Turkish has no gendered pronouns, which makes translating Turkish texts into grammatically gendered languages like English a (usually unproblematic) venture of intuition, discretion, and referential logic. Few texts in Turkish literary history exacerbate the translatability of gendered social identities as deliberately as Murathan Mungan's 1984 short story "The Tears of Love," in which one main character transitions genders in the course of the story. For the readerly experience of the text to translate properly, however, the gender and genderedness of this character needs to remain unthematized for the first 80% of the story, after which these unmarked categories then abruptly unravel. This presentation / workshop will focus on excerpts from the text (which the presenter has recently translated). We will discuss various practical strategies for renaturalizing / denaturalizing (trans)gender in translation, as well as the implications of these translational strategies for gender in a broader sense. We will conclude with a reflection on the question: Is gender perhaps always already in translation?
David Gramling is Assistant Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of German Studies. His research areas are multilingualism/monolingualism, transnational labor migration, Turkish-German literary history, and LGBT studies. In spring 2014, he will be teaching a general education course, "Dialogue of the Sexes: Men and Women in Conversation." His current book project Is entitled The Invention of Monolingualism.
