Rediscovering Agency: A Feminist Perspective of Alice Munro’s Writing in Translation

Abstract

This study focuses on the scope, limits, and implications of literary translators’ agency, exploring the gendered aspects of the translators’ creative projects and their impact on the cultural transfer outcomes in the context of Alice Munro’s writing translated into Russian, Ukrainian, and German. The corpus consists of six short stories from the writer’s two collections Too Much Happiness (“Child’s Play” and “Too Much Happiness,” 2009) and Dear Life (“The Eye,” “Night,” “Voices,” and “Dear Life,” 2013), representing the work of four translators: Heidi Zerning (German), Ievheniia Kononenko (Ukrainian), Andrei Stepanov (Russian), and Tat’iana Borovikova (Russian). The theoretical approach underlying this study builds on Itamar Even-Zohar’s and Gideon Toury’s polysystem theory, feminist translation theories (Barbara Godard; Susanne de Lotbinière-Harwood; Luise von Flotow; Sherry Simon), and Antoine Berman’s positive criticism model to address the issues of intercultural power dynamics in literary translation and the concepts of translators’ agency and visibility, with their potentialities and constraints, for the purpose of foregrounding the existing gaps between contemporary translation scholarship and real-life translating practices. On the basis of this theoretical position, the study proposes a translator-centred analytical methodology, grounded in Berman’s model and combining textual and extratextual aspects. Within this framework, the overview of Munro’s source texts, which suggests their feminist reading as an analytical benchmark, is followed by the contrastive analysis of the target texts, with primary emphasis on the translators’ positions, cultural horizons, and creative projects—particularly as regards their treatment of gender and textual representations of femininity. The last methodological stage examines the available translation paratexts, including peritextual framing, translator-authored and related epitexts, the translators’ first-hand comments, and literary reviews to establish the interconnections between the translating projects and their critical reception. Above all, the study highlights multiple contextual constraints faced by the translators, as well as both transformative and problematic implications of their agency, resulting in diverging representations of gender, culture-specific tensions between the translation projects, and their various impacts on the cultural transfer processes. At the same time, the study argues for wider institutional support and visibility of translators as a way towards their greater empowerment, accountability, and authority.