Translating Violence. The “Rule of the Majority” in Translating Camila Sosa Villada’s Las malas and Gabriela Cabezón Cámara’s La virgen cabeza into French

Abstract

This article analyzes the translation of Camila Sosa Villada’s Las malas and Gabriela Cabezón Cámara’s La virgen cabeza into French. Both novels take on a critique of violence on transvestite individuals, by enacting extreme violence and resignifying stigmatizing language. The aim of the present reflection is to inquire into the phenomena of invisibilizing violence in the translation of those novels into French. What happens when the translator decides to ease, even to dismiss, violent language? May it be about submitting the text and sexualities voiced by the novel to what Gayatri Spivak calls “the rule of majority”? Or, does the erasure of violence obey either to cultural and editorial considerations or to the translators’ own initiative? In this article, I examine the political implications of those decisions, not only concerning the enacting of dissident sexualities, but also to the way a
hegemonic language, like French, welcomes or dismisses the expression of a peripheral language, in this case, Argentinean Spanish, which willingly stands on the margins.