Source — Dinçel, "Seeing Through the 'Other', Expounding on the Metaphorics of Translation: The Case of Hélène Cixous, Clarice Lispector and Anna Akhmatova"
- Title: Seeing Through the "Other", Expounding on the Metaphorics of Translation: The Case of Hélène Cixous, Clarice Lispector and Anna Akhmatova
- Author: Burç İdem Dinçel (at time of writing, MA student in Translation Studies, Boğaziçi University)
- Publication: Journal of Theatre Criticism and Dramaturgy (Tiyatro Eleştirmenliği ve Dramaturji Bölümü Dergisi), issue 12, pp. 31–53
- Date: 2012-02-16
- URL: https://dergipark.org.tr/tr/download/article-file/172500 (PDF; landing page https://dergipark.org.tr/en/pub/teddergi/issue/18482/194619)
- Type: secondary (academic article); neutral/analytical — its own subject is Cixous's play about Akhmatova, not an untranslatability claim, so it has no stake in this project's mission either way
- Accessed: 2026-08-31 (full text obtained via PDF text extraction — see Gaps)
Extract
The article's main subject is Hélène Cixous's 1994 play Black Sail, White Sail and its use of translation as metaphor in dramatizing Anna Akhmatova. Before reaching the play, however, its second section (pp. 35–36) surveys Cixous's separate, earlier relationship to Clarice Lispector — directly relevant to this project since Lispector is its primary saudade source-language author (see saudade.md) — by summarizing Rosemary Arrojo's chapter "Interpretation as Possessive Love: Hélène Cixous, Clarice Lispector and the Ambivalence of Fidelity," in Susan Bassnett and Harish Trivedi (eds.), Post-Colonial Translation (Routledge, 1999) — a book already on file in this project via a different chapter (literariness-mambrol-2018-postcolonial-translation-theory.md).
Per Dinçel's summary of Arrojo: Cixous (French feminist theorist, herself one of Lispector's translators into French — she translated Água Viva in 1980) is read by Arrojo not as a sympathetic feminist ally amplifying a marginalized woman writer, but as engaged in a "covert" form of appropriative rewriting. Key claims from the summary, with Dinçel's own page citations to Arrojo's chapter:
- Cixous "appears to intend to possess the knowledge that she discovered in Lispector, and to own it for herself alone" — Dinçel notes this reading is grounded partly in the fact that Cixous "strictly rejected" translations of Lispector's work into other dominant Western languages (p. 155, 159, per Dinçel).
- The Cixous–Lispector relationship is described by Arrojo as an "asymmetrical dialogue" in which "Cixous practically does all the 'talking'," and Lispector is "inevitably forced not only to be saying 'the same thing everywhere' ... but also to agree unconditionally with her powerful reader" (Arrojo p. 153, quoted by Dinçel).
- Arrojo frames this, via Mahasweta Sengupta's "Translation as Manipulation," as an instance of a dominant power "appropriat[ing] only those texts that conform to the pre-existing discursive parameters of its linguistic networks" — i.e. reads the Cixous–Lispector case through a postcolonial, not primarily gendered-translation-strategy, lens: Cixous's use of Lispector as inspiration for her l'écriture féminine theory is cast as a form of "colonization" of the Brazilian writer by a canonized Western theorist.
Relevance and limits
This is a genuine, sourced connection between this project's saudade source-author (Lispector) and the feminist/postcolonial translation-theory apparatus already on file — but it is not a documented instance of von Flotow's supplementing/prefacing-footnoting/hijacking taxonomy specifically. Arrojo's critique is about Cixous's critical/theoretical use of Lispector as inspiration (and her gatekeeping of who else may translate her) rather than about a specific textual choice inside a translated passage. It is thematically adjacent to von Flotow's "hijacking" concept (a feminist intervening in and taking over a source text) but describes a different mechanism (interpretive appropriation of an author's whole oeuvre and reputation, not a textual intervention within one translation), and Dinçel's article never cites von Flotow. Do not present this as a von Flotow-taxonomy instance; present it as a separate, postcolonial-inflected critique of the same underlying case (a woman theorist's relationship to a woman source-author) that sits beside, not inside, that taxonomy.
Gaps
- This project has not read Arrojo's chapter itself, only Dinçel's summary and direct quotations of it — a secondary source's account of a secondary source. Arrojo's own chapter (Bassnett and Trivedi, eds., Post-Colonial Translation, 1999, pp. 141–161) is not yet obtained.
- Dinçel's article is itself unreviewed for its main subject (the Akhmatova play); only its Cixous–Lispector background section (pp. 35–36) was used here.
- PDF text extraction now works in this session's environment (
pip install pdfminer.sixpluspip install --force-reinstall cffito fix a broken systemcryptographybinding) — this reverses the standing fence inNEXT.mdthat no PDF-text-extraction tool was available; see this session's queue-item-4 note. - No mention of saudade by name in this article; the connection to this project is Lispector as author, not any specific word.