Varying notions of fidelity

Lori Chamberlain points out how the meaning of the word “fidelity” changes with the context and purpose of translation. The gender roles of the text and the translator vary accordingly. Sometimes fidelity means the female text’s relation to the male original / author or the translator who is also male. In some other cases, fidelity is defined as the male translator’s relation with his female mother-tongue. Here the mother-tongue has to be protected by the knight-translator. This chivalrous masculine desire to protect the mother-tongue, however, does condone the act of violation of another language in the act of translation. Chamberlain illustrates this by the example of Thomas Drant, the 16th century English translator of Horace who says that he has done to Horace what the “people of God were commanded to do with their captive women that were handsome and beautiful”, which was to “shave off his hair and pare off his nails” or make Horace very English (qtd in Chamberlain 318).

Serge Gavronsky who has worked on gender issues in translation, divides translation metaphors into two groups: pietistic and cannibalistic. The first group consists of “metaphors based on the coincidence of courtly and Christian traditions, wherein the conventional knight pledges fidelity to the unravished lady, as the Christian to the Virgin” (Chamberlain, 319). This is a master-slave hierarchical relation where the translator is clearly playing a secondary role, and can also be described as “positional translation” (319). The cannibalistic model on the other hand has the aggressive translator who feeds on the text and expresses it in his own terms, thereby getting rid of the original creator. This liberates the translator from the restrictions of following the original. Gavronsky visualizes this relationship as essentially Oedipal: “the translator considers himself as the child of the father-creator, his rival, while the text becomes the object of desire, that which has been completely defined by the paternal figure, the phallus-pen” (qtd in Chamberlain, 319). To produce a ‘good’ translation, the translator has to prevent himself from taking far too many liberties with the text; taking too much freedom is like killing the father figure, which in this case is the author. In the cannibalistic model, this elimination of the father actually takes place, as the translator appropriates the text to express himself.