Breaking Cultural and Gender Barriers

Breaking Cultural and Gender Barriers: A Transcultural and Transnational Approach to Translation in Kate Chopin’s The Awakening

The art of translating a literary text is a significant transcultural and transnational practice, and foremost a commitment to “the spirit of the period,” the ideology, and the intertextual and metatextual references of the author. In this lecture, Eulalia Piñero Gil will reflect on the challenges the literary translator faces and how the translation process is based on a “transformance approach” that considers translation as an intentional act that represents and performs a text into a new cultural space for a new readership. She will speak about specific examples of the choices involved in the translation process of The Awakening by the American writer Kate Chopin.

Eulalia Piñero Gil is Full Professor of American literature and gender studies of the Universidad Autónoma of Madrid, Spain. She has served as president of the Spanish Association for American Studies (SAAS) and has also been a member of the Board of the European Association for American Studies (EAAS). She has published extensively on the American Renaissance, women’s literature, gender and translation, Female Gothic, American and Canadian poetry, and comparative literature. She has translated and edited works by American writers such as Kate Chopin, Gertrude Stein, Herman Melville, Edgar Allan Poe, John Dos Passos and Charlotte Perkins Gilman.