Abstract

A phenomenological account of an extended encounter with feminist theory in translation, the entirety of ‘Subjects through translation’ is best condensed in these three lines from the poet Adrienne Rich: it will be short, it will not be simple // You are coming into us who cannot withstand you // you are taking parts of us into places never planned. What is it like to read text after text in translation? How do familiar words become so strange? How to express the dizziness, the blurring, the sharp and sometimes painful dislocations of meaning, sense? Thoughts dislodged from their usual paths begin to wander, to wonder anew. Subjects are changed.