Inhospitable Conditions: Hospitality, Kinship and Complaint in Maureen Freely's Angry in Piraeus and Mireille Gansel's Translation as Transhumance (tr. Ros Schwartz)

Abstract

This article examines hybrid life writing by literary translators that focuses on the interpersonal relationships between translators and other agents including authors and collaborators. Through a comparative study of Maureen Freely's pamphlet essay Angry in Piraeus (The Cahiers Series, Syph Editions, 2014), described in its blurb as ‘the story of the creation of a translator’, and Mireille Gansel's ‘half memoir, half philosophical treatise’ Traduire comme transhumer (Edition Calligrammes, 2012), translated by Ros Schwartz as Translation as Transhumance (Les Fugitives, 2017) I explore the ways Freely and Gansel present their respective translation philosophies. In the first section, ‘Hospitality’, I set out how their writing welcomes in the reader and sets out various barriers to their task. In ‘Kinship’, the second section, I look at the translators’ stories of their families and how they use séance and music metaphors to show how they conceptualise collaboration with others and the text itself. In the final section, ‘Complaint’, I propose viewing Freely's and Gansel's books as personal and political complaints respectively, drawing on the work on institutional complaint by Sara Ahmed. Taking a lead from contemporary women's writing scholarship, I make an early intervention in the burgeoning field of Literary Translator Studies.