Regendered in Translation: From ‘Lyric I’ to Je lyrique

Abstract

Whereas first-person speech is not marked for the speaker’s gender in English, in French particular linguistic forms identify a speaker as female. This conflicts with the intention of those female authors, poets in particular, who want to speak not from a gendered point of view but as human beings. A similar problem arises in translations of anglophone poetry by women into French. The routine method of rendering the generic ‘lyric I’ by a female ‘je lyrique’ does not reflect the implicit claim women poets often make to universal relevance. With regard to French versions of texts ranging in time from Emily Brontë to the present, this contribution shows how the original meaning of a poem can be narrowed or distorted by grammatical feminization. In some cases, however, the gender ambivalence of the English source texts has been successfully recreated in translation, and the spirit of egalitarian feminism thus kept alive.