The Case of Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness

Authors

  • Brian James Baer Kent State University
  • Yingmei Liu Kent State University

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.21992/tc29573

Abstract

This article explores the notion of queering translation in relation to Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness (1928), often described as the first lesbian novel, focusing on two key terms related to sexual identity, the word queer, which was semantically unstable at this historical moment, and the quasi-scientific term invert. Hall's provocative use of queer against the minoritizing invert, which presages queer critiques of identitarian politics by several decades, complicates the field of sexuality in the novel, presenting special challenges for translators. Those challenges are analyzed in the early French translation of the novel and in later Chinese translations, from both Taiwan and mainland China.

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Author Biographies

Brian James Baer, Kent State University

Brian James Baer is Professor of Russian and Translation Studies at Kent State University. He is founding editor of the journal Translation and Interpreting Studies and co-editor of the book series Literatures, Cultures, Translation (Bloomsbury) and Translation Studies in Translation (Routledge). His publications include the monographs Other Russias, Translation and the Making of Modern Russian Literature, and Queer Theory and Translation Studies, as well as the collected volumes Beyond the Ivory Tower: Re-thinking Translation Pedagogy, with Geoffrey Koby, Researching Translation and Interpreting, with Claudia Angelelli, Translation in Russian Contexts, with Susanna Witt, and Queering Translation, Translating the Queer, with Klaus Kaindl. He is a member of the advisory board of the Mona Baker Centre for Translation Studies, in Shanghai, China, and of the Nida Center for Advanced Research on Translation, in Rimini, Italy.

Yingmei Liu, Kent State University

Yingmei Liu is a doctoral candidate in the Translation Studies program at Kent State University in the USA. Her research interests are translation history, translation pedagogy, translation during the Cold War, cultural and sociological approaches to translation studies, and translation theories. She was awarded a Kent State University Fellowship to complete her dissertation on the Chinese reception of Sartre and Camus in the Cold War.

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Published

2022-09-22

Issue

Vol. 14 No. 1 (2022): Queer Translation

Section

TRANSLATION STUDIES

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