Translation Review - The University of Texas at Dallas

carelessly neglecting important features of
Parenteau-Lebeuf’s text. 40
In three cases, Parenteau-Lebeuf draws
attention to noun gender by using/creating
feminine versions of common masculine nouns:
guerrière, bourrelle, and femme plancher.
Guerrière (“warrior”) is an accepted French
word. The others, though, are neologisms based
on the common French bourreau
(“executioner”) and plancher (“floor”). When
the word guerrière first appears, it is closely
associated with the Amazons, legendary female
fighters. Irene-Iris uses this term in a speech
about undressing in front of men. She feels
shame because of the “battle scars” left by her
garments and because of her ambivalence
toward her own menstrual blood:
Quel galant voudrait d’une guerrière? Quel
homme voudrait d’une amazone incapable
de manipuler les fils de ses désirs?
What gentleman would want a woman
warrior? What man would want an
Amazon unable to handle the bowstrings of
her desire? 41
Because the context of the speech refers to
battles faced particularly by women — battles
with fashion and reproduction — and because
the next line includes the image of the Amazon,
both femaleness and warrior-ness were
important to the understanding of the text and
neither element should be sacrificed. However,
English has a tendency to shy away from
feminine noun endings as needlessly specific, a
tendency that has grown with widespread
objection to such terms as “poetess,”
“stewardess,” and “waitress.” However, in The
Feminist’s Daughter, gender specificity is often
called for. Since “warrioress” is not an English
word, I chose instead “woman warrior” — a
term not wholly unfamiliar because of Maxine
Hong Kingston’s well-known memoir, The
Woman Warrior.
In contrast to guerrière, bourrelle is a
completely new word that is nonetheless
comprehensible to French speakers. Bourrelle
gives a feminine ending to bourreau
(“executioner”): the cognitive dissonance that
would be experienced by a Francophone can be
recreated for an English speaker simply by
adding a feminine noun ending. I decided to
translate bourrelle as “guillotineress.” Having
often encountered the word bourreau in
literature about the French Revolution, I feel
justified embedding the specifically French
context within the word itself. Since
Francophone thinking may naturally turn to the
guillotine, I decided to turn the Anglophone’s
mind in the same direction. Also, Irene-Iris’s
speech suggests that beheading is the bourrelle’s
usual technique:
Tous les jours, sans répit, je guillotine des
milliers de têtes de projets, de résistances,
de guérillas internes, comme la sale
bourrelle que je suis.
Every day, I relentlessly behead thousands
of plans, instances of
resistance, internal guerrillas — like the
dirty guillotineress I am. 42
In addition to the textual evidence supporting
“guillotineress,” I also chose the word because
of its sound. “Guillotineress” has echoes of the
term “murderess,” thereby evoking images of
early twentieth-century female killers.
The last word, femme plancher, makes use
of a convention in French that has parallels in
English. In French, certain occupations — for
instance, author — do not traditionally have
easy feminine equivalents. Instead, a woman
who is an author is often called a “woman
author” (femme auteur). Like their French
counterparts, English speakers would
understand “woman author,” even if they did not
approve of the term. Many English speakers
rightly object to “woman author” on the grounds
that the term needlessly highlights an author’s
sex, which should be irrelevant in most
situations. Many Québécois would react
similarly to the femme ____ construction as their
U.S. counterparts would to “woman ____.” As
previously mentioned in an earlier section, there
has been a shift in Quebec away from femme
auteur toward auteure. The term femme
plancher (“woman floor”), then, represents a
step backward, a parody of former gender usage.
Translation Review 21