Emma Ramadan Talks About Translating & Writing Genderless Characters

Emma Ramadan, translator of writer, professor, and Oulipo member Anne Garréta's Sphinx (Deep Vellum 2015), talks to The Atlantic about how she came to the novel (originally written almost 30 years ago); the challenge of writing genderless characters ("I would slap myself on the wrist when I was talking about one of the characters and accidentally used a gender pronoun"); and what's next for her. "Sphinx is the fragmented retelling, 'ten or maybe thirteen' years after the fact, of a romance between two characters whose genders are never revealed," Stephanie Hayes explains. A poetics of constraint:

Hayes: As you explain in your translator’s note, French has grammatical gender and English has semantic gender. Can you explain some of the specific challenges and tricks of translating a French genderless novel into English?

Ramadan: When you’re writing in the first person in English, it’s easier to avoid gender. It would be almost impossible for a narrator to reveal their gender without stating it explicitly. And aside from that you mostly have to avoid personal pronouns and possessive adjectives. In French, I think it’s much harder to write a story about people without genders—it requires gender agreement with verbs in the past tense and with adjectives.

The reason this book was so difficult was because, in French, one of the easiest ways to describe people is by describing bodies—because the gender agreement happens with the noun of the body part, not the person it’s attached to. So, this book is all about bodies: the narrator watching A*** dance, the narrator watching A*** sleep, the narrator remembering A*** … there’s just a lot of bodies!

There’s a whole page in the book where the narrator is thinking about the ghost of A***’s presence, A***’s body, touching A*** … There was just an entire page where I was like, Oh god, what am I going to do? Body parts need possessive adjectives in English. You say “his arm” or “her leg.” Someone might write a novel in English now using one of the many gender-neutral pronouns we can use these days, like I’ve seen the letter ‘x’ or the letter ‘z’, and different riffs on this, to avoid it altogether. But that approach just seemed very out of place for this book, because these aren’t people who are choosing not to discuss their gender, they’re just people whose genders we happen not to know.

Read the full interview at The Atlantic.