(Critical Theory 2) Rich, Adrienne Cecile - Díaz-Diocaretz, Myriam-Translating Poetic Discourse - Questions On Feminist Strategies in Adrienne Rich-John Benjamins Publishing Company (1985)

TRANSLATING POETIC DISCOURSE:
QUESTIONS ON FEMINIST STRATEGIES IN ADRIENNE RICH

CRITICAL THEORY
Interdisciplinary Approaches to
Language, Discourse and Ideology
Series Editors
Iris M. Zavala
Myriam Daz-Diocaretz
Advisory Editorial Board:
Fernando Lzaro Carreter (Real Academia Espaola)

Jonathan Culler (Cornell University, Ithaca)
Teun A. van Dijk (University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam)
Roger Fowler (University of East Anglia, Norwich)
Claudio Guilln (Harvard University)
Fredric Jameson (University of California, Santa Cruz)
Cheris Kramarae (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)
Teresa de Lauretis (University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee)
Cesare Segre (Universita di F avia)
Harly Sonne (Rijksuniversiteit Utrecht, Utrecht)
Gayatri Ch. Spivak (Emory University, Atlanta)
Volume 2
Myriam Diaz-Diocaretz

Questions on Feminist Strategies in Adrienne Rich
QUESTIONS ON FEMINIST STRATEGIES
IN ADRIENNE RICH
by
MYRIAM DAZ-DIOCARETZ
JOHN BENJAMINS PUBLISHING COMPANY

AMSTERDAM/PHILADELPHIA
1985
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Daz-Diocaretz, Myriam.
Translating poetic discourse.
(Critical theory: interdisciplinary approaches to language, discourse, and ideology; v. 2)
Bibliography.
1. Rich, Adrienne Cecile -- Criticism and interpretation. 2. Rich, Adrienne Cecile --
Translations, Spanish. 3. Feminism and literature . 4. Poetry -- Translating. I. Title. II.
Series: Critical theory; v. 2.
PS3535.I233Z64 1985 811'.54 84-28245
ISBN 0-915027-52-6 (U.S. hb.)
ISBN 0-915027-53-4 (U.S. pb.)
ISBN 90-272-2403-X (European hb.)
ISBN 90-272-2404-8 (European pb.)
Copyright 1985 - John Benjamins B.V.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint, microfilm, or
any other means, without written permission from the publisher.
To the four of us and
to those who understand
the risks taken in these pages
Acknowledgments
Sections of the present book started as a doctoral dissertation presented

to the State University of New York at Stony Brook, completed in December
1982. Since then, through lectures and articles, I have fully revised and rewrit
ten those preliminary notions, and have added new aspects I consider funda
mental.
I would like to thank John Felstiner for his support and comments in
the early stages of my work, and for introducing me to the world of transla
tion. I would also like to thank Adrienne Rich for her stimulating interest
in my work throughout all these years, and most of all for the inspiration I
have found in her poetic creation. I am greatly indebted to the critical mind
of Iris M. Zavala, whose discerning suggestions have enlightened me in many
ways. Finally, I wish to remember Anne Porcelijn for her careful editing of
the final version of the typescript.
CONTENTS
Preface 1
I. Verbal Interaction Framework 7
1. Translation as Sign 8
2. Reader-Response Criticism 13
II. The Translator-Function 24

1. The Translator as Omniscient Reader 25
2. The Translator as Acting Writer 33
III. Translating a Woman's Poetic Discourse 42

1. "A poem can begin/with a lie. And be torn up." 49
2. Heterosocial versus Homosocial 54
3. From Text to Author-Function 58
4. The Intertextual Factor as Feminist Strategy 67
IV. The Speech Situation in Female Identified Discourse 84

1. A Poet in a Woman's Body 85
2. Person Deixis and Gender Markers 89
3. Speaker and Addressee in Adrienne Rich 92
4. Speaker and Addressee in Female-Identified Discourse 105
V. Prosody, Rhythms, Intonation, and the Acting Writer 117

1. "Re-scored for a different instrument" 118
VI. Translation and Women's Studies: Problems and Perpectives. 151
References 158
PREFACE
The major aim of this book is twofold: First, to bring to a focus the dual
activity of translator-function drawn from the semiotics of reading and writ
ing, in its two dimensions as a concrete subject outside the text and within
a given social context, and as a verbal presence traceable in the reading act
a text demands. Second, to explore some of the links between translating
and the study of feminist discourse through the analysis of the translator-func
tion in the recoding practice into Spanish of texts by the North-American
poet Adrienne Rich.
In the first chapter, the process of translating an aesthetic text is pre
sented within a dynamics of the verbal interaction between addresser and
addressee, encoder and decoder, in which the translator is the co-producer
of a pre-existent message. I have combined elements from the nature of the
verbal art conceived in terms of an interrelation between social reality and
literary text, from the works of Mikhail Bakhtin and Jan Mukaovsk, and
I have adapted features of Umberto Eco's Model Reader and aspects related
to textual strategies; reader-oriented interaction (in its variety of systems)
and reception-aesthetics have also proven useful. My objective is to propose
a theoretical model not of reading but of the notion of translator-function
in the dual performance of reader and writer whose receptive disposition
becomes manifested as a textual subject.
In the second chapter I examine further the translator-function in the
dialectics between text and receiver; moreover, I postulate that the translator
as 'omniscient reader' and 'acting writer' is a producer of a sign activated by
a given social interaction creating different types of relationships between
translator and text; this interplay acquires specific characteristics when trans
lating either subversive texts or texts which can be re-located and inserted
into extra-cultural spaces or re-oriented towards distinct groups, thereby pro
voking changed reception horizons within a given linguistic and cultural com
munity. Selected examples from the past are discussed in order to suggest
that the above mentioned phenomena are not rare occurrences, and they set
forth the possibility that translation theory and literary history are not only
2 TRANSLATING POETIC DISCOURSE
linked but can be treated as part of the semiotics of reading; my intention,

however, is far from attempting to write a history of translation.
An obvious question concerns the simple belief that the translator can
alter or modify the meaning of texts, yet this virtual and actual influence has
been largely taken for granted from the standpoint of the social consequences
in aesthetic response. With his/her decoding and recoding, the translator
may cause the source-text to undergo a movement to levels of textual interpre
tation that were not designed by the author. The translator may interact
significantly in the triad author/text/reader and intervene either mediating
or interfering by setting the source-text into cultural motion or stasis.
Incorporated in the author's reality of discourse, the translator is not an
invisible or untraceable figure whose existence is totally reduced or hidden;
he/she brings prior bodies of discourse to the interpretative process leading
to the receptor-text; thus, special emphasis is placed on the ideological moti
vations of the translator in the act of writing. A proper description of the
translator-function must refer to his/her activity as reader in the communica
tive process where writing is the answer to the effects of signification. The
translator is not a mere collector of meaning with passive receptive disposi
tions. While the readings of the source-text engender interpretative opera
tions, the translator produces an equivalent text in the receptor-culture which
will, in turn, furnish a new chain of significations that perhaps did not belong
to the original response.
In chapter three the activity of 'omniscient reader' is further investigated;
I outline some of the multiple levels of reading needed to comprehend the
poetic discourse of Adrienne Rich in its totality in order to recode a selection
of her texts for the Hispanic culture. The discussion points toward translation
problems originating in a specific text that contains an element of indetermi
nacy in a given gender marker; this brings to light a cluster of relations: on
the one hand, language use, poetic tradition and norms of both source and
virtual receptor-text, on the other hand, the translator's cultural and personal
dispositions converging with his/her own intertextual reading experience and
the prior body of discourse the horizon of a specific receptor-culture presup
poses.
The first section, "A poem can begin with a lie. And be torn up.", taken
from the translator's logbook, is used to make explicit hypothetically
the conflict a translator may encounter in having to yield a given component
which involves a tension between the mechanisms of the receptor-culture
and the source-text strategies. Given the scarcity of feminist texts and the
PREFACE 3
marginality of 'lesbian' discourse in the poetic tradition of the receptor-cul

ture in question, difference in acceptability between the two cultures grounds
the translator-function at the core of the conflict. The issue raised is that in
spite of an assumed specificity in a feminist or 'lesbian' verbal construct used
as source, this construct may be neutralized, or converted into a 'more accept
able' semantic form, a fact which results in the production of an 'aberrant'
text.
What is required, then, to reiterate my postulations, are adjustments
related to language use, to the standards of a given culture, and to the trans
lator's ideology and presuppositions. Whether or not the receptor-language
demands it (because of non-correspondence in certain structures and/or
semantic non-equivalence) subtle or even major changes may be performed
that bring as consequence, for example, the displacement from a homosocial
to a heterosocial text-given world. This is pertinent to the case of female
identified/female addressed texts (e.g. woman-to-woman, and 'lesbian'
texts), since in contemporary poetry (from 1960 to the present) these consti
tute a particular kind of emancipatory writing that may be put through a
belligerent relation or may become marginalized when reaching the horizon
of accepted norms of the receptor-culture. "From Text to Author-Function",
the second section, describes the decision of the translator within the
schema of the translator's relation to text, whether in congenial or discordant
attitude, accepting or rejecting the poet's codes to explore further Rich's
discourse in order to avoid 'aberrant' translations.
This approach directs attention to the multiple readings and studies a
translator may undertake as points of reference to comprehend the different
modes of existence of the poet's discourse: production, circulation, evalu
ation, in short, the social existence of the poet's work. An equally important
aspect on the textual level is a survey of the poet's thematic units in conjunc
tion with explorations of the making of feminist ideology, and the textual
strategies used to actualize this ideology. My 'omniscient reader' elicits the
development of Rich's verse, its relations to tradition and conventions of
Anglo-American poetry, to women poets, and maps out the changing percep
tions in the poet's voice and world vision. This range of structures and expec
tations provide an adequate domain for the translator-function to seek not
simply semantic and stylistic equivalent text units but an equivalence concern
ing the new semiotic formulations proposed in feminist texts. Two specific
textual strategies will be set apart as they prove operative and functional in
a feminist context: the displacement of connotations, and the intertextual
factor (absorption, transformation, polemic with other texts). These two

aspects, together with the author-function spectrum have been previously
dealt with in more detail in The Transforming Power of Language: The Poetry
of Adrienne Rich (Daz-Diocaretz 1984a); they are here placed in the
framework of translating. Rich's intertexutal component of polemic and con
genial dialogue defining her discourse in terms of her own handling of the
'alien text' is set forth as a common factor in feminist poetic discourse.
The paradigms formulated from Rich's poetry, extracted from the con
tinuities and discontinuities in three decades of poetic work (1950 to the
present), offer the outline of a probable direction for the analysis of poetic
discourse by women. The relevant features can be distinguished in a fairly
systematic way in a significant sector of contemporary poetry by women in
the United States writing since about 1960. Taking into account Rich's modes
of textual existence and the poetic practice of textual strategies, and the
thematic units as frames of reference, three stages can be located in the
development of her discourse: First, a traditional poetic discourse I denomi
nate non-feminist as a working concept, in which the texts contribute to an
expansion of tradition and of the poet's received ideas, and contain a conge
nial dialogue with the poetic voices of those who precede her; secondly,
the explicit or implicit feminist discourse, defined as a type of writing con
sciously structured toward a major paradigmatic opposition between the
woman and her vision of the world versus patriarchy, often including a textual
polemic with the patriarchal word, together with a critique of language as a
set of constraining structures imposed by patriarchy; finally, female iden
tified/female addressed discourse, oriented toward the exploration of the
woman's world and of the woman-to-woman relationship, in which a conge
nial dialogue with texts by women predominates. In this type of discourse
both the "'T" and the "you" are overtly women ('lesbian' discourse is but a
sector of this interaction).
Chapter four focuses on the 'acting writer"s translation problems with
respect to the speech situation in non-feminist, feminist, and female iden
tified/female oriented texts, and shows how the knowledge acquired as 'omnis
cient reader' contributes to actualize specific choices in the writing of the
translation into Spanish; namely, the conclusions described in the previous
chapter prepare the translator for appropriate guidelines under the overall
disposition favorable to the author's design. Distinctions between poet as
personality (author-function) and poet as persona, arise as essential. The
study proceeds to present paradigms in the speech situation in female iden-
PREFACE 5
tified poetic discourse, specifically discussing the close relationship between

gender markers and speaker/addressee interaction. The problem is a systema
tic one and it involves mainly, (a) the translator's ideological, cultural presup
positions vis vis culture, and (b) the textual factors that are peculiar to
feminist discourse. Continuing the discussion introduced in chapter three, it
becomes evident that translating serves to uncover a vulnerable area in
feminist texts in English and in languages that do not require gender differen-
tation the way Romance languages do; this vulnerable terrain is precisely,
and paradoxically, one of the main components defining feminist discourse.
Focus on person deixis in discourse by women is proposed as an impor
tant part of interpretation in the act of reading, and as a textual strategy to
be followed in the act of writing the receptor-texts, since those deictics are
directly linked with meaning in the speech situation in poetic discourse.
Gender cues are described as semantic markers which facilitate the ideation
procedure related to the female self (speaking or addressed to) in the texts.
The latter is demonstrated through contrastive examples of indeterminacy
in the source-language and the required specificity in the receptor language
as to gender markers.
In chapter five, an analysis of selected prosodie, rhythmic, and spatial
features and their interrelation with lexical, syntactical, and contextual units,
describes the ways in which my translations of Rich into Spanish are seman-
tically dependent and rhythmically independent. Earlier versions of a particu
lar poem are discussed to illustrate changes performed by the 'acting writer'
activity.
The conclusions are intended to contribute to a reformulation of a critical
approach which may link translation studies and feminist writing, and to
propose some distinctive features of an area of poetic discourse by women.
The problems concerning the act of translating feminist texts emphasized
here demonstrate that the decoding/recoding process is not simply from one
language to another but is clearly a complex semiotic operation of transcul-
tural nature. Translating has served to reveal vulnerable areas in feminist
texts, and calls for critical awareness and identification of crucial textual
strategies for the structure of meaning. These aspects are (a) displacement
of connotations, (b) the intertextual factor, and (c) person deixis and gender
markers. Likewise, the author/text/reader interaction framework invites a
criticism that investigates the speaker and addressee relationship as textually
given constructs in non-feminist, feminist and 'lesbian' poetry. I shall there
fore argue in favour of a critical model that would bridge on theoretical and
practical levels Translation and Women's Studies; this implies that the key
elements proposed here could be integrated to the problem of interpretation
and verification in contemporary women's poetry in English.
The translations into Spanish are not included in this volume. They
constitute a separate publication (Diaz-Diocaretz 1985b), therefore, they will
have their own social life in the Hispanic culture, with their own readership.
The present book, then, has two companion volumes the reader is referred
to for a general spectrum of my discoursive account related to the recoding
of the poetry of Adrienne Rich into the Hispanic culture. Each book covers
a different area, and may be read independently and received accordingly.
My notes towards understanding the different translating factors in the
context of feminist poetry began in 1975. Some isolated topics were presented
for discussion at different times and places in seminars, workshops and lec
tures, particularly at Stanford University, the University of California-Irvine,
State University of New York at Stony Brook, the University of Mississippi,
and in the Netherlands, the Winteruniversiteit Vrouwenstudies, and the Uni
versity of Utrecht.
Myriam Diaz-Diocaretz
Amsterdam
I. Verbal Interaction Framework
II
Everything we write
will be used against us
or against those we love.
These are the terms,
take them or leave them.
Poetry never stood a chance
of standing outside history.
One line typed twenty years ago
can be blazed on a wall in spraypaint
to glorify art as detachment
or torture of those we
did not love but also
did not want to kill
We move but our words stand

become responsible
for more than we intended
and this is verbal privilege
Adrienne Rich, "North American Time", 1983

1. TRANSLATION AS SIGN
In this study translation will be understood as the final product of prob

lem-solving and sign production of a receptor-text (RT) functionally equiv
alent to a source-text (ST), performed by a human being in a given language
for a given group of text-receivers. Thus, a translation is more than a static
text to be compared and contrasted with its ST merely for the purpose of
discussing language mistakes or inappropriate choices or for lamenting its
losses, and it is more than a textual link between two languages or two
cultures. 1 A translation is part of a process concerning a dynamics of verbal
interaction; as a verbal object it is a sign activated and conditioned, on the
one hand, by the social organization of the individuals participating in the
communicative process, and on the other hand, by the conditions in which
that interaction occurs (cf. Bakhtin 1977:41).
Translating concerns the processing phases and the mechanisms func
tioning in complex relationships modified and structured by the interplay
between human activity and interlingual textual production; as such, trans
lating begins with the reception of the ST, and continues in the actualization
of the RT in the receptors' interpretative contexts. In translating we shall
distinguish a number of factors related to the concrete forms of social com
munication, since the transfer of a message from ST to RT, as a passage of
an utterance from a given national language or social territory to another,
is a semiotic transfer to another linguistic system.
As a linguistic sign, a translation is grounded on the social interaction
between its interpreter and the new horizon of virtual and actual conditions
of such utterance. My argument is thus based on two assumptions: first, that
translation theory can be treated as a mode of signification and communica
tion, in that a proper description of its interpretative process must refer to
the translator as a reader; second, that in this process of communication,
the effect of this particular signification is realized by the translator as
writer. The translator is not just a collector of meanings who will re-arrange
certain linguistic and textual structures, or who will interpret the text's surface
signs and will explain what they suggest, but an agent (subject, person) whose
VERBAL INTERACTION FRAMEWORK 9
receptive disposition to the act of reading is the act of writing, and whose
discoursive production will be a new chain of significations and responses in
the RT that perhaps does not belong to the original response. Before examin
ing further the function of the translator in the dual activity of omniscient
reader and acting writer, it is necessary to take into account the mechanisms
of interaction that include poet and work and in our particular case, the
ideological implications in the translating process to be applied in the
subsequent chapters to feminist discourse as source.
It is important to start from the theoretical supposition that the meaning
of the text is not exclusively derivable from the semantic features. The reader
must recognize that a poetic text integrates a composite known as the poet's
personality which consists not simply of the individual who creates a given
number of texts but rather a sort of "common denominator", the "sum of
all the poet's writings" (Mukafovsky 1977:146). This corpus of work provides
the author with a specific position in the literary system, together with a
specific place in connection with other poetic individualities of the time. This
leads, naturally, to the poet's position in the development of a literary genre,
of its tradition and its evolution, and to the poet's association within or
without a literary movement or community; in other words, the poet's
relationship with society (p. 157), of particular importance in contemporary
writing by women and feminist discourse.
Poet and society are related to one another through the medium of
language in its poetic function;2 poetic language, Jan Mukaovsk argues
convincingly, requires focus on "the linguistic sign itself hence it is exactly
the opposite of a practical orientation toward a goal which in language is
communication" (1977:4). This is made more evident if it is remembered
that the goal of expression in a literary work is aesthetic production and
aesthetic effect. Here it is also worth considering Roman Jakobson's contribu
tion to the same aspect in his description of the poetic function as comprising
"the focus within the verbal message on the verbal message itself" (Jakobson
1960 in Waugh 1980:58). The unity of the two is produced by the totality of
the interpretative process: the strength of the expectations that will lead the
reader to look for some kind of organization, for poetic structure, within the
semiotics of reading.
It should be considered that the aesthetic self-orientation of poetic lan
guage is a generally acknowledged quality and an important theoretical prin
ciple for the study of poetics. However, language is in itself a system defined
within a framework of developmental changeability; its poetic function is
determined by the existence of a particular national language "with all its

concrete properties which have originated and continue to originate in its
historical development" (Mukafovsky 1977:4). A national language, its cor
responding standard literary language, and the specific poetic function, are
intrinsic characteristics or factors for a literary work as ST. 3 If we leave off
from Mukafovsky's view of the determinants of poetic language in a given
ST, and move this notion toward the determinants of a RT we can begin our
analysis of the multiple textual and sociohistorical forces interacting in the
complex process of translating, by focusing on the communicative function
present in a RT written in poetic language.
In the first place, the language properties mentioned above such as
national language, standard literary language and a specific poetic function
are equally important variables in translating. Mukaovsk's and Jakobson's
views of the aesthetic self-orientation of poetic language prove valid in this
new context of translating as well; however, they are no longer exclusive.
In translating not only the aesthetic effectiveness of a ST is at stake, but also
its specific communicative function. Communication, a property not predo
minantly present in the poetic language of the ST may take over the primary
function of an aesthetic work in translation, because a literary work exists,
obvious as it seems it must be mentioned, only for those who can understand
its language (linguistic code). When translating a poetic work, one of the
primary purposes is that it must be done in such a way that the text is made
accessible and intelligible on the level of competence to the receptors.
Such is the basic standard or requirement of textuality be it literary or
not in translating. 4 Since a literary work belongs to a system which is a
"historically changeable phenomenon" (Mukaovsky 1977:10)5 language as
poetic material is bound to a given standard literary language, a property
characteristic of a particular linguistic community.
In order to formulate a general framework for the act of translating
feminist discourse within the mechanisms of interlingual transference, and
to place the translator within this dynamics, we shall consider another aspect
of the notion of translation as sign, taking as starting point Mukafovsky's
proposition that language "in its very essence is already a sign" (1977:9-10)
and that as poetic material, it has a "semiotic character", as well as Eco's
notion of a sign as "everything that, on the grounds of previously established
social convention, can be taken as something standing for something else"
(1976:16).
Essential for our concept of the translator-function are the convergent
positions of Mikhail Bakhtin, Mukaovsk, and Jakobson concerning the

relationship, in general terms, between author/work/audience, poet/text/per-
ceiver, encoder/decoder, from the standpoint of the verbal art, the work of
art, and the linguistic sign respectively. First of all, social context is a major
factor in the existence of the verbal art; for Bakhtin (1977:123) the "word"
as social sign is determined by the fact that the utterance implicitly always
addresses a certain individual, and that it orginates from someone at the
same time that it is directed towards someone. In translating this implies
that the verbal art is necessarily altered in reference to the addressee of the
utterance. Here the culturally and socially structured horizons play a signifi
cant role for the recomposition of the translation because the RT interacts
between the addresser (poet) of the socially existent sign as ST and the
intended addressees. We shall discuss this point later in chapter 2 when
describing more specifically the interaction involved in the translator-func
tion.
"The work of art is a sign mediating between two individuals as members
of the same collective, and like every sign it needs two subjects for the fulfill
ment of its semiotic function: the one who provides the sign and the one who
perceives it" (Mukaovsky 1977: 163). This definition of the work of art can
also be applied to a liteary work in translation, yet not without modifications.
In order for a ST to be translated into another language, the translator's
"perception" reading, understanding, cognitive experience of the mes
sage and the subsequent, actual translating stage are a prerequisite before
this text reaches the phase of reception in the RL. The translator thus con
stitutes a first mediator between the sign provider and the sign perceiver.
The "two individuals" become at least three poet, translator, reader
and the sign provider of the ST is most likely no longer a member of the
"same collective" as the RT perceiver. This is not to reject Mukafovsky's
notion; on the contrary, it is intended to suggest further elaboration on the
specific nature of the translation as sign, conceived as such from the perspec
tive of the translator-function, so that the ST can be clearly distinguished
from the RT in this context of verbal interaction, particularly because of the
complexities introduced by the actual sense of the new "collective" engaged
in the process.
Jakobson proposes the outline of the six essential factors that must be
present for verbal communication as speech event to be operable, which are
pertinent to my argument. These are: sender, contact, message, code, con
text, receiver (Jakobson 1960; Waugh 1980). To these, six functions corres-
pond in a relational category (Waugh 1980:59), and the predominance of

one or more of these functions is what determines the "verbal structure of
a message" (Jakobson 1960:353).6 Equally important is the fact that a given
message can be perceived from quite different perspectives if one considers
the nature of a speech event. Above all, Jakobson rightly maintains that
"One must distinguish sharply between two positions, of the encoder and
the decoder, in other words: between the role of the addresser and that of
the addressee." (1980:37; cf. Lotman 1977: 25-31). In poetry, the function
that dominates is the orientation towards the message; the self-referentiality
of the message in verbal literary expression is what determines its 'literari
ness'. 7 Those two roles, of addresser and addressee apply also to a text in
its poetic function. Jakobson's clear-cut division paved the way for what then
became dominant critical orientations studying the relationship between
author/text/reader, later text/context/reader, and also between reading and
writing, since emphasis on each one of the above mentioned factors and
functions in verbal communication has offered further theoretical possibilities
and has provided an important platform for research from different
approaches in the study of poetics, linguistics, and ulterior theoretical
developments. Productive insights in this direction come from the Formalist
School to Structuralism, Marxist aesthetics, hermeneutics, psychoanalysis,
deconstruction, text-linguistics, semiotics, pragmatics; each approach re
defines the concepts of sign producer/sign perceiver, and whether those crit
ical positions are text-centered, or receiver-oriented for example, the study
of author-text-reader interaction conveys a consideration of communication
and the semiotics of reading in its totality.
Before I discuss some problems concerning the role of the translator as
omniscient reader and acting writer, a short sketch should be given of the
theoretical framework of reader-response criticism and reception studies.
The works of literary scholars such as Hans Robert Jauss, Umberto Eco,
Wolfgang Iser and others, which I will describe briefly in what concerns my
proposal, have prepared us for more correct assessment of the role and
significance of the reader in the making of textual strategies (see the descrip
tions in Harari 1979; Suleiman and Crosman 1980; Tompkins 1980; Culler
1981).
2. READER-RESPONSE CRITICISM
In spite of its conceptual heterogeneity, contemporary criticism on

reader-response criticism agrees that a text is not a linear monologue of an
absent author read by a passive audience, and it fully recognizes the reader's
active participation in the meaning process (see H o l b 1984; Steiner 1984).
Just as writing is "perceived as an institution, /.../ reading is an important
activity" (Culler 1975:131). For some post-structuralists (Barthes, Foucault,
Eco and others) the notion of author has become a composite of 'textual
strategies' whose meaning, present in the speaker's mind, the reader must
understand and recover.
There exist already more than enough interpretations with which to
begin a spectrum of new concepts to identify and record text/reader interac
tion. A good point of departure is to ennumerate the most well-known, which
are relevant to our discussion; from a variety of systems, we find that the
reader can be 'model', 'ideal', 'real', 'concrete', 'implied', 'informed'. 8 As a
result of this diversity of interpretative approaches, our attention has been
directed to crucial and previously neglected topics, namely that works of
literature are no longer conceived as fixed objects or finished products, and
that the act of reading is not a passive activity of going over what has already
been composed, but rather, an active process in which the addressee partici
pates. The texts supply the reader with words, ideas, images, sounds,
rhythms; elements to which he/she must give meaning. In brief, reading is
considered as an interpretative process of proving contexts.
I will limit myself to those conceptual theories which are pertinent to
our description of the translator as reader; I will exclude those text or
receiver-centered notions which do not consider the extra-textual interactions
(namely Gibson's 'mock reader' 1950; Prince's 'narratee' 1973, 1980; Fish's
'informed reader' 1970, 1980; Holland's 'transactive litterent' 1968, 1976,
1978). For our purpose, we must devote some attention to the concepts of
Jauss's 'concrete reader', Eco's 'Model Reader', Zavala's 'omniscient
reader', and Iser's renewed concept of 'concretization' (1974) as well as to
the notion of 'intertextuality', as a dialogue between text and reader, in
which the multiplicity of meaning is collected and rearranged by the reader. 9
A text, then, can be read only in relation to other texts which are parodied,
refuted, transformed (cf. Bloom 1975 on the idea of 'misreading').
Hans Robert Jauss (1970, 1975, 1978, 1982a, 1982b), one of the most
prominent representatives of the German University of Konstanz school of
criticism (Holub 1984), links the study of aesthetic reception to several impor
tant issues, which are worth considering for our proposal of the translator
as omniscient reader and active writer. Jauss' central concept is the 'horizon
of expectations, or "the set of cultural, ethical, and literary expectations of
the reader in the historical moment of a texts' time of appearance." It is in
reality a set of unconsciously held assumptions prevailing at the moment of
history when a text was created (1982b: 139-189). Jauss finds two levels of
understanding in the reception of the text; the immediate aesthetic experience
of the reader, and the ever-changing analysis of the interpreting scholar
(1982b). The structure and language of the text are thus important and reader-
response is considered as a process that creates meaning within the develop
ment of the text's reception.
If, in the light of Jauss's notion, a true relationship of literature and reader
has aesthetic and historical implications, the function of the translator as a
privileged reader mediating between literature and its receptor also has rele
vance; equally important for the study of the translator is the development
of the chain of receptions of certain works as object of inquiry for a better
comprehension of the sequence of literary works leading toward a more open
understanding of literary history (Jauss 1982b). The same author and the
same ST of a given national literature of a given period often has divergent
and distinct modes of receptions, and more often than not, there exists a
discontinuity in the spectrum of parallel histories; a translation, likewise, as
soon as it begins to circulate comes to exist within a new chain of receptions
which corresponds to that of the R culture and language. Given that a literary
text is not autonomous and it does not offer "the same view to each reader
in each period" (Jauss 1982b:21), translations quite rightly follow this rule.
Jauss's ideas are useful to our argument and can be further developed
in the framework of the translator-function, and not only within the study of
reception as a historical development in a series of interpretations, compared
to the concrete reception or reader-response, and as a process that creates
meaning in the RT. His approach of the reception of the text however points
to but one area in the semiotic process.
We emphasize the usefulness of adopting a criteria to account for trans
lation as a textual productivity actualized after the act of interpretation or
decoding. We are supposing that the production/reception of a specific liter
ary text, is determined by concrete conditions: the context which will be
decisive to judge about its concrete literary character. Since the translator
can determine the verbal and non-verbal context, it is important to assume
yet another reader concept. My main hypothesis must be interpreted in the

frame of this discussion: the translator as producer and interpreter of literary
texts. 10
Within reader-response practice Wolfgang Iser has explored neither
poetry nor translation theory; however, some of his suggestions could be
developed to explore the translator as reader and producer of literary texts.
The concept of 'concretization' (1974:274), which Iser borrows from Roman
Ingarden (Holub 1984 explains the wide use of this concept in German
reception theory), is oriented toward reader-response practice. Iser formu
lates that "the literary work has two poles, which we might call the artistic
and the aesthetic: the artistic refers to the text created by the author, and
the aesthetic to the realization acomplished by the reader. From this polarity
it follows that the literary work cannot be completely identical with the text,
or with the realization of the text, but in fact, must lie between the two"
(1974:724)."
A parallel can be drawn with translating. The translator proceeds in
reverse from the "aesthetic" (as reader) to the "artistic" pole (as writer):
the realization (or concretization) of the text depends on the translator's
function as reader/writer. Furthermore, the artistic pole of the translation is
split and becomes the author's and the translator's simultaneously at the
moment when the aesthetic pole in the reader's perception is realized. Iser's
'implied reader' is "a textual structure anticipating the presence of a recipient
without necessarily defining him" (1978:34), and it designates "a network of
response-inviting structures which impel the reader to grasp the text"
(1978:34). In translating it is these structures that are subject to change under
the translator-function's intervention; as it will be described in chapters 3
and 4 they are constituted by a set of strategies.
More important for our proposal is the semiotic approach of Umberto
Eco (1962, 1968, 1976, 1979, 1980) with the central concept of 'Model
Reader'. Let us briefly summarize its scope. Meaning, according to Eco, is
neither defined exclusively by the author's intention nor determined by the
supposed supremacy of the reader. Eco's 'Model Reader' carries out an
interpretative cooperation with the author. Through successive abductive
inferences, this type of reader "proposes topics, ways of reading, and hypoth
eses of coherence on the basis of suitable encyclopedic competence" (Eco
1979:10-19);12 it is an active agent in the creation of meaning. The author
foresees a model of the possible reader by a choice of a specific linguistic
code and a literary style. Furthermore, a text, as expression, depends on
sociocultural circumstances in which different codes are emitted; 13 it is in

reality "a semantic-pragmatic production of its own 'Model Reader'"
(1979:8), filled with codes and subcodes; it can be read in a naive or in a
critical way; both sender and addressee are inscribed within the textual strat
egy.
Within this framework of codes and textual strategies, I suggest that in
his/her function as reader/writer the translator must understand the specific
linguistic codes involved in the process, the literary styles and the nature of
the text. As reader, the translator naively or crucially searches for
semantic affinities in other codes at the same time that he/she attempts to
clarify or understand textual inferences based on cultural linguistic associa
tions. The translator/reader follows semantic markers to be able to decode
a message and encode it for addressees of a different sociocultural context.
Whether the translator is aware or not, the many procedures involved in
translating require a kind of omniscience, to a certain extent, similar to that
of the reader of manuscripts in the spectrum of genetic of texts, as defined
by I.M. Zavala (1983). Her concept of 'omniscient reader' is introduced in
an analysis of pre-texts as specific modes of production determined by histor
ical contexts.14 As an omniscient reader, the translator must know not only
the existence of the source text in its tradition and cultural milieu, but also
knowledge of the language and cultural significance of the ST is necessary;
like the 'omniscient reader' of manuscripts the translator needs to understand
the textual andd extratextual components. Likewise, cognition of the writer's
concrete circumstances is not indispensable, but is desirable, as the know
ledge of the history of literature of the ST is helpful in an optimal situation;
equally relevant, the sociohistoric and aesthetic contexts of the RT also play
a role in the translator's psycho-social representation of the text, and the
same must be said of the receptor's literary tradition and culture. All these
aspects of knowledge are of primary importance in the reading stage of the
translator's process, more so than in the writing phase. It is under these
circumstances that the 'mistakes' in translation may be mainly due to the
translator's reading procedures rather than the writing procedures (Beaug-
rande 1978). The translator/reader then seeks to understand the social prac
tice of the text to provide contexts for the 'concrete reader' (in Jauss's term)
of the RT.
In his/her role as reader, the translator has received scant attention in
translation studies. We will briefly survey some specific examples; although
Savory (1957) considers the reader, he does so in a general way as a subject
without any defined characteristic, and not as a specific component of textual

strategies. Even though he states (Savory 1957:57-59, 103-116) that there
are four groups of readers of the Bible (an idea he develops from answering
the empirical question "Why do people read the Bible?"), the notion of the
reader remains passive and independent from any standard of textuality.
The existence fo his four groups of readers depends on the answer provided.
Still other studies make only occasional references or tangential comments
concerning the role of the translator as reader and writer, but no systematic
discussion has been developed uniting these two activities.15 I wish to discuss
briefly several explanatory elements that seem likely to prove useful.
Beaugrande (1978) emphasizes a relevant aspect of translation from the
point of view of the reading process. Basing his theoretical framework on
text-linguistics and on reader-oriented theories, Beaugrande's objective is
to determine the factors of a theory adequate for computer translation of
poetry. While such objective has already proved to be a "disaster" as Beaug
rande later admits (1980:290-91), because "the processor simply couldn't
perform the problem-solving which discovers or imposes connectivities upon
language occurrences," the validity of his study in terms of poetic translating
must be recognized.
The first point for consideration is his suggestion that "The basis of the
act of translation is not the original text, but rather the representation of the
text that is eventually generated in the translator's mind" (1978:25). This
formulation is receptor-language oriented; therefore, it does not take into
account what we consider a determining factor, that of the ideological
relationship between translator and original text (analyzed later in this chap
ter). This relationship, it needs to be emphazised, is different, from the start,
from that of the average reader. Only when the representation in the recep
tor's mind becomes textually manifested, exteriorized in a specific type of
transcription be it as a draft, or set of versions, or published material
does the translator as a receiver preserve this representation generated in
the mind; otherwise every reader becomes a translator and every represen
tation of a text may be considered a translation.
In the second place, Beaugrande refers to the act of reading in translating
as essential for a full description of the production of a translation (p.26),
and rightly suggests that translation criticism can be developed from the
reader-perspective, not as reader-function as I propose, but as the activity
of reading. His interest is to focus on the issue of equivalence and reader-
perspective as "the most conducive avenue to approach the issue of transla-
bility" (p.27).
In addition to the text-linguistics study proposed by Beeaugrande, we
believe that criticism focusing on the reader in translating can be quite illumi
nating from a sociohistorical perspective. One area would certainly include
the study of the role of translations in the development of the social fuctions
of language, and the function of both translation and translator in the expan
sion of the universe of discourse with respect to a given society.16
In the chapter 'The Role of Reading in Poetic Translating", Beaugrande
(25-37) stresses the need to consider seriously and in detail the translator's
"reading strategies" rather than the "writing strategies", since, he contends,
most of the errors in translation are due to "inaccurate reading" (e.g. rep
resentation in the translator's mind), rather than "inaccurate writing". In his
essential points Beaugrande also emphasizes the role of the translator in
introducing an equivalent text; for such a task the translator must "estimate
accurately the response of potential readers to the translation" (p. 27). Con
sidering the translator as reader, this is the very point at which Eco and
Beaugrande converge. For Eco (1979:7) "The author has to foresee a model
of the possible reader [...] supposedly able to deal interpretatively with the
expression in the same way as the author deals generatively with them." This
approach makes clear that author and translator encounter a similar task for
meaning assembly and sense production. Interpreting first, the translator
must also deal generatively with the text.
In my view, there are many advantages of this orientation and we can
extrapolate some relevant aspects particularly in reference to a paradigmatic
outline that defines the reader as an important component and determining
factor for the actualization of meaning in the process of textual cooperation.
Even the most elementary sketch reveals that the perception of a literary
work or an aesthetic text is a process that clearly calls for the interaction
of author/text/reader, contrary to the idea of the text as an autonomous
object, or "contrary to the notion of a crystal-like textual object" (Eco
1979:5). No doubt that in a literary text the reader's active function is not
totally metalinguistic, because the reader will unfold or discover the textual
clues in order to interpret what is implicit in the text (Iser 1978; Beaugrande
1978; Eco 1979).
In translation studies, one way of representing RT in a source oriented
approach is:
author text foreign reader
ST RT
and in receptor oriented approach:

foreign authortext reader
ST RT
By implication, the translator is either ignored or normally included under
the category of "text" (or "translation") since it is taken for granted that
someone actually performed the translating process. However, if we conceive
of the act of translating as a process of recreating within a communicative
horizon an aesthetic text equivalent to the ST, we can and must take into
account the translator's function within this process.
Eugene Nida (1964:144-155) presents a model of the translator's activity
and the corresponding role in the schema (fig.41):
Nida explains his model as follows:

In this model a message in language A is decoded by the receptor into a
different form of language A. It is then transformed by a "transfer
mechanism" into language B, and the translator then becomes a source for
the encoding of the message into language B (p. 146).
However, Nida does not provide any further analysis of his model for the
role of the translator, and remarks "If we understood more precisely what
happens in this transfer mechanism, we should be better able to pinpoint
some sources of the difficulty persons have in interpreting from one language
to another" (146). For Nida, it is a question of transfer of "symbols" in the
form required in language B. At that particular period in the development
of his theory, Nida conceived of translating as a process in which the concept
is transferred possibly in essentially "kernel" form, and then the correspond
ing utterance in language B is generated. From this, two remarks need to
be mentioned. First, Nida elaborated his theories from the transfor-
mationalists's principles (Harris 1954, 1957; Chomsky 1965, 1966) in order
to incorporate them in translation theory. Later in 1974, Nida himself pro
vided an explanation for the failure of those applications, since "The early
form of generative-transformational grammar had one very important defi
ciency, namely, the insistence that the sentence was the upper limit of Unguis-
tically relevant structure". Second, in this model the complete interaction

between the message in SL (language A) and the receptors who decode the
message in their RL (language B) is not considered. In fact, in his analysis
of the transfer-mechanism, perhaps because of the limits imposed by that
particular theory, there is no mention of the receptors or the reception of
message B. Thus the role of the translator becomes isolated in such a way
that it is cut off from the actual units of the chain of utterance, and the fact
that language exists also for the addressee was neglected.
My interest in the present discussion is to elucidate the area in which
the translator of a literary work perceives and decodes a given work in order
to recode subsequently the message into a new text, within the context of
translation as sign, as we have suggested in the previous pages. In this final
section, I wish to discuss some explanatory elements on the specific nature
of the translator as reader and writer.
The existence of two essentially different activities that take place
the act of reading and the act of writing will be emphasized. These two
activities are closely intertwined, and both are equally necessary; in actual
translating process as an empirical procedure, no fixed patterns of sequential
occurrence exist. As a point of departure we shall adopt Roman Jakobson's
term 'recoding' for translating (1980:37-38). Jakobson's distinction between
addresser and addressee can be incorporated in our rewriting of the commu
nicative act of the translation of an aesthetic text. 'Recoding', following
Jakobson, occurs when "one language is interpreted in the light of another
language." Here we transfer language into linguistic function. Thus we have
the diagram:
encodermessage 1recodingmessage 2decoder

language 1 language 2
If we adopt the equation translation-recoding, we can define translating
as the process of 'decoding' and 'recoding' into a different language a message
that has been previously 'encoded' by another addresser:17
Both 'decoding' and 'encoding' (in translation) are stages performed in con
secutive order, because a translator cannot 'recode' without having 'decoded'
a message. Therefore, within the act of 'recoding' we must consider the roles
of 'omniscient reader' ('decoder') and acting writer ('encoder'). Both are
functional roles for the translator as reader and co-producer of a literary
work set in pre-existence by another entity, its author.
The distinction between these two stages of translating are essential,
particularly if we take into account that in the interaction of author-text-
reader, centuries may pass between the time of conception of the work and
the reading of a translation. The implications of such an extensive interplay
are evident, since reading is an historically traceable process. Rezeptionss-
thetik has convincingly shown that the intelligibility varies for readers at
different periods. The situation is further complicated when we consider that
a translator often reads a text not from the original but from other translations
as ST. If the historical period does not coincide with that of the original, the
culture gap may influence considerably the translator's interpretation.
Another important problem is provided by Wilss (1982:144): "Frequently
the translator does not know, at least not personally, the author, on whom
he is working, and to make things worse, in many cases he does not know
the destination of his translation product either. Conversely, the TL (target
language) recipient normally does not know and does not even want to know
who is responsible for the translation he is reading". In conclusion, "close
collaboration between SLT author, translator, and TLT reader seems to be
rare." It is also relevant to remember that the communicative process
between ST and receptors' interpretation is not a continuous linear phenom
enon because it may often have interruptions and deviations eventually affect
ing equivalence. Numerous mechanisms can be clustered in this interplay of
textual and extra-textual components; in the pages that follow, I will concen
trate on the translator-function in his/her activity as 'omniscient reader' and
'acting writer' concerning the modes of utilizing and participating in some
specific properties of the verbal-interaction framework presented.
NOTES
1) The term "receptor'1 (language, text, culture, and system) will be preferred to "target" as
proposed by Nida (1964), yet not with an exclusive emphasis on the receivers, but within the
dynamics of author-text-reader interaction. The notion of "translation equivalence" will be under
stood as "reproducing in the receptor language the closest natural equivalent of the message of
the source language" (Nida 1969:495). On the divergent conceptual ideas about the notion of
comparison of translations, I refer the reader to Wilss (1982:28).
2) "Function is not a property but a mode of utilizing the properties of a given phenomenon"
(Mukafovsky 1977:4).
3) Mukaovsky and the Prague Linguistic Circle follow Bohuslav Havrnek's definition of
"standard literary language": "The standard literary language (spisovny jazyk) is the vehicle and
the mediator of culture and civilization; it is an indicator of independent national existence. It
differs from the popular language of a given nation primarily in its function: its tasks are much
broader than those of the popular language, and they are above all, more precisely and deeply
differentiated (...) Furthermore, the norm of the standard literary language is more conscious
and more obligatory than the norm of the popular language, and the requisite of its stability is
more emphatic. Finally, public and written (printed) utterances predominate among the utterances
in the standard literary language" (Havrnek 1940:180, quoted in Mukaovsky 1977:7,n.9). Later
Roman Jakobson (1973) will develop his definition of "poetic language" from the notion of
"standard literary language"; cf. Lzaro Carreter (1980:153). By "national language" we under
stand "the traditional linguistic unities (English, Russian, French, etc.) with their coherent gram
matical and semantic systems." (Bakhtin 1981:430).
Several important propositions introduced by Bakhtin (1977; 1981), Mukaovsky (1977), and
Umberto Eco (1976, 1979) will be integrated in our framework; however, it needs to be said that
neither of these theoreticians have dealt with translation theory nor with the question of gender
linked to presuppositions in discourse, as it shall be explored in Chapters 3 and 4. On the pos
sibilities of relating Bakhtin's theories to feminist criticism, see also Booth (1982).
4) Beaugrande and Dressier (1981) offer a useful framework on the seven standards of textuality
considered fundamental from the viewpoint of text-linguistics; these are cohesion, coherence,
intentionality, acceptability, informativity, situationality, and intertextuality.
5) This important characteristic to a certain extent accounts for the fact that after a certain
period of time new translations of a given text are produced or required.
6) These functions are: (1) emotive (expressive) (2) conative (appellative) (3) metalingual
(metalinguistic) {A) poetic (aesthetic) (5) referential (cognitive, denotative) (6) phatic (Jakobson
1960; Holenstein 1976; Waugh 1980).
7) According to Jakobson (1960), the object of study of literary science is not literature but
"literariness", that is, a delimitation and definition of the methods and components of poetic
language. As an abstract property that provides singularity to the literary fact (Eikhenbaum 1965;
Todorov 1968:102), "literariness" is "a function of historical, ideological, esthetical, psycho-social
factors of which the formal literary properties are only a part" (van Dijk 1973: 96); therefore, it
is a function that varies according to a given culture and period (Greimas and Courts 1982:246).
8) For his notion of "model reader" Barthes (1973) suggests that the act of reading evokes the
erotic dimension of the literary experience; he also states that a text consists of multiple writings,
issued from several cultures, which enter into dialogue with each other or into contestation
(polemic texts) (Barthes 1972); the reader, for Barthes (1970,1979) is not an individual but a
function. Prince (1973, 1980) distinguishes between the "ideal reader" (one who understands the
text well and approves of it), from the "virtual reader" (the reader to whom the author is writing),
and the "real reader" (the persona who holds the book in hand), within the more general frame
of the "narratee". Fish's (1970,1980) "informed reader" is a necessary component of a speech
act; thus, he draws attention on the reader's cognitive activity experienced in the act of reading.
9) On intertextuality, see Kristeva (1969:255); Sollers (1968) Jenny (1976). In "Le Plaisir du
Texte" Barthes (1973:58-59) gives the reader unlimited freedom to associate texts as dictated by
cultural or personal idiosyncracies; we are clearly not referring to this.
10) For Marxist ciriticism emphasis on reception and the influence of reception are set in the
context of the work as a literary object within an aesthetics of production and representation of
a given structure in society. The addresser and addressee also become integrated in the mechanisms
of production. From this perspective the RT plays a crucial role in the history of literatures and
acquires a predominantly sociological function. A case in point is the USSRR where the role of
translations (RT) become a major implement for the construction of a national culture; to wit,
"It is necessary to identify the role of translations in the development of the social functions of
language in broadening the spheres served by the literary written language, in accordance with
the needs of the given society "(Iartseva 1981-1982:81). The implications of this theoretical position
cannot be overlooked since they point to the role of translations as ideological instrument, an
aspect we shall explore.
11) Iser (1974:275), "The convergence of text and reader brings the work into existence, and
this convergence can never be precisely pinpointed, but must always remain virtual, as it is not
to be identified either with the reality of the text or with the individual disposition of the reader. "
12) This was first developed in Eco (1962,1968,1976) and fully revised in (1979).
13) A code is "a system of signification, insofar as it couples present entities with absent units"
(Eco 1976:8).
14) Zavala (1983, and forthcoming) describes her 'omniscient reader' as one who uncovers the
writer's modes of reading and proves that the text is not a totally mysterious operation, but a
product of craft, with its own historical laws, produced under specific material relations. He/she
is a receptor who understands the historical coordinates and relying on a given code, reconstructs
the context and analyzes the communicative strategies of the poet. Zavala has developed this
concept while working with the manuscripts of Rubn Daro.
15) On shifts performed by the translator, see the bibliography and discussion in Wilss
(1982:139-140).
16) The recently developed polysystem theory by Even-Zohar (1978a, 1978b, 1978c, 1979)
and Toury (1978) and developed further by the Leuven group (Lefevere 1977; Holmes, Lambert
& van der Broek 1978; Lefevere and Lambert 1979; see also Lambert 1981 ; Levefere 1981) seems
to be the most feasible approach.
17) For Jakobson translation implies the existence of two equivalent messages in two different
codes (1963:80).
IL The Translator-Function
IV
It doesn't matter what you think.
Words are found responsible
all you can do is choose them
or choose
to remain silent. Or, you never had a choice,
which is why the words that do stand
are responsible
and this is verbal privilege
Adrienne Rich, "North American Time"

1. THE TRANSLATOR AS OMNISCIENT READER
The act of decoding entails several conditions and circumstancial charac

teristics that must be stressed for our framework. For this purpose we will
delineate some of the salient functions; by definition, in our proposed model,
the translator's omniscience involves knowledge of a text's existence. This
awareness of the pre-existent text is connected with the basic condition for
a critical reader of a manuscript (cf. Zavala 1983); the text conveys the
suggestion that it has an author other than the translator himself.
This implies that the translator has a sense of otherness in relation to
the text to be processed, and to the author in question; it means to experience
a kind of sustained strangeness, since the act of translating (reading and
writing) consists of converting a "strangeness into likeness" (Felstiner 1980:5).
Using Bakhtin's notion of the verbal art, translating would be a movement
in language, through language, via the word:
The word is not a thing, but rather the eternally mobile, eternally changing
medium of dialogical intercourse. It never coincides with a single conscious
ness or a single voice. The life of the word is in its transferral from one mouth
to another, one context to another, one social collective to another, one
generation to another. In the process the word does not forget where it has
been and can never wholly free itself from the dominion of the contexts of
which it has been a part (1973:167).
The translator as an active reader will attempt to understand and interpret
all thematic operators which permit one to recode formal structures into
meanings. He/she seeks to understand the orientational features of language
which relate to the situation of utterance (on deictics, see Jakobson 1971;
Culler 1980); among them first and second person pronouns (speaker and
addressee), anaphoric articles and demonstratives; in short, components of
structure in the text. Necessarily the translator's acquired knowledge of all
these aspects, within the interpretative frame of the sense of otherness of a
given text, and the willingness or disposition to recode it, leads him/her to
explore that text in a much more thorough way than the simple critical
reading of it would allow. The text will be moving from one social context
to another, therefore, translating generates a dialogic operation with another
culture, as well as a search for a juxtaposition of dialogical intercourses, and

it reaffirms the nature of language as wandering word and the process itself
creates a pilgrimage of contexts which at times may take the text to a different
period in history.
Like the scholar or critic the translator attempts to disclose and
apprehend the multiplicity of meanings of that textual otherness, of that
alien discourse; to trace its own contexts, not as a single text but as the
ensemble of the author's work. In his/her activity as critic, the translator
studies the language of that author as poetic material, and will try to outline,
in each text, the persona, its corresponding experience, and the individual
consciousness in that text-given world;1 unveiling the forces ofthat dynamics,
shaping poetic motion as rhythmic material. The representation of the text
in the translator's mind will be actualized in the act of creating an object for
aesthetic experience; thus, whatever preexists the poem, including the
poet's peculiar literary heritage, and the factors that have contributed to
shape his/her writing features (cf. Krieger 1976:24), are investigated.
The translator's preliminary readings of the poetic texts will be oriented
to discover structures, thematic movements, the networks of images, the
speaker's perspective and tone, the lexical repertoire, the prosodic charac
teristics. Fundamental in poetry, the prosodic qualities and development, as
"rhythmic cognition" (Gross 1964), all these components will be part of the
reading process of the translator-function. This rhythmic cognition articulates
"the movement of feeling in a poem, and renders to our understanding mean
ings which are not paraphrasable" (Gross 1964:10); formal patterns of
syntax and stress, arrangement of vowels, formal patterns of consonants,
these prosodie elements also play a crucial role as textual components used
by the poet, to be concretized as an aesthetic pole by the translator as reader.
Any possible resource will be used to elucidate the specific linguistic
code and its function, the stylistic components and the textual clues; from
multiple levels of meaning, the omniscient reader infers the aesthetic effec
tiveness of the text both on a virtual (interpretative reading) and actual
(reading to write) levels; such are some of the aspects of possible knowledge
about the author's work as oeuvre with its socio-historic context and its rela
tion to the corresponding literary system.
A further consideration concerning the active role of the translator-func-
tion as reader is that in the communicative and aesthetic verbal interaction,
ideological consequences must also be taken into account. This is inevitably
linked with the poet's image and with the influence he/she may have or fail
THE TRANSLATOR-FUNCTION 27
to have in system of the R-culture. For example, the poetry of Marot, Du

Bellay, Ronsard, Desportes, Du Bartas, became well-known in England
through numerous translations; tracing the relationships of those poets with
those of the English Renaissance, Prescott (1978) has demonstrated that
only certain aspects of their work were actually translated, imitated, and
made available to English readers; an outstanding feature of the poets's
English image was shaped mainly by recurrent uses and subversions of each
poet's arguments through ommission, parody or misinterpretation. This
example suggests that one source of inquiry in the coming years may be the
ideological component of translation by taking specific individual choices as
important units within a culture. The decisive function in text-creativity and
the semiosis involved in the production of aesthetic texts are significantly
determined by the translator's interaction between ST and the receptor's
interpretation, and simultaneously, this interaction may bring a renewal or
an initiation of the dialogue of two cultures.
This perspective enables one to recognize that in addition to understand
ing the standard literary language and the literary style of a particular author,
and beyond comprehending the structure of the text, its meaning and sense,
another factor of the translator-function is his/her own choices of interpreta
tion, which have a strong bearing on selectivity. The selections in the reading
and writing stages give a new identity to each work, thereby providing unsus
pected points (unsuspected to the author) from which to interpret and to
acquire a specific image of work and poet in the receptor's representation.
Thus, difficulties of language and style, rhythm or syntax may be solved or
complicated further; alternatives of meaning may be expanded or narrowed;
the variants, multiplied or eliminated. In the decision-making stage, moti
vated by the will to solve translation problems, the translator's own cultural
and ideological presuppositions are a major factor, besides specific interests
and objectives, and in addition to the restrictions imposed by language use
and aesthetic norms in a given system.
Such decisions about textual strategies may result in weakening or
heightening a particular style by introducing substantial changes in a particu
lar poetic voice ; these modifications do begin in the course of reading (Beaug-
rande 1978). Solving translation problems implies deciding how and where
to appropriate an author's reality of discourse, when and how to accept
textual assumptions of linguistic forms produced by the author's strategies.
Even though it is generally agreed that the translator can 'change the
meaning of texts' no one has argued convincingly in terms of its political,
social consequences. I propose, however, that the function of the translator

is traceable as strategy; the reader's response may be modified or directed
to areas of discourse that have not been designed by the author, thus altering
completely the meaning intended in the text. 2 However, other factors of no
less importance are worth considering within the vast context of reader-
response interactivity.
Indeed the reading-process as a culturally and individually determined
phenomenon is also present in criticism, and in the mechanisms through
which some editors, publishers, translators, or the reading public, ignore or
emphasize certain works in translation. It is important to understand the
conditions, the rules, and the functions that delimit a number of literary texts
setting them against other types of texts and their system of 'literary behavior'
which may underlie these decisions. We should concern ourselves with a
construction of an empirical theory of the relations between an abstract
system and its concrete manifestations, in processes of communication, and
with texts and their social environment or context (van Dijk 1973 makes
relevant suggestions). Within this working distinction of "contextual condi
tions" (Pcheux 1969; van Dijk 1973), we can find theoretical confirmation
on different levels of perceiving structures: these mechanisms are visible in
the well-intentioned decisions to "correct" on an intralingual domain, for
instance, William Faulkner's or Garca Mrquez's "bad grammar". It can
also be detected in the area of editorial policies, in which the editor and/or
publisher as important mechanisms to control a sector of the literary
modes of production determine that dialectal expressions need to be
"translated" or that the spelling and punctuation must be "bettered" in cases
when they are features of style and are, consequently, textual strategies. An
extreme hypothetical example would be the editorial policies which would
impose correcting James Joyce's or Mallarm's punctuation. The ideological
component in the reading process is most clearly evident when a given work
is banned and condemned to silence.
Since these are considerably influential factors in literary history, I shall
refer to the major modification aimed at eliminating the stage of reception
of a given work, performed by an institution, by way of total suppression;
as a consequence, meaning, conventions of literary genres, modes of signifi
cation are conditioned to the ideological project of a specific community.
A text may be prohibited, banned either before it is being considered
for translation or even after it has been translated. This has often been
enforced throughout the centuries by power institutions (Church, State) and
by individuals guided by a centralized and authoritative set of rules defining

their ideological motivations and the restrictions which are then imposed
upon literary artifacts. Thus the translator's interpretative function may be
partly reoriented by those sets of rules which serve the purpose of preserving
an ideology. Such was a common practice of the Spanish Inquisition, a
remarkable case since it lasted four centuries (1478 to 1834), or the Spanish
civilor state censorship in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Historians
of literature have recorded numerous examples of deformations, misread-
ings, or "apparent errors". The translator-function still needs to be studied
from this perspective. A few examples will enable us to recognize how a lack
or an absence of translations are central to the project of literary evolution.
Consider the case of clandestine literature in the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries in Europe, Spain and Spanish-America as acute exam
ples. On the subject of narrative in particular, Zavala (1978, 1983) convinc
ingly argues that the scant production of novels in the eighteenth century,
and the scarcity of innovations in that genre was a direct consequence of the
strong and continuous banning of "subversive" texts. The prohibitions
imposed by the Inquisition (called 'privileged reader' by Zavala) of texts by
Defoe, Swift, Prvost, Diderot, Montesquieu in the original and in any form
of translation, modified the "genre memory" of that particular period in
the literary evolution in Spain (1983:510), and affected the evolution of the
novel as well as interrupted a possible chain of reception. Zavala's theory
deserves further considerations.
No doubt the banning of translations may have significant repercussions
in the history of literature and ideas in a given culture. The complexities
involved in motivations to perform such a mechanism of control still has not
been studied extensively. This operation is not only carried out by an institu
tion as described above; the translator may contribute, unknowingly or not,
to the suppression of a text or to its diffusion, according to an ideological
reading of the textual strategies in the ST. By way of example, the theologian
Diego de Cisneros undertook the translating responsibility of Montaigne's
Essays, at the request of an Inquisitor; the task took around three years
(1634-1637).3 In his exercise of translator-function, Cisneros eliminated por
tions of the text, modified others, especially the propositions he found
"heterodox". To explain his own options and changes, de Cisneros wrote a
"Discurso", an explanatory preface in which he revealed the "dangerous
nature" of the ST, an initiative which readily alerted the Inquisitors (who
ignored the "subversive" nature of the text they had recommended). As a
consequence, Montaigne did not reach the Spanish culture until 1899 in a
translation published in Paris.
The causal consequences of these suppressions cannot be underesti
mated, and literary history should undertake the reconstruction of these
silences. In other cases, an individual may wish to undertake translating an
already banned text, and may find it possible to make it circulate. Of consid
erable more interest are the suppressions performed by translators them
selves, in their dual activity as readers and writers. Especially significant in
this connection, is the role of the decoder and recoder who can anticipate
the reader's expectations and reactions. In this particular sphere, the trans
lator's own cultural codes predominate, since divergent messages may be
structured by supplying or eliminating the fragments, textual strategies,
semantic codes which are considered "dangerous" or inappropriate. The trans-
lator-function becomes normative, providing a "competently accepted"
interpretation which may result in a loss; this interpretation implicitly appeals
to canonized aesthetic or ideological norms (Bereaud 1971 is a useful starting
point). These facts reinforce our knowledge that the concrete readers of
different periods and cultures have been deprived of substantial parts of
content in innumerable works; this is of extreme importance in literary con
tinuity and authenticity. Yet another phenomenon related to this one, is the
number of additions performed by the translator, additions which may influ
ence the general structure of the work in terms of its ideological content.
In this context, mention should be made of the fact that, the motivation
for a specific choice may be dictated by the "horizon of expectations" of the
times of the ST; that is, options related to the translator's desire to conform
to the contemporary audience in cases in which the ST would not suit the
expectations of the receptors; in this sense, the relationship between translat
ing, aesthetic norms and canons of the period comes to surface, an issue to
be discussed further in the relationship translator/ST. However, it needs to
be said that the translator may also be guided simply by his or her own
motivations and world-vision, and instead of adapting to and accepting the
ST codes, may introduce significant changes by introducing units of personal
ideology. A case in point is Les Lettres Pruviennes by Mme. de Graffigny,
one of the major successes in eighteenth century French literature, translated
into Spanish and published in 1792 by Mara Romero Masegosa who modified
the constituents of the novel by altering passages related to the Spanish
cruelties committed during the conquest of Per. She also added a letter that
testified to the heroine's conversion into Catholicism (Dfourneaux 1962).
The Spanish translator shows no passive attitude in reading, interpreting and

recoding the text; it is striking to observe her decisions which have nothing
to do with a lack of literary or linguistic competence. A few examples should
suffice. In Letter I, Mme. de Graffigny writes:
La ville du Soleil, livre aux fureurs d'une nation barbare, devait faire couler
larmes.
Fureurs is recoded as valor ('courage'), and barbare as desconocida ('un
known'). Other passages are totally suppressed. It is not the literary compe
tence but a context of ideological presuppositions and preferences that deter
mined and conditioned this message deviated from its ST; clearly, such
decisions abound, and they oblige us to isolate certain points.
The interpretative process of translating is part of the semiotics of read
ing: the translator-function spells out the assumptions and operations that
lead from text to interpretation. He/she organizes the text diachronically
(e.g. existing moral codes, literary conventions, author's position), or syn-
chronically, identifying points of discord. The translator as reader identifies
the conventions that underline various interpretations; he/she can rearrange
the codes that generate a different sort of interpretation as a safe option, or
can maim texts to adapt them thoroughly to traditional and respectable enter
prises. Such interpretative factors may have interesting effects.
In the reading as well as in the writing stages, no text remains exactly
as its source; I do not want to imply that translation is impossible; I do
suggest, however, that the significance of outlining the translator-function,
lies precisely in the motivations leading to solutions of problems and the
difference which this motivation creates in a text. The translator is no mere
phantom; he/she is a presence incorporated in the author's discourse, yet
not as an invisible or untraceable figure or a voiceless first person whose
existence becomes totally reduced or hidden in the translating process.
A case in point on the translator's presence in discourse is Etienne
Dolet, a well-known humanist who was tortured and burned in Paris in 1546.
Dolet had been under suspicion of atheism for some time, and the conclusive
evidence which finally provoked his execution was that in his translation of
Plato's Axiochus he made some additions or interpolations, and a very con
crete change by adding the phrase "rien du tout", which pointed to his
atheism. The interpolation, an important document in the history of the
translator-function, reads as follows in the sentence uttered by Socrates:
La mort...ne peut rien sur toi, car tu n'es pas si prt dcdr; et quand tu
seras dcd, elle n'y pourra rien aussi, attendu que tu ne seras plus rien
du tout (Dolet in Cary 1955:20).
According to the censors this was a heretical action (well described in Cary
1955:20; Nida 1964:15-16). Leaving this theological heterodoxy aside, it must
be recognized that Dolet's ideology did influence his decision to erase from
Plato's text the possibility of immortality of the soul. Far from being a 'mis
translation' it is a product of interpretative procedures and subsequent recod-
ing dictated by ideological presuppositions, which illustrate my point.
Other examples are pertinent to my argument and can be evaluated
within the perspective of the semiotics of reading. Some interpretative con
ventions were characterized as forms of error, such as the polemic among
the translators of the Scriptures into English which provoked discussions and
accusations. They can, of course, be evaluated in that way (as "error") but
there is also the alternative of considering the ideological perspective. In
England the arguments were centered on the status of the word and its
prevalent usage, specifically regarding the treatment of ecclesiastical words
and their connotations. In 1582, the publication of A Discovery of the Man-
ifold Corruptions of the Holy Scriptures by the Heretics of Our Days, written
by Gregory Martin, one of the translators of the Rhemish Testament, pro
voked a strong controversy. William Fulke responded section by section in
his Defence of the Sincere and True Translation of the Holy Scriptures (see
Amos 1920:70). Significantly, this historical polemic demonstrates that trans
lating was at that time, an ideological interpretation with emphasis on
theological interpretation. Another example of a later period is the first
Hebrew translation of Goethe's Faust; the RT was intended for readers who
knew German and Hebrew and who were "interested in the re-enactment
of Goethe's work in terms of a crtain well-defined Jewish tradition which
they themselves accepted" (Forster 1958:10).
The complexity of the interpretative process is made clear in the oper
ations performed in the aforementioned illustrations. The translator, as
interpreter and reader of various codes that form the message, handles a
multileveled text with its variability, impelled by cultural and ideological
suppositions and presuppositions. What I want to stress here are the inter
pretative operations at work: as omniscient reader, the translator undertakes
a specific decoding to perform a re-arrangement of the original structuring
of the complexity of signification in the text. The divergences between two
or more versions of a R-text by different translators, close or distant in
history are not necessarily or exclusively caused by the different relations
between the structures of the languages involved. In fact, two or three or

even more translations of the same work into the same RL may differ
substantially from the ST and each from each other, as I have shown
elsewhere with William Faulkner's translations into Spanish (1984c). Cases
could be multiplied.
I have argued on the conventions and operations which dictate inter
pretative decisions related to the understanding of structural conventions,
textual strategies, figurative language, the properties of a text, literary signifi
cations. A general examination of the many interpretative operations within
the semiotics of reading, has also provided critical examples of the ideological
component; how, within this framework of interpretative operations, a trans
lator can alter, change, maim, suppress. The final omniscient-reader stage is
when the translator reaches the acting-writer function. At this particular
moment, the translator begins to find ways to introduce the determinant
textual strategies, in order to rearrange the textual design, to place the new
interrelations of components concerning the ST.
2. THE TRANSLATOR AS ACTING WRITER
This attempt to make explicit the interpretative operations as realized

by the disposition of the textual strategies and the nature of the text on the
one hand, and by the translator/reader's own cultural and ideological presup
positions on the other hand, are critical samples from which to draw infer
ences. The translator, critic, scholar, reader in general ('concrete reader'),
all perform readings in varying forms and degrees. Our discussion has sought
to demonstrate that interpretations or translations can also illustrate the
study or history of reading.
It is now important to stress that when we want to understand the nature
of translation, we will have to recognize that the different roles played by
readers in the interpretative act depend on the uses each one makes of the
knowledge and experience acquired in reading a specific text. The critic
fulfills this function by describing, interpreting, evaluating, reducing the text
to fixed structures, drawing theoretical postulates or aesthetic principles,
indicating or explaining failures or stressing technical feats (Culler 1984 gives
pertinent examples). While the translator's readings engender formal oper
ations and while he/she may perform a critical function for the understanding
of the text, the translator completes the function with the production, not
of a derivative text, but an equivalent text which will produce other readings
in the RT. The definable operation of reading will be that of writing.

On a large scale, the translator considers, in the writing activity, not
only the realtionships between text and author, but also of author/S-text/R-
text with its potential readers. From this perspective a translation is the
aesthetic inter/section of an author through a text, or corpus of texts as work
or oeuvre into a language and/or culture different from the source, made
possible by the interaction of the translator-function. Not only does the
translator inter/act but also sets the author's text into cultural motion; the
recoding of the ST is done by textually assuming the author's persona (acting,
substituting), entering the new text in an act of simulation. In the writing
stage the translator proceeds to produce the RT with its textual design shaped
within the boundaries of the R language, conceived as a text which is at the
same time the author's and the translator's.
A translated text, then, is a structured portion of discourse with a dual
internal addresser/encoder, a zone of contact. The translator-function makes
possible a reenacting of the emergence of a given work, in the dynamic
transfer of the original into another language. As producer of the RT, the
translator is an acting writer because he/she is the creative force of the actus,
"the doing" of the multiple moments of the process. For the same reason,
the acting writer is the producer of the translation which is actum, "the thing
done", the final product, the finished version. The role of the translator as
writer concerns the function by means of which linguistic and semantic selec
tions are made, of finding the appropriate equivalent expressions in written
form (which is far from being a literal transcoding). The actus constitutes
the phase between the inception and the completion of the work. It is in this
hypothetical 'moment' or primary instance of interpreting another's discour
se and language, that the translator will search for the equivalent components.
The equivalent text will have a design that anticipates the response of
potential readers to the translation (Beaugrande 1978:27) and will be created
under a sustained element of progression and simultaneity. The translator
seeks to shape the virtual dynamic nature of the work, of the text's presence,
and here a whole spectrum of possible relationships with the receiving context
arise. The transitions between various nuances of this spectrum are flexible.
The organized simultaneity of the text needs to be sustained, reorganized in
the writing stage. The translator is caught in the dialectic relationship of
discourse as the medium of expression for the subjective the personal voice
and the ST as a concrete subject. A difficult area to distinguish in this
dialectic movement is the blurred boundary in which each element of the
author's text (from voice to aesthetic effect) emerges, and the translator's
own voice vanishes. However, it is precisely here where both voices must
converge at what Krieger calls "the center of the work" (1976:9-37), a con
vergence determining the boundaries of the texts, as original on the one
hand, as translator's contribution on the other; or as adaptations or other
derivative forms. In one form or another, the translator is, at this stage, the
bearer of the authorial point of view.
The conflict between the need to make a literary work exist for the
receptors in an accessible and intelligible form, and the desire to produce
an equivalent aesthetic effectiveness must be resolved by the acting writer.
It is in this stage that the translator recovers the communicative function by
means of a close, at first literal text which is then restructured.
Within the framework of the pre-established rules of the RL, the trans
lator's selections have enormous significance, and are guided not only by the
obligatory differences expressed in the SL-RL relationship, or through the
comparative stylistics of these languages. Selectivity will be made through
an organizing operation of addition or substraction of elements (stylistic,
rhetorical or formal), according to the components already available in the
receivers' tradition. By and large, this means, for example, that if a given
literary or poetic structure is not familiar or non-existent in the RL and
receiver's literary conventions, the translator may actually incorporate it;
such is the case of the rubiyt quatrain which became a new stanza form in
English from 1859, when Edward Fitzgerald published his version of the
Rubiyt of Omar Kayym (Savory 1957:44). The early Latin translators of
Greek plays were partially responsible for introducing the hexameter into
Rome; the birth of the alexandrin in France, as Savory describes it, is a more
winding path, since the Roman d'Alexandre (composed in Byzantium in the
II century), was translated into Latin in the IIIrd. ; around the XIth, Alberich
of Pisanon structured it in octosyllables into French, and since 1132 it
appeared in German and finally in the late XIIth century, it was re-translated
into French in endecasyllable verse (Savory 1957). These concrete examples
show evidence that innovations may be incidental, but one must note that
quite a number of aspects in literary history were incorporated as a result of
their initial use in the writing stage of the translator-function.
Finally, it is important to discuss in this theoretical framework of the
translator-function, the unity produced between the omniscient reader/acting
writer and the text itself. Semiotics of reading has made us aware of the part
readers take in the existence of a given text, which may provoke different
responses: confrontations, oppositions, comparisons, questions, surprises,

puzzles, disappointments, pleasure. Acceptance or rejection of the contradic
tory readings engendered will, in turn, create a chain of semiotic references
and potentialities in the RT. Even mimetic associations belong to this process;
the ST (word or text) comes then to function as a new literary or cultural
sign. A historical study would enable us to identify the new orchestration of
signs; as a working hypothesis, which does not pretend to any completeness
of the data, we will only mention the history of the sonnet, the epic,
Baudelaire's translations of Thomas de Quincy and Edgar Allan Poe, as part
of this operation.
Within this cultural activity, the reader performs interpretations at dif
ferent levels; first, he/she seeks to identify the conventions and operations
which produce its observable effects on meaning, thus interpretation. Yet
this reading can only be partially directed since there arises a level of unex
pected decodings. Second, textual strategies come to be in interplay with
reading strategies. Finally, if the responsible interpreter of this act is the
translator, he/she takes the place of the concrete reader of the ST, and
appropriates part of the horizon originally envisioned by the author.
In this act of interpretation, the translator's persona (the writing-self
assumed in the text), the empirical person (individual concrete cir
cumstances, private and cultural presuppositions), and the psycho-social fac
tors external to the work, determine distinct relations in the interplay between
ST and RT, and this phenomenon may account to a certain extent for the
textual strategies chosen, which in turn will affect the receivers response in
the RT. Provisionally, we can distinguish three dimensions of the ST within
the semiotic perspective: (1) as object of reading which will provoke questions
and reflections; (2) as text, in which the completion of this act of reading is
guided by the objective of recoding; (3) as textual object of reading and
writing for a specific addressee, who, in turn, creates (generates) a new chain
of communication.
The translation's (RT) genesis, from its beginning to its completed trans
cription, marks another phase in the interpretative act because the ST is no
longer a purely inner, psychological or unstructured text as a verbal sequence.
In the RT the reading and writing stages of the translator come to an end;
yet it is important to underline that the interpretative act is transferred now
from translator to reader of the RT, and a new stage begins in the reception
of this text, creating new interpretations and responses.
Since communication does take place, reading in order to translate
implies to search for interrelations which will result in a text to be inserted

in a new social context. It is in this phase that the translator begins to have
a specific relation with the ST, at the same time that the RT is being created.
The relation then starts with a concretization and specific horizon defined
by (a) the nature of the text itself; (b) the translator's knowledge about the
text (diachronic/ synchronic elements); (c) the rapport between the trans
lator's knowledge of the world and the text-given knowledge; (d) the inter-
relation between the dynamic world of subjectivity fixed in the verbal struc
tures of the poem and the translator's own subjectivity.4 Within this complex
relation, (c) and (d) are closely related, while the dominant factor in all other
components remain the translator-function's (TF) subjectivity.
Let us start with a simple definition: subjectivity includes personal pre
ferences and choices, misapprehensions, aversions guided or defined by prin
ciples which include ideology and aesthetics. Aesthetics, within this
framework, refers to the elements selected as appropriate for the structure
as a verbal sequence, such as acceptance or rejection of a given rhythmic or
rhetorical figure (aversions and avoidance of cacophony, repetition, or cer
tain rhyming patterns). The aesthetic selections are closely linked with
ideological choice, but the former are determined more by the text's structure
than the translator's beliefs, since a particular decision may arise because of
the norms or deviations of norms in a certain historical period. The complex
ity emerges when the ideological factor and the acknowledgment of the TF's
addressees interact 5
In the rapport between translator-function and text an underlying dialec
tic activity will arise: the TF considers choices, rejects or adopts elements,
and the text will allow or require other elements in the process. These may
vary from a single lexeme, or phoneme, to a phrase, or sentence, or para
graph, or topical unit, or intonational unit; in other words, any given compo
nent of a text. A major concordance or polemic is established which will
provide terrain for the use of ellision, addition, explanation, change of sense
as textual strategies. It needs to be said that, if the text to be translated is
not totally agreeable to the ideological/aesthetic preferences and other sub
jective motivations of the TF, in the writing stage the 'system-defending
persona' created by the translator will make the polemic concrete implicitly
or explicitly in the RT; moreover, quite naturally, while the TF
will be in polemic with the ST, most often there will be a congeniality with
the RT. 6
In the making of the horizon of the text to be translated, before the
writing stage, the representation of the possible addressee may play a crucial
role if the TF conceives not a source oriented but a receiver oriented trans
lation. The ways in which the translator organizes the information will affect
the new interpretative process. In any event, since facts of interpretation
constitute the point of departure of the TF, within the scope of a history of
reading, some four repeatable operations can be traced:
Didactic: favoring explanatory notes which can be marginal or inserted
within the text itself, assuming that the ST is obscure and should be made
clearer to the readers. Most translations of the XVth and XVIth centuries
reflect, in general rule, this particular way of elucidating an obscure passage
uncovering the pedagogic need to explain to the non-initiates certain matters
(see Glatigny 1980:83). The desire to clarify and give coherence may be
concomitant to the teaching of a moral. In the XXth century it is reflected
in the common practice of disambiguating certain elements of the text, pro
ducing as consequence a switching of poetic codes.
Corrective concerns the desire to adapt the interpretation to the reader's
'literary competence'. The French version of the Franco-Gallia by Franois
Hotman (attributed to Simon Goulart), was adapted to the non-Latinist
reader of the 1570's, namely, the average shepherd whose education was
limited (Glatigny:83). Another model of corrective attitude concerns the
standard of literary acceptability in terms of the norms and the reader's
expectations playing a central role in the receptor-oriented translations. Such
is the common practice in the literary relations between Anglosaxon countries
and France in the period of 1816-1830; for example, the English works being
translated were modified to a great extent according to the taste of French
readers, and adapted to the aesthetic principles and notions of the times:
Le got des Anglais n'est pas toujours conforme au ntre/.../ J'ai donc
suprim quelques dtails qui auraient pu paratre oiseux des lecteurs fran
ais et j'ai raccourci les portraits de quelques personnages qui ne sont aucun-
nement lis l'action (in Bereaud 1971:232).
Polemic attitude which may be provoked by certain portions of the message
in the ST which the TF anticipates will be in polemic with the taste and
cultural presuppositions of the reader. The text is modified to 'protect' the
reader from certain 'harmful' elements, and therefore accomodated to fit
acceptable norms (either stylistic features, themes, topics) and/or social con
ventions. Two examples in the Spanish tradition will be analyzed in detail
in Chapter III. However, polemic may also be due to the translator-function's
opposition, not to the ST but to the social context in which the RT will be
introduced. The changes introduced antagonize a particular set of beliefs,

and the RT is used as an ideological instrument.
Preventive attitude, which causes the translator-function to introduce
modifications and changes, thus anticipating a possible censorship or total
suppression of the work. Examples within this range abound; they include
not only lexical and semantic units, but they also affect other components
in the text.
These four operations reveal whole areas of modifications, changes and
suppressions which can be introduced by the translator due to different sets
of reasons that may vary from the most sincere didactic attitude to the self-
defensive or protective. These attitudes provoke textual modifications that
may give way to the shaping of textual strategies designed by the translator
to introduce his/her own voice, and to constitute a traceable presence in the
text. Didactic, polemic, corrective, preventive, congenial, these textual
realities determined by specific dispositions are a consequence of the
dilemma in which the translator-function may be situated, immersed in what
is known as the "inherent antinomy of the spheres of culture" (I borrow this
quotation from Lotman 1975, with another purpose). It should be said, that
since the translator must concretize the passage of a text in a transcultural
interaction, the dynamic principle of the mechanisms of a given culture do
not often coincide with those of another culture. The textual space of a given
aesthetic object defined by a particular or specific collective in the S-culture
may be less possible because of negative valorization or because it may be
considered an anomaly in the R-culture. In general, this problem is related
to divergence or convergence of interpretations, and to the question of
literariness' and its variability (on this last point see van Dijk 1980).
In attempting to make explicit the assumptions, conventions, and inter
pretative operations at work, the semiotics of reading has become a useful
point of departure for translation theory. Moreover, the process of writing
accentuates what is the communicative factor in translating. I have discussed
the notion of translation as an aesthetic sign produced by a given author's
personality conceived as the sum of the poet's writings in a given
national language with its corresponding poetic function. The description of
the translator concerns the double function of omniscient reader and acting
writer, as decoder and recoder of a pre-existent text that already conveys
the factors of communication in the author-text-reader interaction. The trans
lator is thus an important agent to re-direct reception in a significant way
and will produce, in turn, responses that perhaps did not belong to the original
response. The functionality of the text depends on the strategies the trans-
lator-function constructs.
By considering all the possible reactions outlined above I shall attempt
to describe the process of reading and writing in a generalizable form, from
the interpretative operations at work in my own translations of the North
American feminist poet Adrienne Rich, a process I began in 1975. In the
course of translating her poetry I found it necessary to understand the poet's
tradition, her 'voice' and the different perceptions reflected in her own world
vision. This extra-textual path took me on a journey into the poet's literary
personality, which eventually resulted in a journey into the study of North
American feminist poetry and its more recently and consciously developed
form of lesbian/feminist discourse, which Adrienne Rich has helped generate
and expand in the last decade. Given my own Hispanic culture, and the
scarcity of such feminist discourse in the R system, and given the absence of
lesbian discourse as accepted norm of textual production, I had to consider
the nature of my function as translator within the Hispanic culture (my
attitudes and dispositions) vis vis the author's own aesthetic project.
Briefly described, these are the steps I had to follow: First as a reader
of the poet's work I outlined her author-function spectrum; second, I
analyzed the quality of dialogue and polemic in her writing, defining her
work in terms of her own readings of other texts (the intertextual crossings).
Third, as a writer of my own translations, I became aware of my own pros
pective influence upon the writer's voice in the texts in Spanish. All these
operations revealed important and vulnerable areas of feminist discourse as
performed from English into Spanish, directly related to the speech situation
in female-identified poetic texts. In the chapter that follows I shall briefly
discuss these interpretative proceedings.
The section that opens Chapter 3, developed from my 'translator's log-
book' is concentrated on the area of juxtaposition of the two cultures in
question. It is aimed at emphasizing the fact that seemingly obvious or unim
portant elements which native readers of English may easily overlook, may
be changed considerably. This description is not presented as normative, but
as empirical process toward elucidation of some distinctive features of a given
discourse (cf. on cognitive process, van Dijk 1980).
NOTES
1) For the use of this term I rely on Beaugrande and Dressier (1981:6-7) who on the notion
of coherence rightly maintain that a "Text does not make sense by itself, but rather by the
interaction of text-presented knowledge with people's stored knowledge of the world" (cf. Petfi
1974:24-40). The 'text-given world' shall be understood as the available content in a text.
2) 'Meaning' in this context is the potential of a language expression for representing and
conveying knowledge; 'sense' is the knowledge that actually is conveyed by expressions occurring
in a text (cf. Beaugrande 1981:84).
3) See Saenz (1936:369-389) on the importance of Montaigne in Spain.
4) The notion of 'knowledge of the world' corresponds to the 'commonsense knowledge' con
cerning "how the world at large is organized" (Beaugrande and Dressler 1981:25;cf. Petfi
1978:43). The interplay, then, concerns the interpretative movement of the translator's subjectiv
ity (which is 'dynamic' in the sense defined by Krieger 1976) between the knowledge of the world
and the one suggested by the text.
5) "Ideology" is to be understood as an idea-system (Bakhtin 1981:333-335); "it is semiotic in
the sense that it involves the concrete exchange of signs in society and in history. Every word/dis
course betrays the ideology of its speaker/.../ Every speaker, therefore, is an ideologue and every
utterance an ideologerne." (Michael Holquist, "Glossary" in Bakhtin 1981:429).
6) There are, of course, evidently a good number of cases, especially in work 'for hire', in
which the translator recodes following the author's design and suppresses his/her polemic readings.
777. Translating a woman's poetic discourse
V
Suppose you want to write
of a woman braiding
another woman's hair
straight down, or with beads and shells
in three-strand plaits or corn-rows
you had better know the thickness
the length the pattern
why she decides to braid her hair
how it is done to her
what country it happens in
what else happens in that country
You have to know these things
Adrienne Rich, "North American Time"

TRANSLATING A WOMAN'S POETIC DISCOURSE
The possible ways of approaching the authorial subject makes the reader/
writer activities (as outlined in preceding chapters) operate in certain
directions on the extratextual domain, which are directly linked with tracking
down references activating knowledge for the translator's comprehension of
the text. With this extratextual circumstance "the author's name is attached
to the text from the outside, and through its connotations it introduces specific
information and expectations into the reading of the texts" (Tynjanov in
Steiner 1984:133). Thus, every portion of knowledge that preexists the text
in the interpretative act will contribute to the reservoir of the reader's presup
positions. If the author is a man or a woman, the extratextual inferencing
provokes a priori different underlying frames, since, as feminist criticism has
demonstrated, the presuppositions toward women writers are far different
from those toward male writers in all respects.
Given the above mentioned phenomenon, the muted group framework,
first suggested by E. Ardener (1975) and S. Ardener (1975), and later devel
oped by Kramarae (1981) is quite suggestive for further study in our context.
Its basis is the notion that "The language of a particular culture does not
serve all its speakers equally, for not all speakers contribute in an equal
fashion to its formulation. Women (and members of other subordinate
groups) are not as free or as able as men to say what they wish when and
where they wish, because the words and the norms for their use have been
formulated by the dominant group, men" (Kramarae 1981:1). This applies
to women's written discourse as well, including poetry, as Kramarae suggests
(p.19-20).
While this muted group theory has been applied taking into considera
tion the production of speech in communication and written discourse in
general, it is also quite valid for an understanding of the reception of women's
work in connection with the terms set by Tynjanov which enables us to relate
the notion of production to that of interpretation within a problematics of
the text as part of a collectivity in which the text-reader-interaction
mechanisms are at work. Thus, the idea of women as a subordinated group
therefore "muted" may exist in the reader's consciousnes and in their
knowledge of the world, and then becomes transformed into expectations

from a woman's text. If women have been a muted group, it is in the twentieth
century, particularly in the last thirty years that awareness of this fact has
developed, and a sector of women poets have begun to explore the pos
sibilities of breaking the conventional boundaries imposed on them that were
tacitly accepted by them before. As Jacobus (1979) affirms, women's writing
works with 'male discourse' to deconstruct it. Women's writing is gender
preoccupied, and contains an assertion of sexuality within the text and its
strategies. This aspect of gender in writing has been studied in poetry mainly
form the thematic point of view. The knowledge of this critical disposition
in the reading public among which we include the translator might help
to explain certain strategies which rule writing and interpretation. It is in
this very point that the possible relations between translation theory and
practice and the field of Women's Studies may be explored.
My interest is to formulate ways to integrate both disciplines for the
current theoretical frameworks in feminist poetics. In fact, little has been
done on this subject, except for studies of distortions detected in English
versions of the Bible (see Trible 1978) which show substantial analogies with
the phenomena we want to explain. The discussion opened by feminist schol
ars on traditional literary studies have stimulated research on various expres
sions of women's writing, and the contributions of Translation Studies is
certainly becoming a necessary step to approach women's written discourse
on an interlingual and intercultural perspective. This should not be uderstood
as a suggestion to fuse both disciplines or to include one into the other, but
it is proposed as a much needed fertile crossroads: this would give the neces
sary complement to integrate elements for a framework that might prove
appropriate to analyze the nature, the function, and the mechanisms shaping
poetic discourse by women in certain cultures, to arrive then at workable
conclusions on a larger scope about specificity of this type of discourse. One
way to begin may be the study of the interlingual transference into another
literary system, with a focus on the structures that are maintained or discon
tinued (on language use or structure of the text). The problems and options
involved in translating texts by women brings to light in its essence the ideolog
ical property both in feminist and lesbian texts, and woman-identified texts
in general, and in the need for the translator-function to consider his/her
ideological presuppositions and dispositions in the respective contexts of
communication. A relevant area is the relationship between source and
receptor texts seen from the focus on non-obligatory deviations and the
TRANSLATING A WOMAN'S POETIC DISCOURSE 45
translator as mediator. Under some circumstances, the text can be disam

biguated, and not only the message but also the content can be changed by
modifying the possible conditions under which the text will be received (cf.
Eco 1976:15o).1
We should start with the simple fact that a poem written by a woman
is not necessarily female-identified; when the text is ambiguous, only the
reader's act of inferencing can determine whether the persona, or the speak
ing subject is a woman. In languages such as English that do not have an
obligatory differentiation in certain gender markers because of indetermi
nacy, the reader is the only one to ideate the speaker as either male or female.
In the case of an appropriate inclusion and presentation of texts of
Adrienne Rich (or any feminist writer) into the Hispanic culture, it is essential
to know that she is not simply an "American poet", but a poet with acute
awareness of writing from her location as a woman in a particular society,
and whose texts are an exteriorization of that woman-identified conscious
ness. This presupposition, however, even though crucial, is insufficient on
the theoretical level (e.g. to define Rich as a feminist or a lesbian poet erases
part of her discourse that does not fit into this category), and inaccurate for
the actual translation procedures. When the entire work of a poet is to be
considered in Rich, three and a half decades of writing up to the present
special caution is necessary to elucidate the poet's codes according to her
own changing perspective and voice.
One crucial problem for the translator who has the possibility of selecting
the author and the texts, is to decide how much is to be altered and in which
ways, in addition to normal procedures of finding equivalence. The discussion
should be taken beyond the domain of "systemic constraints" (on linguistic
rules, see Toury 1981) with emphasis on freedom rather than restrictions,
yet considering the close interrelation between both.
The present chapter discusses four aspects of the journey of the omnis-
cient reader's activity, from a particular text toward an outline of some find
ings in the cognitive experience required to trace the poet's development of
particular structures and specific components in feminist verbal constructs;
knowledge of particular poems necessitates readings of contiguous texts; a
contextual spectrum is indispensable for a more accurate inferencing, and
also to establish relational features. 2
In the multiple readings performed, the omniscient reader discovers
that the work of Adrienne Rich ranges from traditional (non-feminist) to
feminist, and lesbian discourse. Before going further in this discussion it is
necessary to sketch a few basic descriptions, which were not determined a

priori, but were inferred after study of the poet's discourse (see Daz-
Diocaretz 1984a). I will include them here to facilitate exposition, as a remin
der to state some general principles.
The term women's discourse represents for our purpose the global writ
ten discourse by women. Traditional' or non-feminist poetic discourse
responds to the two main restrictions exerted on women's publication and
production of a discourse in which the forms and words to be used have
already been determined by men (cf. Jacobus 1979; Kramarae 1981). This
applies to verbal sequences in which women attempt to adapt to those restric
tions, and try to fulfill the expectations texts by male writers provoke. These
texts then, contribute to expand the tradition and the system in which their
authors aim at finding a suitable position, and at being accepted. Stylistic,
thematic, formal structures are followed 'dutifully', and most often the
speaker is undetermined. This does not imply a lack of originality, yet the
poet is socially bound by rules, conventions, norms, values, and other prop
erties or a culture or community.
Feminist discourse encircles verbal constructs created with textual strat
egies (imagery, arguments, perspective) that contribute to an expansion of
messages in which the individual and the collective experience originate
from a critical stance against the social contexts of patriarchy and its lan
guage. 3 Lesbian discourse includes the set of works in which the authors
have not "internalized the patriarchal view of their subservience nor
accepted, even superficially, their 'feminine role' and their ancillary position"
(Heilbrun 1982:810); it encompasses the expression of lesbian identity and
a "sense of community in the lesbian setting" (Krieger 1982:92). This thematic
factor of identity and community is textually present in lesbian discourse in
what, for purposes of clarity, I shall call the female-each-other, that is, in
elements expressing contiguity (together), and reciprocity (to each other)
among female speakers. The lesbian text asserts itself by the act of naming
itself as such or by the explicit verbal expression of related themes, and most
importantly, by the contextual strengthening of emotive and referential
meanings encompassing erotic/love relationships between two female sub
jects. While feminist discourse is often female-identified (or gender iden
tified), it may not necessarily be female addressed. In lesbian texts we find
a relationship and an interaction between the female speaker with a female
addressee, constituting a homosocial microcosm of a particular female iden
tified world vision. Feminist and lesbian texts contain an implicit commitment
from their authors to expand the production of meaning from a female-iden

tified perspective; both modes contribute to the foundations of a particular
ideology shaped by a world vision oriented toward identity construction,
same-sex forms of recognition within the context of a 'female culture' and
its tradition.
This proposed differentiation, however, is far from exhaustive; it is
intended as an alternative or point of departure to study specificity in women's
writing. The three types of discourse in Adrienne Rich were drawn from the
verbal constructs themselves, unfolding as significant and consecutive direc
tions in her writing within the wider spectrum of poetic discourse by women.
Before engaging ouselves in further discussions perhaps it is relevant to ex
plain why this particular poet has been selected to be the central subject in
the present study. Leaving personal motivations aside, there are two main
reasons that offered ground for theoretical reflection beyond the actual inter
lingual transference of the poetry of Adrienne Rich.
The first major reason concerns the unique characteristics of the poet
in terms of the development of the three stages of her discourse mentioned
above (see Diaz-Diocaretz 1984a:2-50). Rich provides, in each one of these
discoursive stages, the paradigms for possible differentiation of women's
poetic discourse. The second reason is related to a question feminist and
English speaking readers might ask: If Rich's texts overtly and unambigu
ously present her poetic world vision as feminist and lesbian, why not discuss
instead the work of poets who might challenge the definitions and classificat-
ory criteria for these types of texts? My claim will be that Rich's overt and
obvious texts may be modified considerably; therefore, if this can be done,
particularly as it will be illustrated in the section that follows in terms of
heterosocial versus homosocial codes with the virtual and actual approval of
the Hispanic culture, or more precisely, if I in my translator-function activity
can alter the meanings of a poet who has put to practice and consciously
developed this particular discourse, there are grounds in this programmatic
proposal to believe that this appropriateness could be carried out for poets
whose codes are not overt. There is more than a fairly good possibility that
the poet's codes become subverted since the decision remains the translator's
alone.
A related purpose that will be underlying my discussion refers to the
need to develop more critically-oriented readings of translations of women
poets in the past and present, in order to detect changes which have remained
unnoticed up to now. Also within my proposal, equal attention should be
paid in translations into English, from the viewpoint of the speaker and
addressee relation in a given text and the corresponding world vision, because
the gender specificity that may exist in a given source-text may disappear.
The poems by Chilean Nobel Laureate Gabriela Mistral (female speaker's
voice) and those of Marguerite Yourcenar provide two different cases.
Yourcenar, for example, writes in the first person singular masculine form
in "Sept pomes pour une morte". The question is to which extent the spe
cificity in Mistral's writing in the feminine, and of Yourcenar's in the
masculine, is transferred, and to which extent these components are left
indeterminate in an English translation? We cannot possibly undertake a
vast investigation, because it exceeds the limits I have set for this book, but
this is also pertinent for texts within a homosocial world vision by male poets.
As suggested above if a given text goes through a movement from deter-
minacy to indeterminacy in a given element in language use (e.g. person
deixis and gender markers) as we shall discuss in chapter 4, then the reading
of a translation is to be included not only as part of the reception process of
the author exclusively, but it must include the reception of the translator as
coproducer of the text and as generator of new meanings, since recoding an
aesthetic text, in these terms, results in a semiotic interaction.
Thus, a conflict such as the one presented in the section "A poem can
begin with a lie. And be torn up." is solved by the translator-function; a
considerable influence exerted on the receptor-text will be due to the cogni
tion acquired in a reading to find suitable codes, not only on the seman
tic, lexical, syntactic levels, but on extra-linguistic levels which will result in
the acting writer's linguistic choice. It is important to stress, however, that
the conflict should be formulated within the context of extralinguistic factors.
It is not simply a question of the poet's concrete circumstances (biography,
and so on) or the aesthetic tradition or literary conventions in which Rich's
work is inserted and evaluated; it is equally important to know the extent to
which thematic and formal elements may be vehicle for extra-aesthetic values,
and how these function as textual strategies (cf. Mukafovsky 1977:94).
I will begin the following section with the dialectic interaction between
the translator-function and a specific text in order to arrive at an elucidation
of the author-function. In order to render intelligible and significant a whole
body of already existing discourse, it is important to give meaning to the
foregrounded features functioning as textual strategies, namely, displace
ment of connotations, intertextuality. I shall start to explain in general terms
what sort of expectations a reader's cultural presuppositions bring to the
text, and the intertextual relations the translator as reader may have to prior
texts. What I would like to stress are the hypothetical interpretative opera
tions at work which could result in an 'aberrant' recoding. In his/her trans
lator-function the reader must undertake various readings which will influ
ence the choice between alternative interpretative strategies.
1. "A POEM CAN BEGIN/WITH A LIE. AND BE TORN UP. "4

As I read "Twenty-One Love Poems" (Rich 1976, 1978) I remember
what for my horizon of prospective readers will seem a concurrent series of
poems in the literary convention in Spanish: Pablo Neruda's Veinte poemas
de amor y una cancin desesperada (1924). They are love poems inspired by
a woman, source and purpose of his creation, subject and object of the poet's
world. Neruda's sequence opens with "Cuerpo de mujer". The speaker, as
lover, creates the central metaphor of the woman as cosmos, the woman's
body as the desired world where he longs to travel and where he longs to be
fulfilled. In the complete sequence, the woman's body is the natural world
and the world of nature where the speaker will seek "the son". This is expres
sed through the principal opposition of T/you', the speaker, a man, the
addressee, a woman; the central thematic link in Veinte poemas de amor is
the desire to surmount that opposition, that separation.
Adrienne Rich's first text in "Twenty-One Love Poems" introduces
images of the external world that converge in the city as a kind of contempo
rary wasteland. It is a city filled with "pornography", "cruelties", "rancid
dreams". In Rich's sequence the opposition is not T/you' as in Neruda's but
"we versus the city" (1978:25):
Wherever in this city, screens flicker
with pornography, with science-fiction vampires,
victimized hirelings bending to the lash,
we also have to walk...if simply as we walk
through the rainsoaked garbage, the tabloid cruelties
of our own neighborhoods.
We need to grasp our lives inseparable
from those rancid dreams, that blurt of metal, those disgraces
and the red begonia perilously flashing
from a tenement sill six stories high,
or the long-legged young girls playing ball
in the junior highschool playground.
No one has imagined us. We want to live like trees,
sycamores blazing through the sulfuric air,
dappled with scars, still exuberantly budding,
our animal passion rooted in the city.
The speaker declares the desire not to be part of that decaying, debased
lanscape. In that wish I hear, rather, the need to hide from that world, to
survive within and away from it, in a private and nurturing shelter where
"no one has imagined [them]."
No one has imagined them. But I as translator, want to imagine them,
to envision the speaker and the "you" implicit in the dual "we". Thus I begin
to leave Neruda's sequence behind, suspending the familiar in order to grasp
the unfamiliar world of Rich's poetic sequence. In poem II, the speaking
voice becomes more distinct, now as the represented T' who is at once a
poet, a dreamer, a lover. I follow the lyric stream, its rhythms, pauses, I
begin to feel the cohesion of that world, and I start translating what gives
me the most aesthetic pleasure, from poem II (1978:25):
You've kissed my hair
to wake me. I dreamed you were a poem,
I say, a poem I wanted to show someone...
and I laugh and fall dreaming again
of the desire to show you to everyone I love,
to move openly together ...
In my notes I write:
Me has despertado con tu beso
en los cabellos. So que eras un poema,
es decir, un poema que dese mostrarle a alguien...
y ro y vuelvo a soar
que deseo mostrarte a cuntos amo,
que avancemos libremente, juntos ...
I stop and embark on the will to have the poems present, represented in my
consciousness, on the search for a bridge between the objects as experience
of perception and the thoughts which that perception arouses; to reconstruct
the meanings of Rich's poems and to select the corresponding sense, I must
discover the 'truth' in each text. My background and culture are different
from Rich's; there may be gaps that might prevent me from inferring those
true meanings. Do I dare disturb the poet's universe? The line "no one has
imagined us" keeps resonating. To imagine the lovers, as I go on translating,
means also to look for textual clues defining further the speaker's and the
addressee's gender. The speaker in the sequence is a woman: in poem VIII
she is "Philoctetes/in woman's form"; poem XII presents the resemblance
between this speaker and the 'you': "and our bodies, so alike, are yet so
different." This image is apparenty clarified in the closure: "we were two
lovers of one gender/we were two women of one generation."

Since it is not uncommon for a translator to project personal presuppo
sitions however different those might be from the references suggested in
the textual clues of the ST, I could think naively that those "two lovers of one
gender" are two close friends who have confided to each other their experi
ences of being lovers: two women sharing private information about their
intimacy (there are abundant examples in the literary tradition of the RT).
Advancing further in my reading, I conclude that Neruda's poems being to
a woman, Rich's texts are love poems to a man. 5 There are no actual explicit
indexes in the sequence to tell me the T and the 'you' are different from
what I imagine them to be. Yet, unsure about my interpretation, and about
how well equipped I am by my own culture, I choose to find the basis of the
lyric impulse, of the speakers' world vision; I want to discover the poet's
true society and community to explore her own order, her own universe, not
only in "Twenty-One Love Poems" but also in the companion poems of The
Dream of the Common Language (1978).
Gradually, I discover in the rest of the poems of The Dream, such as
"Power" (p.3), "Phantasia for Elvira Shatayev" (pp. 4-6), and "Splittings"
(pp. 10-11), that the speaker is also a woman, and the poems are women's
experiences. As I proceed, two important semantic clues appear: In "Two
a Poet" the speaking subject says, "I write this not for you [...] but for another
woman" (my emphasis); in the dialogued section (number 4) of "Natural
Resources" (pp. 60-67), the woman affirms she can imagine a world where
men are absent. There seems to be no doubt now, if I read the book closely,
that the poet's textual world is a woman's world. I infer that the lovers in
the central sequence of the poetic monologue, the T' and the 'you', lover
and loved one, are women. Going back to my first attempt at translating
poem II, I read "que avancemos libremente, juntos." To use the masculine
for the adjective juntos would be a common, grammatically legitimate way
to indicate the duality, or plurality, since the masculine plural form is nor
mally employed to include both men and women; even when the speakers
are women, language use indicates that in Spanish the form often used is the
masculine.6 To leave this form would be a displacement of reference, since
the masculine juntos would lead the readers in Spanish to perceive the poem
in the light of an 'aberration'. 7 However, as a translator who is aware of the
moral and social tradition and conventions in the Hispanic culture as a whole,
in the context of my own horizon of prospective readers, to use the adjective
in the feminine plural (juntas) would be more than daring. It would explicitly
refer the reader to conceive of the speaker and addressee's relationship within
the homosocial context, which in fact the twenty one love poems develop.
The connotative code indicates association with the word homosexual, and
more precisely "lesbian" by implication. This is an obvious interpretative
hypothesis I can anticipate the readers of my translation will carry out in
their decoding of the text.
The dictionary of the Real Academia Espaola, that dictates the norms
and accepted uses of words, has integrated, only in 1939 the term homosexual,
basing the standard of acceptance on the use of this term in twentieth century
texts, and it is described simply as sodomita 'sodomite', modified in 1970.8
The word lesbiano, lesbiana, with its accepted use in the masculine and
the feminine form is defined exclusively as follows:
1. adj. Lesbio. Apl. a pers., t.c.s.
Lesbio, bia (del lat. lesbius.), adj. Natural de Lesbos.
2. Perteneciente a esta isla del Mediterrneo.
The sole definition of lesbiana as an inhabitant of the island of Lesbos has
been extended to 'mujer homosexual' ('homosexual woman') only in the
1970 supplement of the Real Academia Espaola. The reasons for such a
late entry are, surely, moral codes. But my readers will not look up these
words in the dictionary, nor will they be informed of the meaning of the
word. In the interpretative reading, the ideological biases of their culture
and their own private codes will surely guide their inferences; the negative
contextual associations then, are inevitable. One evident solution for the
translator could be to avoid the equivalent for 'together' ('juntas', 'juntos')
which requires a choice in gender category, with a "safer" substitution of the
personal pronouns 'you and I' instead of the adjective together. It would
then read "que avancemos libremente t y y o " ; either this semantic solution
or the one which prefers the masculine plural form (generic) would leave
the line, the poem and the sequence, ambiguous as to speaker and addressee,
since the generic form is a conventional and grammatically accepted way to
indicate the plural for male and female subjects. However, if I selected the
neutral, ambiguous form (the plural), I would be cooperating with those who
have left what Rich calls the "half world" (1978:27) of silenced and unwanted
women "outside the law". Translating a structure of language, a sentence, a
phrase, does not imply necessarily translating a text with its correlations
organizing the aesthetic message as it was conceived by the poet. It can be
a grammatically correct translation, yet it would convey 'aberrant' presuppos-
itions. I am also torn between the poet's message and the constraints tacitly
imposed by the RT culture, that is, constraints that limit the accepted norms
and conventions of a woman's poetic voice within the Hispanic literary tra
dition.
Very few historical analogies could be considered to underlie Rich's
discourse, with the exception of the Medieval and Renaissance cancion
d'amigo (Galician-Portuguese) and women's lyric Castilian poetry of the
fourteenth to the sixteenth centuries, whose specific topic is love (on this
type of poetry see Frenck Alatorre 1975), or else the addressee is normally the
mother or a girlfriend. Another more complex historical analogy would be
Sor Juana Ins de la Cruz, the Mexican XVIIthe century poet (who shares
with Ann Bradstreet the title of the Tenth Muse), whose speaking subjects
can be a woman, a man, or unidentified; the adressee can be masculine,
feminine, or unidentified (Fernndez forthcoming has important insights into
this author's love poetry). However, the context is not the same in either of
these examples, since the amado 'loved one' is clearly masculine, if ever
referred to (we shall return to this aspect in chapter four).
On the basis of the lack of substantial analogies, the translator is thus
confronted with the presuppositions inscribed in the receptor culture. Crucial
difficulties seem to be present here; in my omniscient-reader activity, I can
choose to actualize Rich's text by incorporating textual clues in such a way
that the poet's codes are not shifted, or betrayed. At this level we find a
commonground in translating and reading; the conflict to accept the author's
strategies, the implied system and its conventions, or to reject them for want
of more acceptable contextual interaction. Reader and translator are equally
immersed in this dilemma, yet the former may deviate or follow the message
in his/her own interpretation, while the translator, if willing to change the
codes, will initiate a new chain of inferences that will eventually influence
the readers in the R culture. The conflict between two attitudes, that of
fidelity or freedom, often accounted for in translation studies but seldom
from the point of view of semiotics lies in the core of the problematics pre
viously described. Eco's schema of the aesthetic text as a communicative act
provides a description of the translator's conflict, and seems feasible to ex
plain the dialectics in an interpretative reading:
On the one hand the addressee seeks to draw excitement from the ambiguity
of the message and to fill out an ambiguous text with suitable codes; on the
other, he is induced by contextual relationships to see the message exactly
as it was intended, in an act of fidelity to the author and to the historical
environment in which the message was emitted (Eco 1976:276)
In translating, the omniscient reader being the addressee, the main conflict
may have a threefold outlet: to accept or reject the poet's codes, or the
translator's own, or those of the R culture. Not much substantial research
has been introduced in this area. The social context plays an important role
in this act of communication, and can rule in a significant way the situation
of utterance, its interpretation, for the expression to be meaningful.
2. HETEROSOCIAL VERSUS HOMOSOCIAL
In the previous section I presented a possible misreading and a possible

miswrriting. I exemplified the presuppositions by which a translator can give
the ST meaning. Those presuppositions are intelligible mainly in terms of a
specific social context of a previously existent discourse which implicitly or
explicitly postulates an intersubjective body of knowledge; they are deeply
instilled in historical and social conventions. As a portion of content, this
knowledge is an account of what the reader knows, of what he/she has already
read, and for our pupose it can rightly be called the intertextuality of the
translator as reader, since it calls our attention to the importance of prior
texts, of deeply rooted cultural beliefs, norms and conventions. The intertex
tuality of the translator proposes to show the interpretative relation to par
ticular, prior texts and their designation in the existing discourse of a given
culture.
The lines that follow will illustrate how the Spanish culture, through an
individual's presuppositions, may silence or distort an important portion of
an author's message, deviating it to previously accepted norms. The examples
are pertinent to my argument on feminist and woman-identified and addres
sed discourse; special attention will be paid to the actual social practice of
language taking place in the process of widening the current social existence
of meaning for homosocial arrangements and related concepts (see Diaz-
Diocaretz 1983b:441-449). This operation is ideological, and it will be out
lined from the notion of text as power, in a metonymic mode to interpret a
group of texts by women, which will be described as speech acts. By speech
act (first developed by Austin 1962; Searle 1969) we shall understand the
communicative process in which the message is uttered by a sender to an
addressee in order to influence, to act on the consciousness of this addressee
upon reception of this message. As a speech act, the text can have some very
specific characteristics, as in the case of feminist and lesbian poetry in the
United states after the 1960's (e.g. Adrienne Rich, Susan Griffin, Audre
Lorde, Judy Grahn). Those texts are speech acts against the paradigms of
oppression, particularly against patriarchal connotative components of lan
guage. What the poets perform is an emancipatory feminist speech act, by
virtue of the change they propose, that is to be realized in language itself,
and in the ways meaning is produced; this is an act of crucial importance for
the construction of their identity and for the foundation and establishment
of this particular homosocial community.
Before recoding any set of texts shaping a type of homosocial discourse,
it is necessary to decode the paradigms of oppression in all its traceable
manifestations for the study of diachronically and synchronically related com
ponents. Thus, in an account of the literary contexts, an awareness of ele
ments such as displacement of connotations along with studies of thematic
links, of concurrent use of images, or handling any other portions of content
can give us new insights into the writer's strategies, and into our own act
of reading and interpreting. Such an awareness leads to cognition, achieved
through close readings, and it is an important instrument to find the sources
and textual clues in what I shall call a homosocially arranged discourse (Diaz-
Diocaretz 1983b).9 Our findings in a given object of study often depend greatly
not only on what we read but on how we read; the interpretive process does
not end there; the critic, the historian, the sociologist, the theoretician write
about what they interpret, while the translator inscribes that very interpreta
tion. The search for strategic adjustments in conceptualization and handling
of lexico-semantic units impels the translator to embark fully on the discovery
and rewriting of new correlations that are being proposed against the forces
of the preceding codes (Corti 1976; Eco 1976). I would like to emphasize the
actual process of "re-shaping" language from text to discourse within the
framework of the forms of recognition of a homosocially arranged discourse
in the interpretative act. This refers to the interaction between reading and
writing, closely related to the development of what I denominate 'the suspi
cion of established discourse'.
A case in point is the 'aberrant' decoding of such homosocial discourse.
The translation of Virgil's Eclogues, especially of "Eclogue II", is such a
case of translation that has remained almost unnoticed in Spanish, or at least,
has been silenced. In this particular poem, the thematic center is the shepherd
Cory don's laments over his unrequited love for Alexis. This monologue, in
the translation by poet Juan del Enzina in the fifteenth century, is Christ
ianized, and the sorrow of Cory don is transformed into the intense shyness
of a poet-to-be ("que se transforma en timidez de poeta metido a panegirista
novicio", Bayo 1959:27-28, 33-34). Thus, Alexis, the object of desire in Vir
gil's text, becomes the King Fernando el Catlico, and Corydon's deepest
feelings and emotions are directed toward serving the monarch.
The same Eclogue is translated in yet another aberrant way in 1829, by
Flix M. Hidalgo. His version undermines a significant factor, for which M.
Menndez Pelayo (a note Spanish scholar) praises him fifty years later in
the prologue to a 1879 edition. M. Menndez Pelayo stresses that Hidalgo's
translation may not always be the most faithful, since there are paraphrases
here and there, alterations, and suppression of some other elements, yet
one specific change, according to him, was inspired by reasons of moral
concern and finesse which dignify Hidalgo: Alexis, the shepherd, is substi
tuted by Galatea, the shepherdess for whom Corydon's love burns (M.
Menndez Pelayo 1879:xlvii):
Se abrasaba de amor por Galatea
El pastor Coridn: zagala hermosa
M. Menndez Pelayo's praise represents a significant way in which a
receptor culture imposes moral constraints. 10 Other translations which have
suffered such distortions and silences are the nineteenth century novelist
Juan Valera's version of Longus's Daphnis and Chloe and Carlos Riba's
anthology of the Greek poet K.P. Kavafis. In Hidalgo's translation, it is a
very specific choice that provokes a displacement from a homosocial to a
heterosocial world. This betrayal of the poet's codes is surely not unique in
the Spanish culture, and the Hispanic culture at large, where "moral" censor
ship still prevails a century after M. Menndez Pelayo's prologue. Texts by
men and women writers in the past remain to be studied from this perspective,
particularly in translations where substitutions have been imposed by
heterosocial conventions. In Hidalgo's version we witness the ideological
pressures by which heterosocial paradigms are inserted in a text and con
sequently produce an irruptive intervention into the textually-given homo-
socical world. Virgil's "Eclogue" has been manipulated by the presuppositions
of the translator as omniscient reader and acting writer in conjunction with
those of the receptor culture.
The next example is just a reminder that the heterosocial appropriations
of homosocial discourse are present not only in the act of translating, but
they can occur in the act of reading, even within the author's culture. There
are other kinds of ideological presuppositions that may lead the reader to
produce a deviant text. This example refers specifically to Adrienne Rich
and a sample of the social life of her discourse as well as an instance of the
reception of part of her work in the United States, in which positive accep
tance does not necessarily coincide with the factual acceptance because
speaker and addressee rely on divergent norms and values (on this see van
Dijk 1977 who gives valuable suggestions).
In the New York Review of Books (May 1982), a few months after Rich
had published a recent volume of poetry, a woman placed the following
advertisement:
A WILD PATIENCE has taken me this far.
Literate female awaits hugs/epiphanies
with warm/cerebral male, 45-65. NYR,
Box 8515.
This short passage brings into focus an obvious misreading and most certainly
a deviant appropriation of Rich's discourse. The "literate female" as reader,
has made Rich's A Wild Patience Has Taken Me This Far (1981) her own,
treating the woman-identified/woman-addressed text-given world as an
extension of her own heterosocial reality. This variation of approach shows
that readers in general may propose different questions, and may construct
what are different types of texts. Rich's poetic texts impose constraints
through their textual clues, yet the readers concentrate on different codes
or conventions, hence change not only the structures and strategies but the
corresponding context of communication.
While it is true that in most cases Rich's poetry can be interpreted
according to her explicit codes, in others we can trace misreadings of her
message. A case in point is the female reader who chose to depend on the
rules and conventions of her culture and community, thus displacing the
codes in a direction not structured by Rich. It is pertinent to consider the
common pragmatic properties of The Dream of a Common Language and
A Wild Patience, together with the essay "Compulsory Heterosexuahty and
Lesbian Existence" (Rich 1980), an ensemble of texts which constitute a
female identified speech act addressed to female receptors. More particu
larly, the function of her speech act is a change of the reader who is part of
the social life of her discourse. If readers interpret her poetry in an aberrant
way, the speech act will ultimately fail its purpose and her literary communi
cation will fall into the norms of accepted cultural conventions. Rich is quite
clear on this issue: 'Two friends of mine, both artists, wrote me about reading
the Twenty-One Love Poems with their male lovers, assuring me how 'univer
sal' the poems were. I found myself angered, and when I asked myself why,
I realized that it was anger at having my work essentially assimilated and

stripped of its meaning, 'integrated' into heterosexual romance. That kind
of 'acceptance' of the book seems to me a refusal of its deepest implications"
(Rich in Bulkin 1977b:58).
A distinct problem arises. Theoretically, a translator may perform an
'aberrant' interpretation and subsequently produce an inexact message, thus
changing the speaking voice. One might infer that the interpreted and trans
lated text may, through the betrayal of the poet's codes, affect the commu
nicative act. We should briefly recall the hypothetical hesitancy on the line
"to move openly together" which posits yet another question of important
consequences: if the use of the feminine plural is the truest form of the actual
context of the poems in The Dream, will this gender marker be equally valid
for Rich's previous texts? The answer could only be found after reading
Rich's previous books, a required task to understand the thematic founda
tions and conditions upon which and against which her poetry has been
conceived. It should also be a reminder that in 1978 the last poem of The
Dream has the following poetic image:
two women, eye to eye
measuring each other's spirit, each other's
limitless desire,
a whole new poetry beginning here. (p.76)
This textual clue cannot be discarded, since the "whole new poetry" formu
lates a particular kind of communication, and to operate a change and assign
a specific interpretation based on other values and norms would result in a
displacement of connotations; 11 I therefore choose to perform an act of coop
eration with the poet in order to follow the textual strategies, the contextual
correlations. As a point of departure of my ST, I take the whole discourse,
the textual existence of Rich, as the poet's author-function. As a general
preliminary theoretical framework, I am concerned with a literary text and
its context, conditions of production, processing, reception; in short, produc
tions and interpretations of texts as social actions.
3. FROM TEXT TO AUTHOR-FUNCTION
In theory, the ways to comprehend a poet's work has many different

trajectories, since the actual interaction between author and translator, as
an empirical process, cannot realistically be fixed into a methodological path.
It may begin with a biographical, historical investigation, and may be com-
plemented by a philological research; or the center may remain an interpreta

tive analysis of the ST. Reading in order to translate is an activity oriented
toward the cognition of the texts so that contexts can be filled in, textual
strategies and clues identified. The readings will also enable the translator
to limit, discard, select the poetic texts that will be representative of the
poet; for a feminist poet such as Rich, a study of the different forms of
existence of her discourse in her author-function activity (a term I borrow
from Foucault 1979 as a parallel to translator-function), the spectrum includes
the changing modes of production, modes of circulation and valorization,
specially because this synchronic reading will prove useful for interpretative
decisions.
It should be noted that after the publication in 1951 of A Change of
World, Rich is more than a producer of books; and her own texts, interviews,
newspaper articles, reviews, recordings, readings, inclusion in anthologies
and the such must be carefully evaluated, since they reflect the "sum of all
the poet's writings". These represent the modes of production (that should
be closely analyzed for authors in general), which in turn affect modes of
valorization the critical evaluation of her work, the changing status of her
discourse, and the ways in which she has been received. Equally valid with
the author-function is "transdiscursivity" (Foucault 1979:153; Daz-
Diocaretz 1983a), that is, the range by which other authors have expanded
Rich's discourse carrying out further literary productivity.12
The activity of author-function, then, contributes to a better knowledge
of the poet's mode of existence in written discourse, and it is fundamental
to complement the framework establishing the principles of the poet's unity
of writing. Studying the influence, evolution, finding dominant traits that
are pertinent as continuities and/or discontinuities in the author within this
larger spectrum provides a greater amount of information on the author's
discourse before translating. This knowledge is useful not only to trace down
the themes and concepts that are crucial in Rich's language, but also the
concepts and themes which her discourse proposes and sets in motion in the
area of feminist ideology, the core of which lies in her notion of "re-vision"
and in her persistent task of re-thinking and reclaiming language to make it
function for women in and outside of patriarchy. 13 This is also traceable in
the aesthetic features of her poetry.
Both Rich's trajectory as a poet and her thematic developments were
presented in detail in a previous study (Daz-Diocaretz 1984a). Here I shall
limit myself to point to the main conclusions drawn form a diachronic analysis
of the poet's work; her shifts, purposes, are important factors the translator
cannot neglect. From text to author-function to discourse, the contextual
relationships in Rich's work reveal three stages in a chronological progres
sion. The establishment of these three stages, with subtle transitions, was
not done as a prescriptive operational mode, but simply as the result of
discoveries of a conjunction of several significant factors; it followed not an
external or an arbitrary set of rules, but paradigms were discovered in mul
tiple close readings and chronological tracings of all her poems, on at least
five levels besides the study of style and poetic language as such: (a) author-
function (b) dominant themes, particularly that of woman and language and
her relationship with the text-given world (c) the poetic argument toward a
feminist ideology that consistently denounces the role of the patriarchal word
and world as vehicle and major shaping agent of civilization, culture, and
social organization (as holder of power, and 'truth') which brings about specific
practice of textual strategies to oppose authoritative patriarchal discourse.
This is reinforced by the poet's constant reference to and exploration of
poetry itself within this project. The argument is carried out through the
displacement of connotations as a feminist textual strategy, (d) The intertex
tual factor in Rich's discourse makes manifest dominances of presence and
absence of patriarchal and women's alien texts on the one hand, and of the
disposition of polemic or congenial dialogue determining a given discourse,
e) Crucial decisions made by the translator-function (referred to in chapter
4): the speech situation in feminist and female identified and oriented poetic
discourse illustrates that in translating texts from the discourse in question,
ideologic motivations and aesthetic dominancies play a decisive role; these
five levels are relevant for feminist discourse, in which Rich's poetry
demonstrates a consistent pattern of variables.
Rich's poems explore the possibilities of an authentic expression of what
constitutes a woman's voice in a patriarchal world, and from this perspective
her relationship to language and society emerges. The poet's changing world
visions can be, for purposes of the present discussion, organized around four
dominant spectra: the first one consists of the point of view of the woman
growing up in a world that has been previously ordered and for which she
must be equipped to exist as a subordinated being; that is, she has "to take
the world as it was given" (cf. Daz-Diocaretz 1978a, 1978b). The woman
begins to perceive her individuality in a world in which her private experience
is defined by pre-established conventions and previously assigned definitions
about which there is little she can do (Rich 1951, 1955, 1963).
Second, the man-woman relationship set in context of a patriarchy-

oriented society is first accepted, yet lived through with a certain distance,
at times with restraint and suspicion, later confronted and critically rejected,
and finally re-examined.
Third, the woman in the act of "re-vision" which brings her cognition of
the need to establish her own true values in a man's world. As a consequence
of this awareness, the image of the male figure becomes often the agent and
instrument of social physical spiritual violence, or indifference, and also
destruction (e.g. war) and self-destruction (e.g. suicide). A "visionary anger"
arises and the poet explores the suffering and alienation felt as a woman,
from the realization that man cannot stop being the perpetuator of patriarchal
values and a potential enemy to himself.
Fourth, the woman-to-woman relationship becomes the answer to attain
a meaningful existence, as a result of a gradual assertion of identity and
identification with women in the past and the present as well. This develop
ment can be seen in the light of a movement from aesthetic detachment
objectifying emotions and personal voice, to a direct lesbian-feminist vision.
Man appears as an incidental presence, the occasional transgressor; this does
not mean he has ceased to exist but that he is deterritorialized in the poet's
presented vision. Woman is no longer living in a man's world; the critique
of patriarchy and Rich's self assertion open a new territory for the bonding
with other women through the "power of language, which is the ultimate
relationship with everything in the universe" (Rich 1979d:248).
Parallel to these four major thematic units, a number of relevant facts
from Rich's author-function must be mentioned. The first one concerns the
modes of production and circulation. After Diving into the Wreck (1973) the
poet began to publish extensively and primarily in feminist literary
magazines.14 Since 1976 several of her poems and essays begin to appear first
as chapbooks issued by small presses run by women (Rich 1976, 1977a,
1977b). Also in that period she starts to concern herself with the concrete
readership and reception of her work (e.g. on the "Twenty-One Love Poems"
she said: "I wanted it in women's hands", see Bulkin 1977a:59). The second
one is related to the modes of valorization. From The Will to Change (1971)
and Diving into the Wreck (1973) together with the two essays "When We
Dead Awaken" (1971 in 1979a) and "The Anti-Feminist Woman" (1979c)
critics focus on the poet's exploration of the links between poetry and patriar
chy, and the critical commentaries on Rich's poetry become polarized
between the practitioners of a feminist approach and those critical readers
who, on social and cultural bases, reject the poet's change.

From another angle, the poet's semantic motivations are guided in prin
ciple by her proposed "Re-vision" (Rich 1979b:35) which brings implications
of either accepting or polemizing with tradition. From an artistically
detached, objectified vision in 1951, to the systematic creation of a particular
critique of society through language, feminist ideology begins to shape Rich's
argument for an alternative world in antagonistic affiliation with patriarchy.
The method proposed and applied is a set of textual strategies concerning
the use of certain lexical and semantic decisions in order to develop a displace
ment of connotations. Thus, for example, to the patriarchal notion of a
'desirable' love relationship including man and woman, Rich presents contex
tual connotations with new correspondences and oppositions, first in her
feminist texts, then in her lesbian and female identified and oriented poetic
texts where the emotional connotations of negativity implicitly and tradition
ally attributed by patriarchy to the woman to-woman relationship are shifted;
The Dream of a Common Language, A Wild Patience Has Taken Me This
Far and Sources will explore consistently what to patriarchy is 'deviant' (e.g.
'lesbian') yet now charging the semantic force of the terms with positivity,
subverting an area of power in language in order to repossess it:
For many women, the commonest words are having to be sifted through,
rejected, laid aside for a long time, or turned to the light for new colors and
flashes of meaning: power, love, control, violence, political, personal, pri-
vate, friendship, community, sexual, work, pain, pleasure, self, integrity...
When we become acutely, disturbingly aware of the language we are using
and that is using us, we begin to grasp a material resource that women have
never before collectively attempted to repossess (though we were its inven
tors, and though individual writers like Dickinson, Woolf, Stein, H.D., have
approached language as transforming power) (1979d:247).
In the context of her total discourse, a central textual strategy in Rich obeys
the desire to redirect this negativity; from the diachronic readings of Rich's
work previously outlined (Diaz-Diocaretz 1983a, 1984a) it is evident that
the poet's struggle is to break the socially received and programmed con
straining frames and stereotypes and the former ideological structures that
have shaped women's consciousness in the past. 15 The underlying ideological
structures in the feminist poet have as target the traditional, and patriarchal
system of thoughts still prevalent, and the search for an alternative terrain
where to expand the universe of discourse by and for women.
The ideological displacement of emotional connotations of negativity is
undoubtedly a major feminist strategy, and a central clue for the translator.
Instances abound, yet I shall limit myself to two examples. The lines "the
silence burying unwanted children / women, deviants, witnesses in desert
sand" (Rich 1978:27), refers to the women who have been cast out from
'civilization' by an enforced set of norms exerted by the patriarchal world.
In Spanish the dictionary provides the following:
deviant a. desviado, descarriado, que no se adhiere a lo considerado normal
en un grupo o sociedad. s.persona cuya conducta difiere de lo establecido;
invertido, homosexual (Simon and Schuster 1973:185).
The four adjectives offered by the dictionary point to negative connotative
units, desviado and descarriado refer to the notion of outlaws, and invertido,
homosexual to sexual preference; therefore, any of such words used by the
translator would express negativity while in Rich this word is used to question
and challenge the conventional meaning. Descarriado also relates to the
semantic field 'madness', and desviado to 'degenerate'. A non-omniscient
reader who would select one of these lexical units would violate the poet's
textual strategies. A translator who wishes to write a more accurate meaning
and who wishes to put to practice the author-function spectrum would have
to consider the option marginadas, suggesting 'put on the border', or margi-
nated. "Deviant" is one of the recurrent adjectives Rich applies to women
in the twentieth century, as well as to women in the past, since it becomes
in her textual world a way of naming with an old word but with renewed
meaning those who have not followed the patriarchal constraints. "Heroines"
begins as follows: "Exceptional/'even deviant/ you draw your long skirts across
the nineteenth century" (Rich 1981:33). This illustrates the strategy of direct
use of a given word (e.g. 'lesbian', 'deviant'), yet it should be remembered
that the making of feminist discourse is actualized by the creation of contexts
where the multiplicity of possible semantic fields connected with allusions
to, definitions and assumptions about women and their relationships and
connections to one another, as well as to society and nature (Diaz-Diocaretz
1984a) interact.
As a counterforce to the authoritative and dominant discourse of patriar
chy, of the power of established literature as an institution handed down,
perpetuated, imposed to women, the feminist poet opposes the received
hierarchies through her poetic argument structuring her discourse with an
element of consistent self-referentiality to demonstrate how language,
because of its inherent transforming power, may fail to those who claim to
control it, and how it can serve, by virtue of this very power being reclaimed
polemically, to create new meanings. Thus, the metonymic relation of the
lesbian feminist text as a speech act (Daz-Diocaretz 1983a; 1984a) together

with the notion of text as power (see Elshtein 1982), can rightly be understood
in the light of yet another framework introduced by Brown and Gilman
(1960) on the "power semantic" described as:
One person may be said to have power over another in the degree that he
is able to control the behaviour of the other. Power is a relationship between
at least two persons, and it is nonreciprocal in the sense that both cannot
have power in the same area of behaviour. The power semantic is similarly
nonreciprocal; the superior says T and receives V (p.255).
The central assumption for the nonreciprocal power semantic is elaborated
from the dichotomy between superior and inferior; I suggest consideration
of this relational proposal for the muted group framework, in which women
have been held as the inferior speaker, and the feminist writer in general
has inscribed her awareness of this nonobjectivity, nonreciprocity in the
shaping of her discourse; thus, together with the aesthetic project, in Rich
for example, the making of an ideology to disassemble this power marks a
significant feature beginning about 1965 as a specifically feminist approach
to re-interpret traditional discourse; this decision is closely related to the
contextual relations in each text as well as with the transforming self expressed
in the speaker of the poems. From the feminist project (Diaz-Diocaretz
1983a, 1984a) to the ideation of the lesbian feminist world, the features drawn
from a particular female-identified and addressed vision are intertwined with
the inclusion of textual strategies.16 In Rich, this practice is highly charac
terized by a semantic consistency in each of the three phases of her discourse,
which requires the recoding of a functional equivalence.
Since Diving into the Wreck Rich no longer uses words exclusively as
purely aesthetic elements, that is, language is no longer a neutral medium
through which poetic structures can convey only a poetic situation; this
changed objective creates new territory and is the istrument with which to
advance in the act of re-vision.
Adrienne Rich's texts after Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law (1963) clearly
indicate the poet's attempt to reconstruct language and society, to redirect
the feminine and the female as positive forces, moving from the power of
man as 'exploiter' to the power of woman as 'explorer' of new boundaries.
These properties are not independent; Rich maintains dialogues with
women's texts (written or imagined) and polemics with stratified patriarchal
texts in order to gain acceptance of a new kind of audience for this re-visioned
discourse; her texts function as a speech act to change the reader; this speech
act can best be described in the following schema of a feminist communicative

interaction:
Rich's implied readers and the actual readership are predominantly women,
as well as readers interested in women's 'culture' and in literature by women,
a fact which holds true for other feminist writers, to search out the true
nature of women's relationships, "both consummated and unconsummated"
(Bulkin 1977a:62). The poet and her readership will, ultimately, undergo
change in knowledge, with specific psycho-social consequences, as a starting
point to (re)examine those texts written by women that are still unknown,
or unimagined, and to sift through women's lives in their true meaning (trom
a woman-identified perspective) in order to discover their potential for
power. This silenced history is verbal and nonverbal, and it includes women
as heroines in history.
Rich and the feminist poet in general opposes the notion of woman
the female, feminine as a mere subordinate of shadow of man, and the
culturally assigned weakness and inferiority, the supposed flimsiness attrib
uted to women; in contrast, the poet sets forth the notion of woman as
center of inherent strength, as substance itself, as an empowered being inter
preting the world from the inner eye of woman. This textual world can be
explained as a synecdochical embodiment of language; for feminist writers
a woman's text is an integral part not a mere appendix of the general symbolic
text of human culture; strictly speaking, they assign specific properties to
their work.
It is most important to underline that Rich understands her texts as do
other poets in the same line, as part of feminist discourse (since 1971), a
speech act whose purpose is to develop a radical lesbian feminist approach
to culture, society, and identity. Poems such as "Women" (1968), "Trying
to Talk with a Man" (1971), "The Stranger" (1972), "Power" (1974), "Origins
and History of Consciousness" (1972-74) more particularly indicate this
request to the coming of consciousness and the purpose of creating a feminist
vision. This poetic stance is further developed on a theoretical basis in her
essay "Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence" (1980) which
can be understood as a private and political manifesto and a sort of exegesis
of her poetic work after 1974. Here she proposes the idea of the lesbian
continuum as a working concept and a strategic term to accomplish the nam
ing and description of a woman-identified experience outside the realm of
patriarchal conceptions.
The specific question of the woman identified experience becomes
encoded in a new, liberating way moving from the previous feminist critique
of 're-vision' (Rich 1971) in the "act of looking back, of seeing with fresh
eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction," (Rich 1979b:35)
toward a world vision encompassing this continuum consisting of a polyphony
of women's voices in the past and present, fused in time, to explore the still
unnamed history and private stories "outside the law" of patriarchy and
conventions. Language is thus assumed to seek and to re-member the for
merly lost continuum; in fact the text becomes an integration of special
literary and aesthetic functions (Kramarae 1981; Rich 1981); yet language is
conceived as power, a power for women to embody texts. Feminist dis
course expands toward a possible discourse ad feminam (cf. Rich 1963:22).
The idea of text as power is exercised as the emancipatory act which takes
varying forms: it begins with conscious re-readings, and use of words in
feminist context, with enlarging the reservoir of received lexicon by coining
new words, by reclaiming words and connotations retroactively, especially
words "loaded with so much negativity" (Schwarz 1979; cf. Rich 1980:650).
On the basis of this substantial changing factor, writers (and especially
poets, since we are concentrating on poetic discourse) enact change in com
municative behaviour (see Kramarae 1981) in order to develop possibilities
of expression for women, outside the domain and value system of traditional
discourse. The usefulness of the operational definition of our term a
synecdochical embodiment of language is that it provides the explicit
account of a peculiar factor; lesbian texts can then be described as the verbal
constructs and expression of a woman-identified microcosm containing pri
vate/public, individual/collective portions of knowledge in which the T and
'we' as community of speakers is nearly always woman-identified. The writers
assume textually this identity from that location and re-orient the dialogues
and polemics which will concurrently indicate the movement of connotations
as described previously. Given these formulations, we can now state that in
traditional, non-feminist discourse these attitudes and semantic par
ticularities are absent. We might attempt to describe the difference and dis
tinctive properties of this discourse from Kramarae's introduction of the
muted group framework in communicative operations in which "the constant
attempts made to silence women mean that women, to be heard by men, try
to present themselves in speech forms recognizable and respected by men"
(1981:19). Note that Rich's first books A Change of World (1951), The
Diamond Cutters and Other Poems (1955), and to a certain extent the poems
in Snapshots were produced within that framework of literary tradition and
values, as Rich has later confirmed. Independence from norms and values
for the speaker and addressee evolve later, and has its effects in the commu
nicative act and the poetic utterance itself.
4. THE INTERTEXTUAL FACTOR AS FEMINIST STRATEGY
Did you think I was talking about my life?

I was trying to drive a tradition up against the wall.
A. Rich, "Ghazals: Homage to Ghalib", 1968
The authorial subject is not a tabula rasa, but a composite knowledge

of literary traditions and cultures, integrating previously existent codes into
the new text. In the past years, this important notion has been called inter-
textuality (Kristeva 1969, 1974, 1980; Barthes 1979).17 It explores the
relationship between poet (as authorial subject) and any textual manifesta
tion of another text linguistic or non-linguistic either external (rapport
of one text to another), or internal (rapport of a text with itself), implicit or
explicit, and can only best be described in its plurality and complexity (Ricar-
dou 1971; Jenny 1976; Genette 1979). The basis of this complexity is what
I call the alien text (that which is not the poet's own), and comprises a rapport
of two discoursive entities in dialectic and dialogical interrelation.
My proposition of the intertextual factor to study poetic discourse by
women (Daz-Diocaretz 1984a:31-50) is neither what might be necessarily
called a feminist approach nor a traditional instance to demonstrate that
writing is either masculine or feminine; within the larger project of studying
a specific corpus of texts, that of poetry by women in the twentieth century
American tradition, a primary doubt guides my investigation: whether there
actually exists a poetic discourse by women that is distinct (with some dif
ferentiation features) from the more general domain of poetic discourse as
a whole within a literary system.
The poet and the alien text is but one area in the spectrum of intertextual
networks; however, for a possible systematic approach that would consider
this a major factor, it is appropriate to attempt to isolate different manifes
tations of this textual plurality. Such an analysis presupposes the formulation
and reformulation of some theoretical problems which are far from being
clarified: that of particularities (if any) the woman has with literary tradition
and with language itself, since recognition of this first level may help distin
guish the parts of culture which are accepted, or else subject to correction
and modification.
The question raised by the rapport between the poet and the alien text
requires that we center our attention not only on language, but especially
on poetic structure. The purpose is to recognize how the author, as reader,
experiences textuality. Furthermore, this aspect projected to the frame of
semiotics of translating poetic language signals an operation of combined
mechanisms whose implications must be discussed.
Since the beginning of the recent development of the women's move
ment, critics have been exploring the representation of gender and female
sexuality in the arts. In poetry, a few studies have shown connections between
the uses of subject matter and sources (Carruthers 1979), mythological
themes and images (Ostriker 1982), psychological criticism (Gallop 1983),
fiction (Marks 1979), and a woman-generated writing. Attention on images
and themes, metaphors and myths will, no doubt, help to find the significance
of form and content; yet one must always refer to the question of structure,
the perception of poetry as a genre (Riffaterre 1978:115-163 gives pertinent
observations). The problem we face is a lack of a framework that would
analize feminist poetic discourse from this perspective, the literary norms to
which texts may be related and by virtue of which they become more mean
ingful and coherent. Intertextuality, in the terms that will be proposed in
this section, could contribute to answer the queries concerning the salient
features of what characterizes poems written, for example, from a feminist
orientation, and will help identify the components that are peculiar to a set
of texts that would comprise this category. It will enable us to approach
the constitutive conventions which relate this type of discourse to tradition,
or else deviate it from accepted modes and values.
The very concept of intertextuality poses some problems since its struc
turalist (Kristeva 1974) and post-structuralist development. It is not pertinent
here to discuss these problems, since previous studies can serve that purpose
(Communications 1968; Barthes 1970; Culler 1975, 1981; Potique 1976;
Rifatterre 1978). We shall focus only on the most suitable line of argument
for our purpose, related to poetry, namely, Kiril Taranovsky's notion of
subtext which can be further developed in our framework. His subtext is an
"already existing text (or texts) reflected in a new one". Four types are
distinguished (1976:18):
(1) that which serves as a simple impulse for the creation of an image;
(2) zaimstvovanie po ritmu i zvucaniju (Borrowing of a rhythmic figure and
the sounds contained therein);
(3) the text which supports or reveals the poetic message of a later text;
(4) the text which is treated polemically by the poet.
The first two do not necessarily contribute to our better understanding of
a given poem. However, (2) may be combined with (3) and/or (4), and (3)
and (4) may, in turn, be blended.
A starting point is that for Taranovsky and some Soviet formalists the
subtext is "the source of the repeated element not the element itself"
(Rusinko 1979:20). In our analysis we will consider the definitions of these
four types, however, we shall not primarily identify 'sources' but the voice
of another as it becomes present in the poet's text. Therefore, the alien text
represents as a sign of an entire message or of part of it what is not
peculiar to the text itself.
We understand that the study of intertextuality provides a method for
discovering patterns in meaning for poetic texts; it may be useful to trace
correlations of opposed values. It not only consists of seeking the oppo
sitions, or how the writer makes use of the alien text, but it may serve to see
those relations the texts seem to accept or absorb. Focus on the presence of
the alien text is possible even taking into account a single word or lexical
unit that might signal an absorption or a transgression of a preexistent text,
and by implication, of a given discourse.18
A chronological reading of intertextual crossings in Rich's poetry as
strategy, confirms the three distinct aesthetic and ideological stages I have
outlined relying on my knowledge of her author-function (thematic units,
production and circulation) and the shifting of connotations. In Rich's par
ticular case (and the same is true for other feminist poets, see Daz-Diocaretz
1984a), identifying sources, concealing or revealing to the reader the alien
text's origin, is not the central interest, since at times the native context of
certain texts are provided in notes, or directly suggested in the poems. In
other instances, the alien inscribed voice is so fully integrated that the reader
of the poem can hardly realize it is not the poet's own. The latter is a complex
area of interpretation because the nature of its function is based on conven
tions which remain unexpressed since they are generally not explicit. What
seems to be clear is that the text may require a rather specialized knowledge
of particular codes and formal features, and the reader may be unaware of
them.
To read Adrienne Rich's work written after 1955 is to participate in the
consistent questioning of the patriarchal text through unexpected and unique

combinations. The reader is invited in the communicative process of a literary
text to confirm the actual acceptance or rejection of those messages. Her
poems acquire the properties of performative sentences. Rich's creative oper
ation is a response to an external dialogue which is both social and ideological
and therefore has semiotic value (cf. Bakhtin 1977).
The patriarchal word or text included in a poem comes as a social
sign which no longer speaks but is spoken about, within a new frame, and
comes destitute of its original social horizon; yet since "the word does not
forget where it has been and can never wholly free itself from the dominion
of the context of which it has been part" (Bakhtin 1973:167), it conveys the
voice that will contribute to an internal dialogue, now set in a feminist hori
zon, as part of the opposition of values motivated by the poet's extralinguistic
experience (ideology). We find, then, the correlation between the project
of a textual world that is woman-identified, and the ideology shaping that
world which results in a set of strategies. The basic strategic device will consist
of the inclusion of an alien text (in its multiple forms, e. g. patriarchal, woman-
oriented, social), creating a context that imposes new constraints upon the
alien word; it is manipulated with different methods and it provokes a new
evaluation of content of that alien text and of the values and norms it repre
sents and for which it has been isolated.
This practice clearly reveals an intention to manipulate expression and
it may be actualized on any of lexical, syntactical or phonological levels, in
concomitance with other contextual aspects influencing semantic interpreta
tion. A change of codes in correlation with content is produced, and with it
a new awareness about the world (cf.Eco 1976:273-275). As an encoder of
her own messages, the poet directs attention to her own addressee's possible
reactions. Thus the text as sign of patriarchal ideology and the different ways
of handling it is another manifestation of the writer's intent to affirm that
transformation of and in language is possible is one assumes appropriation
of a message; in this transformation, the alien text becomes a fragment
included in the totality of the feminist verbal construct. The poet converts
the privilege of the word to her own use and de-privileges the patriarchal
text. As I proposed in a previous study (1984a), in a feminist context, the
alien text of patriarchy represents authoritative discourse, that is, the
privileged word undergoes a discoursive displacement and becomes
relativized; as a strategy, it is an effective method to structure the poems
and make them converge with other types of textual productions, and to
generate a multiplicity of meanings centered in opposition to male-oriented

discourse. The objective is partly to activate the reader's memory in order
to produce cultural oppositions between the patriarchal monopoly of dis
course and the consequences this monopoly has brought in the production
of verbal meaning. These oppositions create dominant textual polemics as
recurrent elements in a given area of poetic discourse by women.
It needs to be said, however, by way of distinction, that the intertextual
factor in Black North American poetry is made coherent by memorizing
mechanisms calling for a re-remembrance of African heritage, and the alien
text that predominates is rather the social text; this property carries a far
stronger suggestion of a demand for the political component (see Daz-
Diocaretz 1984a, 1984b, 1984d, 1985a)
Tracing the intertextual bonds in traditional, feminist, and female-iden
tified and addressed poetic texts implies to decipher underlying networks of
meaning. From this follows the importance of the different types of dialogues
and polemics, of intertextual crossings that shape the perspective of feminist
and lesbian poetry as compared to what we call traditional discourse. My
analysis based on the trajectory of intertextual dialogue by isolating the com
ponent of congenial and/or polemic that surfaces in Rich's discourse accord
ing to her own readings and re-writings may prove useful for the formulation
of the intertextual factor in other literary texts by women especially after the
1960's' (although it can probably be adapted for other time periods). 19
The intertextual factor in Rich's work presents three forms of typologies
in the interior of her poetic discourse, as different degrees of objectivation.
Bakhtin (1970) provides a model typology which I have incorporated: first,
the acceptance of the traditional literary conventions as direct quotations or
support (what Bakhtin calls the "mot bivocal convergent", 1970:259); ironic
distancing, parody the alien text becomes active and there is a tendency
to internal dialogization (mot bivocal "divergent"); third, polemic, reply
the alien text is made to appear, but always with polemic coloration.20 The
degree of presence of the alien text helps to distinguish the intentionahty or
non intentionahty of the intertextual dialogue; it proves useful to measure
the distance taken between the author's voice and the voice of the other (le
mot d'autrui) (Todorov 1981:114). To quote Bakhtin, it includes:
Le mot employ entre guillements, c'est--dire ressenti et utilis comme
tranger, et le mme mot (ou un autre) sans guillemets. Les gradations
infinies dans les degrs d'tranget (ou d'approppriation) entre les mots,
leurs diffrents degrs de distance par rapport au locuteur. Les mots se
placent sur des plans diffrents, des distances diffrentes, par rapport au
plan des mots de l'auteur.
Non seulement le discours indirect libre, mais les diffrentes formes du
discourse tranger cach, demi-cach, dispers, etc. (in Todorov 1981:115).
Within this framework we shall analyze Rich's intertextual process in a syn
chronic way.
As it was described in the previous section, Rich's work from 1951 to
about 1955 (A Change of World and The Diamond Cutters) reveals a not
unexpected implicit integration of the poets that dominated the literary scene
and the readings of her formative years. These were the echoes promptly
identified by her critics. For Auden, their family tree is "confessedly related
to the poetry of Robert Frost" or to the poetry of Yeats (1951 in Gelpi and
Gelpi 1975:126). Randall Jarrell speaks of the influence of Rudyard Kipling
and Frost in The Diamond Cutters (1956 in Gelpi and Gelpi 1975:128). Robert
Boyers remarks that "The poetic echoes refresh the context by reminding
us of comparably moving treatments of similar themes" (1973 in Gelpi and
Gelpi 1975: 151); for Boyers it is a "poetry that can afford" those echoes be
it of Shakespeare, T.S. Eliot, John Donne. Helen Vendler also celebrates
those features (1973 in Gelpi and Gelpi 1975). The critics' perception of
Rich's 'models' in her first two books can be interpreted in the light of the
poet's acceptance of poetic conventions (mot bivocal convergent), of the
notion of a poem as a pre-determined structure in which images and feelings
and the intellect were put in a lucid frame of poetic craft, because the final
achievement was "formal order" (Rich 1964 in Gelpi and Gelpi 1975:89).
Rich welcomed in those structures the cadence of the iambic pentameter,
and through this she ventured occasionally for a freer verse, yet without
abandoning or wanting to separate her voice from the tradition upon which
the poems were grounded at that time. The subsequent change her poetry
experiences provides a meaningful function to those first echoes, especially
when the poems are put in retrospective. The external contexts the poet
assimilates are more than 'ornaments', because the relation of the alien text
and the ways these are integrated furnish further clues and reveal the tran
sitions and the changes forming the inner cycles in her work.
The reader will recognize in A Change of World and The Diamond
Cutters intertextual crossings "that serve as a simple impulse for the creation
of an image", and also of the "borrowing of a rhythmic figure" (Taranovsky
1976:18). Poems such as "Autumn Equinox" (1975:23) in connection with
Yeats's "Sailing to Byzantium" (Yeats 1962:95) are a good example. The
poems are developed toward other texts and also from them, so that the
poet's encounter with tradition, her exploration of its roots goes back and
forth, yet never actually leaving the intertextual traditional paths. In The
Diamond Cutters, "Lucifer in the Train" refers back to Milton's Satan, and
"Living in Sin" to Eliot's "The Waste Land" (part II), and "The Diamond
Cutters", the title poem, with Stevens's "Imago", through the image of the
"fortunate stone". Above all, rather than inserted, the alien texts appear
totally fused in the poems, and there is no clear division for the reader to
detect the presence of other texts. The alien word still has not surfaced as
such, as an actual presence in her discourse, and it exists only in as far as
her readers can identify certain themes, a rhythmic unit, an image. Those
texts and the poet's own work are essentially providing a source of inspiration
of new meaning that contributes to an expansion of the poet's inherited
tradition. The borrowings of this first period are evidence that the poet is
shaping her own poetic model of the world, drawing her material from the
foundations of a literature she considers "universal". Reflecting on this early
period Rich comments in 1971:
Looking back at poems I wrote before I was 21, I'm startled because beneath
the conscious craft are glimpses of the split I even then experienced between
the girl who wrote poems, and defined herself in writing poems, and the
girl who was to define herself by her relationships with men (Rich 1979b:40).
In this early period there are no specific direct allusions or quotations from
other texts. This is quite significant, for her use of the alien text to reinforce
a textual strategy demonstrates her awareness of the textual possibilities it
offers, as well as the possibility of distance (irony and parody).
A fine example on the process of intertextual crossings is the poem
"Snapshots of a Daughter-in-law", written between 1958-1960 and published
in 1963, which makes the alien texts an integral constituent thus initiating
the strategy of using texts to create a congenial or a polemic dialogue with
other voices. "Snapshots" provides a key to understanding her subsequent
strategies (mot bivocal divergent) that resound as a double voiced word: her
own and that of the alien text. In the next fifteen years Rich's poetry will
intentionally have a constant countervoice of patriarchy.
The alien text in "Snapshots", written in ten sections, is conspicuous
through the margins of quotation marks, or by use of italics indicating their
foreigness, each text serving as an image and metonymic device through
which a former text in its totality is alluded to. This strategy has considerable
significance; the whole structure of the poems will reinforce this effect by
making the reader aware of the intertextual factor. In the more general
ensemble of other components, this strategy stands in relation to all others
to compose feminist discourse. Given the split mentioned above, the accusa
tory tone is textually manifested in Rich's method of poetic pattern in the
resulting interplay of texts from the past. The reader will notice no random
or undirected distributional references, and will be led to make the connection
to the world of patriarchy as an antagonistic force. The position of the alien
text will play a role in the reaffirmation of female identity and the female
self from the emergence of "Snapshots" up to The Dream of a Common
Language. This is particularly distinctive since before Snapshots the poet
followed the persuasive force of the patriarchal word with the received ideas
and images without further distance or objectivation; meaning was, then,
ideologically grounded in agreement between the poet and those values and
norms.
This attempt runs parallel to the quest for a viable integration, for
although Rich had read a good number of women poets (Sappho, Ann
Bradstreet, Christina Rosetti, Emily Dickinson, Elinor Wylie, Edna St. Vin
cent Millay, H.D., Marianne Moore), they had inspired no special claim.
Rich herself explains that "even in reading these women I was looking in
them for the same things I had found in the poetry of men, because I wanted
women poets to be equals for men, and to be equal was still confused with
sounding the same" (1971 in Rich 1979b:39). It is important to stress that
Snapshots prologues a new trajectory. Rich begins not only to include alien
texts and provide clues to the reader, but also to reverse meanings and make
it evident that the world which was supposedly believed to be universal, is
far from being so.
A particular strategy Rich introduces in "Snapshots" is subsequently
adopted by feminist writers (e.g. Susan Griffin 1978; Mary Daly 1978; Moers
1978). It consists of the use of a lexico-semantic inclusion of a phrase or unit
from a literary, philosophical, political, rhetorical text to which the poet
inscribes a change in the gender explicit in that alien text. A pertinent example
is Baudelaire's line "mon semblable, mon frre!" which is subverted to "ma
semblable, ma soeur!"; irony, parody and dialogization become apparent.
The poet not only creates a diachronic relation between a voice in the past
and her own, but also proposes a reversal of values in order to create an
internal polemic with the alien text. This specific reformulation of literary
tradition, norms, and values is an essential characteristic to describe the
feminist intertextual factor: there is a sub/version of form and content.
The reader will find that Rich's dialogic relation with preexistent texts
confers the networks for a mosaic of literary references and inferences whose
centre of coherence is the speaker's voice. The contrast is clear in "Snap
shots", where several indicators ('shifters') are introduced to signal the use
of explicit intertextual bonds. Now the texts are no longer a dialogue within
tradition nor is this tradition freely incorporated in the poems. The alien text
is made to stand in its intratextual difference for the reader's possible interpre
tation in this new context.
It is important, at this point, to explain the range of markers used by
Rich: direct allusions, references, or quotations, information in the form of
notes giving the source; also, rapport by anthroponymy or toponymy. The
functions of theses texts are basically (1) to illustrate, support or reinforce
the speaker's poetic argument (e.g. the inclusion of E. Dickinson's and Mary
Wollstonecraft's voices), and (2) to establish a polemic with the alien text
(e.g. with Baudelaire, Horace, Thomas Campion, Diderot, Samuel Johnson,
Shakespeare).
Traditional practices are deviated and set in a contemporary context for
the effects of parody and contrasts, and irony, in a hyperbolic frame, as in
section 5 of "Snapshots":
Dulce ridens, dulce loquens
she shaves her legs until they gleam
like petrified mammoth-tusk.
By placing a quotation in the first line of the section, Rich establishes an
argumentative moment with her own images and her twentieth century voice
to oppose that of Horace, through his line from Ode XIX, "Integer vitae",
II, 23-24 (for the source I rely on Gelpi and Gelpi 1975:13,n.3). The contrast
is not simply between what is, according to established conventions, supposed
to be poetic (Cicero's line) and what is defined as non-poetic (Rich's next
two lines), but it is also included there to show how women exist cir
cumscribed by patriarchal suppositions. The ordinary scene of the woman
falsifying her nature, trying to please and look the way she is expected to is
a contemporary image that emerges as anti-poetic especially because of the
neighboring voice of Horace. The unifying effect of this brief section is an
ironic criticism from the poet to the belief that women are essentially "sweet".
The argument is further developed in the next lines, section 6 of the
same poem:
When to her lute Corinna sings
neither words nor music are her own;
only the long hair dipping

over her cheek, only the song
of silk against her knees
and these
adjusted in the reflections of an eye.
Thomas Campion's (1567-1620) first line begins this section, to be contrasted
with Rich's belief that a woman has no language of her own. A similar device
for irony is produced in other sections of "Snapshots"; in each of them the
opposition is conferred maximal emphasis.
There are other aspects worth considering to envisage the poet's dispos
ition of single elements, often thereby suggesting a definite pattern. One of
them is the consistent introduction of foreign lexical expressions, that is,
alien texts in Latin, French, German, and Spanish. The choice of a different
linguistic code stresses a clearly defined end toward providing information
for the reader to draw inferences related to the presence of the alien text.
In all these cases, the alien text appears under different forms that affect
or alter either the syntactic, semantic, or the phonological components; also
on a wider level, it provokes a resulting change in the contexts of the poems.
Several types of texts are applied by the poet in order to bring into contact
different modes of production of meaning:
(a) a polygenetic text which points to a plurality of texts diachronically related
to the one in question (Rusinko 1979). In "Snapshots", for example, Boadicea
(anthroponymy) represents not only the Queen, and the myth, but it corre
lates these two units with all other images of this figure appearing in
nineteenth century plays, together with William Cowper's (XVIIIth century),
Alfred Lord Tennyson's (XIX century) and with Tacitus's texts (Diaz-
Diocaretz 1984a:43-44). In the same poem, an image of the "angels chiding"
is diachronically related to C.K.D. Patmore's, Virginia Woolfs, and Wallace
Stevens's images.
(b) a lexico-semantic unit that comes from literary or non-literary discourse.
(c)ideographic elements transcribed into statements; their origin is a non-lin
guistic system, and they consist of an intersemiotic transposition of images
from film, photography, painting.
(d) texts representing images as textual indexes from the popular culture
contemporary to the poet (e.g. from songs)
(e) social texts that have as source signs from extra-textual empirical reality,
transformed into perceived events mediated as symbols of patriarchy in so
ciety (e.g. events about Vietnam, actual graffitti, a sign from the subway).
(f) the borrowing of a rhythmic figure that grounds the text in the poetic
tradition.
In numberous instances, the alien texts change their function from non-
aesthetic to aesthetic, as in the social text la va del tren subterrneo les
peligrosa, taken from the New York subway (Rich 1975:202) or "Angel loves
Rosita" (Rich 1975:126), or even Cortot's brief commentary for a musical
piece by Chopin that becomes an important detail to set the atmosphere in
the opening of "Snapshots". All these examples point to the simple fact that
as an encoder of her poetic messages, Rich directs attention to her addressee's
possible reactions. The reader must recognize the expressive device that may
alter the content; it is a strategy to create a new perception of the included
text and to de-familiarize the reader with the already-read. 21 Rich's shifters
function as recognition strategy to identify the clues, as part of the project
to handle expression into de-privileging the patriarchal word. 22
I have attempted to characterize the various levels of the alien text
particularly the one originating from patriarchy and have tried to show how
it was brought into contact with Rich's poetic arguments. The changes con
cerning the function of the alien text correspond to the semantic development
in her poetic world. However, one must distinguish yet another intertextual
crossing that will make Rich's own textual world intelligible. If in The Dream
of a Common Language the woman-identified world begins to take shape in
a language that allows its existence, in A Wild Patience Has Taken Me This
Far the use of the alien text reveals a double voiced world of women; such
discourse places the action of women as dominant intertextual poetic net
works. The alien text is implicitly recognized by Rich (1981:60-61) in her
"Notes". They consist of references to diaries, letters, epigraphs, speeches,
messages, phrases, fragments from feminist articles, pamphlets, essays, and
monographs (literary, historical, sociological).
The poem "Turning the Wheel" is described as follows: "The letter is
a poetic fiction, based on a reading of Virginia Grattan, Mary Colter, Builder
Upon the Red Earth (Flagstaff, Ariz.: Northland Press, 1980)" (Rich
1981:61).
The range of these cultural and historical references takes many forms.
Another text purposely indicated in Rich's notes to the same book is about
the epigraph for the poem "For Julia in Nebraska": "Quoted from the Willa
Cather Educational Foundation, Historical Landmark Council, marker at
the intersection of Highways 281 and 4, fourteen miles north of Red Cloud,
Nebraska" (p. 60). This epigraph is a social text which serves as an 'impulse'
for the creation not simply of an image, but of the poem itself. On the
thematic level, the poem suggests what the marker does not say about Willa
Cather. The actual social text is reproduced as epigraph; here Rich also
develops a polemic with the statements that are supposedly universal:
Here on the divide between the Republican and the Little Blue lived some
of the most courageous people of the frontier. Their fortunes and their loves
live again in the writings of Willa Cather, daughter of the plains and interpre
ter of man's growth in these fields and in the valleys beyond.
On this beautiful, ever-changing land, man fought to establish a home. In

her vision of the plow against the sun, symbol of the beauty and importance
of work, Willa Cather caught the eternal blending of earth and sky.... (Rich
1981:16)
It must be noticed that this epigraph, from the external world, as a social
sign is fulfilling a different function from that of earlier social text. Now even
the referents of these signs are textual units operating within the semantic
fields related to "woman" and to the search for the underlying, true architec
ture of women's lives. Thus, the poem begins to develop as if against the
epigraph, and from it, in the form of this poetic fiction where the addressee
is "Julia", and Willa Cather serves as symbol of the women whose stories
were left buried in silence:
they named this Catherland, for Willa Cather,
lesbian the marker is mute,
the marker white men set on a soil
of broken treaties, Indian blood,
women wiped out in childbirths, massacres
for Willa Cather, lesbian,
whose letters were burnt in shame (p. 17).
This poem also brings forth reflections on language (one of Rich's textual
strategies), on the meaning-making process, and the difficulties this brings
in for women. The recurrent motifs and key words on that subject present
the dangers and stumblings of such an undertaking. Linguistically, as well as
thematically, the poems in A Wild Patience constantly turn back on them
selves, in a recurrent, reflexive gyre, as if a constant mirroring forced one
to examine what is being expressed. It could be said that the poem, in the
process, becomes its own alien text. The poet reveals meanings, unfolds
poetic images, and at the same time, in a dialectic way, deciphers that imag
ery, a kind of heautentironoumenus in split selves:
I've listened to your words

seen you stand by the caldron's glare
rendering grammar by the heat
of your humanly wrath.
Brave linguist, bearing your double axe and shield
painfully honed and polished,
no word lies cool on your tongue
bent on restoring meaning to
our lesbian names, in quiet fury
weaving the chronicle so violently torn (1981:17).
Then the poet focuses on the marker (included as epigraph as explained
above), one sentence from that alien text is fragmented by her in order to
carry out the polemic;
On this beautiful, ever-changing land
the historical marker says
man fought to establish a home
(fought whom? the marker is mute.)
The dialogic nature of Rich's poetry orchestrates a polyphony: 'man's his
tory' , the social text, Cather's life, and her voice that uncovers a half truth.
To summarize, in Rich's poetic discourse the movements of underlying
networks display three procedures in her relation to the alien text. The first
one is the traditional voices present in the form of 'echo', 'influence', 'borrow
ing' in texts where the poet and tradition are in harmony; there is no separa
tion between the already-existent texts and the poet's own. Therefore, the
alien text is not emphasized and does not exist as strategy. The second, to
which I have devoted special attention, is the poetic discourse in which the
alien text predominantly originates in patriarchy and the poet takes a polemic
dialogue and a polemic critique of male dominated tradition. I have suggested
that this polemic characterizes feminist discourse. Third, the use of the alien
text changes to enhance texts by and about women, the semantic boundaries
of woman's world and woman-to-woman relationships. Congenial dialogue
with texts by women is predominant and it defines the intertextual factor in
woman-identified and oriented discourse.
It remains to be said that thematic semes, linguistic items, quotations,
references all the complex world of intertextuality, are important for the
production of meaning in a given poetic verbal construct. The translator-func-
tion will bring to the text a knowledge of language and additional knowledge
closely linked with forms of literary organization, implicit models for literary
structure. The polemic devices introduced by the poet will guide the translator
in the perception and elucidation of the ST and in the construction of the RT.
The intertextual feminist factor is not only important for the translator
as omniscient reader but it determines the characteristics of the poet's use
of verbal language and the strategies pertinent for the translator as acting
writer. Consideration of the poet and the alien text in intertextual correlations
has a double function because the translator, while reading Rich's poetry is
able to delineate in which ways the poet herself is a reader of other texts, the
presence of this act of reading becomes a reference on which to rely for the
structuring of the poems. Thus, the translator-function reads a given literary
work in the double dimension in which a register of resonances of other
authors, voices, messages underlie the poetic discourse being translated.
Likewise, the design of the source-text with its intertextual components
provides the translator with horizons of prospective underlying structures in
the receptor-text. These intertextual structures are to be distinguished from
the obligatory and optional components on the level of the linguistic codes.
For the intertextual factor, the aesthetic function dominates, as well as the
expressive movements of the discourse in relation to the poet's perception
of her social and cultural world, and the conventions followed harmoniously,
and those with which she polemizes.
The translator needs to distinguish between the dominant devices and
to understand the external contexts whose relevance cannot be denied or
ignored; to read through Rich's own 'readings' and recognize her particular
networks of alien texts prove quite fruitful if the interest is to produce and
convey equivalent networks of meanings, and in order to create an equally
firm discoursive basis on which to ground the text in question. The attempt
to produce the same change of codes in the translation or to produce parallel
shifts of the intertextual factor can be seen in the more functional and rela
tional framework intended to produce an equivalent response for the inter
pretative operation in the RT. For this it is necessary to adduce the poet's
contexts by reading each poem as a specific temporal act poetically structured
at a specific time in history (cf. Culler 1975) to understand the textual strat
egies which the poet uses directly or obliquely by recreating or refuting
models. This procedure would be useful if incorporated within the interpre
tation of the poem. Finally, the function of intertextuality can be exercised
by the translator within the constraints of expected coherence so as not to
dismantle the general aesthetic argument of congenial or polemic dialogue
within the poet's discourse.
NOTES
1) On these circumstances of interpretation, Eco (1976:150) says: "In opposition to a strategy

of coding, which strives to render messages redundant in order to secure interpretation according
to pre-established plans, one can trace a tactic of decoding where the message as expression form
does not change but the addressee rediscovers his freedom of decoding." The point is that the
translator's own freedom may result in fact in an actual change of the message as expression-form.
2) For the notion of "inferencing" we will follow Beaugrande and Dressler's definition (1981:6) :
"The adding of one's own knowledge to bring a textual world together."
3) In 1972, Adrienne Rich provides one of the earliest attempts in a feminist context at defining
'patriarchy', which we still consider crucial: it means "not simply the tracing of descent through
the father, which anthropologists seem to agree is a relatively late phenomenon, but any kind of
group organization in which males hold dominant power and determine what part females shall
and shall not play, and in which capabilities assigned to women are relegated generally to mystical
and aesthetic and excluded from the practical and political realms" (1979c:78).
4) From Rich (1978:16)
5) It will later become evident that in these preliminary observations the translator, the T in
this section, is purposely playing the part of the non-omniscient reader. Consequently, the state
ment "Rich's poems are a sequence of love poems to a man" should not be taken as a contradiction
but as a rhetorical argument in the section.
6) In this case standard use would predominate over 'correct' standard language in the trans
lator's choice. Unless the speaker wants to exclude men, usage points to the masculine juntos.
7) "Aberration" is a term we borrow from Eco (1976:141) in the following context: "the
message as a source constitutes a sort of network of constraints which allow certain optional
results. Some of these can be considered as fertile inferences which enrich the original messages,
others are mere 'aberrations'. But the term 'aberration' must be understood only as a betrayal
of the sender's intentions; insofar as a network of messages acquires a sort of autonomous textual
status, it is doubtful whether, from the point of view of the text itself/.../ such a betrayal should
be viewed negatively."
8) I remind the reader that the Real Academia Espaola is the standard dictionary not only
for Spain but for the whole Hispanic world which includes twenty-one Spanish speaking countries
in Latin America with at least 270 million inhabitants. The actual influence the RAE may have,
and the way language develops as it actually generates from the speaker's use are, nevertheless,
two different variables.
9) In the context of the global discourse of patriarchy, lesbian and feminist discourse represents
the expression of a specific point of view determined by ideological structures. At the same time
that these writers want to de-program the former ideological structures that shaped women's
consciousness in a heterosocially oriented and dominant world in the past and present, they have
designed in their texts the kind of interpretations they envision. It is not solely a critique of the
'old' system of thought the heterosocial tradition it is also the reconstruction of new ideolog
ical frameworks to understand and reinterpret attitudes, arguments and world visions conceived
by women in the contemporary world. We can characterize this mode of writing as a type of
homosocially arranged discourse (on further components, see Diaz-Diocaretz 1983a, 1983b;
applied to A. Rich, see 1984a).
10) Moral constraints are not restricted to the Hispanic culture alone. Marguerite Yourcenar's
novella Alexis, published in 1929, deals with the subject of homosexuality. Yourcenar wrote a
Preface thirty-four years later stating how much the book was still applicable:" /.../ Alexis's
intimate problem is hardly less anguishing or secret today than it was formerly /.../ the drama of
Alexis and Monique /.../ doubtless will go on being lived out so long as the world of sexual realities
remains shackled with prohibitions, perhaps the most dangerous of which are those of language"
(quoted in Fisher 1984).
11) "Displacement of connotations" is used here to indicate the act of displacing an emotional
connotation as a result of an ideological operation performed by code-switching (Eco's term
1976:288-289). Code-switching, however, has been left aside in order to avoid confusion with its
application in Linguistics, for example, by Labov (1972:188-189) as "dialect mixture" or an alter
nation of variants that "are said to belong to different systems /.../ and in which the speaker
moves from one consistent set of co-occurring rules to another."
12) In this sense one can also apply Dolezel's (1969:14-17) typology on the three types of
writers and their relationship to context: context-free, context-bound, and context-sensitive writ
ers; they vary thus from the most to the least innovative and original.
13) Rich's crucial notion was proposed as follows: "Re-vision the act of looking back, of
seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction is for women more
than a chapter in cultural history: it is an act of survival. /.../ A radical critique of literature,
feminist in its impulse, would take the work first of all as a clue to how we live, how we have
been living, how we have been led to imagine ourselves, how our language has trapped as well
as liberated us, how the very act of naming has been till now a male prerogative, and how we
can begin to see and name and therefore live afresh (1979b:35). For a discussion of the
programmatic implications in feminist discourse originating from Rich's definition, see Diaz-
Diocaretz 1984a).
14) Many of Rich's poems appeared, among others, in Chrysalis, Amazon Quarterly, Field,
Heresies, The Little Magazine, Moving Out, New Boston Review, 13th Moon, Conditions, Iowa
Review, Maenad, Sunbury, Massachusetts Review, indeed a wide variety of literary journals. Her
work has been translated into Dutch, French, German, Italian, Japanese, and Spanish; quite
interestingly, in each one of the implied cultures, Rich has been attributed a different image
within the feminist spectrum; this image depends greatly on the work that is translated and the
modes of circulation. For example, while in Japan Adrienne Rich was introduced as a feminist
poet, in the Netherlands Dutch readers know, up to 1984, only her lesbian texts Twenty-One
Love Poems, and the essay "Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence" (Rich 1980),
besides Of Woman Born; therefore she exists only as a lesbian writer; in 1985 a translation of
selected poems from 1951 will give the Dutch readership a more comprehensive perspective; in
Spain, also up to 1984, her prose books are known (Rich 1976, 1979) yet no poem has been
available in translation; in 1985 the first anthology will appear (Diaz-Diocaretz 1985b). An
interesting aspect of Rich's author-function to be studied in the future is the 'social life' of her
discourse in other cultures.
15) In "Compulsory Heterosexuality" Rich (1980:650) writes: "As the term 'lesbian' has been
held to limiting, clinical associations in its patriarchal definition, female friendship and com
radeship have been set apart from the erotic, thus limiting the erotic itself. But as we deepen and
broaden the range of what we define as lesbian existence, as we delineate a lesbian continuum,
we begin to discover the erotic in female terms: as that which is unconfined to any single part of
the body or solely to the body itself, as an energy not only diffuse but /.../ omnipresent /.../ and
in the sharing of work."
16) The word 'ideation' is taken from Iser's definition (1078:137): "the nearest English equiv
alent to the German vorstellen, which means to evoke the presence of something which is not
given." Iser distinguishes between "perception and ideation as two different means of access to
the world: perception requires the actual presence of the object, whereas ideation depends upon
its absence or nonexistence."
17) Julia Kristeva (1974) who introduced the term intertextualit, writes that it is the transpos
ition of one or more systems of signs into another, accompanied by a new articulation of the
enunciative and denotative position (see also Kristeva 1980:5). Kristeva (1969) explains it as the
phenomenon in which every text takes the mosaic of citations, and every text is the absorption
and transformation of other texts; the notion of intertextuality comes to take the place of inter-
subjectivity. Roland Barthes (1979:77) believes that "Every text, being itself the intertext of
another text, belongs to the intertextual, which must not be confused with a text's origins: to
search for the 'sources of' and the 'influence upon' a work to satisfy the myth of filiation." Since
Kristeva's introduction this term has been re-defined from different perspectives. For seminal
discussions in intertextuality see Esprit: Lecture I, L'Espace du Texte (1974:774-833) and Potique:
Intertextualits (1976). Other critics are in favour of the notions of allusion, citation (cf. Rabinowitz
1980:241-242). Jonathan Culler (1981:139-140) calls it vraisemblance; Robert Rogers (1982:31-46)
prefers the term "intertextual crossings"; Grard Genette (1979) proposes "transtextuality",
"metatextuality", "paratextuality", and "archtextuality". For a more detailed discussion of inter
textuality in feminist discourse I refer the reader to Diaz-Diocaretz (1984a:32-38). For additional
discussions see Culler (1976); Ben-Porat (1976) and the special issue on 'le vraisemblable' in
Communications (1968); Bennani (1981) links translating and intertextuality.
18) I believe that intertextuality can be linked to Bakhtin's idea (1973:411 passim) of the
dialogy of poetic language. By dialogical discourse the Russian theoretician means a verbal pro
cess; a word, discourse, language or culture undergoes "dialogization" when it becomes
relativized, de-privileged, aware of competing definitions for the same thing. Un-dialogized
language is authoritative or absolute. This is the central concept for Bakhtin in his study on
Dostoievsky (see also Mukaovsky 1973).
19) The intertextual factor in poets writing after 1960 shows that within the spectrum of
"feminist" writing there are substantial differences among poets such as Anne Sexton, Diane
Wakoski, Susan Griffin, Judy Grahn, June Jordan, Audre Lorde.
20) cf. "polmique cache ou ouverte", Todorov (1981:107-114).
21) I use "de-familiarize' in the sense attributed to this term by Shlovsky (1965), Erlich (1954),
Eco (1976).
22) A significant example in Rich's prose is the main title of her Of Woman Born: Motherhood
as Experience and Institution that sets an open polemics with Shakespeare's "Macbeth", where
the witches' prophecy that "none of woman born/Shall harm Macbeth" dominates in Acts IV and
V until the dnouement.
IV. The Speech Situation in Female Identified Discourse
I am the lover and the loved,

home and wanderer, she who splits
firewood and she who knocks, a stranger
in the storm, two women, eye to eye
measuring each other's spirit, each other's
limitless desire,
a whole new poetry beginning here.
Adrienne Rich, "Transcendental Etude," 1977.

1. A POET IN A WOMAN'S BODY
The opening lines of a poem introducing a first person speaker-singular

or plural ( T , 'we') lead the reader to rely upon a number of elements for
the comprehension of content, particularly to ideate the speaking subject,
whether an object, a personification, or a person. The use of such deictics
as technical devices may be multiple; thus, the situation of the speaker in
poetry is a complex area which resists generalizations. The question we shall
be concerned with here will be limited to some alternatives in relation to the
referent for pronouns identifying the speaking subject as either male or
female in the interpretation of a poem, and the relationship of this subject
to the addressee implied in the text; in other words, the focus will be on the
semantics of the pronouns of address (Brown and Gilman 1960:253).
The poetic persona is relevant as an important textual clue. It is, as
defined by Culler (1975:170), "a construct, a function of the language of the
poem, but it none the less fulfills the unifying role of the individual subject,
and even poems which make it difficult to construct a poetic persona rely
for their effects on the fact that the reader will try to construct an enunciative
posture." The existence of an individual subject supposes an identity created
and assumed to give expression to that portion of the world of the poem,
which determines the perspective from which the poet speaks, and provides
the passage through which the poet's text as a totality is envisioned. In other
words, it provides the viewpoint from which the poet "penetrates the reading
audience, and that of the reader (that) penetrates the consciousness of the
poet" (Lotman 1977:29).
An interpretative disposition may guide the reader to associate the T
or 'we' of the verbal construct with the empirical individual signing as author
(male or female, born on a given date at a specific place, and in a given
cultural context). This non-explicit convention is part of the pre-existent
knowledge the reader imagines to be applicable in order to comprehend the
text in a more satisfactory way. While it may in fact contribute to the under
standing of the text, the referring act (the speaker imagined by the reader)
may be inaccurate or incomplete, in which case "the sender of the utterance
as logical subject of the sentence" (Eco 1976:116), does not correspond to
the one designed by the poet.

The persona as a fictional construct belongs to the domain of the possible
"semiotic lie", in which "sign-vehicles always convey a context, even when
there is no testable referent" (Eco 1976:116). From this we can infer that
even though a male author does not always write from the perspective of a
male speaker, and in the same way a female author does not always necessar
ily speak from the perspective of a woman, it is quite feasible that the reader
may convey a presupposition into the interpretation of the poem if not
explicit to allocate a given identity. In feminist criticism the question has
been suggested under the belief that the crucial point of women's writing is
"Speaking both for and as a woman (rather than 'like' a woman)" (my
emphasis) (Jacobus 1979:15). It needs to be stressed also that the reading
act, the filling in of the textual gaps in texts written for and as a woman is
equally important in the communicative process in an aesthetic text. As
Shoshana Felman (1975) suggests, speaking as a woman is determined by a
strategic, theoretical position and not by anatomy or biology.
In poetic discourse, as Gilbert and Gubar have argued (1979) the T'
emerges as articulation of a strong and assertive subject. For the woman (as
author) the "central self that speaks or sings a poem must be forcefully
defined, whether 'she'/'he' is real or imaginary. If the novelist therefore, inevit
ably sees herself from the outside, as an object, a character, a small figure
in a large pattern, the lyric poet must be continually aware of herself from
the inside, as a subject, a speaker" (p.xxii). The problem I would like to
address is not the degree and forms of awareness of herself the poet has from
within, but in which ways she can be sure that her texts assertively define
gender (that 'he' or 'she'), especially the female speaking subject from the
viewpoint of a linguistically based construct in close relation to the referential
expressions as interpreted by the reader.
Unless otherwise determined, it is easily assumed in contemporary
poetry by women that a speaker as T' refers to a female speaker. Yet, Culler
most emphatically suggests, "even in poems which are ostensibly presented
as personal statements made on particular occasions, the conventions of
reading enable us to avoid considering that framework as a purely biographi
cal matter and to construct a referencial context in accordance with demands
of coherence that the rest of the poem makes" (1975:167). This assumption
is easy to observe when the author is anonymous, since the reader can only
rely upon the clues and strategies provided by the text itself. A case in point
is Medieval lyric poetry. Philologists have made attempts to define the gender
T H E S P E E C H SITUATION IN F E M A L E I D E N T I F I E D D I S C O U R S E 87
of the author of Iberian Mozarabic popular songs. It is easy to identify the

speaking voice in the preserved kharjas, where the main speaker is a woman;
love songs, lamentations in which girls bewail the absence of their lovers.
The female voice is also dominant in the cantigas d'amigo, Galician-Por-
tuguese lyrics (written between the late twelfth and fourteenth centuries),
and the Castilian courtly-love lyrics of the fourteenth to the sixteenth cen
turies (see Frenk Alatorre 1975 on this type of lyrical poetry). One of the
main categories of this poetical corpus is the song of a woman to or about
her lover; the melancholy and longing can also be woman addressed (to the
mother, to women friends, to herself), as well as addressed to the male lover
or to abstract-symbolic subjects (the sea, birds, animals). In all this tradition
love is the almost exclusive concern.
The lyrical love poetry of the Mexican nun poet Sor Juana Ins de la
Cruz (1648-1695) provides yet another example where the reader would need
to make inferences, and the references are not always provided with clues.
The speaker's gender is traceable with difficulty (unless one relies, of course,
on biography). What has made the critics wonder about the reality of her
passion is the artifice of changing the speaking voice: the lyric T can be 1)
male, female, or ambiguous, and the speaker addresses a woman; 2) a man;
3) an undefined person by ellipsis of personal pronouns and other gender
markers (on this ambiguity see Fernndez, in press). The following example
of ambiguity is relevant to our point. In sonnet 164, Sor Juana writes:
Esta tarde, mi bien, cuando te hablaba,
como en tu rostro y tus acciones va
que con palabras no te persuada,
que el corazn me vieses deseaba /... /
This afternoon, my love, while I was talking to you

since I could see by your face and actions
that I was not convincing you with my words,
I wished that you could see my heart/.../
(trans. E.Rivers 1966:327)
The masks of a gender identity, of the lyric speaking voice present dif
ficulties to interpret the poem referentially; the reader cannot rely on previ
ous inferencing operations. When a woman poet in the Spanish language
chooses to follow the norms of the dominant tradition, therefore to work
within the domain of 'male'discourse, and decides on the male speaking
subject as a textual strategy, this feature surfaces through the units related
to the speaker and the semantic field surrounding the persona, because of
the specificity required for gender: the reader interprets the poem by recog
nizing the gender references. This striking feature functions in Portuguese
and in French as well.1 The best way to illustrate this point is with a poem
by Marguerite Yourcenar; when the speaking voice is male, the gender mar
kers act as shifters:
Je suis plus vendu qu'un esclave,
Et plus qu'un pauvre, abandonn,
Je suis l'eau cleste qui lave
Le sang que pour vous j'ai donn.
from Quia Hirtolamus Esset (1982:90)
I am more sold than a slave,

And more than a poor one, abandoned,
I am the celestial water washing away
The blood I have for you bestowed.
(my translation)
Yourcenar can choose yet another literary code, now as a female speaker:
Je suis pareille la servante de la ferme;
Le long de la douleur je m'avance d'un pas ferme;
Le seau du ct gauche est plein de sang;
from "Le pome du joug" (1982:48)
I am similar to the maid at the farm;
As pain runs along with firm step I advance;
The bucket on the left side is filled with blood;
(my translation)
Or (like Sor Juana), she can purposely structure an ambiguity of both speaker
and addressee, by creating the expressive opposition le or la (masculine and
feminine article respectively) that corresponds to the semantic opposition
male/female:
Toi le frlon et moi la rose;
Toi l'cume et moi le rocher;
Dans l'trange mtamorphose,
Toi la Phnix, moi le bcher.
Toi le Narcisse et moi la source,

Mes yeux refltant ton moi;
Toi le trsor et moi la bourse;
Moi l'onde et le nageur en moi.
from "Erotique" (1982:94)
Yourcenar uses gender markers, in this poem, in an expressive form, as a

THE SPEECH SITUATION IN FEMALE IDENTIFIED DISCOURSE 89
stylistic and technical device. The speaking voice, the T is verbally concerned
to speak, to activate the relationship between sexuality and textuality, a
strategy facilitated by the basic structure of the French language. Such a
poem can be equally structured in Spanish, with an equivalent set of oppos
itions, without considerable semantic variation, since this morphology is a
common denominator of Romance languages in general. The situation is
altered in the English linguistic code (as in other non-Romance languages);
the question of a poet's use of persona and of the specificity as strategic clues
for the reader becomes more diffuse, hence our expectations may be altered
because the effects of deictics and shifters vary (Culler 1975:165). Personal
pronouns belong to a complex category where code and message may overlap
each other; furthermore, the amount of information needed or emerging as
redundant varies because "languages differ essentially by what they must
express, and not by what they might express" (Jakobson 1963:84). Within
this frame we shall discuss some aspects of person deixis and gender markers
in their structuring function for the speaker and addressee relation in poetic
verbal sequences produced by a woman poet.
2. PERSON DEIXIS AND GENDER MARKERS
In the course of my discussion I have been arguing on two interrelated

points: (a) the translator's necessity to know the author's textual strategies;
(b) in the interpretative process, the translator will depend heavily on his/her
presuppositions and abilities as reader to bring into play the specific features,
the T' and the 'you' of the poetic construct. So far as the second aspect is
concerned, the gender category would seem to reveal a crucial factor, given
that it is directly inscribed in the communicative circuit of American feminist
and lesbian texts. This angle of the situation of utterance can scarcely be
overestimated in the dialectic interaction of the translator's interpretative
act, since the latter must consider selections that are linguistically grounded.
If the examples and framework I considered in the preceding chapters are
correct, then it seems that the decisions in the writing stage of translating
are semantically determined and motivated, and there must be a willingness
to recognize deictics and other orientational features of language (on this, see
Jakobson 1971). The identity of the speaker will depend on the general poetic
construct.
Quite significantly, in our context, translating requires a commitment
specifically related to language and women's discourse. I have argued that
the translator's cultural and ideological presuppositions are of particular

importance; the functions as reader and writer bring along a prospective
influence upon the author's voice in the receptor-language. 2 This formulation
is made explicit in the case of texts by women translated from English into
Spanish, and the roots of the problems are to be found primarily in the very
historical origin of the receptor-language.
Like all the Romance languages, Spanish has developed from Latin, a
language learned and taught almost exclusively among males in the past.
Indeed Latin still prevails in Western countries on the level of conceptuali
zation, taxonomy and lexicons of specialized areas (Ong 1977; Kramarae
1981:50); however, it is much more deeply settled in the cultures of the
Romance languages for reasons of historic, linguistic evolution (for the impli
cations on gender see Kramarae 1981). In Spanish, the presence of Latin is
on certain aspects of language structure and language use, but also it is
implicitly present as the medium of expression for male-dominated ideology.
Some rules of gender differentiation illustrate only a limited area of this
influence.
When English and Spanish are compared and contrasted, the gender
differentiation system in each of them reveals Spanish as a much more mar
kedly polarizing language with the predominance of male oriented struc
tures. 3 Given this characteristic, the case of gender categories arises as the
most vulnerable area for the translation of feminist and lesbian texts, since
both are directly dependent upon whether the speaker, the addressee, or
the subject represented is either male or female. Therefore, an accurate use
of person deictics and the corresponding gender of its related referents is of
paramount importance for the translator not to reinstate the female-identified
and female oriented texts into the patriarchal paradigms their authors are
writing against. The emancipatory property such texts can be purposely or
inadvertently counteracted or neutralized.
Three main assumptions are the basis for my analysis: (a) neither the
text is an autonomous structure, nor does the reader have total control on
the meaning-making process. The act of reading, as discussed in previous
chapters, is a dialectic set of mechanisms that requires an interpretative
cooperation between author and reader, (b) From the omniscient reader and
acting writer activities, the translator must provide adequate contexts to
make the reception of a given work possible, and must understand the social
practice of the messages within both languages source and receptor
and perform adjustments accordingly, (c) Focus on person deictics in literary
discourse by women is a viable part of interpretation in poetry, and a textual

strategy to be followed by translators, since those deictics are directly linked
with meaning in the speech situation. Gender cues are semantic markers
which identify and define, in the texts we are studying, the female-self (speak
ing and addressed to). Although deictics include anaphoric and demonstra
tives, verb tense and adverbials of time and place, I shall concentrate on the
first and second person pronouns, relevant for the speaker and addressee
(see Benveniste 1966; Jakobson 1971; Culler 1975:164-170).
The above mentioned aspects indicate that in the dialectics between the
blanks to be filled in by the reader, and the textual pressures (indexes in the
act of reading that guide us to areas of meaning designed by the poet), the
translator's changes and scrutiny of variants in the recoding stage are
actualized within the lines of or in opposition to the receptor's accepted
cultural or literary procedures and conventions.
In the light of this basic structure, I must insist on the fact that while
English does not require morphologic agreements of one sentence element
with another in order to articulate a given relation in terms of gender, Spanish
does require specificity, in the concord of at least one or two elements, in
order to articulate a given reference in terms of gender. This identification
is particularly relevant in Spanish in the correct use of nouns, adjectives,
and pronouns. The items just mentioned are either masculine or feminine,
only articles and pronouns have in some cases a neuter form (e.g., the neuter
article lo is applied only to substantivated adjectives, as in lo bueno, lo bello).
Adjectives agree in gender and number with the nouns they modify; the past
participles agree in gender and number with the nominative they refer to.
Quite naturally, any change in this direction will also affect the original
properties of voice and perspective in the structure and tone of the texts.
Thus, the translator will have to create a referential context on which to base
the conventions and procedures of interpretation to give coherence to the
poem. In this connection, person deictics has a semantic function, to be
understood as a "covariation between the pronoun used and the objective
relationship existing between speaker and addressee" (Brown and Gilman
1960:253). It is necessary to understand the process of articulation of the
speaking subject as well as the emergence of new signifying chains: the accep
tance of the patriarchal world, or the forms of transgression in that world
developed by the poet in order to transform it by means of new sets of
reference.
Another important aspect concerning the addressee refers to the passage
from indeterminacy to ambiguity. Indeterminacy occurs whenever in an

expression the intended sense is not clear (cf. Beaugrande and Dressier 1981).
The English nouns, adjectives, and pronouns (except for the personal pro
nouns 'he' and 'she') that are indeterminate in gender categories on the one
hand, and the English pronoun 'you' referring to the addressee that is
unmarked by number and by degrees of formality on the other hand, impel
the translator to interpret those indeterminacies which, if sustained in the
poetic construct, may become an ambiguity.
To find a solution to these questions does not necessarily mean that the
translator must or should recreate meaning and sense equivalent to those of
the source text;4 if the translator is unwilling (ideologically biased) to follow
the specific indexes, or is unaware of the subtleties and nuances of a given
deictic orientation, or of the corresponding implicit gender category, a single
shift may destroy the contextual relationships in a text that belongs to the
domain of discourse by women. Adrienne Rich's "Twenty-One Love Poems"
(1978), briefly discussed in Chapter Three, section 1, are a concrete example
of a consciously created female-identified writing that is also female addres
sed. Thus, the movement of her poems from English into Spanish, and the
omniscient reader's findings previous to the writing of the translations dis
closes one way in which the feminist and lesbian texts could be neutralized
or annulled. I want to suggest that texts of this kind translated from English
into French, Italian, Portuguese, and Rumanian, are likely to present similar
problems. The next proposal refers to the reverse linguistic transference:
texts in Spanish containing a given specificity, when translated into English
loose this property delineating the gender correlations within the text. The
question is left to both translator and reader in the English language. 5
To recapitulate, since the speaker/addressee interaction and gender
specificity are paramount in feminist and lesbian or, in general, in female-
identified discourse (previously described in Chapter three) I shall now pre
sent some proceedings directed toward an elucidation of possible solutions
found to distinguish consistently speaker/addressee the T' or 'we' and the
'you' in the different discourse manifestations: traditional (non-feminist),
feminist, female identified and addressed.
3. SPEAKER AND ADDRESSEE IN ADRIENNE RICH
In the process of translating Adrienne Rich's poetry, among the most

crucial linguistic decisions that needed to be made were those related to
gender; in order to actualize the appropriate selections, the change concern

ing the personal pronouns referring to person deixis, the entire development
of the poet's work had to be considered. 6 In order to determine the apparently
simple category of gender in nouns, pronouns, and adjectives in Spanish, it
was indispensable to correlate the chain of different identities of the speaking
persons implied in the T', 'we', and the 'you'.
I have insisted that a synchronic reading of Rich's changes as presented
in Chapter three, from A Change of World (1951) to A Wild Patience Has
Taken Me This Far (1981) are useful sources for inferences to locate appro
priate textual clues allowing for an interaction of gender markers. Even in
cases of elipsis of personal pronouns quite common in Spanish especially
of the first and second person, the determination of the subject must be
deduced. (A case in point is Sor Juana Ins de la Cruz). If the Dream of a
Common Language is a book about women, in which the major addressee
is female, does it mean that all of Rich's work originates from the same
perspective? The changes in approach to language, to the alien text, and in
her world vision, all indicate an increasing willingness to do away with an
internalization of "the oppressor's language", which, for Rich is patriarchy.
This purpose provokes uncertainties of poetic voice, and are reflected in
transitions such as the poem "Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law", still written
in formal style and rhythm, with a detached perspective, yet with a fully
developed intertextual polemics. Written in the third person singular, the
speaker in that poem was 'she' not T' (Rich 1971 in 1979b; Diaz-Diocaretz
1984a:7). Chery Walker (1982:9-10) has described this uncertainty as man
ifested in American women poets before 1945; she writes: "The core of this
vacillation here described in terms of sexual politics is what I call the
female poet's ambivalence: such vacillation is the one fundamentally perva
sive feature of American women's poetry up to 1945. In addition to gender
ambivalence /.../ women poets have been prone to other variants of the same
basic diseases: ambivalence toward the desire for power, toward their ambi
tions, toward their need to say 'I am' boldly and effectively in the creative
world. " This ambivalence prevails in poetic discourse by women in the United
States at least up to 1970 (cf. Montefiore 1983; McCluskie 1983; Diaz-
Diocaretz 1984a).
In A Change of World and The Diamond Cutters the general unspecified
'we' is the most recurrent deictic for the speaking subject: it represents the
speaker's sense of being fused with a world seen detachedly, where the experi
ence of the individual becomes dissolved in the external flow of life. The
closure of "Storm Warnings" exemplifies the distanced perspective in Rich's

early period:
These are the things that we have learned to do
Who live in troubled regions (1975:3).
The 'we' of this poem, and of the first decade of Rich's writing, is a marker
of generic reference, and quite different from the 'we' of The Dream and A
Wild Patience, where it refers to the feminine dual or plural. Careless treat
ment of this detail alone may create in Spanish a discourse that does not
correspond at all to the ST.
While the changes may be implicit in English, or even indeterminate in
the receptor language, because of the required specificity, by following the
poet's design on all levels, one can create a functional equivalence in the
development of the speaker/addressee in her poetry, where the 'we' and the
T go through a change revealing a consistent pattern, from an undefined
generic addressee, to the masculine plural or singular (man, the male-domi
nated system, the enemy), and on to the dual or plural or singular feminine
forms. The expressive effect of the required specificity in Spanish will make
these developments more prominent, while they are basically implicit in the
ST. It is my belief that a translator who is unaware or unwilling to attempt
to find an equivalence in the recoding of the semantic changes of speaker
and addressee interaction within the texts, will shift the poet's codes com
pletely, particularly in Rich's feminist discourse, where it is possible to use
the more general and 'universal' conventional masculine form in Spanish.
Thus, the shift of pronouns and adjectives and related sentence elements in
their gender specific form become more emphatic in Spanish. The choice,
then, is between a more conspicuous trajectory in the discoursive movements
of person deictics and gender markers, and the production of a uniform,
unchanged voice in the RT.
To return to the closure of "Storm Warnings", the Spanish becomes:
Esto es lo que hemos aprendido a ejercitar
Aquellos que habitamos
Areas atormentadas.
The 'we' becomes a masculine plural form, since this is the unit corresponding
to the marker of generic reference. Such a selection is relevant if we
remember that there are cases in which only one lexical unit in a text may
be enough to serve as marker of gender; and the change from a generic to
a partitive reference as well as from definite to indefinite or viceversa, alters
the text substantially. Even with a more literal translation like los que
habitamos 'those who live', I would have to consider the speaker's gender
and the co-referents. This is but one of the numerous instances in which the
pronoun in English with its absence of gender in the syntactic form
must be made specific, disambiguated, in Spanish; furthermore, the required
concord in Spanish involves, at times, several other elements in the sentence.
This virtual nature of Spanish does not allow bringing specific examples of
pronouns and adjectives into our discussion, since they cannot be separated
from other morphological agreements. The very transition into Spanish trig
gers the need for different types of syntactic concordance.
Since most of the poems in A Change of World are written from a similar,
objectified perspective, and the same is true for the Diamond Cutters, the
corresponding form used for 'we' is the masculine plural. In the poem "The
Middle-Aged" 'Los de edad madura', the same semantic relation is per
formed to deduce gender in the only adjective in Spanish in which the oblig
atory choice refers either to masculine or feminine persona (emphasis mine) :
Signs of possession and of being possessed,
We tasted, tense with envy.
Signos de posesin y de ser posedos
Que sentamos, tensos de envidia.
The decision to use the masculine plural form, even though it supports the
'patriarchal' structures of language use, will allow the Hispanic reader to
discover the contrasts in Rich's work from this traditional 'we' to the sub
sequent stages of the 'we' in the feminine plural defining semantically her
lesbian discourse. This is a choice that belongs to the translator alone, for
one may recode the texts all in traditional form, or apply the inferences from
A Dream and A Wild Patience restrospectively and anachronistically,
and consequently suppose and impose additional feminist codes upon earlier
texts where they did not exist.
The split between poet and persona is not only in the practice of the
objectified 'she', 'he', 'they' and 'we', but also in texts where the poet uses
the persona of a man. "The Loser" (Rich 1963) is presented through a first
person singular speaker, a man who "thinks of the woman he once loved;
first after her wedding, and then nearly a decade later", as the epigraph
explains (Rich 1975:45). In another poem, "Orion", from Leaflets (1969),
the speaker, also an T', but now a woman, is talking to the "fierce half-
brother", therefore the adjectives and pronouns referred to the addressee,
the 'you', must be in the masculine.

Rich's special concern for some features of her poetry can be considered
adequate to suggest textual clues. In Poems Selected and New (1975) a book
the poet considers "not as a summing-up or even a retrospective, but as the
graph of a process still going on," and later in The Fact of a Doorframe
(1984a), where she reiterates, "I have been changed, my poems have
changed, through this process, and it continues" (p.xvi), Rich signals in the
Notes what is a major alteration in the poems "The Tourist and the Town"
and "Afterward":
The pronouns in the third part of the poem were originally masculine. But
the tourist was a woman, myself, and I never saw her as anything else. In
1953, when the poem was written, some notion of 'universality' prevailed
which made the feminine pronoun suspect, 'personal'. In this poem, and in
'Afterward' in A Change of World, I have altered the pronouns not simply
as a matter of fact but because they alter, for me, the dimensions of the
poem (1975:247).
These lines are clear as to the importance the poet attributes to the questions
of gender, which may in fact be strategies to transform the communicative
dimension of the poem. This complex process involves, essentially, that
whenever gender requires specification in Spanish, those texts which are
'traditional' or non-feminist (Rich's first three books 1951,1955,1963), the
indeterminacy of the 'we' is transferred to the conventional form of the
masculine plural nosotros for a corresponding textual intelligibility.
In "Planetarium" (1968) the woman as persona (first in the third person)
and the speaker become the same referent in the poem. This is a first impor
tant change in Rich, because from The Will to Change (1971) she will use
the pronoun T to express the fusion of persona and poet so that the first
person singular is unmistakably of feminine gender; that is, the poems will
be consistently woman-identified. "Planetarium" begins:
A woman in the shape of a monster
a monster in the shape of a woman
the skies are full of them (Rich 1975:146)
Then the lexicalization of referent and speaker are externalized as the T'
comprising both women: "I am bombarded yet I stand." The politics of
gender and textuality becomes articulated in the metaphor for a woman-iden
tified text:
/.../ I am an instrument in the shape
of a woman trying to translate pulsations
into images for the relief of the body

and the reconstruction of the mind (1975:148).
The 'we' of the first two books takes a turn to self-definition from Snap-
shots of a Daughter-in-Law and is developed further in Necessities of Life
(1966), Leaflets (1969), The Will to Change (1971), and Diving into the Wreck
(1973). The new semantic field for 'we' predominant in these books is the
duality including male and female, the texts being female-identified they
encompass husband and wife, or lovers, in a heterosocial textual world. One
example will suffice to show what happens in the transference into Spanish.
In "De una sobreviviente" ("From a Survivor") the markers appear in lines
six and seven (1975:210):
Lucky or unlucky, we didn't know
the race had failures of that order
Afortunados o infortunados, desconocamos
que la carrera traa este tipo de fracasos
The title is inscribed in the feminine, as suggested by the article 'una'; as the
adjective suffix /Sp./ -ados indicates, the masculine plural form must be used
for the dual referent comprising the married couple (it also needs to be
mentioned that the same form serves for the dual male/male form).
There is a significant change in Diving into the Wreck (1973). "The
Phenomenology of Anger" presents a woman's attempt to speak out her
anger, to understand her mental, psychological and spiritual process in the
act of becoming conscious of oppressions. The mistrust toward the male
world and of patriarchal language from the speaker's part is a key point to
understand the contextual politics of the poem, indeed of the book as a unity.
In this particular text Rich begins to react openly against patriarchy and its
language, against authoritative discourse, or drawing from Bakhtin's sugges
tions, against "the privileged language that approaches us from without"
(1981:424). Therefore, another step is taken as an opposition to dominant
privileges, norms and social conventions: the poet asserts her decision to
become conscious of this oppression. The semantics of the pronouns of
address undergo a transformation, which offers an option in Spanish to create
an equivalent semantics of gender. The 'you', and 'they' are most certainly
the 'male' dominated, patriarchal world, in opposition to the T that is
woman-identified. Rich's concern with language becomes a more dominant
theme from this book onwards. She struggles to free her discourse from that
authoritative word and the internally persuasive words of poetic tradition
which now she sees from a woman's perspective. Her direct critique now is
against the "oppressor's language" as she had written in "The Burning of
Paper Instead of Children" (1968) and in "Our Whole Life" (1969).
Diving into the Wreck (1973) can be considered a book of transition
from feminist to lesbian discourse. While the texts are invariably woman-
identified, the addressees include the previously used undetermined 'you';
the male companion of "Trying to Talk with a Man" (1973:3-4) also appears
in "Waking in the Dark" (pp.7-10); the poem "When We Dead Awaken"
(pp.5-6) containing the dual feminine 'we', also "The Mirror in Which Two
Are Seen as One" (pp. 14-16), "Translations" (pp.40-41), as well as "Rape"
(pp.44-45) are addressed to a woman; "Incipience" (pp. 11-12) and
"Dialogue" (p.21) express a feminine 'we' of solidarity; in "Burning Oneself
In" (p.46) the same woman-oriented solidarity exists with the additional
opposition of "they" that is clearly masculine plural (see also "For a Sister",
p.48):
Pieces of information, like this one
blow onto the heap
They keep it fed, whether we will it or not,
another summer, and another
of suffering quietly
in bookstores, in the parks
however we may scream we are
suffering quietly
We have previously recognized that the trajectory of the poetic T in
the speech situation of Rich's poetry reveals that the speaker traverses several
identities that vary from the undefined addresser to the female identified
speaker. 7 Within this framework, "The Stranger" in Diving into the Wreck
(1973:19) posits an interesting and complex translation problem connected
with the thematic constituents, since it is structured on the idea of androgyne.
The concept of the androgyne makes any gender classification inadequate
and thus raises complexities in the making of meaning. Yet the difficulty lies
not only on the term itself, but on the title of the poem. The speaker in this
text designates a "synecdochical voice for both male and female" (Stimpson
1980:178), and brings into play a new set of expectations, since it stands at
the threshold between patriarchal and feminist discourses. This is a strong
point and a strong confirmation that the ambiguity can be kept in English,
and in contrast the possibilities Spanish offers must be recognized as inaccu
rate. "The Stranger" may become: el extrao, la extraa, el extranjero ('the
foreigner'), la extranjera, all words that must be either masculine or feminine.

The alternative of avoiding gender by using the abstract noun
extraeza('strangeness') is a possibility soon discarded because the androgyne
then becomes a temporal state of mind or it would mean "the condition of
feeling strange". To decide on the neuter lo extrao 'the odd' or 'the extrane
ous' would depersonalize the speaker even more. The masculine form e.g.
el extrao, would dismantle the poet's central idea of woman in patriarchy.
All these elements considered, I decided to use the feminine singular form
la extranjera, basing this choice on an ideological inference and the discour-
sive situation of Rich's quest for self-identity as poet and persona in a woman-
identified textual world. The title is the only index of gender in the poem,
and as such it is enough to project the semantic network to the text as a
whole; as a result, "the living mind you fail to describe" is, in the Spanish
RT, a woman's mind.
There are still other difficulties and complexities to be considered. The
semantic changes of the speaker are paralleled by the developments and
transformations of the addressee in Rich's poems, namely the 'you'. The
next step is to extract and relate all the different possibilities of the second
person pronoun, since the English 'you' is polysemic when compared to
Spanish forms: it corresponds to t, usted, ustedes, vosotros/as (vos in Central
America) representing either male or female addressees. The use of these
forms is not random and is determined by several factors which govern its
function. An important one is the distinction made between formal and
familiar (or informal) address in both plural and singular forms (I shall ignore
these cases and will only consider what is pertinent in our context; for a
thorough discussion see Brown and Gilman 1960). I will describe some of
the difficulties that arise. The form t indicates the second person singular
(masculine or feminine) and vosotros (masculine or generic), vosotras
(feminine) are its corresponding plural forms. In Andalusia (Spain) and in
Latin America the pronoun vosotros/as has almost disappeared in the spoken
language and in Latin America in written language, and in common
usage, this has been replaced by the pronoun ustedes (Seco 1958:346) in
formal address. In order to avoid limiting any geographical boundaries that
might restrict my own horizon of prospective readers, in the early poems
where the addressee is undefined in the ST, and to create a close rapport
with the reader, the equivalent for 'you' is t, more familiar in tone and used
both in Latin America and Spain. The decision to exclude the more formal
usted (pl.ustedes) was based on the knowledge of the conventions of poetry
and of the poet's strategies in the communicative act. This decision acquires
coherence in association with the choice of the masculine form equivalent
to 'we' as discussed earlier. "Diamantistas" 'The Diamond Cutters' is a case
in point, in which the first line of the last three stanzas begin with an impera
tive followed by an adjective. I limit myself to including the initial phrase in
each case:
Be serious/.../ S formal/.../
Be hard of heart/.../ S distante/.../
Be proud/.../ S orgulloso/.../
Formal and distante do not require the syntactic agreement because they
have the same form for both masculine and feminine; orgulloso, is here used
with its masculine word ending .-o, the choice of gender being obligatory;
moreover, the second person singular was chosen in the imperative, for the
intended close rapport with the reader referred to above (the option of the
plural is equally valid but establishes a distance). Similar decisions were
taken in other cases, such as the poems "The Blue Ghazals" and "Pierrot Le
Fou" from The Will to Change (1973) in which the speaker is a woman and
the addressee an undefined 'you' (tu).
Essentially, in the first books (Rich 1951,1955,1963), the addressee is
mostly unspecified. In her textual strategies, Rich prefers a sort of imperson
ality and detachment between the 'we' and the 'you'. This non-specificity and
its function cannot be taken for granted; whenever the impersonal unknown,
or generic addressee apears, the Spanish equivalent consistently selected is
the masculine plural, as in "The Diamond Cutters" and "Ghost of a Chance".
Both poems assert their context with the generic form (e.g. "you intelligence/
so late dredged up from dark" (1975:32), "you see a man/trying to think."
(p.64)). However, in later texts like "The Blue Ghazals", "Trying to Talk
with a Man", and "The Phenomenology of Anger" the addressee is more
clearly the oppressor, the male world, man in patriarchy. Those poems give
shape to Rich's feminist poetic discourse, and therefore a reference must be
constructed; definitely the t leaves no ground, its connection is the male
world. The discoursive situation in the feminist texts clearly identify the
addressee with the otherness of the patriarchal world.
There is yet another step female-identified and addressed instance,
the 'female each other' of lesbian discoursewhich as I suggested previously
(Diaz-Diocaretz 1984a) begins with the poem "From an Old House in
America" (1974), whose last line is: "Any woman's death diminishes me."
Thereafter, the gender of the addressee in implicit or explicit dialogues will

be invariably a woman, and patriarchy is (re)moved through the use of the
deictic 'they' a strategy to suggest the referent of the male world, as an alien
frontier. These strong lines from The Dream (1978:27) exemplify the act of
putting a portion of the world aside (emphasis mine):
And my incurable anger, my unmendable wounds
break open further with tears, I am crying helplessly,
and they still control the world, and you are not in my arms.
Y mi ira irremediable, mis heridas sin sanar
estallan abiertas por las lgrimas, lloro sin consuelo,
y sin embargo ellos an deciden en el mundo,
y t no ests en mis brazos.
The pronoun ellos included in the Spanish version is emphatic (it is not
obligatory) since it presents an opposition to the T ; therefore the masculine
form was included in order to signal to the reader a referent other than the
generic 'they' (on the intertextual polemic of this line see Daz-Diocaretz
1984a:46-48). Deitics in a contextual framework helps to produce certain
readings. In the English (ST) some forms remain morphologically unchanged
even though the semantic designation of the deictics has varied. Another case
worth considering is the 'we' in the poem "Waking in the Dark" (written in
1971, in 1975:188-191) which has a referent inclusive of both male and female
(my emphasis):
there is no dismay
we move together like underwater plants.
No hay congoja
como plantas submarinas avanzamos juntos
The entire contextual situation of the poem indicates that 'we' is the dual
male/female, for which the Spanish requires nosotros, therefore, the related
adjective goes in the masculine plural (juntos).
Quite another referent is that of the "Twenty-One Love Poems" (written
between 1974-1976), especially poem II (lines discussed in Chapter three,
section 1). The context presents another challenge, and the deictics give us
primarily a woman-to-woman discourse (my italics):
to move openly together
in the pull of gravity which is not simple
In Spanish the semantic change explicitly reveals a different enunciation:
from the heterosocial to the homosocial world, emphasized by the simple
movement from the masculine to the feminine form: 'together' could be

translated as juntos but the referent is clearly woman-to-woman:
avanzar juntas, libres,
con el nada sencillo impulso de la gravedad
This example is intended to demonstrate that even though in English the
sentence elements do not indicate gender, there exists if one follows the
referential textual clues and the contextual frames the presence of the
implied female-each-other {una a la otra); even though it may be textually
suggested, the translator would have no difficulties in presupposing other
interpretations. Within this context, identifying the 'we', and in the under
standing that pronouns are a political problem to the poet (sex, class, ethnic
identity are crucial factors, see Rich 1984b) together, each other, we must be
translated in the feminine if we read the poet in her designed contexts. Set
against this framework, deictics oblige us to construct a woman-to-woman
discoursive situation in Spanish. As in "Origins and History of Conscious
ness" (1978:9):
/.../We did this. Conceived
of each other, conceived each other in a darkness
which I remember as drenched in light.
/.../Esto hicimos. Nos imaginamos
una a la otra, y nos imaginamos a cada cual
en una obscuridad que recuerdo baada de luz.
What I have called a "synecdochical embodiment of language" in Chap
ter three becomes extremely relevant for the translator of feminist discourse,
particularly in relation to morphology, semantics, and other contrastive dif
ferences in languages, although to present the problem I have exemplified
it only with Spanish. In Adrienne Rich it is no coincidence that the poet's
name appears more than once recorded as a voice in her texts. The act of
naming herself, of including herself (the empirical individual) as an inscribed
poetic persona responds to the feminist writer's call to require from the
reader the actual association of poet and persona, contrary to general trad
itional poetic conventions, and to the norms and canons and most of all,
expectations in poetic discourse by women in the past. It reveals a changing
image of the self that tends to revise and reflect on traditional rhetorical
strategies. The enunciative distance and impersonality of a given sector of
contemporary poetry and the interplay with personal pronouns to obscure
references and the speaking subject is questioned and challenged (on these
features see Culler 1975:168). We have no difficulty in recognizing in this a

major poetic strategy, one which partly builds up poetic discourse and reveals
one dimension of the breakthrough in poetry from 1960 to the present.
Woman as speaker is the expression and fusion of persona and poet, in a
text that proposes itself as feminist. From this one can see clearly that in a
woman-identified voice there is no longer a split of ambivalence. Rich's
effective method of reflection makes it evident that there underlies a politics
of ordinary pronouns to unmuffle the muted self.8
Equally valid for our purpose, is the woman-identified and woman-
addressed poetic discourse in which the T' and the 'we' are almost without
exception feminine, and 'you' most often also feminine. From this we must
deduce that all the elements in the sentence that require concordance should
be of the same gender category; as a result, the more elements requiring
specificity in Spanish, the more emphatic results the strategy.
Personal pronouns, then, in the Romance languages become more polit
ical; that is, more gender identified, therefore, more open to be muffled or
neutralized for ideological or cultural reasons if one chooses to silence them.
It is pertinent to stress that in Spanish, if the translator follows the given
contextual pressures of textuality/gender, the discourse acquires its full func
tional equivalence. Connections are multiple within this challenge to conce
alment and hiding of the self in its full power of enunciation. This semiotic
operation is also applicable to poems that are written in the context of female
speaker and addressee and are not necessarily 'lesbian' (e.g poems from the
seventeenth century on, addressed to women by women poets). "Paula
Becker to Clara Westhoff" (Rich 1978:42-44), for example, is composed in
the epistolary tradition, and both speaker and addressee are women. The
word juntas 'together', casadas 'married', amiga, 'friend' and other units
shape and make explicit the dialogue between two women. The translator
is invited to respond to textual strategies, not simply suggested by the title,
but in the poem as a complete structure. The situation of discourse is con
structed through equivalent explicitness of gender.
Other problems do arise in the interlingual transfer of a feminist text in
relation to gender and its special function in a given poem. In "Natural
Resources" (1978:60-67) Rich writes:
The rainbow laboring to extend herself
where neither men nor cattle understand (p.60)
'Herself' (a s misma), as an expressive deictic makes most emphatically of
the rainbow a feminine referent in English, while in Spanish 'el arco iris' is
invariably masculine. Morphologically the referent is required, there is no

possibility of avoiding the masculine form for the sake of comprehension in
Spanish. This specific problem belongs to the related question of natural
gender and value-differentiation between two linguistic systems; namely,
that "there are no two languages which would sort their stock of words into
anything like identical gender divisions" (Fodor 1959:4). I found an unor
thodox solution, only made possible by punctuation and its syntactical dis
tributional pattern, which allows for emphasis and clarity (on the possibilities
of punctuation see Moliner 1982). Therefore I introduced 'ella 'she' to make
the feminist strategy clear and its central functional opposition he/she, thus
the Spanish reads:
arco iris, ella, est luchando por extenderse
all donde no comprenden ni el hombre ni el ganado
Other feminist uses of a word can be solved with a similar effect in Spanish.
In the same poem:
The miner is no metaphor. She goes
into the cage like the rest (1978:60).
In Spanish, perhaps more so than in English, for social contextual inferences,
it is unusual to think of such a type of activity for women, therefore it is not
frequent to use 'miner' in the feminine. Yet minera does not violate any
syntactical or morphological rule, even though it may come as a surprise to
the concrete reader. For such reasons, the lines stays: "La minera no es una
metfora."
We have examined crucial examples of the translator as writer. He/she
preserves as much of the literal meaning as possible by offering solutions to
apparent contradictions, obscurities, non-determinacies, discontinuities in
feminist discourse, with an exploratory attention focused on gender markers
which inscribe the author in her own textuality/sexuality. In the polemic
with patriarchy and norms, uses and tradition within the given social context,
Adrienne Rich (and other feminist writers) re-contextualizes her discourse
to enlarge the possibilities of her own female-speaker. This potentiality is
embodied in gender, and what characterizes the self. For such reasons, the
translator needs to find or introduce a discourse in the receptors' semiotic
system which is adequate to transfer the above described complexities.
4. SPEAKER AND ADDRESSEE IN FEMALE-IDENTIFIED DIS

COURSE
The semantic movement in the lyric T and person deitics in Adrienne

Rich's poetic discourse have a referential function beyond establishing the
speech situation itself in each text, or in her work as a whole. 9 The paradigms
in Rich's texts arise from the systematization of a problem whose solutions
provide additional guidelines; this problem was also found dominant as it
emerged subsequently in my act of translating the work of other women
poets publishing in the last two decades. The readings of texts by, among
others, Sylvia Plath (1960,1965,1981), Denise Levertov (1959,1961,1964,
1979,1982), H.D. (1961), Anne Sexton (1960,1962,1969,1971,1974,1978),
Diane Wakoski (1962, 1971, 1974, 1977,1978, 1982), Nikki Giovanni (1968,
1970, 1972, 1973, 1980), Audre Lorde (1968, 1970, 1973, 1976, 1978), Alice
Walker (1968,1973), June Jordan (1969,1977,1980), and OlgaBroumas (1977,
1979) revealed essential differences since the semantic character of the
speaker and addressee interaction ( T and 'you') made evident a number
of distinctive features, yet these are responsive to some common strategies.
As we have discussed, the three most important components, in the poetry
of Adrienne Rich, are the relation of poet and the alien text, the shifting of
connotations, and especially gender determination in connection with
speaker and addressee interaction all reveal strategic positions in dis
course, and are activated in different ways. I will concentrate on the implica
tions for study of discourse by women from the perspective of the speech
situation.
Woman-identified texts are the most recurrent feature in the poetry by
women in the United States since 1960. In cases of deictics connected with
gender markers in the terms previously defined the sense conveyed in the
source texts and the corresponding equivalence to be given in translation,
depends greatly on the translator's collaboration. The previous knowledge
of a poet's author-function and of her texts will contribute to guide the
inferencing operation as we hope to have illustrated.
A source text containing gender indeterminacy must be resolved for
comprehension in the reading act and for subsequent coherence in the recod-
ing phase. I shall refer to a few of these cases in the subsequent pages, and
will proceed from actual examples of texts which do not provide clues or
which are ambiguous; therefore, if contextual relations are ignored or
unknown, the linguistic choice in the translation may be in favour of a non-
overlapping textual identity. This is often overlooked in literary theory. The

problem is complicated in the domain of writing by women, the reasons are
partly rooted in the standards of acceptability of a text or a set of texts in a
given social or cultural setting.
Cheryl Walker rightly suggests that "The greatest danger women artists
have faced has been, not oppression and hostility toward them, but their
own internalization of the attitudes of the oppressors" (1982:7). Such form
of internalization has frequently been practiced through the use of a persona
as the most widespread and still lasting, even when the persona of the
feminine gender is adopted, in which case it may not necessarily be a woman
but an oblique representation of an aspect of woman (metonymic device).
By way of example, the poem "Of the Four Humours of Man's Constitution"
where Ann Bradstreet (1612-1672) strategically makes use of Cholera as
persona:
We both once Masculines, the world doth know,
Now Feminines while, for love we owe
Unto your Sisterhood, Which makes us render
Our noble selves in a less noble gender.
(in Walker 1982:9)
Thus, woman's poetry can reveal a constant interplay of two major' decisions
with regard to the language of male tradition: acceptance of a non-gender-
specified speaker (through ellipsis or ambiguity) and the absence of any
attempt to assert the female speaker in the first person. The correlation of
woman poet and the extra-textual world with woman in a male oriented
world must be seen from the perspective of the woman as speaking subject
in full awareness of her gendered voice as center of a given world vision.
Clearly this predominates in the literature of the United States only after
1960 as a body of texts produced in a relatively systematic way, where linguis
tic and social patterns reinforce one another to antagonize or abandon con
ventional language, an aspect that sets a turning point in contemporary writ
ing in relation to the lyric genre in general.
In contemporary poetry, the speaker/addressee interplay in the lyric
speech situation has become multifaceted: women poets are exploring the
possibilities of decentering and unbinding the woman identified self in ways
that did not seem possible before, and are transgressing the former restric
tions in order to speak from and through a self closer to the poet's individu
ality. There is an ironic twist in this search. The woman poet would seem to
have fewer discoursive boundaries than the male poet, because traditionally
women have been confined to write within patriarchal conventions, and have
normally adopted the male persona in all its complexities. In contrast, male
poets in general tend to follow their own self-expression; the poets who have
gone beyond their gender/culture oriented persona are exceptional. In the
near past one can mention Walt Whitman in America, and the Andalusian
Federico Garca Lorca. Only when it is a convention within a genre, as in
mystical poetry, has the male poet adopted the female speaking-subject
perspective, such as San Juan de la Cruz (1542-1591). The arguments on this
exceed the limits set for this study but deserve closer attention.
The theoretical orientation proposed proves useful in Rich's poetry
whose properties make it possible to grasp the degrees of self-awareness in
texts by other poets, and the inferencing act which ultimately defines the
choice of specific gender markers in Spanish. My basic schema is as follows:
in a 'traditional' text the lyric T is not necessarily and not often female-iden
tified and often gives expression to the voice of a persona. If it is explicitly
a woman-speaker, the semantic level tends to follow the prevailing cultural
order; 'we' and 'you' unless explicit, are generic or unspecified when seman-
tically used in the plural (when 'we' is not dual and 'you' not singular). In
this type of discourse my option for the Spanish equivalent is the generic
nosotros (masculine) and the addressee ('you') is the masculine plural or
singular. When I say 'we' or 'you' it is to be understood as a metonymic
device, that is, representing the appropriate and relevant series of units that
must be put in concordance within the text. The 'traditional' text, quite
evidently, constitutes the largest category and is the most frequently used
model; it should, therefore, be studied separately. One of the major difficul
ties encountered is to decide on an appropriate equivalent for the speaker
T produced by a woman poet who does not provide other reliable gender
clues, thus leaving her texts open for extratextual speculations, and as such,
moreover, the linguistic choices are left to the interpreter.
One might still consider another question: how to determine when the
poet is conceiving a lyric T' with a voice in the masculine. The fact that a
poem was written by a woman cannot always account automatically for the
woman's voice in the text; the references in Sor Juana Ins de la Cruz, and
Marguerite Yourcenar are illustrative examples of explicitness but in English
these become problematic.
There are reasonable grounds to consider that in a feminist text the
speaking T' refers to a female self; 'we' may be either the dual male/female
or the plural inclusive of both genders, or even inclusive only of female
referents. When the addressee semantically denotes the singular form, it

usually corresponds to the representation of man, or the male world or the
persona in patriarchy with whom the speaker is in polemic. The Spanish for
the metonymic 'we' plural or dual is also nosotros as in the 'traditional' texts.
In such cases the sentence elements referring to the speaker in the first person
in Spanish are written in the feminine, and the corresponding gender markers
for 'you' are in the masculine. Sylvia Plath's texts correspond, mainly to this
category, e.g. her poem "Lady Lazarus": "Or So, so Herr Doktor./ So, Herr
Enemy." (my italics), is written in the masculine in Spanish {Doctor,
Enemigo) (Plath 1966:8). The same applies to Alice Walker's and Diane
Wakoski's poems in which the 'we' in the love poems is the dual male/female
and the addressee in the singular (in the context just mentioned) is the male
referent. Denise Levertov, Nikki Giovanni, June Jordan also fall into this
dominant category; they write within the spectrum of heterosocial world,
therefore the 'we' points semantically to the inclusion of male/female.
From our functional point of view, the third category is the female
identified and female addressed discourse which discloses textually a love
relationship, and through distinctive features the speaker clearly strengthens
erotic love. Such is the case of the verbal construct of a lesbian text. Both
speaker and addressee may comprise the semantic sphere of the first person
plural dual or collective for which in Spanish this relationship can be
explicitly inscribed by the feminine pronoun nosotras, or by the use of
similar gender-specific expressions such as the metonymic 'female each
other', una a otra. In the absence of an addressee, the first person dominates
in the feminine form. This poetic discourse can be used in a variety of ways.
Judy Grahn's "A Woman is Talking to Death" (part seven) provides a good
example. Here there is a constant interplay in the sequence as a whole
consisting of nine sections (1978:111-131) to suggest that the real sense
of the adjectives can only be conveyed in the feminine; simultaneously, in
this passage we witness the displacement of connotations (my italics):
I am a pervert, therefore I've learned
to keep my hands to myself in public
but I was so drunk that night,
I actually did something loving
I took her in my arms, this woman,
until she could breathe right, and
my friends who are perverts too
they touched her too/.../ (p.128)
The three adjectives stressed here suffice to indicate in Spanish that the text
is female identified, just following the internal structure of the poem itself
which provides the major context.
Pursuing those manifest characteristics of the nature of the text, it seems
preferable not to denominate a poet 'feminist' or 'lesbian'; their ideological
stand and/or sexual preferences in real life are to be distinguished from their
poetic discourse. The fact that a feminist poet identifies herself as such is
part of her author-function, but textual strategies may lead to other abductive
inferences. Conversely, a poet such as Diane Wakoski, who in her author-
function activity does not include herself in the sector of feminist text produc
ers, shows a considerable number of texts that indeed are part of 'feminist'
discourse (as opposed to 'traditional' texts) thematically in her recurrent
polemic with the male lover as addressee and her self-assertion as a woman
subordinated to his world (see especially The Motorcycle Betrayal Poems,
1971; Waiting for the King of Spain, 1977, and The Man Who Shook Hands
1978). The ambivalence in Wakoski's poetry originates in her awareness of
dependence on the male-dominated relationship but it is this very cognizance
that maintains her consistent polemic. This involves the distinction to be
made between what the poet says and the type of texts she produces.
At this point, I mean to stress that in the act of interpretation it is
necessary to identify the strategies or any specific textual property used as
device to produce an expressive effect. Provisional as it may be, the outline
of deictic clues is meant as a working framework to trace relevant features of
internal differentiation in the speech situation within poetic discourse by
women. There appears to be a predominant pattern (of inclusive, not exclu
sive factors) which in cases of indeterminacy provides a guideline to build
the referential components in a given text. Discussions are open in this seman
tic actualization of textual strategies, because the problems are numerous.
The constitution of the lyric T' in women's discourse needs to be studied
more extensively in order to reach a more complete understanding of the
lyric T' in general, since the causes that induce a woman poet to include an
indefinite or non determinate speaking T' originate in the different spatial,
temporal and personal frameworks, even though they may respond to the
same historical and cultural conventions, norms and values to which male
poets respond.
These operations and complexities are not restricted to the domain of
poetic discourse alone, but to women's writing in general. I shall give a few
representative examples from contemporary American writers.
no TRANSLATING POETIC DISCOURSE
Susan Griffin provides us with an interpretative problem in a text where

the speaking subject is divided (my emphasis):
One day 'you' is the nag, the dictator, the time
and motion expert, the boss, the destroyer. And on
that day T am the dreamer, the seeker, the poet,
the visionary thinker, the daring questioner
nevertheless terrified by this other/.../ (1982:642)
This image of the self unfolding from within can have at least four versions
in Spanish, each one simply produced by shifting the gender in the words in
italics. One would include all the qualifiers for the T and 'you' in the
feminine, interpreting Griffin in a context of actual dichotomy of the self
into two female selves, corresponding thus to the woman as speaker/woman
as author correlation.
Another version can be created by using the masculine for all above
emphasized words. Although this possible translation seems farfetched, it is
not impossible for the translator to create this deviation purposely and effec
tively. It would move the text into 'traditional' writing, making explicit an
internalization of male oriented norms. A third possibility would also take
Griffin's text beyond her own design; the terms related to the 'you' could
be in the masculine thus making the antagonistic roles represent patriarchy
within herself, as the "male facets" that have been internalized, so that the
T would be in the feminine; the interesting feature of this option is that the
feminine and the masculine selves would conflict within:10
Un da 't' es el regan, el dictador, el experto
en tiempo y cambios, el jefe, el destructor, y en
ese da 'yo' soy la soadora, la buscadora, la poeta,
la pensadora visionaria,
la osada interrogadora
que sin embargo se aterra de ese otro.
And a fourth hypothetical version would have the 'you' in the feminine and
the T' in the masculine:
Un da 't' es la regaona, la dictadora, la experta
en tiempo y cambios, la jefa, la destructora. Y en
ese da 'yo' soy el soador, el buscador, el poeta,
el pensador visionario, el osado interrogador
que sin embargo se aterra de esa otra.
While in the previous text the reader would be offered a woman-identified

utterance in which there is a polemic with the male roles, therefore making
it a feminist text, the one just quoted would make explicit a conflict of a
woman poet whose self-identification is male, and who has an internal quarrel
with a negative female self. Each interpretation produces a different writing
reflected in a semantic shift activated by the interplay of gender markers
centered around the speaker and addressee factor performed by the trans-
lator-function.
There are still other variations to which the translator needs to be atten
tive, concerning the different semantic relations in deictics and the speaking
subject which I will illustrate with Susan Sherman's closure in "First and Last
Poem" (1979:2):
we grow smaller as we grow
as things empty themselves of us
and we of them
it is so deep this thing between us
no name can contain it
even time trembles at its touch
The first three lines refer to a generic "we" in the source-text and even
though by ellipsis this pronoun is not included in Spanish, some other words
need concordance, for which the masculine plural is the only accurate form.
In the last three lines of the poem, however, Sherman takes the poetic con
struct back to the implicit dialogue with Violeta Parra (Chilean folk singer
and poet), to whom the text is dedicated, and by whom it was inspired, so
that the second semantic correlation implicitly expressed as a 'we' yet actually
present in the text as "between us" surfaces in a more evident way in Spanish:
empequeecemos al crecer
a medida que las cosas se vacan de nosotros
y nosotros de ellas
es tan profundo esto entre nosotras
que ningn nombre lo puede contener
con su tacto incluso el tiempo tiembla
(Daz-Diocaretz 1983c: 12)
Therefore, in the same text the Spanish directly points to the changing refe
rents, and the movement is made from the general nosotros to the particular
nosotras, the latter defining the poem as woman-identified and woman-
addressed.
Margaret Randall's "Standing Guard in Managua" offers another exam
ple, with its opening personal pronoun which could give voice to a personal
statement. Only the first line of the poem would require specificity in Spanish,
namely, in the word "alone":
Standing alone against the night

I open to all its hidden sounds
soft rustle of branches, crickets, a cock
crowing somewhere beyond the trees.
Spots of light catch leaves and throw them out
in moving shapes.
The darkness is a living body
I want to bring to its knees.
(Randall 1983:68)
Given the extratextual reliable knowledge about the Nicaraguan Revolution
and about the continuous struggle of its people, the poem could refer to
either man or woman; within this particular context, the poem brings into
play a set of social and cultural expectations which would make us infer that
the T is male, since under 'normal' circumstances it is men who stand guard.
The lack of additional gender clues induced me in my translation to accept
two possibilities, therefore two distinct versions were written: one in which
the individual standing guard was male, the other, female. Both texts were
sent to the author who answered unequivocally: "In 'Posta en la noche de
Managua' of course it has to be sola 'alone' and not solo because it is I
myself..." (Daz-Diocaretz 1983e). The lack of details or information can
cause such misleading decodings. These changes in interpreting deictics are
as valid as the poet's expectation that the readers interpret her text as personal
experience. Deictics alone do not make the T' of the speaker of an explicit
gender, unless other referential certainties are given for the semiotic transfer
to another linguistic system.
Further considerations related to the speech situation in women's texts
seem to indicate that translation theory and practice can also contribute to
uncover issues that otherwise remain marginal and which indeed are signific
antly relevant to the current questions of what constitutes women's writing.
It seems indispensable, for instance, to systematize areas of research on the
basis of a theory of speaker and addressee in women's discourse, given that
"discourse receives its meaning from the person(s) to whom it is addressed"
(I borrow from Kristeva 1975:54), that is, from the reader and from the
translator-function perspective besides the actual intratextual feature under
discussion in this chapter. This framework would necessarily include textual
studies as well as focus on reception theory.
Another point to be stressed is the possible function of translation studies
in the area of conceptualization. In an article on 'revisionist' language in
women poets, Alicia Ostriker makes some conclusive remarks in a footnote
(1982:79) about the sexual identification of the following poets she charac
terizes: H.D.'s orientation in Helen in Egypt is 'heterosexual'; Susan Grif
fin's, in Woman and Nature: The Roaring Inside Her, 'lesbian'; and Anne
Sexton's, in Transformations, 'asexual'. This is not meant to criticize
Ostriker's views but to comment that such a 'reading' does not seem to be
centered on the texts. An interpretation of these books from the framework
I am proposing e.g. dominant textual strategies in discourse by women,
would lead to conclude that H.D.'s text is feminist, Griffin's is both feminist
and lesbian, and Sexton's feminist. I have suggested that translation problems
can help postulate the dimensions of discourse by women since it gives aware
ness to complexities surrounding the speaking subject and the persona or
subject-construct who is the source of the poetic or literary utterance. What
is being called in question here, for instance, is whether the classification
"heterosexual/lesbian/asexual" is applicable in a more general category of
women's writing; or other questions such as, what constitutes "asexual writ
ing" in a woman poet and in discourse in general? Which are the textual or
discoursive frontiers of "heterosexual" and "asexual" writing? In view of
these categorizations, can there exist a writing that is "sexual"? My argument
is that the semantic and stylistic problems a translator encounters can offer
clues to systematize and isolate some textual categories, and they can help
to put to test their actual functionality as a concrete work is transferred to
another culture or another linguistic system; a correlation between thematic
and linguistic components is an indispensable area for an effective link
between translation and criticism in Women's Studies.
A single example from an Indo-European, Indic language will show the
difficulties when referential uncertainties pose obstacles. A brief but concise
comment of Gayatri Ch.Spivak to her English translation of the Bengali
short-story "Draupadi" by Mahasveta Devy, explains the performance of a
fertile inference (1981:392); Spivak demonstrates that in her decision to trans
late a personal pronoun she was guided both by contextual pressures and
her own ideology (congenial to that of the author) to decode and recode a
'her' instead of 'his' in an instance of indeterminacy, since modern Bengali
does not distinguish between either gender forms. Examples are sure to
abound of similar cases of indeterminacies, and other feminist texts may not
be interpreted in a satisfying or accurate way in the receptor-language; most
importantly, the resulting translation may deviate meanings in such a way
as to dis-assert the existence of female speaker or addressee. These are of
course, not hypotheses about the conventions of readings only; the reverse
situation can also be produced and a non-feminist text (or an ambiguous

one) may be translated to create a feminist or lesbian verbal construct, claim
ing an explicitness that was not at all designed by the author, thus approaching
the text with presuppositions that simply displace it from one type of discourse
to another.
A case in point is the translation of the short-story "Mar" by the Catalan
writer Montserrat Roig performed by Helen R.Lane. I shall focus only on
the points useful to our discussion.11 The first one concerns the use of mas
culine plural in Spanish to include men and women in the source-text (which
we have discussed as the 'generic we'): "cuando algunos amigos intelectuales
nos miraban con recelo,'' an expression in which the author is not making
any gender or sex classification or distinction. However, the translator's
contextual presuppositions led her to recode: "when some of my intellectual
men friends cast fearful glances in our direction..." thus restricting the gender
categorization in English. The effect is one of opposition to patriarchal domi
nances in the thematic outgrowth of the short-story. A more significant aber
rant interpretative inference concerns the relationship between Mar the
female protagonist and a woman friend: the translator purposely adds
sexual inferences, absent in the source-text. This intent is explicit in two
examples. The triviality and domesticity of the question "Qu pcima me
echaste?" becomes "What sort of love potion did you give me?" The translator
associated pcima with love, disambiguating the semantic connotation of the
Spanish word (denoting a liquid drink of disagreable taste). With this infer
ence, the text is displaced to a restricted use in Pre-Renaissance literature;
the "love potion" can be found, for example, in La Celestina (1499). Such
operation also induces the reader to make inferences in the code of sexual
love, a characteristic that does not exist in the source-text.
In the next example, from the same story, the referents are the two
women: "stas se entienden, stas tienen un asunto..." where the author is
merely suggesting that they share something intense. The translation reads:
"those two are having an affair, they're sleeping together." Where does
the assertive "sleeping together" emerge from but the translator's own
presuppositions? Montserrat Roig was interviewed on these and other
changes of her text into English and quite interestingly explains the trans
lator's options in the following terms (in Perramn and Ma 1982:55): (my
translation): "I imagine the translator wanted to give more emphasis, perhaps
because, nowadays, in American feminist literature the theme of friendship
between two women is in fashion as a substitution for original love, but I
wanted to go beyond it." Clearly, this shows the opposite phenomenon. It is

not a question of neutralizing a female identified text, but of transforming
a non-explicit feminist into a lesbian semantic unit, a detail that determines
the textual lesbian network in the story in its totality.
To recapitulate my main concerns: a translator of discourse by women,
and of discourse in general is likely to find it necessary to develop certain
strategic readings or to follow textual clues to recode semantic networks
within each text. In a feminist context, the strategies are motivated to prevent
collaboration with those who have muted the voices of women (Kramarae
1981:1-32; Gubar 1981:243-264), or to avoid placing the author in a textual
world that is absent in the source-text. In translation, the act of reading in
a context favourable to the author entails a willingness to discover the codes
underlying the text, an elucidation that guides subsequently the writing-activ
ity in the translator-function; it cannot be a mere application of literary
conventions, and language rules and models. It implies a resolution of inde-
terminacies, carried out by taking up suggestions of meaning from the author-
function perspective. Gender cues, and the deictics of first and second person
are to be taken into account in order to assert the existence of woman as
speaking subject of discourse, bringing woman's voice into being as the cen
tral force in a text. Any change in voice and gender is not only a betrayal of
a text, but more importantly a betrayal of the ideological stand of an author
who is struggling to transgress linguistic and social codes.
Paradigms of patriarchal ideology are deeply rooted in Spanish (as in
all Romance languages), and the case of silenced women's voices is overtly
manifest. This fact offers a challenge for the translator to introduce woman-
identified texts as alternative strategies to fortify an emancipatory language
in the Hispanic culture from the expression of a woman's voice. Equally
important is the growing awareness both in the translator of texts by women
and the reader of translations, and the needed development of research and
criticism in this area. My suggestions should not be taken as limited only to
translations from English into Spanish. The very notion of translating has
no boundaries of languages or cultures. The journey of woman-identified
discourse from this point of view, can be studied and extended to wider
crosscultural dimensions.
NOTES
1) It should be observed that this obligatory feature is not exclusive of the Romance languages.
For example, the same applies to Russian. Jakobson (1963:83) remarked, in the comparison of
Russian grammatical forms and those of English that in order to translate correctly the English
phrase I hired a worker a Russian needs supplementary information, e.g. to distinguish between
masculine or feminine rabotnika or rabotnicu. "Si, un Anglais qui vient d'noncer cettephrase,
je demande si l'ouvrier tait un homme ou une femme, il peut juger ma question non pertinente ou
indiscrete, tandis que, dans la version russe de cette phrase, la rponse cette question est
obligatoire.'' He concludes that the information required by different grammatical systems varies,
therefore the translator who works with a phrase in isolation can deprive a message from its initial
content (meaning).
2) cf. Beaugrande (1978:25-37). See chapter I in the present study, and Daz-Diocaretz (1984c).
3) I shall restrict myself to the question of gender markers having a semantic function in the
speech situation in the poems. I refer the reader to studies of gender on aspects I shall not consider
here but that bring to light complementary issues: Lakoff (1975); Stanley and Robbins (1978);
on generic terms in English, see Morton (1972), Bodine (1975); Martyna (1980); Kramarae (1981);
on language patterns and sex differentiation, see Gould and Wartofsky (1976); Vetterling-Braggin,
Elliston and English (1977); see also Miller and Swift (1976).
4) For the definitions of these terms see note 2, Chapter 2.
5) As an initial study, I suggest, for example, a critical reading of comparison of specificity in
the poems included in the anthologies edited by Bankier, Cosman et al (1976), Jacquez Wieser
(1979), and Crow (1984).
6) Some of my translations of Rich's work have appeared in Diaz-Diocaretz (1978b, 1980a,
1980c, 1983a, 1983c, 1983d). The anthology (Diaz-Diocaretz 1985b) includes a comprehensive
selection of poems in translation, from 1951 to 1981, with a preface by A.Rich.
7) Gardiner (1981) analyzes female identity as a process, from the perspective of feminist
psychology; Ostriker (1982:88) discusses briefly the nature of the T and the 'we' in women poets,
especially the speaker of Rich's "Diving into the Wreck"; she concludes that identity in women
poets is "more often fluid than solid," as it is a "divided self" in women's revisionist mythology.
8) Female identity and definitions of the female self are central issues in feminist and lesbian
perspectives. See Juhasz (1976); Showalter (1977); Carruthers (1979); Gardiner (1981); Stimpson
(1981).
9) I agree with Eco (1976:66) that "Every attempt to establish what the referent of a sign is
forces us to define the referent in terms of an abstract entity which moreover is only a cultural
convention." This is quite relevant for the ideation of speaker and addressee in feminist discourse.
10) In this version, the translator has the option between poeta and poetisa for the feminine.
While the first one is a contemporary, non-traditional use practised by women poets themselves
or feminist critics, the second one is the form accepted by the Real Academia Espaola, and has
wide use among traditional women poets and critics. Poetisa still has a much more frequent.use
that its corresponding 'poetess'.
11) For examples and discussion of other changes made by the translator in Roig's short-story,
see the notes on a comparative description and enumeration, followed by an interview with the
author on those points in Perramn and Ma (1982:47-55). I owe the information pertinent to
my discussion to their article; however, I am responsible for placing it in a semiotic context.
V. Prosody, Rhythms, Intonation, and the Acting Writer
and your anger uttered in silence word and stammer

shattering the fog lances of sun
piercing the grey Pacific unanswerable tide
carving itself in clefts and fissures of the rock
Beauty of your breasts your hands
turning a stone a shell a weed a prism in coastal light
traveller and witness
the passion of the speechless
driving your speech
protectless
Adrienne Rich, "Coast to Coast", 1978
neither Rosenkavalier nor Gtterdmmerung

but a woman's voice singing old songs
with new words, with a quiet bass, a flute
plucked and fingered by women outside the law.
Adrienne Rich, XIII, "Twenty-One Love Poems", 1974-1976

1. "RE-SCORED FOR A DIFFERENT INSTRUMENT" 1
In the presentation of rhythm and intonational features of Rich's work

I have chosen poems that show a thematic as well as a rhythmic development.
Rich begins by following the conventions of the leading figures in the post-war
period, such as W.H. Auden, T.S. Eliot, Robert Frost, and others (see Gelpi
and Gelpi 1975:125-171). During this early period a neutral tone and detach
ment from the self give expression to controlled diction and a conscious
practice of stylistic, rhetorical, and thematic devices making manifest the
poet's acceptance of the literary standards and norms.
As I previously stated, Change of World, The Diamond Cutters, and
Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law are Rich's early volumes in which craft
predominates over experience, the latter, then, is submitted to form. In the
books that follow the poet begins to discover that the 'double-bind' of being
a woman and a poet need not be separated, that a closer approach to the
woman's vision calls for stylistic choices that are to represent this new integ
ration; she realizes that her own voice can be articulated in forms that seem
to be more adequate to her primary concerns with the relationship of the
individual with language and with society, and of women in this context, all
encompassed in her search for a meaningful connection between word and
world, woman and patriarchy.
In poems such as "Storm Warnings", "An Unsaid Word", "The Middle-
Aged", "The Diamond Cutters", and "The Knight" (1951;1955;1963), Rich
writes predominantly in blank verse (unrhymed iambic pentamenter lines).
I would like to start by saying that the main difficulty in translating texts
with a clearly delineated poetic form lies in the lack of functional equivalence
within the respective aesthetic and prosodic structures of source and receptor
literary systems. There is "no identical form in any one language that can
be entirely identical with a verse form in any other" (Holmes 1970:95). In
the case of English and Spanish there arises immediately a problem involving
different systems of scansion. For Spanish, a method of versification based
solely on the iambic, trochaic, anapestic, spondaic, and amphibraic feet as
predominant has been proved by scholars to be either insufficient or inapplic
able; this is particularly true in the case of varying accentual lines and com
bined clauses, as shown by Andrs Bello (1835) and later confirmed by
PROSODY, RHYTHMS, INTONATION, & THE ACTING WRITER 119
Toms Navarro Toms (1974:31).

Blank verse has been the distinctive poetic metre of English literature
since its introduction by Henry H. Surrey (15177-1547) through his transla
tion of the Aeneid (ca. 1540), and later by Thomas Wyatt in 1557. This long
tradition has been reinforced by the fact that the iambic rhythm is the closest
to normal rhythm in English speech. By contrast, in Spanish, the most com
monly used metrical unit is the octoslabo (Navarro Toms 1974:31) which
coincides with the most frequent melodic unit in this language. The roman
cero, coplas populares, drama, refrains, proverbs, and maxims have often
been composed upon variations of the octoslabo. Furthermore, Spanish
literary tradition has also become enriched in poetic forms, versification in
particular, through the development of a variety of prosodic rhythms. An
illustrative example is the poetry of the Nicaragan 'Modernista' Rubn
Daro. Daro shows a mastery of rhythmic freedom and control of form in
his use of a wide variety of metric patterns and stanzas (see Navarro Toms
1974). It is through Daro and the poets of Modernismo in the Hispanic
world that contemporary poetry in Spanish begins.
The tradition of blank verse in literature in English is quite different
from the verso blanco of Spanish literature. Verso blanco is the meter that
follows all the precepts of strophic regularity (number of syllables, stresses,
pauses) in unrhymed lines; verso blanco is any poem that follows any conven
tional or established poetic form (Lzaro Carreter 1971:407). Given this
disparity, the problem is not to find an "identical" form in Spanish, but to
select the appropriate stylistic elements for a meter 'parallel' to the original.
In order to do this, the method of translating followed in the writing of all
the poems presented in this selection, begins, after the reading stage, with
the search for a meaningful correlation of syntax and rhythm and the images
that create the tone of the poem; this correlation is developed first from the
recoding of an equivalent meaning. That is, the approach will not "take the
form of the original as /.../ starting point, fitting content into a mimetic
(considering only the form) or analogical (function of form within the poetic
tradition) form, but starting from the semantic material, allowing it to take
on its own unique poetic shape" (Holmes 1970:96). It will therefore be an
"organic form" which is content-derivative; yet it will not be a free organic
form, since the aesthetic effect to be achieved will be one that expresses the
tone and meaning of the original.
Rhythmically and thematically, "Storm Warnings" (Rich 1951)
("Amenazas de tormenta"), constitutes a good starting point for examining
some of the formal aspects of Rich's early poetry, and for delineating the
origin from which her language moves into freer rhythmic lines. The aesthetic
effectiveness of the poem is achieved not only in the depth of experience
expressed in an original poetic form, but in the "unstated" tone of presenti
ment, of restrained fear, and the suggestion of controlled emotions,
actualized syntactically by long sentences, abstract images interconnected
and articulated by the measured line that seeks to free itself, and by the
emphatic alliterative echoes; the first stanza is as follows:
1 The glass has been falling all the afternoon,
2 And knowing better than the instrument
3 What winds are walking overhead, what zone
4 Of gray unrest is moving across the land,
5 I leave the book upon a pillowed chair
6 And walk from window to closed window, watching
7 Boughs strain against the sky
Images of the objective, of the external world of what is apparently
independent from personal reality the weather, the instrument to measure
and interpret it, the house itself and its surroundings articulate the
speaker's intuition about the coming storm, the warning about the external
world, external power. Before this imminent danger arrives, the 'powerless'
speaker enacts a ritual of defense in an intellectualized manner. The "glass",
"the instrument", "winds", "zone", dominate visually in the poem, and the
speaker's presence is suspended, mentioned for the first time only in line 5
of the stanza. The speaker is hiding both from the storm in the house, and
from visibility in language, as if avoiding exposure.
The image "What winds are walking overhead, what zone..." becomes
closely linked with line 7 by means of the alliterative cluster, "And walk
from window to closed window, watching"; this alliteration of /w+ vowel/
also sets the contrast between the speaker and the sky. The freedom of the
natural elements is made evident by the opposition to the confinement of
the speaker, who can only "watch." Several clusters of words create
sequences of alliterative and semantic characteristics, especially the constant
use of /w+ vowel/ throughout the poem. Stanza 2 has "inward toward..."
"waiting," and the repetition of "weather." This sound sequence is carried
over into stanza 3 with "weatherglasses," "wind," in "the wind will rise";
and the last stanza gathers the previous echoes in the image "the insistent
whine/of weather."
For our purpose I shall analyze different versions of "Amenazas de tor
menta" ('Storm Warnings') which show differences in objectives and method.
Since a careful explanation of each choice in terms of diction, syllabic length

and related elements would be a separate subject in the genetic process of
translation, I will only compare one draft and two 'final' versions, the above
mentioned text corresponding to a translation finished in 1977, published
the following year with five additional poems (Daz-Diocaretz 1978b: 109),
and a more recent complete version of 1981. Before writing the 1977 version,
my choice for the first stanza was:
El barmetro ha estado bajando toda la tarde,
Y sabiendo ms que los instrumentos
Qu vientos caminan en lo alto y qu zona
De nebulosa inquietud cruza la tierra,
Dejo el libro sobre una silla acojinada
Y camino de ventana en ventana cerrada, observando
Las ramas extenderse contra el cielo.
The first obvious difference between this version and the source text is
the word tarde which semantically includes both afternoon and evening. It
is an obligatory change that makes the reference of the time of day in the
poem less specific in Spanish. The overall meaning of the text is not affected
by this change, that is, the mention of the afternoon or of the exact time
when the speaker experiences the storm warning is not fundamental. The
poet's choice in this case was, perhaps, directed by prosodic expectations;
the lines,
The glass has been falling all evening = 9 syllables
or,
The glass has been falling all day = 8 syllables
would have unsettled the metric pattern. Rich's careful choice of words is
revealed in the metrical scheme that develops in lines varying from 10 to 11
syllables, in stanzas of eight lines each. Each stanza ends with a shortened
iambic trimeter line and a shortened iambic tetrameter line in the third stanza.
The first stanza in Spanish, quoted above, is the result of a search for an
equivalent syntactical rhythm and of the semantic unfolding of the poem.
The last line," Las ramas extenderse contra el cielo," is an approximate
rendering of the image, "boughs strain against the sky." However, in Spanish
this line is almost as long as the other ones in the stanza, therefore, the entire
stanzaic unit ends flatly if compared to the source-text. Because English is
characterized by a high monosyllabic and bisyllabic frequency of words, and
Spanish is predominantly polysyllabic, lines tend to become longer in trans
lating from English.
This is a major problem that affects intonational qualities in poetic trans

lations regardless of the historical period of either source-text or translation.
The problem originates in the non-correspondence of rhythm between the
two languages; the translator finds semantically equivalent lines in Spanish
to be inevitably longer. An illustrative example of this difficulty can be found
in most of the translations of Robert Lowell done by the Argentinian poet
Alberto Girri (1969:26-27). Compare from this point of view the first lines
of Lowell's "Children of Light":
of
syllables
(10) Our fathers wrung their bread from stocks and stones
(10) And fenced their gardens with the Redman's bones;
(11) Embarking from the Nether Land of Holland,
(10) Pilgrims unhouseled by Geneva's night
Girri's version, titled "Hijos de la luz" begins:2
(19) Nuestros padres arrancaron su pan de los troncos y de las piedras
(16) y cercaron sus jardines con los huesos de piel roja;
(14) embarcados desde la tierra baja de Holanda,
(21) peregrinos desalojados de sus casas por la noche de Ginebra,
The difference in number of syllables, and the irregularity of the Spanish
are evident. What strikes the reader is that Girri could have compressed the
lines, especially the fourth one, with the elimination of de sus casas that
makes the image redundant because desalojados already denotes the condi
tion of being expelled from where one dwells. Those are the choices a trans
lator can make or may choose to ignore; needless to say, the nature of the
options determines style.
Aware, then, of the polysyllabic nature of Spanish, and wanting to create
an equivalent effect created by the shortened line at the end of each stanza,
I rewrite the last line in the first version (originally of eleven syllables),
dividing it as follows:
Las ramas extenderse = heptasyllabic line
Contra el cielo = tetrasyllabic line
The next stanzas continue to be shaped by the same principles: first of seman
tic equivalence, then rhythm and sound sequences. Therefore, even though I
include an extra-shortened line as closure in the stanza, I can create an effect
that is similar or parallel in terms of space on the page and rhythmic compres
sion. Still considering the same version, the polysyllabic composition of
Spanish is even more evident in the last stanza of the poem. While the English
text has five iambic pentameter lines (1-2-3-4 and 6) and one iambic trimeter
line,
1 I draw the curtains as the sky goes black
2 And set a match to candles sheathed in glass
3 Against the keyhole draught, the insistent whine
4 Of weather through the unsealed aperture.
5 This is our sole defense against the season;
6 These are the things that we have learned to do
7 Who live in troubled regions.
the Spanish reads,
of
syll.
(14) Corro las cortinas al ennegrecerse el cielo
(16) Y acerco una llama a las velas envainadas en cristal,
(18) Amparndolas de la corriente, el insistente plaido
(16) Del tiempo que penetra en la abertura desellada.
(15) Esta es nuestra nica defensa contra la estacin
(14) Estas son las cosas que hemos aprendido a hacer
( 7) Aquellos que vivimos
( 9) En regiones atormentadas.
After counting the average syllabic pattern of the entire text, I realized the
lines in my text ranged in length from 11 to 20 syllables; consequently, I
revised and eliminated some redundant expressions, in an attempt to achieve
a certain rhythmic regularity. The 1977 version was untouched for some time,
until a new revision or series of revisions was undertaken fours years
later. The version presented in my forthcoming anthology is a product of a
most recent re-writing (1981):
line of
syll.
1 (14) Corro las cortinas al ennegrecerse el cielo
2 (14) Y enciendo las velas envainadas en cristal
3 (14) A espaldas de la corriente de la cerradura,
4 (6+11) Insistente gemir, tiempo cruzando el ojo desellado
5 (14) Este es nuestro nico amparo de la estacin.
6 (14) Esto es lo que hemos aprendido a ejercitar
7 (7) Aquellos que habitamos
8 (7) Areas atormentadas.
Many details are to be explained, yet we shall concentrate on the ones

emphasized above. Line 1 remains identical, so that the alliterations are kept
for connections with other phonological units in the poem. Line2: The former
acerco una llama T bring a flame near' was a weak image as compared to
enciendo T light' which is more visually concrete since it contains both the
idea of approaching a match or flame and of lighting the candles, making
the image more vivid and the line shorter. Moreover, enciendo echoes the
vocalic quality of the first line ending in cielo 'sky', keeping thus the sense
of contrast conveyed by the original between the darkened sky and the sudden
light of the candles. Line 3: In the source-text, the first hemistich "Against
the keyhole draught" becomes a complex image in translation. The speaker
has drawn the curtains, lit the candles; I infer there is a door, and that the
speaker is "against" it in order to protect the candles from the draught.
"Keyhole" is el ojo de la cerradura literally 'the eye of the lock', an octosyllabic
phrase in itself; translating the line in an almost literal rendition of the
hemistich would give:
de la corriente del ojo de la cerradura
The first hemistich would have nineteen syllables, and the second, eight:
'the insistent whine'
Too long a line is disturbing. It is in these instances that the translator

(now as a writer acting as if I were the author, having the sense of double
consciousness) begins to re-create the receptor text. First, the focus in this
line is the act of protection on the part of the speaker, not just for the candles,
but for him/herself (the speaker is not defined). This is visually presented in
English by "against the keyhole draught." The line becomes shortened by
changing the first word, amparndola (5 syllables), for the shorter a espaldas
(trysyllabic), closer in meaning to 'against' and implicitly referring to the
speaker's position with respect to the door:
A espaldas de la corriente...
Now the image of the "keyhole" disappears, but the image I choose allows
me to be more specific, to indicate where the speaker stands. I assume the
interpretative cooperation of my prospective readers that will infer, not only
the speaker's position near a door, ideated through the mention of cerradura
'lock', synecdoche for door; it will also be possible to infer that if the draught
comes from the lock (cerradura), then the latter is of a type in which there
is a hole through which the wind will enter. Line 4: The 1977 version reads
el insistente plaido; trying to shorten the lines, the change from plaido to
gemir does not introduce too important a variation in meaning. Gemir 'moan'
here used as a noun conveys the image of a prolonged wailing, the difference
is that the wind becomes personified, whereas with plaido 'wailing' it
remains an object. The caesura is introduced here to eliminate a word {del
tiempo) 'of weather', and to separate the two metaphors related to the
weather so that the hemistichs that in English were in line three, appear in
line 4 in Spanish. Then, the entire line of the original becomes the second
hemistich of line 4:
The 1977 version had la abertura desellada. In the 1981 version, the image
of the keyhole that had been modified in the previous line, is now completed
with the word ojo implying not eye but the aperture of the lock, since ojo
often translates 'hole'. In this way, what could have been a simple use of a
dead'metaphor had I chosen el ojo de la cerradura is made more poetic
because the image is extended throughout the two lines:
3 A espaldas de la corriente de la cerradura
4 Insistente gemir, tiempo cruzando el ojo desellado.
Line 5: Amparo (1981 version) creates stronger connotations of need for
shelter and protection, while defensa (1977 version) is too charged a word.
Amparo emphasizes an awareness of a certain powerlessness. Line 6, "These
are the things that we have learned to do," has two versions:
=Estas son las cosas que hemos aprendido a hacer (1977)
Esto es lo que hemos aprendido a ejercitar (1981)
The change from the literal phrase Estas son las cosas 'These are the things'
to Esto es 'This is' provides more conciseness. 'Things' in this context in
English is an empty morpheme that is best translated by the neuter esto. "To
do" is a polysemic word, it comprises the ritual performed while the speaker
gets ready for the storm. It implies "knowing", "thinking" and consequently,
performing the necessary acts; to "do" is precisely the experience told in the
poem, the ritual of self-defense against the weather "in the heart and abroad."
The corresponding verb hacer 'to do' is much more indefinite in Spanish;
the line was diffuse since hacer translates not only 'do' but 'make'. The verb
ejercitar brings in the idea (not expressed in the original) of recurrence of

the bad weather internal or external and of the also recurrent and
insistent act of defense carried out by the speaker. With knowledge comes
the practice of defense:
Line 7:
[Aquellos que vivimos] (eliminated) (1977)
Aquellos que habitamos (1981)
Vivir is less concrete because it can refer to living and existing and not only
inhabiting, whereas habitar is more formal and more specific for the semantic
interrelations of the poem: the house is the habitat, as central metaphor for
psychological and spiritual states of the individual (Gelpi 1973; Daz-
Diocaretz 1978b).
Line 8:
[Regiones] atormentadas (eliminated)
Areas atormentadas
A more important semantic change from regiones to reas, is my choice of
the word atormentadas 'distressed'. My decision was based on connotative
inferences; some of the variants to this word are:
preocupadas = too vague; the result would be an awkward metaphor,
inquietas = because the image suggested is too indefinite.
agitadas =
CONNOTATIONAL CODE:
revueltas = political uprising, riot and the like
disturbadas = strictly meteorology (rea); a dead metaphor, and a
clich
perturbadas = meteorology (atmospheric disturbance)
= psychology (mentally ill)
afligidas = passive acceptance of suffering or pain
angustiadas = despair, anguish
infortunadas = hopeless condition caused by the forces of fate
Unlike its cognate 'tormented', atormentadas connotes constant inner trou
ble, yet it is not as expressive of intensity and private suffering as afligidas
'grieved', angustiadas 'anguished', infortunadas 'unfortunate', words Rich
would have rejected, especially in those early years of a poetry of "objectified
emotions." Moreover, atormentadas is somehow more neutral than the other
variants in terms of the origin of suffering. For example, infortunadas refers

to a cause or origin of suffering external to the speaker while atormentadas
alludes to constant thinking and worry about something that hurts. While it
may be argued that atormentadas also expresses a personal emotion or state
of mind, this is balanced by the strong echo produced by this word, the last
one of the poem, and the title: Amenazas de tormenta. That word then
as a textual strategy that my potential or prospective reader will interpret
becomes in this act of textual cooperation, a-tormenta-da which with this
association means having or being in a state of tormenta, suggesting 'storm
beaten', 'stormed', 'troubled by storm', and also 'bombarded'. This is a gain
of the poem in Spanish that would not be possible in English.
In this foregoing example I have attempted to demonstrate that in the
process of writing a translation, as in poetry itself, we cannot separate the
image-making process from the making of rhythm and the choice of lexical
and syntactical units.
It is pertinent to stress that in my 1977 version of "Storm warnings" the
receptor-text was what I would call a 'deviant' structure in metrical patterns,
since there was no regularity at all in the lines. What dominated was the
equivalent meaning, some alliterative chains, and a more similar graphic
distribution in the making of the lines. In contrast, my 1981 version, with
the compressed lines therefore with redundancies eliminated was
guided by a more conscious wish to produce an equivalent metrical pattern;
at that time I became more aware of the possibilities of prosodic features.
The poem "Amenazas de tormenta", in the version discussed here, has been
finally composed of four stanzas, each one consisting of six polyrhythmic
lines of fourteen syllables, with occasional variations of lines of eleven sylla
bles (endecaslabos). The number of caesuras was kept (thirteen) in Spanish,
the distribution coinciding in all but two lines. Each stanza has a shortened
enjambed line (7-7-5 and seven syllables: heptaslabo and pentaslabo), fol
lowed by a closing line of 4-4-6 and seven syllables.
The semantic content and the correlations of the original have been
maintained and in some cases reinforced, or developed further. No image
has been omitted, no idea neglected. The arrangement of the euphonic ele
ments in the poem, that is, the aesthetically intentional organization of the
speech sound material (Mukaovsky 1977:14) has been transformed even
though the semantic fields remain the same. Using the original as a point of
departure, and keeping the lexical interrelations, I was guided in my own
choice of words by the possibilities of alliteration, of internal rhyme that the
alternatives offered in Spanish. The possibilities were richer in Spanish than

in English. Compare, for example, the semantic fields:
instruments
glass barmetro /e-o/
instrument instrumento /e-o/
prediction pronsticos
clocks relojes
weatherglasses barmetros /e-o/
instrument herraje
weather
afternoon tarde
winds vientos /ie-o/
zone zona /o-a/
gray nebulosa /o-a/
land tierra /ie-a/
sky cielo /ie-o/
air aire
weather tiempo /ie-o/
polar realm dominio polar
elements elementos /e-o/
time tiempo /ie-o/
house
window ventana /a-/
closed cerrada /a-a/
curtains cortinas
candles velas
sheathed envainadas /a-a/
These examples clearly suggest that the lexico-semantic units in Spanish
correspond to equivalent units in English. Since "A translation is not a monis
tic composition, but an interpretation and conglomerate of two structures,"
(Levy, in Popovic 1970:79), we can see how the semantic units in Spanish
create new correlations; the original has the main alliteration of/w+ vowel/
as shown earlier. The Spanish is given an organic structure with the assonant
groups /e-o/, /ie-o/ and /a-a/ together with some other elements such as allit
erations and internal rhyme. Some of the outstanding assonantal and allitera
tive correlations in the original on the one hand, and the ones in the transa-
tion on the other hand, can be found in the following lexical units:
lines SOURCE-TEXT RECEPTOR-TEXT
(1) fallingall barmetro-estado-bajando-
(2) toda-s-instrumentos
(3) what-winds-walking qu-vientos-caminan-qu
(4) zona nebulosa
(5) mullida
(6) walk-window-watching ventana-ventana-cerrada-observo
(7) strain-against ramas
cielo
(1) again nuevo-pienso
(2) inward-toward-waiting- interna-espera
silent
(3) single-time-traveled
(4) secret corrientes
(5) weather tiempo
(1)
(2) elementos
(3) weatherglasses barmetros
(4) time-time tiempo-tiempo-manos-dominar
(5) shattered restos
(6) wind-wind viento-viento
(7) shutters resta
(1) corro-cortinas-ennegrecerse-cielo
(2) set-match-sheathed-glass enciendo-velas-envainadas
(3) whine corriente-cerradura
(4) weather insistente-tiempo
(5) sole-defense-season este-es-nuestro-estacin
(6)
(7) regions atormentadas
The possible assonance in Spanish could also lead to a rhyming scheme
not suggested in the original. The Spanish version is structured in such a way
as to set words in contact with one another by means of reiterations and
internal rhyme. The recurrent /e-o/ and the consonant rhyme /ento/ are the
main units of speech and organization in Spanish used to create a continuity
in an interaction of semantic spheres. This is further emphasized by the
decision not to use clima 'climate' for weather but tiempo, a synonym that
dominates the poem, since 'weather' and time are central images in the
original; in the translation, tiempo 'time' and 'weather', is used in its
polysemy.
The poem acquires its own rhythm, framed by polyrhythmic tetra-
decasyllabic lines, a metre characteristic of contemporary Spanish poetry,
and one of the forms established by Ruben Daro and the poetas modernistas
in the literature in Spanish:
Amenazas de tormenta
El barmetro ha estado bajando toda la tarde,

Y como s ms que los instrumentos
Qu vientos caminan en lo alto y qu zonas
De nebulosas inquietudes cruzan la tierra,
Abandono el libro sobre una butaca mullida
Y camino de ventana en ventana cerrada, y observo
Las ramas extenderse
Contra el cielo
Y de nuevo pienso, a menudo cuando el aire

Se interna en el alma silenciosa de la espera,
Cmo el tiempo va con un nico propsito
Por las corrientes secretas de lo no percibido
Hacia este dominio polar. El tiempo exterior
Y el tiempo del corazn avanzan por igual
Indiferentes a los
Pronsticos.
Entre el prever e impedir los cambios

Yace el poder sobre los elementos
Que no alteran relojes ni barmetros.
El tiempo en las manos no es dominar el tiempo,
Ni los restos destrozados de un herraje
Son prueba contra el viento; el viento ascender,
Slo nos resta
Asegurar postigos.
Corro las cortinas al ennegrecerse el cielo

Y enciendo las velas envainadas en cristal
A espaldas de la corriente de la cerradura,
Insistente gemir, tiempo cruzando el ojo desellado.
Este es nuestro nico amparo de la estacin.
Esto es lo que hemos aprendido a ejercitar
Aqullos que habitamos
Areas atormentadas.
The source-text "The Middle Aged" (Rich 1975:17) is written in iambic

pentameter lines, varying in length from nine to thirteen syllables, and with
a dominant eleven-syllable line. Of the twenty-five lines, ten contain two
hemistichs and six have three hemistichs each. The syntactical arrangement
of the first sentence, distributed in the first seven lines produces a slow tempo,
a sense of delayed rhythm, evoking the placid atmosphere of the opening:
Their faces, safe as an interior
Of Holland tiles and Oriental carpet,
Where the fruit-bowl, always filled, stood in a light
Of placid afternoon their voices' measure,
Their figures moving in the Sunday garden
To lay the tea outdoors or trim the borders,
Afflicted, haunted us. /.../
It must be said that the syntactically distinct structures, the careful subordi
nation of clauses in this poem are characteristic of Rich's first books. When
comparing English and Spanish, in the latter subordination functions in a
different way. For example, when words denominate parts of the body and
are preceded by a possessive adjective, they may function as subject (Vasvari
Fainberg 1983), as in "their faces, safe as an interior/ of Holland tiles and
Oriental carpet/.../haunted us." Spanish does not allow such a construction.
The beginning of the text (Sus rostros 'Their faces') following the syntactic
structure in English, and ending with the verb nos rondaban 'haunted us'
leaves the initial phrase loose, isolated to the extent that it seems unconnected
with the main verb: Sus rostros, seguros como un interior/De azulejos holan
deses y alfombra oriental/.../ (Daz-Diocaretz 1980a:48). In a revised version
I decided to delay the mention of 'their faces' to the fourth line, in order to
create an equivalent sense in the suspension. The structure in English is:
"Their faces/.../ their voices' measure,/ Their figures/.../ haunted us" (lines
1-7). The receptor-text is as follows:
Seguros como un interior
De azulejos holandeses y de alfombra oriental,
Con la frutera siempre colmada, irguindose
A la luz de la plcida tarde, sus rostros,
La mesura de sus voces,
Sus siluetas en movimiento en el jardn dominical
Para servir el t afuera o podar las plantas,
Sus rostros, angustiados, nos rondaban.
The repetition of sus rostros (lines 4 and 8) creates an echo and reinforces
the syntactic structure of the extended sentence; it helps maintain the con-
tinuity of the slowly created image. Without omitting any image, the Spanish
follows its "former structure" in terms of the semantic units and the aesthetic
effect of subordination on the syntactical level. It also follows the rhythmic
function of the hemistichs, the actual presence of pauses as the speaker
remembers the past and the silence of the elders:
The reminiscence of a Christmas party
Of fourteen years ago all memory,
Signs of possession and of being possessed,
We tasted, tense with envy. They were so kind,
Would have given us anything; the bowl of fruit
Was tilled for us, there was a room upstairs
We must call ours: but twenty years of living
They could not give. Nor did they ever speak
Of the coarse stain on that polished balustrade,
The crack in the study window, or the letters
Locked in a drawer and the key destroyed.
All to be understood by us, returning
Late, in our own time how that peace was made,
Upon what terms, with how much left unsaid.
Like "Amenazas de tormenta", "Los de edad madura" was written predomin
antly in variations of fourteen syllable lines, with a combination of octosyl
labic and heptasyllabic hemistichs:
Los de edad madura
Seguros como un interior
De azulejos holandeses y de alfombra oriental,
Con la frutera siempre colmada irguindose
la luz de la plcida tarde, sus rostros,
La mesura de sus voces,
Sus siluetas en movimiento en el jardn dominical
Para servir el t afuera o podar las plantas,
Sus rostros, angustiados nos rondaban. Porque ser
Joven era siempre vivir en el hogar de otros
Cuya paz, si la ansibamos, haba sido forjada por ellos,
Y era nuestra, pero de segunda mano, y por poco tiempo.
La rutina era de aquella casa, no nuestra, el sol
Empalideciendo las cortinas fortunistas azul argentado,
Recuerdos de una fiesta navidea
De catorce aos atrs... todo reminiscencias,
Signos de posesin y de ser posedos,
Que disfrutbamos, tensos de envidia. Eran tan amables,
Nos hubiesen dado cunto quisisemos; la fuente de frutas
Colmada para nosotros. Haba un cuarto arriba
Que debemos llamar nuestro; pero no pudieron darnos

veinte aos de vida. Nunca hablaron
De la tosca mancha en esa pulida balaustrada,
De la grieta en la ventana del estudio, o las cartas
Bajo llave en el cajn, y la llave destruida.
Debimos comprender esto, cuando regresamos tarde,
nuestro propio tiempo. Cmo se forj esa paz,
En qu trminos, con cunto silencio...
"The Knight" {"El caballero") consists of three stanzas of eight iambic
tetrameter lines each. The knight is a symbol for patriarchy, as the armored
figure, the self-destroying man who must repress part of his nature. The
image of the medieval knight is developed in the first stanza, showing him
triumphant:
A knight rides into the noon,
and his helmet points to the sun,
and a thousand splintered suns
are the gaiety of his mail.
The soles of his feet glitter
and his palms flash in reply,
and under his crackling banner
he rides like a ship in sail.
(1975:43-44)
Yet beneath that glitter is a man in rags, wounded, who needs to be saved.
The third stanza posits the question "who will unhorse him..." suggesting
that defeat is necessary to save him.
As compared to "Storm Warnings" and "The Middle-Aged" this poem
has a different prosodic structure which gives it a faster tempo. If there is a
contrast between the first two poems in English and this one, the Spanish
too must show a parallel contrast between the three poems. Therefore the
metric pattern in Spanish must be shorter than the one used in the poems
"Amenazas de tormenta" and "Los de edad madura" (fourteen-syllable line).
After looking for correlations in semantic fields, I begin to reduce the syllabic
length of the lines, and to eliminate any component that might be unneces
sary. The shortest metrical pattern available to me is decasyllabic lines,
decaslabo polirrtmico, and decaslabo dactilico, less common than the tet-
radecasyllabic lines in Spanish, but used, for instance, by Federico Garca
Lorca in Balada de Santiago and in some passages of Espigas e Idilios, as
well as by Csar Vallejo in Redoble fnebre a los escombros de Durango
(Navarro Toms 1974:483). I alternated the decaslabos with the endecaslabo
meldico.
Some of the metrical combinations are, in the first stanza:
thus, these two stanzas read as follows:

El caballero
Un caballero cabalga hacia el medioda,

su yelmo apunta al sol,
y un millar de soles astillados
engalanan su cota de malla.
Resplandecen las suelas de sus pies,
sus palmas fulguran al replicar,
y bajo su crepitante pendn
cabalga como un navio con las velas desplegadas.
Un caballero cabalga hacia el medioda,

slo su ojo tiene vida,
amargo cogulo engastado
en una mscara metlica;
traidores guiapos y andrajos
por dentro se pegan a la carne
y consumen sus nervios a jirones
bajo el radiante casco.
In the third stanza, another example of the metrical pattern is:
Thus the main metrical combination is:

decaslabo dactilico simple: oo oo oo o: 3-6-9
endecaslabo meldico: oo oo o oo o: 3-6-10
"El caballero" then, is written in versos decasilbicos polirrtmicos, being at

the same time semantically dependent and analogical to its source, and rhyth
mically independent, as an independent artistic text. There is clearly a rapport
between source and translated poems, which has been realized in the writing
stage.
The axes of combination and selection (Jakobson 1960; Lzaro Carreter
1976) of the original textual strategies become interrelated with the axes of
selection and combination of the new text, as a product of the choices of the
translator as omniscient reader and acting writer.
As an omniscient reader, I must consider the range of possibilities avail
able within the tradition of poetry in Spanish, and my knowledge about the
socio-historical circumstances of the text must be put to use in the stage of
writing these translations. As we have seen in studying the first three poems,
the translator possesses in his/her power the choice to modify not only the
semantic levels of the poetic text, but also the prosodic ones. In my case,
the conflict between freedom and fidelity is solved or balanced by remaining
semantically faithful while developing my own initiative through pursuing
the rhythmic possibilities of Spanish.

In the writing stage in the translation of an aesthetic text, there is clearly
a mutual influence, as already suggested. The author-function activity, or,
in the traditional sense, Adrienne Rich as poet, directs my choices in the act
of reading her work as oeuvre. This is the case in the translations of the first
three texts. Distance, objectivity must be expressed in the structure of the
poems; later, the contrasts with source-texts written ten to fifteen years sub
sequent to the time of the conception of those poems, and their dictinct
rhythm emerge more clearly. Each of these early poems must be distinguished
from the poetry that follows; however, within the contours of Rich's use of
blank verse, each of these poems must have a style and rhythm in correlation
to the other texts. In this case, I have emphasized the relationship between
"Storm Warnings", "The Middle-Aged" and "The Knight", poems that re
present a formal stylistic ensemble in the totality of the developmental
changes of Rich's language.
Each of the three poems we are discussing belongs to a different book:
"Storm Warnings" to A Change of World, "The Middle-Aged" to The
Diamond Cutters and "The Knight" to Snapshots. This selection allows the
reader to grasp a certain continuity in the poet's practice of blank verse, as
well as the increasing prosodic variations within a metrical pattern which
reveal the gradual change in the poet's use of language eventually reflected
in the development of the poet's voice. "Storm Warnings" represents the
detached rendering of experience, as well as the craft of the young poet who
does not take risks in metrical patterns nor in thematic aspects. "The Middle-
Aged" expresses the poet's early perception of the past and of family ties,
in a freer language, yet still rhythmically rooted in the poetic tradition, and
still syntactically complex. "The Knight" shows the continuity of iambic
rhythm in Rich's poetry, and most importantly, the introduction of the symbol
of patriarchy: the male figure that will continue to appear in her poetry in
the subsequent books. This poem shows the tensions present for the poet
when she was beginning, tensions which persisted for many years as to
whether to write her own intuited truth in a personal way or to yield to the
expectations of the "masters". The sense of malaise over patriarchy's influ
ence, even the concept of patriarchy itself, are incipient during the writing
of the first three books from which the poems are taken. It is in poems like
"The Diamond Cutters" that we see craft, formal metrical structures, under
stood in a different light.
In "The Diamond Cutters" rhyme disappears, and alliteration, asso-
nance begin to take prominence as textual strategy:

Now, you intelligence
So late dredged up from dark
Upon whose smoky walls
Bison took fumbling form
Or flint was edged on flint
Now, careful arriviste,
Delineate at will
Incisions in the ice. (1975:32).
At the same time, the poem is formally framed in trimeter and tetrameter
lines. The next poems in my selection illustrate Rich's experiments with
sentence structure, a development that has an important effect on the nature
of the poet's intonational line. Intonation becomes the dominant structural
component of the poems, and blank verse withdraws and disappears, as rhyme
and other metrical patterns fall into the background. This shift in the intona
tional elements of Rich's poetry involves the semantic sphere. "Ghost of a
Chance" represents a clear example of these changes:
You see a man
trying to think.
You want to say

to everything:
Keep off! Give him room!
But you only watch,
terrified
the old consolations
will get him at last
like a fish
half-dead from flopping
and almost crawling
across the shingle,
almost breathing
the raw, agonizing
air
till a wave
pulls it back blind into the triumphant
sea.
(1975:64)
It is no longer the metrical regularity that counts, but the presence of each
word shaping the sentence that now has become rhythmicized, that has been
set on the page in fourteen intonational lines. If we compare "Ghost of a
Chance'' with "Novella" (Rich 1963) we can observe the different selections
the poet makes for aesthetic effect. In "Novella", subordinate clauses are
almost absent; short, simple sentences support the division of the poem into
equally short lines. The rhythmical division involves the length of words as
well as their meaning: the poet carefully avoids words that have more than
two syllables.
The absence of syntactical transitions, or links between one sentence
and the other, emphasizes the sense of separation of the couple, their quarrel,
their tensions:
It gets dark outside.
The children quarrel in the attic.
She has no blood left in her heart.
The man comes back to a dark house.
The only light is in the attic.
He has forgotten his key.
He rings at his own door
and hears sobbing on the stairs.
The lights go on in the house.
The door closes behind him.
Outside, separate as minds,
the stars too come alight.
(1975:65)
The brevity of these statements, containing, except for the last two lines,
factual information, represents what will be an occasional structure used for
purposes of emphasis in her subsequent poetry. The distinct syntactical
articulation of the sentence by means of syntactic stresses and pauses as
in "The Middle-Aged" begins to be avoided, in Necessities of Life (Rich
1966), as in the closure of "The Trees", written in 1963:
Listen. The glass is breaking.
The trees are stumbling forward
into the night. Winds rush to meet them.
The moon is broken like a mirror,
its pieces flash now in the crown
of the tallest oak.
As Rich develops and explores her own poetic voice, transitions that were
formerly necessary in the use of subordination and superordination as part
of aesthetic effectiveness become suppressed (Mukaovsky 1977:13). Despite
the lack of syntactical equivalence between English and Spanish, in my acting
writer function I try to keep the syntactical peculiarities used by the author,
as explained in the intonational analysis of "The Middle-Aged". A better

illustrative example of this characteristic is the poem "An Unsaid Word"
("La palabra callada"), from Change of World (1951) in which the structure
is formulated by the modifying phrases that also constitute the core of the
poem:
She who has power to call her man
From that estranged intensity
Where his mind forages alone,
Yet keeps her peace and leaves him free,
And when his thoughts to her return
Stands where he left her, still his own,
Knows this the hardest thing to learn.
These subordinated clauses, in the original, and in the translation are framed
by the first and last line of the poem:
She who has power to call her man
Aquella con poder para invocar a su hombre
Knows this the hardest thing to learn.

Sabe que esto es lo ms difcil de aprender.
It is in Snapshots of a Daughter'-in-Law that Rich's language unfolds and is
articulated by non-metrical prosody. In Spanish I do not seek to find an
analogical form, instead I allow the poems to find their own rhythm in their
new literary tradition. For this purpose I follow the contextual pressures of
the original, that is, the particular intonational characteristics as textual strat
egies in each poem selected to be translated, trying to detect the dominant
component of a given text. The lexical choices in Spanish will be directed
by the semantic spheres in the first place, then the syntactical peculiarities
and the sound sequences and their correlations. Also important is the tone
produced by the interrelation of all these devices.
A varying use of punctuation in poem after poem, together with different
speech rhythms, contribute to the poet's search for effects that are appropri
ate to the subject matter of each of the texts. I maintain these effects in an
effort to present the development of Rich's language from this point of view
as well. "Picnic", from Leaflets (Rich 1969:36) shows an important shift in
intonational patterns that Rich will fully develop in The Will to Change (Rich
1972), her next book. Punctuation is reduced to the minimum; later, as the
subject and stance of the poem require it, it disappears. The syntax and the
semantic divisions of the sentence are emphasized by spacing:

Sunday in Inwood Park
the picnic eaten
the chicken bones scattered
for the fox we'll never see
the children playing in the caves
My death is folded in my pocket
like a nylon raincoat
What kind of sunlight is it
that leaves the rocks so cold?
(1975:107)
It seems clear that sentence structure yields to the continuity of the
intonational line (Mukaovsky 1977:13), not only the sound effects but the
visual effects punctuation, capitalization, distribution of the lines on the
page play an important role in the design of an aesthetic text that is poetic
in essence. I have preserved these peculiarities, even in cases where the
poet's style shows idiosyncracy. A case in point exists with "The Blue Ghaz-
als"; here a parenthesis begins and is not concluded. Thinking it an erratum
I wrote to the poet saying I did not know what to do; to me, it was a very
odd detail, and I did not think it characteristic of her writing. Her answer was:
I did use an open parenthesis without closing it in "The Blue Ghazals"
that is not a printer's error. At the time I did that a good deal, as if trying
to leave the parenthesis open ended an experiment in notation which
didn't work because, like you, most people would assume a misprint. If you
like, you can close the parenthesis at the end of the couplet. (Daz-Diocaretz
1980b:2)
Leaving the parenthesis open would have probably left my prospective read
ers puzzled, and perhaps, like me, they would also have assumed that it was
a printer's error; however, I concluded that closing the parenthesis would
not produce any different aesthetic effect in the poem. I chose to eliminate
it completely, so that the rhythmic stream of the poem would not be inter
rupted.
In "The Phenomenology of Anger" ("Fenomenologa de la ira"), in the
last section, Rich juxtaposes the sentence "la va del tren subterrneo es
peligrosa" in italics.3 The relevance of this line a social text since it is a
warning, a notice found in the New York subway would be lost if merely
included in Spanish without any emphasis, consequently, I use capitals to
signal its meaningful inclusion. I have made this decision guided by Rich's
manner of stressing certain words with capitals in the poems "To Judith,
Taking Leave", written in 1962 (Rich 1975:131-132), "STAND UP in my

nightgown at the window" (Rich 1975:166)4 and "Planetarium" (Rich
1971:13-14), among others. It must be said that Rich became more aware of
the intonational elements in 1975. In the "Foreword" to her Poems: Selected
and New (1975) she wrote: "In preparing the manuscript, I have made few
alterations in old poems; those few have mainly to do with music and punc
tuation" (Rich 1975:xv). The spatial organization of the poem on the page
confirms that the poem "has a physical medium to be regulated and manipu
lated, almost like that of the plastic arts: that the poem literally shouts its
physical presence, its here-ness and now-ness, to us, and does not pass away"
(Krieger 1976:209). During the fifties, Charles Olson and Lawrence Ferlin-
ghetti gave impulse to the Symbolists' idea of the page and the poem on the
page as an "open field",5 an important feature of contemporary American
poetry to which Adrienne Rich is not indifferent. These elements must be
preserved in translation. The poem's physical presence is not determined by
the limits or possibilities of a given culture, it originates in that culture, and
in translation, this feature can be translated without much difficulty. What
may vary in translation is the reader's perception of that physical presence,
depending on the degree of familiarization or de-familiarization of visual
structures that are supposed to or expected to reinforce a poem. "Pierrot Le
Fou" (1969) illustrates how the poet's voice is made into a continuous, gentle
undulation, suggesting a double voice:
6.
To record
in order to see
if you know how the story ends
why tell it
To record
in order to forget
the surface is always lucid
my shadows are under the skin
To record
in order to control
the eye of the camera
doesn't weep tears of blood
To record
for that is what one does
climbing your stairs, over and over
I memorized the bare walls
This is my way of coming back

(1975:158)
6.
Grabar
para ver
si sabes cmo termina el cuento
para qu contarlo
Grabar
para olvidar
la superficie es siempre transparente
y mis sombras estn bajo la piel
Grabar
para controlar
el ojo de la cmara
no llora lgrimas de sangre
Grabar
porque eso es lo que se hace
subiendo tus escaleras, una y otra vez
me aprend de memoria las paredes desnudas
Esta es mi manera de regresar

The translator as omniscient reader must take into consideration the
particular characteristics of the course of the intonational line, so that in the
writing stage, these properties are also considered for the physical presence
of the text. These features are prominent in "Planetarium" (1968), "The
Blue Ghazals" written in 1968-69 (Rich 1971), "The Phenomenology of
Anger" dated 1972 (Rich 1973), where the juxtapositions of images are ver
balized in sustained sequences to be connected by the reader. These visual,
graphic properties create important ambiguities; the translator may change
substantially the original aesthetic message in its multi-leveled design by
simple rearrangement of the spacing of the poem. In these translations I
have to create a mirroring design. Poems like "Power" (Rich 1978:3) for
instance, contain breath-length units:
Living in the earth-deposits of our history
Today a backhoe divulged out of a crumbling flank of earth
one bottle amber perfect a hundred-year-old
cure for fever or melancholy a tonic
for living on this earth in the winters of this climate
Vivir en los sedimentos de tierra de nuestra historia

Hoy un azadn sac a la luz de un terrn de tierra desmoronada
una botella mbar perfecta un remedio
centenario para la fiebre o la melancola un tnico
para vivir en esta tierra en los inviernos de este clima
Or, in "Cartographies of Silence" (Rich 1978:16-20), a different rhythm is

produced:
1.
A conversation begins
with a lie. And each
speaker of the so-called common language feels

the ice-floe split, the drift apart
as if powerless, as if up against
a force of nature
A poem can begin

with a lie. And be torn up.
1.
Una conversacin se inicia
con una mentira. Y cada
hablante del llamado lenguaje comn siente

la ruptura del tmpano de hielo, el ventisquero
que se aleja como si fuese impotente, como si

luchase contra una fuerza de la naturaleza
Un poema puede comenzar

con una mentira. Y puede ser despedazado.
Complexities arise went the poet's word is multi-voiced (having multiple rela
tions with alien texts) as in "Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law". In such cases,
as I previously discussed in detail, one has to consider the intertextual factor
in an effort not to dismantle the subtextual energies and echoes, and the
polemics of the text. A deeper understanding of intertextuality, polyglossia,
defamiliarization, can prove useful for interpretation, and later for the writing
(recoding) into another language. Such understanding would help reproduce
the voice of authority, and those of irony and detachment; "Snapshots"
contains quotations and allusions (from different perspectives) to authors as
varied as Cicero, Diderot, Tennyson, Mary Wollstonecraft. The subtexts,
and their references to alien texts are restrictions for the nature of the lexicon
to be used in translation. In the first place because it is a characteristic of
Rich in her poetry to quote in other languages (Latin, French) or in, for
instance, eighteenth century English, and each of these references brings in
a different syntactical, and therefore intonational properties. In my transla

tion of the poem I introduced parallel echoes of eighteenth century Spanish
for the English quotations and kept the ones in Latin and French in
the original, to produce the same effect of "foreigness" or defamiliarization,
and linguistic distance suggested in the source-text. One example will suffice:
3.
A thinking woman sleeps with monsters.
The beak that grips her, she becomes. And Nature,
that sprung-lidded, still commodious
steamer-trunk of tempora and mores
gets stuffed with it all;
The argument ad feminam, all the old knives

that have rusted in my back, I drive in yours,
ma semblable, ma soeur!
3.
Una mujer reflexiva se acuesta con monstruos.
Ella se convierte en el pico que la agarra. Y la Naturaleza
aquel todava incmodo arcn
de tempora y mores
se atiborra con todo eso
[...]
El asunto ad feminam: les entierro todos los viejos cuchillos

que se me han oxidado en la espalda,
semblable, soeur!
The poet's use of other languages (polyglossia) by means of mentions
of titles of songs, of books, works of art from cultures (social texts) other
than American, are kept with the original denomination of their language
of origin, unless there exists a corresponding name in Spanish; this same
principle is applied for toponymy. Words like Broadway, Brooklyn, Manhat
tan, have no corresponding word in Spanish and they do not need one to
convey the connotational codes of the city.
There are, of course, a few cases of unsolvable linguistic discontinuity
as in "Pierrot Le Fou", a poem in which an image is totally lost without the
connotations of a particular place in New York:
Scanning reel after reel
tundras in negative,
the Bowery
all those scenes
(1975:125)
This poem is presented as a series of images, juxtaposed like those in a film,

and is structured by an intersemiotic relation with a film by Jean-Luc Godard.
In an unpublished version (1979) of my translation, "The Bowery" as
metonymy was los borrachos tirados en la calle with no geographical or
toponymic indication; in a later text I decided on: "the Bowery/ la calle de
los borrachos, thus adding an explanatory clause implied in the poem. I
believe that in this case the connotations and the visual effect of the images
of the Bowery are far more important than the mere geographical allusion.
The poet, I inferred in 1979, was emphasizing, more than the New York
setting familiar to American readers, the vision of the drunken men in the
street. This conclusion was not easy to reach. When the poem was first
translated I had never been to New York City, and "the Bowery" was simply
an unknown toponymical name that after asking some Americans I could
visualize as an unattractive part of the city. In 1979, when I visited New
York, and "the Bowery" I realized it was not a place in itself, but more
importantly, it was a composite of images from a socio-cultural extra-textual
reality I would have never known had I not been there. After this 'discovery'
it was necessary to add that image to express the general meaning of the
section in the poem. This was the road from the uncoded text, to extra-textual
reality, to recoding. In 1980, still doubting my own addition to the only
instance in which I purposely contributed an image that was absent (although
implied) in the text (in other words, it was not explicitly present), I consulted
the author, who confirmed that the inference I had made was fertile:
Yes, I think "borrachos tirados en la calle" very good for "the Bowery0"
you are right, it is the image that "Bowery" calls up that I wanted, not simply
the name (Daz-Diocaretz 1980b:2).
At the time Rich answered I had already decided the addition was necessary
to prevent a reduction of the original message; otherwise "the Bowery"
would have remained as a mere phonological effect for my concrete readers.
By adding the image of the drunken men, I am also directing the reader's
interpretation, preventing unpredictable decoding of this portion of the
aesthetic message. In this example I openly accepted my own presupposi
tions, based on an extra-textual knowledge of reality, now as omniscient
reader of the language of the city, performing a textual manipulation of the
original message in a way that would not betray the author's codes.
Another interesting problem arose with the word "pulsar" in
"Planetarium" (Rich 1971:14). As acting writer I intended to create an organic
form semantically equivalent to the original. The problem was in the lines:
Heartbeat of the pulsar

heart sweating through my body
The radio impulse
pouring in from Taurus...(Rich 1971:15)
My research, as omniscient reader, began in the standard English dictionaries:
Pulsar .n. /pulse, and -ar./ Any
or several small, heavenly objects
in the Milky Way that emit radio
pulses at regular intervals.
(Webster.140)
After reading the poem again, with this definition in mind, I discovered that
this word obviously belonged to the semantic field "astronomy" in the poem,
while simultaneously relating to the field "heart". Continuing my search, I
observed that "pulsar" was not a common word; in his edition of Rich's
poetry for English speakers and readers, Gelpi and Gelpi (1975:46 n.5) exp
lain the term in a footnote: "Any of several very short-period variable galactic
radio sources." The polysemy of the word originates in its root, pulse,
which denotes both semantic fields of "astronomy" and "heart". The image
in the poem is composed on the basis of both relations: the beating, pulsating
of the radio sources and the beating of those sources through the speaker's
body. The cohesiveness of meaning is reinforced by the alliterative and asso-
nantal elements: "heartbeat", "pulsar", "heart", "impulse".
I proceeded with my search for the Spanish equivalent. The Standard
Spanish Dictionary of the Real Academia Espaola gives the following:
Pulsar. (Del. lat. pulsare, empujar, impeler.) tr. Tocar, golpear. 2. Recono
cer el estado del pulso o latido de las arterias. 3. fig. Tantear un asunto
para descubrir el medio de tratarlo. 4. intro. Latir la arteria, el corazn
otra cosa que tiene movimiento sensible. (Real Academia Espaola: 1946)
From this definition it is clear that the word pulsar does not exist in the
language of astronomy in Spanish; furthermore, it only exists as a verb, not
a noun. However, with pulsar in Spanish one can still create semantic corre
lations obliquely equivalent to those in English:
Los latidos del pulsar
el corazn exudando por mi cuerpo
El impulso de radio
fluyendo desde Taurus
These lines correspond to my version written in 1977 (Diaz-Diocaretz
1978b: 113). Pulsar did not exist in standard bilingual dictionaries of English
and Spanish for astronomy. The Spanish speaking astronomers who used
that word informed me that they would use it "in English". Their answer,
of course, was motivated by a simple fact: English has become the standard
language for, or the source from which to borrow most of the terms of
technology and the advanced sciences. In English it is a common practice to
introduce a neologism taken for the Latin, as is the case of radio (Lat. radius
and radium). Relying on these general conventions I decided to take the risk
of introducing the neologism in Spanish: pulsar, thinking of its Latin root.
But the incorporation of this word into Spanish in the poem created another
problem. Given the standard denotational meanings of the verb pulsar in
Spanish quoted above (see Real Academia Espaola: 1946), the semantic
context containing latidos 'heartbeat' and corazn 'heart', pulsar could be
reduced by the reader's interpretative act to only one semantic field, leaving
out the word's associations with the field of "astronomy"; to prevent the
reader from performing that displacement or from thinking that pulsar was
redundant (in the semantic field of corazn 'heart'), I decided to place the
word in italics. This italicization of the word gave visual emphasis to the
image, adding an intonational element not present in the original. The word
pulsar contributes to the ambiguity of the Spanish (in my translation used
as noun) and supports the sound sequence, creating a euphonic effect with
the line that follows, through the echo of impulso.
No doubt the problem produced by 'pulsar' could have been avoided
by my use of a paraphrase like fuentes galcteas or pulsos de radiacin, or
several other variants to suggest the meaning in astronomy. But my willing
ness to accept Rich's codes on the one hand, and the flexibility of Spanish
on the other hand, led me to decide on a semantic neologism and to introduce
the new sense, emphasizing it with italics. The chronology of the way the
process unfolded is relevant in this particular example. In 1981 the revised
edition of the Spanish dictionary Pequeo Larousse Ilustrado eventually
included a word with the definition corresponding to "pulsar" as used in
astronomy. The entry says:
Pulsar m. (de la expr. ingl. pulsating star, estrella con pulsaciones). Astr.
Fuente de radiacin radioelctrica, luminosa, X o gamma, cuyas emisiones
son muy breves (50 ms) y tienen un perodo de aproximadamente un segundo.
(Garca-Pelayo y Gross 1981:852).
Interestingly enough, in this dictionary the origin indicated for the word is
English (de la expr. ingl). Even though the Real Academia Espaola still
has not included this meaning in its dictionary, which for many people indi
cates the official incorporation of a word in Spanish, I have left the word in
italics, with the spelling pulsar, as in 1978. I have chosen this example to
show the close interrelation of lexico-semantic choices that also affect
polysemy, and intonational elements (graphic and phonological). It also
makes evident, as I have attempted to demonstrate, that problems of this
type make the translator aware, in a very practical way, of the importance
of inferences and suppositions, and of the limitations in the usefulness of
dictionaries, and most of all, of the nature of language as a changeable
phenomenon.
Syllabic composition of words is an important component that also deter
mines intonation and has an influence on meaning. The obligatory change
in rhythm in the translations from English into Spanish is, as I have indicated
earlier in this chapter, an unavoidable restriction. When certain texts present
a particular type of syllabic composition of words, the semantic correlations,
the tempo, the rhythm are emphasized. Monosyllabic words accelerate pro
nunciation, the pauses suspend it. In English, a monosyllabic unit can actually
be a word, a fact that happens with much more frequency than in Spanish.
Rich's poetic exploitation of the syllabic composition of words is effectively
seen in "The Phenomenology of Anger", a poem in ten sections, each with
its own tempo. In section 4 Rich writes:
4. White light splits the room.
Table. Window. Lampshade. You.
My hands, sticky in a new way
(Rich 1975:199-200)
My translation, following the intonational peculiarities suggested by the orig
inal, is:
4. El cuarto se hiende con la potente luz.
Mesa. Ventana. Pantalla. T.
Mis manos estn pegajosas de un modo diferente.
Even though Rich does not make use of a specific meter for effects of
rhythm in her later poems, she creates shifts of tone by varying the regularity
of word length, and this causes subsequent intonational nuances. "The
Phenomenology of Anger" posits an interesting problem. Since maintaining
the same number of syllables in Spanish would have been impossible, I
experimented with the Spanish version of this poem by attempting to keep
the same number of strong stresses in each line. See, for example, the follow
ing:
I hate you.
I hate the mask you wear, your eyes
assuming a depth
they do not possess, drawing me
into the grotto of your skull
the landscape of bone
I hate your words
they make me think of fake
revolutionary bills
crisp imitation parchment
they sell at battlefields
(Rich 1973:29)
In Spanish "Fenomenologa de la ira" reads:
Te odio.
Odio la mscara que usas, tus ojos
que fingen una profundidad
que no existe en ti, que me arrastran
hasta el antro de tu crneo
un paisaje de osamenta
Odio tus palabras
me hacen pensar en falsos
bonos revolucionarios
crujiente imitacin de pergamino
en venta en los campos de batalla
In both texts, the pattern in the number of strong stresses is the following:
1, 4, 2, 3, 2, 2, 2, 3, 2, 3, and 3. Although it may be argued that English and
Spanish do not function with the same method of scansion, an acoustic
analysis of both texts would show similar rhythmic patterns, in spite of the
differing number of syllables in the source and receptor language. This exam
ple of poetic rhythm has been presented to stress the importance of the perfor-
mance of poetic texts, which in translation constitute an interesting subject
for comparative studies in both translation theory, acoustics, and poetics.
Capitalization, punctuation, syntax, and semantic divisions of the sen
tence are used by the poet in such a way that each element fulfills more than
one function for the composition of the intonational line in each poem. For
the translator, the conflict between freedom and fidelity (from the point of
view of semiotics) entails the knowledge of the poet's linguistic code, the
components of the poet's style. This knowledge is acquired during the act
of reading, a process I have already discussed as the act of cognition of the
author-function spectrum. In the translation of a poetic text, the textual and
contextual pressures are not only semantic. The visual/physical presence of

the poem (Krieger 1976) and its intonational qualities are also essential. The
non-correspondence between either prosodic or semantic structures does not
necessarily imply the impossibility of translating a given unit; it can also
represent a way and an opportunity to actualize the potential structures
suggested in the original text and recoded in the translation of a text that
will be semantically dependent and rhythmically independent. In its new
tradition, this aesthetic text composed in poetic language has been trans
formed through my selections and the new interrelations into a new sovereign
text.
NOTES
1) Quoted from "Foreword", by Adrienne Rich, in Bankier et al. (1976:xx).

2) Alberto Girri, who is a well-known Argentinian poet, seems to be following the model of
non-metrical prosody of Dmaso Alonso in his Hijos de la Ira (1946) and by Vicente Aleixandre
in Sombra del Paraso (1944) in these translations of Lowell (Girri 1969).
3) When the poem "The Phenomenology of Anger" first appeared in Diving into the Wreck
(1973), the line la via del tren subterrneo es peligrosa was not in italics. For this particular aesthetic
effect I have chosen the version included in Poems: Selected and New (Rich 1975:198-202), and
in Adrienne Rich's Poetry (Gelpi and Gelpi 1975:68-72) in which the line in question is italicized.
4) In The Will to Change (1971) the poem "Stand up in my nightgown at the window" appears
untitled and without the first two words in capitals. In Poems: Selected and New (Rich 1975:166)
it is untitled but its first line reads" STAND UP in my nightgown at the window."
5) Mailarm (1945:455) writes: "Les blancs en effet, assument l'importance, frappent d'abord;
la versification en exigea, comme silence alentour, ordinairement, au point qu'un moreau, lyrique
ou de peu de pieds, occupe, au milieu, le tiers environ du feuillet: je ne transgresse cette mesure,
seulement la disperse." This preface to Un coup de ds jamais n'abolir le hasard is quite well-
known. Maliarm has been the inspiration for many poets both in Europe and in America. His
poetic work has been also considered as the prototype of verbal art, and has been chosen, with
Baudelaire, by formalists, structuralists and semioticians as an excellent example of poetic trans
ference of verbal material. Mallarm's ideas on poetic language have been developed further by
Jakobson (1973, 1980), Lzaro Carreter (1976), Eco (1979) among others.
VI Translation and Women's Studies: Problems and Perspectives
I have outlined a verbal interaction framework in which author-text-

translator-reader play an equally decisive role in the communicative act of
an aesthetic text. In the first chapter I introduced the notion of translation
as sign within the dynamics of the semiotics of reading. The translator, as
decoder, brings into the process a preexistent knowledge, personal and cul
tural presuppositions, together with the knowledge acquired in the elucida
tion of textual features, comprehension of content, ideation of contexts, and
the information available concerning the poet and the social existence of
his/her discourse. The ideological factor (as a result of an idea-system) in
the multiple reading phases is also to be considered for the recognition and
interpretative consideration of the poet's textual propositions that will be
fully or partly followed or rejected. More generally, for my purposes, I have
given an account of those formulations and notions from text-centered and
reader-oriented approaches that seem to be the most compatible for further
study within this proposed framework.
Much more important than the consideration of the translator as an
individual, whether male or female, is an understanding of a meaning-
generating network called translator-function defined as including: (1) the
individual and the corresponding concrete circumstances (2) a given socio-
cultural context (3) a particular interpretive operation (4) a specific reading
role (5) the translator's relation to source and receptor-text (6) a specific
writing role (7) the textual features through which the activities as omniscient
reader and acting writer become evident or traceable and by means of which
the receptive disposition of the readers of the translation is designed. The
modes of integration of all these properties is what constitutes the translator-
function.
In addition to the translator's tactics of decoding and the strategies of
recoding, together with the receptor's own strategies of reading, the interplay
between two cultural systems was shown from the discussion of texts revealing
a non-correspondence between a homosocial or heterosocial text given world
in the source and the translation; here the primacy of context over text
emerges and proves that the assumed shared knowledge between poet and
reader comes to be substituted by the knowledge shared between translator

and reader. I hope to have suggested that, given the increasing amount of
literature being produced, more and more of the actual reading is done
through translations, and most often the general, average reader takes for
granted that the text in question brings forward the translator's discourse as
well.
The question on homosocial versus heterosocial is not meant to be con
sidered as restricted to textually expressed homosocial relations. It concerns
the making of a world vision and the strategies to structure it. Furthermore,
it is aimed at suggesting critical reading from this perspective in order to
understand the translator-function and the mechanisms of culture that
include the dimensions of male/female displacements, and the sociohistorical,
psychological circumstances causing these changes. For example, figures,
characters in narrative as well as in drama, personae in poetic discourse in
general, are known to appear in translation containing an 'equivalent' male
or female figure in another culture (female substitutes male or vice versa);
omission of words indicating gender in texts that otherwise would suggest
'unnatural practices' or lack of 'morals' or the like is another common feature
worthy of systematic attention.
Translating a poetic discourse written by a woman brings, as a prelimi
nary dilemma, the need to reformulate the connections between an individual
existing in empirical reality as poet and a given literary text. As a reader of
the poet Adrienne Rich, I had recourse to her actual discoursive existence
as a whole whenever I felt it necessary to enlarge the body of extra-textual
information for intra-textual inferencing; implicitly, I have ignored the poet's
biographical reality. The author-function contains portions of that reality
only in as far as it is textually existent; as such, this notion is intended as an
alternative to prevent subjective, non-testable information being added to
the translator's possible omniscience. The many implications of the above
mentioned dilemma have been analyzed from the start by feminist critics in
this century. It is my belief that the dominant orientation of this argument
on a theoretical level would have to consider not only the poet, her biographi
cal reality and her work, but the type of discourse she produces and its
function within a given literary system.
The next point that develops naturally from the previous aspect, is the
fact that translating feminist poetic discourse provokes questions clearly sur
passing the boundaries of traditionally discussed translation problems and
the restrictions and freedom activated by obligatory and optional linguistic
TRANSLATION AND WOMEN'S STUDIES 153
changes. A feminist text violates the reader's expectations by designing a

network of components that is far from being arbitrary. Given the strategies
of production and reception (generative and interpretative) in the source-
text, the translator as reader/writer can also manipulate expression. The new
semiotic statements created by the feminist displacement of emotional con
notations, and articulated in the poet's emancipatory verbal construct for an
opposition of values with the patriarchal world, are expressive devices that
depend for their preservation, on the translator's recoding strategies. Seman
tic transformations actualized by the feminist text are clearly seen in the
practice of the intertextual factor. This adds yet another dimension in the
verbal interaction framework, that of the poet as reader of other texts, to
be distinguished from the translator's own intertextual knowledge under
which the text is transformed. By containing features that touch upon trans
gression of previously existent discourses, the text suggests and presupposes
ways of reading; here the path from receiving textual components to applying
them as strategies needs to be emphasized as another area to explore the
translator-function vis vis the author-function. What the translator under
stands and interprets, determines the textual form and the message contained
in the receptor-text. The properties of a given natural language, and the
textual strategies arranged by the poet, are two aspects that interact in a
dynamic rapport in which the translator is at the center, and his/her textual
cooperation becomes crucial. Thus, if the word serves as an element of change
in the verbal art, translating is an activity that provides a wide field for the
study of the relations between poetic form, ideology, and language.
Translation theory and practice is inherently a comparative area that
can only be described accurately as crossdisciplinary. Women's Studies, a
more recent field of scholarship is also characterized by a wide variety of
disciplines which are beginning to develop in new directions. The analysis
proposed in chapter IV, based on the speech situation in woman-identified
discourse, is intended as an example of translation problems we can take as
a working unit, which can subsequently be further explored, to trace prob
abilistic dominances in what constitutes women's writing, if the latter is dif
ferent from men's writing.
Translating a feminist text demands consideration of the modes used by
its author to challenge the already established and received ideological struc
tures, and the preexistent norms and values; just as no text is devoid of
ideology, no translation is free from it either. The indeterminacy of a given
feature of language structure emerges as a free zone for the translator to
perform, through the semiosis of reading, an interpretation that includes the

options existing in the receptor-language, and eventually, a final equivalent
or aberrant unit that is likely to remain unnoticed in the overall network of
the text. It must be stressed that indeterminacy in a given language is not
necessarily by itself a complex feature. Yet in a feminist context, or in a
woman-identified or addressed text, speaker and addressee semantics, as
part of the structure of the text, arises most evidently as a multi-faceted
problem. The translator's authority to direct the poet's codes in the dual
activity as reader and writer cannot be separated from indeterminacy if the
two languages involved (source and receptor) produce a non-symmetrical
correspondence. Writing is peculiar to the tranlator as interpreter in that it
implies inscribing personal, cultural and ideological units that are activated
in the dialectics between source and receptor-cultures.
It is important to emphasize once more, that I am not proposing that
all forms of writing are conditioned by sexual politics, but that language
structure in a given linguistic system may require certain choices from the
translator to disambiguate or to draw inferences related to gender; that is,
a factor in a grammatical rule may determine a semantic change in the trans
lation. As a starting point to present this problem I proposed study of the
woman's voice as speaking subject, explicit or implicit, inscribed in the text,
to delineate a particular world vision and the demands of interpretation the
text makes.
Closely related to the problem of indeterminacy, the pronouns of address
and a consistent semantics in the feminist text, seem to indicate that within
the speaker and addressee interaction, a more complete spectrum that
includes other types of texts by women writers and poetic discourse in general
proves fundamental. In this context, semantic recognition of person deictics
are more than a reading strategy linked up with the question of the category
of grammatical gender, because it reveals a complex area that includes seman
tic, pragmatic, sociological as well as psychological implications. Many sides
of the problem remain to be discussed, first on a mono-cultural system to
proceed then toward a transcultural schema.
In view of existing language indeterminacies, we need to concern ourse
lves not only with reformulating what actually constitutes a feminist text,
but more importantly, to find which components in a given text determine
the categories of feminist/non-feminist, traditional/non-traditional, or female
identified and/or female addressed, or 'lesbian'; it is also important for the
translator to test the true correlation between the descriptions of discourse
by women and the actual factors that appear to be peculiar to this type of
writing. For example, in texts by women, an important distinction exists
in black North American poetry after 1969 (see Daz-Diocaretz 1985a),
where the speech situation is predominantly linked with revolt and self-affir
mation; it is the expression of a collective and socially, ethnically determined
T , 'we', and 'you', not simply a metaphorical device or an abstract or exclu
sively personal construct.
What we have to explore further are the many bridges between Trans
lation and Women's Studies (Diaz-Diocaretz 1983f). Valuable conclusions
can be reached through the contrastive analysis of texts by women as they
have been translated in different cultures and periods. For example, the
speaker and addressee interaction, at a textual level, can only be understood
in the light of studies on the pronouns of address and the complexity of the
categories of grammatical gender; this line of discussion leads to the more
general question of gender in language and its origins, still to be solved in
linguistic science, and also concerns the awareness of gender constraints in
language as proposed by scholars in Women's and Feminist Studies. Each
one of these topics is connected to the question of social structures and
ideology since the semantics proposed in texts by women varies according
to the socio-cultural context.
As a preliminary, one of the main tasks of this book has been to propose
systematic attention and to illustrate from the translator's activity, that the
two fields we are discussing are deeply interwoven. The meeting of Transla
tion and Women's Studies is a crossroads, therefore, quite a number of
problems have been set out and remain at several stages, and only the
development of future systematic studies can provide the formulation of a
wider description of possible applications to these areas. By way of summary,
I shall briefly enumerate a few propositions:
1. The act of reading critically in a feminist context can begin with an
analysis of what has already been translated in order to outline the
woman's presence/absence as translator (as coproducer of meaning), as
character (textual component), as reader (extra-textual), and with a
historical understanding of her function in the corresponding cultures.
2. When a text reaches a new tradition, a different cluster of relationships
is established. The reading community of a translation does not corres
pond to that of the source. A study of reception of translated texts by
women provides us with further information on the presuppositions and
expectations within the context of the muted group framework, at a
TRANSLATING POETIC DISCOURSE
comparative level between at least two cultures.

Study of the woman as translator and her role in a given cultural system
is as important as study of the woman as writer. What she chooses to
translate, the modes of utilizing a text for her recoding, and the correla
tion of these factors to her own author-function (production, circulation,
evaluation) offers insights into her contribution to the establishment of
norms and standards of her times.
Given the features of language indeterminacy on the one hand, and the
problematics of speaker and addressee in the writing by women on the
other hand, a study of recoding by male translators of 'traditional' texts
by women is particularly useful to test assumptions of both current
feminist critical formulations and 'patriarchal' or male-dominated struc
tures. The source text's suggestions of meaning and the translator's own
inferences will reveal patterns of consistency to be included in the verbal
interaction framework proposed.
In what concerns contemporary writing by women, in translating, the
act of reading in a feminist context entails a willingness to discover the
codes underlying the text; it cannot be a mere application of linguistic
rules, structures or models that preexist the receptor-text. Authors con
sciously writing from a woman-identified perspective, who are creating
texts in order to widen the semantic possibilities for the female speaker,
call for the translator's additional cooperation. A subtle change may be
not only a betrayal of the message but more importantly, a betrayal of
the ideological stand of an author who is struggling to transgress previ
ously existent linguistic and cultural codes. Given the mobility of conno
tations (from positive to negative and vice versa), and given the practice
of a programmatic writing by the feminist writer to redirect the conno
tations determined by the male dominated world, translation makes
these issues particularly salient.
The self-assertion of the female speaking subject in contemporary writ
ten discourse is a necessary area to reflect on in translating, because the
receptor text that comes as a result of the interpretative process can
dis-assert that very component.
A translation is a sign actualized as a textual space creating meaning to
be communicated as cultural unit. As such, meaning is a social conven
tion (Eco 1976), and a woman's discourse is subject to constraints of
interactions that are socially determined. The mechanisms of censorship
can repress production and suppress distribution of translations of a
woman writer, whose texts are thought to be threatening to certain

institutions or a ruling system. The translator can develop strategies to
conceal certain areas of an author's work (Diaz-Diocaretz 1979), and
still attempt to introduce 'subversive' writing; these strategies depend
on the system in question, the culture, and the type of discourse being
translated. The relationship of censorship and actual translating strate
gies and procedures are indeed a promising matter for future analysis.
8. Finally, it is important that translators of women's discourse become
more aware of the possibilities to systematize problems that arise from
the actual activity as omniscient readers and acting writers.
I leave these questions open.
REFERENCES
I. Adrienne Rich
Rich, Adrienne (Cecile). 1951. A Change of World. New Haven: Yale University Press.
. 1955. The Diamond Cutters and Other Poems. New York: Harper and Row.
. 1963. Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law. New York: Harper and Row.
. 1966. Necessities of Life: Poems 1962-1965. New York: Norton.
. 1967. Selected Poems. London: Chatto & Windus.
--. 1969. Leaflets: Poems 1965-1968. New York: Norton.
--. 1971. The Will to Change: Poems 1968-1970. New York: Norton.
--. 1973. Diving into the Wreck: Poems 1971-1972. New York: Norton.
. 1975. Poems: Selected and New, 1950-1974. New York: Norton.
. 1976. Twenty-One Love Poems. California: Effie's Press.
. 1978. The Dream of a Common Language: Poems 1974-1977. New York: Norton.
. 1979a. On Lies, Secrets, and Silences: Selected Prose 1966-1978. New York: Norton.
-----. 1979b. "When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Revision" (1971). In Rich 1979a: 33-49.
-----. 1979c. "The Antifeminist Woman" (1972). In Rich 1979a: 68-84.
. 1979d. "Power and Danger: Works of a Common Woman". Intr. Judy Grahn. 1978. The
Work of a Common Woman. New York: St. Martin's Press. In Rich 1979a: 247-258.
. 1980. "Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence." Signs 5/4: 631-660.
-----. 1981. A Wild Patience Has Taken Me This Far: Poems 1978-1981. New York: Norton.
. 1983. Sources. Woodside, Calif.: The Heyeck Press.
. 1984a. The Fact of a Doorframe: Poems Selected and New 1950-1984. New York: Norton.
. 1984b. "Notes Towards a Politics of Location." Lecture for the first session of the Utrecht
Summer School of Critical Semiotics, June 1st, University of Utrecht. In M. Diaz-Diocaretz &
Iris M. Zavala (eds.), Women, Feminist Identity and Society in the 1980's: Selected Papers.
Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1985.
II. Primary Sources: Poetry
Broumas, Olga. 1977. Beginning with O. New Haven: Yale University Press.
. 1979. Soie Sauvage. Washington: Copper Canyon Press.
Giovanni, Nikki. 1968. Black Judgement. Detroit: Broadside Press.
. 1970. Black Feeling, Black Talk, Black Judgement. New York: William Morrow.
. 1972. My House: Poems. New York: William Morrow.
. 1973. Ego Tripping and other Poems for Young People. New York: L. Hill.
. 1980. Cotton Candy on a Rainy Day. New York: Morrow Quill Paperbacks.
Grahn, Judy. 1978. The Work of a Common Woman. New York: St. Martin's Press.
H.D. 1961. Helen in Egypt. New York: New Directions.
Jordan, June. 1969. Who Look at Me. New York: Crowell.
. 1977. Things That I Do in the Dark: Selected Poetry. New York: Random House.
. 1980. Passion New Poems 1977-1980. Boston: Beacon Press.
REFERENCES 159
Levertov, Denise. 1959. With Eyes at the Back of Our Heads. New York: New Directions.
. 1961. The Jacob's Ladder. New York: New Directions.
. 1964. Taste and See. New York: New Directions.
. 1979. Collected Earlier Poems 1940-1960. New York: New Directions.
. 1982. Candles in Babylon. New York: New Directions.
Lorde, Audre. 1968. The First Cities. New York: The Poets Press.
. 1970. Cables to Rage. London: Paul Breman.
. 1973. From a Land Where Other People Live. Detroit: Broadside Press.
-----. 1976. Coal. New York: Norton.
. 1978. The Black Unicorn: Poems. New York: Norton.
Mailarm, Stephan. 1945. Oeuvres compltes. Paris: Gallimard.
Plath, Sylvia. 1960. The Colossus. New York: Vintage Books (repr. 1968).
. 1965. Ariel. New York: Harper and Row.
. 1981. The Collected Poems. New York: Harper and Row.
Randall, Margaret. 1983. "From Nicaragua... (Poems & Photos)." Ikon (Summer/Fall) Second
Series 2, 65-69.
Sexton, Anne. 1960. To Bedlam and Part Way Back. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
. 1962. All My Pretty Ones. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
. 1969. Love Poems. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
1971. Transformations. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
. 1974. The Death Notebooks. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
. 1978. Words for Dr.Y. Uncollected Poems. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
Sherman, Susan. 1974. With Anger/With Love Selections: Poems & Prose. Amherst, Mass.:
Mulch Press.
Wakoski, Diane. 1962. Coins and Coffins. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday.
. 1971. The Motorcycle Betrayal Poems. New York: Simon & Schuster.
~. 1974. Trilogy. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday.
1977. Waiting for the King of Spain. Santa Barbara: Black Sparrow Press.
~. 1978. The Man Who Shook Hands. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday.
. 1982. The Magician's Feastletters. Santa Barbara: Black Sparrow Press.
Walker, Alice. 1968. Once: Poems. New York: Harcourt, Brace Jovanovich.
. 1973. Revolutionary Petunias and Other Poems. New York: Harcourt, Brace Jovanovich.
Yeats, William Butler. 1966. Selected Poems. M.L. Rosenthal (ed.). New York: Collier Books.
Yourcenar, Marguerite. 1982. Las caridades de Alcipo y otros poemas. Silvia Baron Supervielle
(trans.) bil. ed. Madrid: Visor.
III. General References.
Amos, Flora Ross. 1920. Early Theories of Translation. New York: Columbia University Press
(repr. 1973).
Ardener, Edwin. 1975. "The 'Problem' Revisited." In Sh. Ardener (ed.), Perceiving Women.
Ardener, Shirley (ed.) 1975. Perceiving Women. London: Malaby Press.
Arrowsmith, William and Roger Shattuck (eds.). 1961. The Craft and Context of Translation.
Austin: University of Texas Press.
Auden, W.H. 1975. "Foreword" to A Change of World (1951).In Gelpi andGelpi(eds..), Adrienne
Rich's Poetry.
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(Critical Theory 2) Rich, Adrienne Cecile - Díaz-Diocaretz, Myriam-Translating Poetic Discourse - Questions On Feminist Strategies in Adrienne Rich-John Benjamins Publishing Company (1985)

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TRANSLATING POETIC DISCOURSE:

QUESTIONS ON FEMINIST STRATEGIES IN ADRIENNE RICH

Advisory Editorial Board:

Fernando Lzaro Carreter (Real Academia Espaola)

TRANSLATING POETIC DISCOURSE:

JOHN BENJAMINS PUBLISHING COMPANY

Sections of the present book started as a doctoral dissertation presented

II. The Translator-Function 24

III. Translating a Woman's Poetic Discourse 42

IV. The Speech Situation in Female Identified Discourse 84

V. Prosody, Rhythms, Intonation, and the Acting Writer 117

VI. Translation and Women's Studies: Problems and Perpectives. 151

linked but can be treated as part of the semiotics of reading; my intention,

marginality of 'lesbian' discourse in the poetic tradition of the receptor-cul

factor (absorption, transformation, polemic with other texts). These two

tified poetic discourse, specifically discussing the close relationship between

We move but our words stand

and this is verbal privilege

Adrienne Rich, "North American Time", 1983

In this study translation will be understood as the final product of prob

determined by the existence of a particular national language "with all its

positions of Mikhail Bakhtin, Mukaovsk, and Jakobson concerning the

pond in a relational category (Waugh 1980:59), and the predominance of

In spite of its conceptual heterogeneity, contemporary criticism on

yet another reader concept. My main hypothesis must be interpreted in the

sociocultural circumstances in which different codes are emitted; 13 it is in

without any defined characteristic, and not as a specific component of textual

and in receptor oriented approach:

Nida explains his model as follows:

tically relevant structure". Second, in this model the complete interaction

encodermessage 1recodingmessage 2decoder

and this is verbal privilege

Adrienne Rich, "North American Time"

The act of decoding entails several conditions and circumstancial charac

culture, as well as a search for a juxtaposition of dialogical intercourses, and

to have in system of the R-culture. For example, the poetry of Marot, Du

social consequences. I propose, however, that the function of the translator

by individuals guided by a centralized and authoritative set of rules defining

The Spanish translator shows no passive attitude in reading, interpreting and

between the structures of the languages involved. In fact, two or three or

2. THE TRANSLATOR AS ACTING WRITER

This attempt to make explicit the interpretative operations as realized

in the RT. The definable operation of reading will be that of writing.

responses: confrontations, oppositions, comparisons, questions, surprises,

implies to search for interrelations which will result in a text to be inserted

introduced. The changes introduced antagonize a particular set of beliefs,

You have to know these things

Adrienne Rich, "North American Time"

knowledge of the world, and then becomes transformed into expectations

translator as mediator. Under some circumstances, the text can be disam

necessary to sketch a few basic descriptions, which were not determined a

from their authors to expand the production of meaning from a female-iden

1. "A POEM CAN BEGIN/WITH A LIE. AND BE TORN UP. "4

lovers of one gender/we were two women of one generation."

2. HETEROSOCIAL VERSUS HOMOSOCIAL

In the previous section I presented a possible misreading and a possible

I realized that it was anger at having my work essentially assimilated and

3. FROM TEXT TO AUTHOR-FUNCTION

In theory, the ways to comprehend a poet's work has many different

plemented by a philological research; or the center may remain an interpreta

Second, the man-woman relationship set in context of a patriarchy-

who, on social and cultural bases, reject the poet's change.

lesbian feminist text as a speech act (Daz-Diocaretz 1983a; 1984a) together