In this article we have first and foremost proposed an interdisciplinary analysis of some

turn-of-the-century Portuguese literary productions, which celebrate and highlight an

exoticised cultural diversity. Though this is a basic draft of a specific theoretical

translation thinking, we have, however, tried to suggest that translation is a linguistic,

cultural, discursive practice that (re)produces, filters, mediates, and (re)creates a cultural

Other, simultaneously focusing not only on the Orient as the passive object of

ethnocentric and literary representation, but actively influencing Western culture and

literature. Literary translation in general emerges as an intercultural dialogue between

different literatures and literary traditions. Hence literature and literary translation are

artistic forms of expressing, creating, gendering, contacting with, seeking, and giving

meaning to the world, a true kaleidoscope of diversity.

References

Primary literature

Feijó, António. 2004. Poesias completas, J. Cândido Martins (pref). Ponte de Lima:

Edições Caixotim.

Gautier, Judith. 1933. Le Livre de jade. Paris: Librairie Plon.

Secondary literature

Asad, Talal. 1986. “The concept of cultural translation”. In Writing Culture, James

Clifford and George E. Marcus (eds.). Berkeley: University of California Press.

Bakhtin, Mikhail. 1984. Rabelais and his World, Hélène Iswolsky (transl.).

Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.

Baudelaire, Charles. 1998. Petits poèmes en prose (le spleen de Paris), Pierre-Louis

Rey (pref). Paris: Pocket.

Bassnett, Susan. 2002. Translation Studies. London and New York: Routledge.

Berman, Antoine. 1999. La Traduction et la lettre ou l’auberge du lointain. Paris: Seuil.



Bernard, Susan. 1959. Le Poème en prose. De Baudelaire jusqu’à nos jours. Paris:

Librairie Nizet.

Buescu, Helena and João Ferreira Duarte. 2007. “Communicating voices: Herberto

Helder’s experiments in cross-cultural poetry”. Forum for Modern Languages

Study 43 (2): 173-186.

Carbonell, Ovidi. 1996. “The exotic space of translation”. In Translation, Power,

Subversion, Román Álvarez and M. Carmen-África Vidal (eds). Clevedon,

Philadelphia, Adelaide: Multilingual Matters, LTD. 79-98.

Casanova, Pascale. 2004. The World Republic of Letters, M. B. Debevoise (trans).

Cambridge and Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.

Cronin, Michael. 2006. Translation and Identity. London and New York: Routledge.

Détrie, Muriel. 1991. “Poétiques orientales, poétiques occidentales”. Revue de

littérature comparée 65 (2): 133- 138.

Egerer, Claudia. 2001. “Ambivalent geographies – The exotic as domesticated other”.

Third Text 55: 15-28.

Even-Zohar, Itamar. 1990. “The law of literary interference”. Poetics Today 11 (1): 53-

72.

Gautier, Judith. 1900. Les Musiques à l’exposition de 1900 – La Musique japonaise, Les

Danses de sada-yacco. Paris: Société d’Editions Littéraires & Artistiques,

Librairie Paul Ollendorff, Enoch et Cie.

Keating, Maria Eduarda. 2005. “Poéticas da tradução poética”. Relâmpago – Revista de

poesia 17: 47-61.

Klaudy, Kinga. 2001. “Explicitation”. In Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation

Studies, Mona Baker (ed). London and New York: Routledge. 80-84.

Lemos, Júlio de. 1959. Achegas bio-biblio-iconográficas – No 1º centenário do

nascimento de António Feijó 1859-1959, 1 de Junho. Ponte de Lima: Câmara

Municipal de Ponte de Lima.

Lippmann, Walter. 1922. Public Opinion. New York: Macmillan.

Lowe, Lisa. 1986. “The orient as woman in Flaubert’s Salammbô and Voyage en

Orient”. Comparative Literature Studies 23 (1): 44-58.

Parrilla, Gonzalo & García, Manuel. 2000. Orientalismo, exotismo y traducción.

Toledo: Escuela de Traductores de Toledo.



Rubins, Maria. 2002. “Dialogues across cultures: Adaptations of Chinese verse by

Judith Gautier and Nikolai Gumilev”. Comparative Literature: 145-164.

Said, Edward. 2003. Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books.

Segalen, Victor. 1978. Essai sur l’exotisme, une esthétique du divers (notes).

Montpellier: Fata Morgana.

Toury, Gideon. 1995. Descriptive Translation Studies and Beyond. Amsterdam and

Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

Trivedi, Harish. 2007. “Translating culture vs. cultural translation”. Lecture delievered

on 9th November 2007 at the University of Warwick (UK).

http://search.warwick.ac.uk/website?q=Harish+Trivedi&contentType=&indexSect

ion=sitebuilder&sortBy=rel&pagenumber=2. Visited November 2007.

Weisberg, Gabriel P. 1969. “Félix Bracquemond and Japanese influence in ceramic

decoration”. The Art Bulletin 51 (3): 277-280.

Wolf, Michaela. 2002. “Culture as translation – and beyond ethnographic models of

representation in translation studies”. In Crosscultural Transgressions, Theo

Hermans (ed.). Manchester: St. Jerome Publishing. 180-192.

About the author

Marta PACHECO PINTO graduated in Translation in 2006 at the Faculty of Arts of the University of Lisbon, where she is at present working on a PhD in Translation Studies. Being a member of the Centre for Comparative Studies, she is involved in several activities with regard to this field. She also works part-time as a translator. Currently, she is co-editing the proceedings of the 3rd World Congress of the International American Studies Association.

Address: Centro de Estudos Comparatistas, Faculdade de Letras da Universidade de Lisboa, Cidade Universitária, 1600-214 Lisboa, Portugal

E-mail: [email protected]

translating the female oriental other. introduction to a research

Documents