Session 7: Erotic Literatures II

5th Global Conference

Friday 6th November – Sunday 8th November 2009
Salzburg, Austria

A Study on the English Translation of Eroticism: The Case of Li Ang’s Sha Fu
Yi-ping Wu
English Department/Graduate Institute of Interpreting and Translation, National Kaohsiung First University of Science and Technology, Taiwan, R.O.C.

Complete omission and mitigation of sexual descriptions are two translation strategies employed by the translators to avoid indecency or to reduce obscenity. In his study of Chinese translation of sexual descriptions in The Color Purple, Han Ziman (2008) points out that Chinese translators tend to treat them by means of neutralizing, generalizing or deleting such descriptions due to Chinese people’s conservatism on subjects of sex. In the case of rape narrative, Irene Chen (2009) notes that the male translator has a tendency to distort the feminist narrative of sexual offences against women (i.e. rape) because they tend to identify more with the rapist (mostly man) than with the victims (mostly women). Nevertheless, Quintero and Buendía (2001) also found that the translator use augmentation to preserve the affluence of erotic narratives presented in a literary text because of the demands of the target society. In dealing with the erotic narratives that contains sexual expressions, vulgar elements and obscene languages, how to translate becomes the translator’s dilemma since their mediations are constrained by the principle of faithfulness and also the demand of the target culture.

This paper aims at an analysis of the sexual descriptions and obscene languages rendered in Howard Goldblatt’s English translation of Li Ang’s Sha Fu (1986), a well-known feminist text that has been translated into different foreign languages. Closer examination reveals that Goldblatt tends to euphemize the sexual descriptions and obscene words presented in the original, and this representation of eroticism inevitably diminishes the negative connotations of sexual abuse imposed upon woman. Moreover, such a rendering inevitably alters the ideological focalization of sexual oppression and violence encoded in Sha Fu and also undermines Li Ang’s feminist view on destructive gender relationship. To preserve the particular use of obscene language and the sexual depictions in a literary text, it may be assumed that augmentation seems to be a more suitable translation strategy in maintaining the linguistic equivalent of obscenity and vulgarity found in erotic narrative. Whether explicit rendering of obscene and vulgar elements is capable of manifesting the ideological framework significant from Li Ang’s feminist point of view will be discussed in the lights of its potential effects.

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The Erotic in Herman Bang’s “Franz Pander“
Anke Sandleben-Krah
Philipps-University, Marburg, Germany

In his short story “Franz Pander“ Bang tells the story of a young man, who already as a boy was different from everyone else his age, on the one hand due to his awkwardly mature behaviour, on the other hand due to his delicacy and extraordinarily well-tended physique, earning him the nickname “Jomfru” – “Virgin”.

Apparently his mother, a woman of very low social rank, keeps telling him that he is the result of an extra-marital affair she had with a man of a considerably higher class, hence Franz feels completely displaced in the poor surroundings of his upbringing. Any contact Franz has with the upper class is moulded by sensory perception, and it undeniably arouses him when he e.g. furtively tastes the delicious meals he serves the rich, or when looking at the pictures of exquisite ladies. At the same time, he is disgusted by anything connected with his background.

When rejecting an ordinary girl’s approach, Franz fuels the suspicion of being homosexual. The night he spends with a prostitute for his first sexual encounter leaves him traumatised by the discrepancy between his imagination and the reality of sexual intercourse. He cannot take it anymore, and commits suicide.

In my paper I would like to take a closer look at how Franz – at least temporarily – seems to find a way to avoid or to substitute sexuality as usually practised by his peculiar way of applying all of his five senses when viewing the world around him. Furthermore I would like to reflect Franz ’s behaviour in the mirror of the principles of aestheticism and the fact that Bang is generally known as THE representative of Danish decadence. Additionally, I would like to draw parallels between Bang and his protagonist of the story, in particular with regard to the issue of homosexuality.

Desiring the Missing Body: The Absent Love of Amans in John Gower’s Confessio Amantis
William Storm
Marquette University, USA

John Gower’s Confessio Amantis is ostensibly about the love that a lover called Amans has for his beloved. While this may be ostensibly true, the difficulty is that the poem’s purported subjected matter works only as a frame for Amans’ confessor, Genius, to discuss vice and how best to overcome vice, a text that ultimately becomes a highly imaginative framework to instruct a king on the best ways to rule. Such a view, however popular or pragmatic, avoids dealing with the lines in which Amans describes his love for this mysterious lady. These lines represent not only some of the most beautiful poetry within the piece, but these lines also speak to a problem of erotic love within the poem. Amans’ love for his lady exists without a partner. While the reader may imagine that Amans’ love is real, the reader is never given a true picture of this woman. This study will look at the ways in which the medieval author, here John Gower, must work within the constraints of an absent figure of erotic love. It is a process of desiring an absent figure, the longing for a union with the incorporeal. In this respect, what Gower attempts to do through Amans is akin to the mystical union of Margery Kempe or Julian of Norwich. What all of these authors attempt to do is to make a lover out of the past experiences and the wants of the moment. But, ultimately, this paper argues that the erotic longings for an absent lover allows the author to tap into a set of classical and medieval motifs, e.g., Ovidian and Christian, that more completely encapsulate the longings of a lover.