Introduction

In The Book of Embraces, Eduardo Galeano (Reference Galeano1989/1992: 118) cites an African proverb that states, “Until lions have their own historians, histories of the hunt will glorify the hunter.” This Element is based on the firm belief that for many centuries History has been written by the hunters. Today this statement is widely accepted, after “critical historiography” finally deconstructed the idea that History is the objective and neutral narration of the events that occurred in the past.

Examples that history is anything but neutral are endless. For instance, visions of the Spanish Civil War radically differ depending on whether we read Paul Preston or Luis Suárez. The same also applies to what happened in 1492 when Christopher Columbus arrived in America, as in Isabel Wagemann’s exhibition Conquistadoras (Madrid, Casa de América, October 2022–January 2023).Footnote ¹ Examples are infinite, although one of the most extreme cases is doubtlessly that of those historians who deny the Holocaust.

Translating His-stories stems from the idea that revisionist narratives are crucial for any shift to happen.Footnote ² The first section focuses on contemporary theories of critical historiography, which argue that the historical text is one way of translating reality, and that the historian is a translator. Accordingly, the historical text is thus understood as one narrative of facts among many other possible narratives. Without denying factuality, this view moves away from earlier theories such as the Rankean vision of history, which regarded the historical text as neutral and objective. Instead, it is an example of what Salman Rushdie (Reference Rushdie1981/1995: 459) calls “a chutnification of history.”

Section 2 offers many examples of literary works that rewrite historical events previously told by dominant voices, such as Julian Barnes’s A History of the World in 10 ½ Chapters (Reference Barnes1989) or Elena Poniatowska’s La noche de Tlatelolco (1971), among many others. The next section looks at how women have overcome what Chimamanda Adichie calls the danger of a single story, and have translated, for example, classic myths to tell hitherto untold stories. Section 4 addresses a very specific type of literature, the translations that women have made of well-known fairy tales in order to transform them into different stories devoid of any patriarchal bias. These new stories warn us that the protagonists do not always have to be blonde and blue-eyed, and that the end of the story is not always “and they lived happily ever after.” In the final section I examine the feminist translations of canonical authors such as William Shakespeare, Geoffrey Chaucer, or Fernando Pessoa, made by women writers, namely, Jen Bervin, Patience Agbabi, Caroline Bergvall, and Erin Mouré.

This Element argues that it is urgent to reread, rewrite, translate, and rethink all those stories that have been told from a single patriarchal point of view. In this context, this Element focuses on how women dare to be lionesses and rewrite stories previously told by men. In line with contemporary theories of translation, these stories are understood here as translations because women rewrite, again but for the first time, what has already been told.

1 Historical Texts as Translations of the Past

Following Hayden White in Metahistory (Reference White1975), the idea underlying this Element is that the historical text is one way of translating reality, and consequently, that the historian is a translator. Again, in another key text, The Content of the Form (Reference White1987: 1), White defines history as “the problem of how to translate knowing into telling.” The historical text shows who produces knowledge and what are the politics of the production of a particular knowledge and on what basis certain contexts are foregrounded over others (Mohanty Reference Mohanty, Mohanty, Russo and Torres1991: 3). Historical writing is seen as translating between different mediums (LaCapra Reference LaCapra1983/1994: 26), where the past is converted into written form and interpreted through contemporary concepts (Jenkins Reference Jenkins1991/2003: 15–16), as argued by Margarita Savchenkova, the editor of a special issue of Translation Matters on history as translation. In this context, historians act as translators bridging the past and the present. As Peter Burke (Reference Burke2005: 3) aptly states, “If the past is a foreign country … then historians may be regarded as translators between past and present.”

Taking critical historiography as my theoretical foundation, this section will approach historical texts as translations of the past, as intralingual translationsFootnote ³ of past events, in line with some of the previously mentioned historians and many others (Alonzi Reference Alonzi2024, Reference Alonzi and Alonzi2023a, Reference Alonzi and Alonzi2023b, Reference Alonzi2023c). Retelling History (in the singular and with a capital H) is crucial because only in this way can other stories be heard, stories that have been silenced for centuries. The second half of the twentieth century was a period marked “by a tremendous multiplicity of discussions and innovations in historical writing and theory” (Olsen Reference Olsen2014: 1). In this Element I will concentrate on the views offered by the critical historiography of the 1960s, whose new conceptualizations and transgressing of the boundaries of mainstream historical writing gradually made clear that historical texts are translations of events. This means that rewritings of history can vary, depending on the historian who recounts the facts, the making of the historian. What has been called the making of the historian refers to how “the construction of historical writing goes hand in hand with the construction of scholarly identities and positions” (Olsen Reference Olsen2014: 4).

At the beginning of the twentieth century, the attack on historical realism highlighted the need to reflect on the misrepresentation that originates from the person telling the story: “‘[T]he story’ in history is provided by the historian” (Munslow Reference Munslow2013: 6). So, he argues that history is fundamentally “the process of translating evidence into facts” (Munslow Reference Munslow1997: 6) and is essentially “a translation exercise” (Munslow Reference Munslow2012: 150). The social sciences, Marxism, the beginning of the Indian “Subaltern Studies,” the macro approach of the French Annales School or the micro approach of the Italian microhistorians, for example, subvert the Rankean view of history, that defended the idea that history is an objective, neutral discipline that gives a single account, the only true one, of events that took place in the past. The Journal of the History of Ideas (1940) and Walter Benjamin’s Theses on the Philosophy of History (1955) along with other scholarly publications raised serious doubts that history is universal, unique, objective, and neutral. Questioning the objectivity of history is a first step, but a very important one.

Historians such as Hayden White, Dominick LaCapra, Michel de Certeau, Paul Veyne, Peter Burke, Louis O. Mink, Lionel Gossman, David Carr, Maurice Mandelbaum, W. H. Dray, Louis Mink, Nöel Carroll, and Frank Ankersmit no longer accepted the idea that the activity of the historian is to objectively discover and reconstruct the past. As they began to revise conventional historiographic notions such as objectivity, neutrality, transparency of representation, and impersonality, they progressively distanced themselves from a view of history as factual representation and preferred to understand it as a process of experimentation (LaCapra Reference LaCapra2004, Reference LaCapra2013; Munslow Reference Munslow2013). History thus became as “a deeply problematical concept” (Young Reference Young1990: vi), given that it is based on who decides what to tell or what to silence depending on one set of interests or another: “To the question ‘What is history?’, we must always add: ‘Who decides? On what grounds, and to what end?’” (Morley Reference Morley1999/2002: 23).

Undoubtedly, facts exist.Footnote ⁴ However, without denying factuality, it is no less true that the way we narrate facts does not change factuality but rather how facts are interpreted and how they are presented to the readers. Historical texts are narratives (Harding Reference Harding and Rundle2022a, Reference Harding, Deane-Cox and Spiessens2022b) that tell stories (Bal Reference Bal2009). They are a type of organized discourse that has undergone a process of selective appropriation (Baker Reference Baker2006). History as a construction of narratives around events can also be a way of approaching contemporary events, as Harding (Reference Harding2012) has brilliantly shown in her analysis of Russian and translated reporting of the Beslan hostage-taking in 2004. Yet, even here, reports were written and published online after events have occurred,

Translation is a Foucauldian discursive practice (St-Pierre Reference St-Pierre1993) which urges us to ask how facts are transformed through translation and under what conditions that transformation is achieved. For instance, as Vicente Rafael argues in an interview with Christopher Rundle, translation is crucial in the workings of colonial history and in general in the formation of historical imagination. Translation opens the field to tell “a different history”:

This approach from below makes the translator work “with the materiality of texts and the landscape of documental evidence to show how historical investigation will always be linked to the workings of translation in one form or another” (Rafael in Rundle and Rafael Reference Rundle, Rafael, Gambier and van Doorslaer2016: 29. See also Rundle Reference Rundle, Baker and Saldanha2020). So, the fact that colonized cultures have kept some words without translating them into the language of the colonizer has to do with what Rafael calls the insurgency of language:

Until recently, History had always been told from what Hayden White (Reference White1987: 20) calls the “doxa” of the “historiographical establishment” (see also White Reference White1978a: 46–47). This perspective endeavored to make the general public believe that historical discourse was unbiased, and that the story was a mirror image of the facts. However, ideology understood as “meaning in the service of power … highlights the role language plays in establishing and sustaining socio-historically situated relations of domination” (Knowles and Malmkjær Reference Knowles and Malmkjær1996: 44). What occurred thus becomes a construction, where truths are “‘useful fictions’ that are in discourse by virtue of power (somebody has to put and keep them there) and power uses the term ‘truth’ to exercise control: regimes of truth” (Jenkins Reference Jenkins1991/2003: 39).

Understanding a narrative as a construct means comprehending it from the perspective of a certain author and their view of what happened (Knowles and Malmkjær Reference Knowles and Malmkjær1996: 47–49). A particular vision of a particular reality is conveyed through the author’s choice of words and sources. History, like translation and writing in general, are signification systems we use to construct the meaning of the past:

The histories we assign to things and people are constructed, created, constituted and always conditioned by their context, Alun Munslow remarks in his preface to Keith Jenkins’s Re-thinking history (Reference Jenkins1991/2003: xi). Thus, historians “carry out their translations of the past” (Alonzi Reference Alonzi2023c: 667).Footnote ⁵ The narration thus becomes a semiotic representation, a translation, a rewriting told from the perspective of the dominant power. “Historical interpretation of the past can be considered an act of translation, epistemologically and cognitively” (Alonzi Reference Alonzi and Alonzi2023a: 1). Alonzi goes on to say something that is key to this Element: “This act of translation is also an act of synchronization which connects past, present, and future, disrupting and resetting time, as well as creating complex temporalities differing from linear chronology” (Alonzi Reference Alonzi and Alonzi2023a: 1). For Alonzi (Reference Alonzi2024: 381), the task of the historian and that of the translator are similar:

So, also in tune with the new, broader concept of translation in contemporary translation studies, we shall see how retelling stories already told by the dominant power means transferring them to other contexts, telling them in other words and in the voices of those who until now have been silenced. As Cronin (Reference Cronin, St-Pierre and Kar2007: 254) states in another context, we should ask not only what gets translated but also why so much is not translated.

In line with the contemporary view that “the boundaries of our discipline are expanding and blurring, with ever more interdisciplinary research, and definitions of translation becoming ever more amorphous and figurative so that they now often include any change or transformation from one mode to another” (Harding Reference Harding and Rundle2022a: 54), the idea underlying Translating His-stories is that translating is a dynamic and complex process that goes beyond the mere substitution of one language for another. The examples offered in this Element will show that translation is “a creative literary activity, for translators are all the time engaging with texts first as readers and then as rewriters, as recreators of that text in another language” (Bassnett Reference Bassnett, Bassnett and Bush2006/2007: 174). They will show that words in translation “can shape our vision of the real and cause us to experience reality differently … the translator as agent of metamorphosis may not only effect change but become himself or herself metamorphosised in the process” (Cronin Reference Cronin, St-Pierre and Kar2007: 271).

Contemporary studies on translation are aware of the need to examine in depth the relationship between the production of knowledge in a given culture and its transmission, relocation, and reinterpretation in another context. The production of knowledge is mediated; it has to do with the production and ostentation of power and with the strategies used by this power to represent the other. This is all the more true of historical knowledge:

The first step is to assume that there is not just one History but many, because stories are texts that depend on the words (White Reference White1987) and sources that we choose. Far from being an objective activity, narrating, like translating, is a selective task. And that selection is made with words. Narrations are literary artifacts (White Reference White1975, Reference White1978a, Reference White, Canary and Kozicki1978b). Whoever narrates history is a translator of facts, who must take into account the many ways in which the production of historical narratives reveals the asymmetry between groups and individuals who have very different access to the means of production of history (Trouillot Reference Trouillot1995: xix).

Narrating thus becomes a first intralinguistic translation. In Metahistory (Reference White1975: 129), Hayden White explicitly states that the historical text is one way of translating reality, and consequently, the historian is a translator and, as mentioned earlier, in The Content of Form (Reference White1987), history is defined as a way “to translate knowing into telling” (White Reference White1987: 1). In this same line, historian Reinhart Koselleck (Reference Koselleck2002: viii) considers that the history of historiography is a history of the evolution of the language of historians. History is thus “an act of translation” (Jenkins Reference Jenkins1991/2003: 48). In this context, Hayden White asserts that history is a very effective way of developing self-reflection. Once again, it is not a matter of denying factuality but rather of putting facts on the table that have various interpretations and rewritings, and these rewritings are different ways of telling them.

Apart from Hayden White, the idea that history (or stories) is the construction of a narrator has also been observed by Roland Barthes, who in “The Discourse of History” (1967/1989) asserts that history is born of a narrator, which gives rise to the illusion of objectivity: “Presenting a story as if it is telling itself creates what Barthes called a ‘referential illusion’, an impression of objectivity … objective discourse brings about a ‘reality effect’, the impression that the words match external referents” (Hermans Reference Hermans2022: 12).

As Spivak (Reference Spivak, Landry and MacLean1993/1996: 25) states, “History is, after all, a storying.” She understands history as “history-writing” in her groundbreaking Reference Spivak and Guha1985 article “Subaltern Studies: Deconstructing Historiography” (Spivak Reference Spivak and Guha1985). Historians as translators relocate words and objects, words as objects, “words/objects of the present in the past; in this way they construct ‘possible’ stories/histories. It is like a circle that starts from the present, enters the past and returns to the present, all the while with a view to the future” (Alonzi Reference Alonzi and Alonzi2023b: 200).

The way a story is told, namely, the words that are chosen and their arrangement in the sentence, gives rise to a type of narrative that alerts us to the urgency of not simply accepting the stories transmitted to us by those who in theory have the authority to do so. That is why we must ask questions about how those stories have been reconstructed, whom they represent, and why precisely the focus is on a certain group of people and not others. Many other questions must also be asked that in some circles will not be well received. Such questions not only force us to retrace our steps and follow the paths previously traveled by others but also to look for unusual, and perhaps unconventional, different, and uncomfortable ways out.

One of the literary works that best describes these new ways of seeing historical texts as translations of past events is Haroun and the Sea of Stories, where Salman Rushdie (Reference Rushdie1990/1999) introduces Rasid Khalifa, who lives in an extraordinarily sad city. Yet despite living in a city that has forgotten its name and whose factories produce, package and ship sadness, Rasid is a jovial man, perhaps because he is always telling stories. His son Haroun describes his father as a juggler, because the stories he tells are made up of bits and pieces of different stories that he handles as he pleases. When he asks his father where all these stories come from, Rasid discovers that they come from the Ocean of the Streams of Story. That place, the great Ocean of Stories, is really amazing, because it is full of the Streams of Story, a thousand and one different streams, each one of a different color. Furthermore, they are interwoven like a liquid tapestry forming an embroidery of enormous complexity, because each one of those strands of colors represents and contains a single story:

This is precisely what critical historiography and the later historiographic currents of the twenty-first century propose in a much more arid way. Rushdie’s inclusive Sea may be seen as the starting point of this Element. Understanding historical texts as translations of the past made by a historian helps us to understand that there is no single History (with a capital H and in the singular). Rushdie aims for a sea full of different kinds of stories, fluid stories that have the capacity to change, to become new versions of themselves, to join with other stories and to metamorphose into something different. In other words, stories that are open to plural interpretations and not only limited to those imposed by the hegemonic power of the winners.

Rushdie also warns us that it is not going to be easy to give everyone a voice. Indeed, about halfway through the novel we learn that someone has poured poison into those coastal waters of the Ocean of the Streams of Story. The waters are now filthy, and Haroun realizes that the poisons have altered the colors of the streams of stories, dulling and graying them. In front of the multicolor, the different points of view, the monocolor, the unique History:

Many colors, different voices, freedom. All this is dangerous, and Poison Blenders want to ruin it. In this line, it is worth reproducing the following fragment of the novel, because it summarizes perfectly the sense and feeling of what this Element wants to show in a rather less poetic way:

Controlling individual stories means controlling the world. To erase different perspectives, to silence stories that are not the official one is to construct History, the dream of any dictator. So, in “Notes on Writing and the Nation,” Rushdie argues:

In Midnight’s Children Rushdie tells his views on History in terms of food, through Saleem’s cooked up chutneys and his “chutnification of history” (Rushdie Reference Rushdie1981/1995: 459). The taste of the chutney, we read in the novel, is more than an echo of a long-ago taste. It is that old taste itself, and it has the power of bringing back that past. Thus, the “chutnification of history” is a way to retrieve and interpret memory. On the last pages of the novel Saleem hopes that perhaps one day the world may taste the pickles of history:

Chutnification is a form of hybridization which provides cohesion but emphasizing the multiplicity of the ingredients, “to change the flavour in degree, but not in kind” (Rushdie Reference Rushdie1981/1995: 461). Saleem refers to each chapter as a “pickle,” which are mixtures of different ingredients that mix together, exchanging flavors:

Saleem is the impure translator of the past, a hybrid being, a profane cook, an imperfect, impure and ambivalent creature who, unlike Brahmin, who cooks protecting himself against contamination, enjoys mixtures and pickling as “shadows of imperfection” (Rushdie Reference Rushdie1981/1995: 529). This is the kind of chutnified stories we will see in the following pages, stories in which pickling “helps embody a multitudinous and diverse world” (Ray Reference Ray2022: 75).

2 Literature That Translates History

Literature has adhered to these new critical currents of historiography, and there are now many writers who have decided to translate stories that have already been told in order to offer other views of past events. This section will offer a number of examples of literary works which follow these new critical ways of looking at history. These literary works will show that there are now many writers who have decided to translate histories intralinguistically, thus offering again for the first time new translations of stories that had already been told in order to offer other views of past events. These translations show how translating aspects of one culture into another “is never a simple semantic substitution. Rather, the self-images of two cultures come to bear on the matter and clash over it … Translations, therefore, can teach us much about certain aspects of a culture at certain stages of its evolution” (Lefevere Reference Lefevere1988: 26).

An extreme example of this is the world of 1984, where “All history was a palimpsest, scraped clean and reinscribed exactly as often as was necessary. In no case would it have been possible, once the deed was done, to prove that any falsification had taken place” (Orwell Reference Orwell1949/1983: 39). In 1984, Orwell (Reference Orwell1949/1983: 213–214) announced that those who control the present control the past, and those who control the past control the future, and that history is not what happened but what historians tell us happened:

It is important that the other stories come to light, that reality be translated from other realities, and that these stories be narrated by the subalterns themselves (Chakrabarty Reference Chakrabarty2002; Guha Reference Guha1997). When Gayatri Spivak speaks of the subaltern in her essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?” (1988), she is not referring so much to the silence of the subalterns (Hindu women) or their inability to speak but to an unwillingness to listen to their voices. This is the case of A History of the World in 10 ½ Chapters, by Julian Barnes (Reference Barnes1989), a novel in which the history of the world is accessed through the eyes of a termite. The termite is an insignificant creature, a “nobody” as Eduardo Galeano would say. It is also an entity with no symbolic capital in the words of Bourdieu, who speaks to us of “the story of the ‘second’ Noah” (Barnes Reference Barnes1989: 30).

History thus depends on who tells it. It can change by simply adding or removing a word, as demonstrated by José Saramago in his História do Cerco de Lisboa (1989). In fact, contemporary fiction frequently looks to specific historical figures to rewrite the hitherto official history. For example, Angela Carter rewrites the myth of Eve in The Passion of the New Eve (1977); Eduardo Galeano rewrites Genesis in The Book of Embraces (Reference Galeano1989/1992); and Jen Bervin tells stories from the perspective of a worm in her Silk Poems (2017).

Many other novels approach history from a similar perspective. For example, in The Chaneysville Incident, by David Bradley (1981), John, the main character, relies on his narrative imagination to gradually go from being a historian to becoming a storyteller, which forces the reader to ask what the truth of history really is. In Waiting for the Barbarians (1980), Coetzee demonstrates how the habitus of the colonizer constructs the other (Spivak’s “othering”) to confirm his own reality. All of these novels and many others rewrite and translate history from the other’s perspectives. For example, Graham Swift opens Waterland with this epigraph:

And a few pages further on, he describes historiography as a construct, in terms similar to those used by many contemporary historians:

If in line with Hayden White and other historians, history is conceived as a narrative, it is hardly surprising that so many writers have reflected on what history means and how it represents the past, in other words, how it is constructed, reconstructed and translated, generally from the viewpoint of the conqueror. That is why many novelists have rewritten certain chapters of history, and some have even focused on rewriting world history in general. For this reason, history teacher, Tom Crick, the protagonist of Waterland, asks his students, “ … what is the point of history? Why history? Why the past?” And then he answers his own question by stating that history teaches us “to accept the burden of our need to ask why” (Swift Reference Swift1983: 92, 93).

In the same way as many historians, novels such as Shame (1983) by Salman Rushdie, Welcome to Hard Times (1996) by E. L. Doctorow, The Public Burning (1977) by Robert Coover, and A Maggot (1985) by John Fowles, question concepts such as linearity and referentiality, not to mention representation, continuity, neutrality, and objectivity. They start from the idea that history narrates and constructs the past, and that the sources, archives, and texts from which historians create their history are, once again, nothing but representations.

Like Roa Bastos’s narrator in Yo, el Supremo (1974), a historian is a compiler of discourses whose text is interwoven with many others. As Dominick LaCapra warns, no document is innocent. Instead, it processes and rewrites reality “in ways intimately bound up with larger sociocultural and political processes” (LaCapra Reference LaCapra1985: 38). Thus, John Berger’s G. (1972), Julian Barnes’s Flaubert’s Parrot (2009), and D. M. Thomas’s The White Hotel (1981) question the status that traditional historiography has accorded to archives, and regard them as texts open to interpretation. In the case of Maxine Hong Kingston’s China Men (1980), sequel to The Woman Warrior (1976), they can even be a collection of stories that tell the story of the men in her family.

Novels such as Foe (where Coetzee reinvents the story of Robinson Crusoe through Susan Barton, a castaway on a desert island) highlight the relationship between “story” and “history” and denounce the fact that the narrators of history have the power to silence and exclude events and stories of the past. They rightly claim that this is indeed what historians have always done throughout the ages (see Hutcheon Reference Hutcheon1988, Reference Hutcheon1989).

Other novels recount history from the perspective of the underdog. In Rudy Wiebe’s The Temptations of Big Bear and Leonard Cohen’s Beautiful Losers, the underdogs are the Canadian Indians, whereas in the novels of J. M. Coetzee, Toni Morrison, and Ishmael Reed, they are the blacks in South Africa and in America. Similarly in Paul Bowles’s translations of the Moroccan writers and storytellers, Ahmed Yacoubi, Larbi Layachi, Mohammed Mrabet, or Mohamed Choukrim, the history of Tangier is told from the perspective of the oral storytellers who have always lived there (Vidal Claramonte Reference Vidal Claramonte2023).

These are but a few of the many examples of what Linda Hutcheon calls “historiographic metafiction,” or literature focused on revealing the ideological content of history as told by the victors.Footnote ⁶ Since the revision of history in historiographic metafiction does not distinguish between fiction and history, Linda Hutcheon (Reference Hutcheon1989: 36) observes the following: “How do we know the past today? Through its discourses, through its texts – that is through the traces of its historical events: the archival materials, the documents, the narratives of witness … the historian.”

The literature that wants to retell the stories already told suggests that to re-enact the past is to open it to the present in order to prevent it from being a conclusive and teleological past. Novels like Flaubert’s Parrot or A Maggot underline the fact that there is no single truth but many truths, no single order but diverse orders, each as arbitrary as the other – and if not, let us recall Alphabetical Africa or Walter Abish’s How German is It.

All of them remind us that memory is not an instrument to explore the past but rather its representation. And these representations of the past obviously have ideological implications such as whom they belong to, and who constructed them. They also force us to reflect on the imposed nature of meaning, as reflected in novels such as The Public Burning. All writers are concerned “with memory, since all writing is a remembrance of things past; all writers draw on the past, mine it as a quarry. Memory is especially important to anyone who cares about change, for forgetting dooms it to repetition” (Greene Reference Greene1991: 304).

Giving a voice to those who had no voice is empowering. Perhaps that is why Derrida asserts that Althusser’s much-needed critique of the Hegelian concept of history and of the notion of expressive totality is aimed at demonstrating that there is not a single history or a general history, but rather different, scattered histories.

Indeed, there are many examples of contemporary writers who tell the stories of those who have been previously silenced. These range from Eduardo Galeano’s “nobodies” (Reference Hutcheon1989/1992) to the stories of subalterns in the case of The Children of Sánchez (1961/1970) by Óscar Lewis, or La noche de Tlatelolco (1971) by Elena Poniatowska. Both novels rewrite the official history taking as their sources the oral histories of its protagonists, the “nobodies.” They are what Latin American literature calls crónicas, a form that emerged at the end of the 1960s whose aim was to narrate the plurality of voices of urban life and to record “a marginal reality, bringing to the fore aspects of city life that have tended to be ignored and articulating discourses from disempowered social groups” (Bielsa Reference Bielsa2006: xiv).

La noche de Tlatelolco tells the massacre that took place on October 2, 1968, at the Plaza de las Tres Culturas, in Mexico D. F. This massacre is one of the subjects most studied by historians and explored by Mexican literature. Poniatowska does not tell History but stories, since she writes her crónica from the perspective of direct participants or witnesses and “shares an explicit commitment to denounce repression and abuse of authority, raise the consciousness of its readers about situations of political, economic, and cultural terror, and offer an alternative view to official, hegemonic history” (Jörgensen Reference Jörgensen1994: 68). The clash between the student movement and Díaz Ordaz’s government is rewritten by Poniatowska by contrasting the official History about what took place and the voices of the conquered based on interviews, personal letters, diaries, recorded conversations and photographs which deny the construction of the facts as narrated by the official discourse. However, Poniatowska also decided to include the voice of those who opposed the student movement, and who represent a conservative, authoritarian discourse. The result is a multilayered text charged with heteroglossia and polyphony that challenges the authorized monochromatic version of what took place. Thus, she translates the official homogeneous History through many fragmented oral stories:

These and other examples show that it is possible to rewrite the stories told by those in power if we retell the stories that the powerful did not want to come to light. Why do we always remember 1492 but not 1493? As suggested by Julian Barnes in his, already mentioned, A History of the World in 10 ½ Chapters, we should celebrate 1493. This is the date of “the return, not the discovery” (Barnes Reference Barnes1989: 241), the date on which Christopher Columbus pocketed the 10,000 maravedis that he had promised to the first man who sighted the New World. The official history says nothing about the sailor to whom the money actually belonged. It had been won by a random sailor, but Columbus claimed it for himself, and as legend goes, the sailor then became a renegade. So, 1493 was also an interesting year. In line with many contemporary historians, Barnes (Reference Barnes1989: 242) emphasizes that history is not what happened but what historians tell us happened:

These examples and many others show that translating History is, as stated at the beginning of this Element, much more than substituting one word for another. Translating a text means “reconfiguring it … No translation can ever be the ‘same’ as the original, for translation involves so much more than the linguistic, though obviously language is a crucial element … translators have to deal with more than just words which may or may not have dictionary equivalents” (Bassnett Reference Bassnett2022c: vii). Translation is not a mechanical secondary act, but a complex process that goes beyond fidelity and equivalence. When translating History ethically, different narratives and counter-narratives are created (Baker Reference Baker2006), thus extending the definition of translation and reflecting the values of horizontality, nonhierarchy, and pluralism (Baker Reference Baker2016: 1).

These translations of History are examples of translation as a creative process that goes beyond an instrumentalist model, which conceives translation as reproduction, as a much more open territory, where translation is an interpretation that transforms a communicative artifact into something quite different. These and many other examples make clear that “the discipline has expanded so extensively that the term ‘translation’ can seem too narrow to reflect all that it encompasses … [It is] a complex, multifaceted field of study, practice and theorization [… which] will continue to fascinate for the foreseeable future” (Malmkjær Reference Malmkjær and Malmkjær2022: 1, 9). In this line, the next section will show translations as creative herstories. Creative herstories are creative translations in which

3 Overcoming the Danger of a Single Story: Women’s Translations of Literary His-stories

In this new context, and in line with Salman Rushdie’s Sea of Haroun (Reference Rushdie1990/1999), where, as we saw, all stories wish to be told, a subversive and political translation of History is that offered by some women writers. This section will show examples of women who have rewritten stories previously told by men or who bring to light untold stories as translations of the stories previously told. Women thus become translators of the stories that have already been (un)told. Their translations have the capacity to become, as in Rushdie’s current-filled sea, new translations which yearn to join other stories and to metamorphose into something different. Fortunately, throughout the twenty-first century stories have become increasingly hybrid and plural.

Women need to have the floor, because having a voice means expressing one’s own point of view. It means beginning to have the power to deconstruct the homogeneous and supposedly universal foundations of patriarchal logocentrism:

Undoubtedly, there is danger when women begin to speak out. Today many women who realize that the story that has been told is not theirs have begun to rewrite the stories previously imposed by the patriarchy. These stories rewritten by women tell us for the first time again what has already been told. From a feminist perspective the centrality of rewriting and remembering history has always been recognized because “the very practice of remembering and rewriting leads to the formation of politicized consciousness and self-identity. Writing often becomes the context through which new-political identities are forged” (Mohanty Reference Mohanty, Mohanty, Russo and Torres1991: 34).

Women’s stories are rewritings that are open to many interpretations and are not only limited to those imposed by the hegemonic power of the victors. It is urgent to ask whose stories are told, from whose perspective and in whose voice. Whose stories, versions, and voices are left silent and on the contrary, whose are translated: “Whose tale will be told above and over all others as the official story? Whose voices will whisper around the edges of the canon, telling their heretical versions? Whose voices will be forcibly silenced, and whose will die out?” (Price Reference Price2004: xiii, xviii).

Women are aware of the power of telling, but especially of the power of telling a single story. In 2009, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie stated that the single story creates stereotypes: “They make one story become the only story,” and the single story “robs people of dignity.” It is never accidental that those in power try to convince us that there is only one story:

However, if we dare to reject the possibility that there is only one story, the one imposed on us, we can bring to light other stories that have been hitherto silenced, but which are also important:

That is why Spivak (Reference Spivak, Landry and MacLean1993/1996: 27–28) stresses that it is not a matter of denying that truth exists but of questioning the stories that have been imposed on us. Or when constructing a narrative something is always left out, and it is not always obvious what (Spivak Reference Spivak1990: 9). The past is actually constructed histories, and none of them is the past but translations of the past: “ … we read the world as a text, and, logically, such readings are infinite” (Jenkins Reference Jenkins1991/2003: 11).

Those who for centuries have been subalterns because they have had no voice now want to take the floor and breathe for themselves. As the Tobago-born poet Marlene NourbeSe Philip (Reference Philip, Kim and Miller2018: 38) writes:

By telling again for the first time what has already been told, women find themselves, not by taming words, but by letting the words keep their magic. As Sandra Gilbert points out, this is none other than accepting the possibility of going to sleep in one world and waking up in a different one. This can only happen if we question certainties and undermine foundations, to banish the dominant gaze in favor of the plural kaleidoscope. We must thus embark on a feminine journey that becomes a Derridean supplement to tell those other stories of women that for so many centuries have been silenced by those who have spoken for them:

Echoing stories already told, women tell them for the first time with a view to becoming the subjects, not the objects, of the discourse. Women translate the stories already told by the patriarchy from a feminine and feminist point of view. Their texts are translations that rewrite something for the first time. These rewritings paradoxically transform, in the Derridean sense of the word, the secondary into the primary. Women are translators of the first time again.

Women have embarked on a journey that revisits the road trodden in all disciplines. In the early 1980s, Craig Owens (Reference Owens and Foster1983) underlined the presence of an insistent feminine voice, and soon after, critical historiography gave way to books such as the History of Women in the West, coordinated by Georges Duby and Michelle Perrot (1991). Thanks to such contributions, the canon gradually became feminine and feminist, as reflected in literature with Elaine Showalter (1977) and her publication, A Literature of Their Own, and in art, with Linda Nochlin and Griselda Pollock, among others. Even in music, there is Susan McClary (1991/2002), who published Feminine Endings: Music, Gender & Sexuality in 1991. This feminist look from the “new musicology” of the seventies relates music to cultural studies, conceiving it as a type of discourse that has contributed to the creation of sexual stereotypes that can be deconstructed with a different interpretation of musical texts. Also interesting are the feminist rewritings of crime novels.

All of these books allow us to travel to other territories far from the falsely unitary founding subject, outside the great Lyotardian stories that theorists like Alice Jardine (Reference Jardine1985: 24) describe as the crisis of the metanarratives invented by men. They revise myths and traditional stories and make re-visions that are what Adrienne Rich refers to as “acts of survival.” So now, for the first time, we can see the story translated, rewritten in other stories told by women.

Herstory began with mid-nineteenth century activists, such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, who created a historical archive that was “different” from what was regarded as “universal.” The result was an extensive collection of documents entitled History of Woman Suffrage (1881), which was largely ignored by most latter-day historians. In the same way, women’s history was not taught in school and university classrooms because women lacked power and their ideas had never been taken into account. We seek a historiography that challenges generalization and that teaches us, as Chimamanda Adichie has observed, that there is no single story.

For centuries, women have been silenced by men, but now women are rewriting men’s History in original stories. Contemporary feminist fiction recreates and rewrites classical voices from a perspective that reclaims and vindicates the voice of women. One of the best-known examples is Adrienne Rich, who in her poem “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning” (1970) rewrites John Donne’s poem of the same title, and shortly afterward, speaks of the need to translate the past, or more specifically, of its re-vision in “When we Dead Awaken”:

An example is the 1980s genre of US black women’s fiction “which collectively rewrites and encodes the history of American slavery and the oppositional agency of African-American slave women” (Mohanty Reference Mohanty, Mohanty, Russo and Torres1991: 36). This is the case of Beloved, in which Toni Morrison rewrites and revises the history of slavery in the United States and of Gayle Jones’s Corregidora, among many other examples.

Stories such as the myth of Eve are translated in Angela Carter’s The Passion of the New Eve (1977). Also well-known is Jean Rhys’s rewriting of Jane Eyre in White Sargasso Sea (2000), in which she translates the story of the “mad woman” from the viewpoint of a Dominican woman. In a different context, María Mercedes Carranza rewrites the silenced story of the silenced woman in Jan van Eyck’s The Arnolfini Portrait (1434) in her 2004 poem “Aquí con la señora Arnolfini” [Here I am with Mrs. Arnolfini]. Michèle Roberts translates the story of Mary Magdalene in The Wild Girl (1984) and also retells the story of Noah’s Ark from the perspective of Noah’s wife in The Book of Mrs Noah (1987), whose ark on this occasion is filled with books and stories; likewise, she rewrites the life of Saint Teresa of Ávila in Impossible Saints (1997). More recently, Jane Crowther’s Gatsby (2025) translates Jay Gatsby and Mick Carraway into women, Xiaolu Guo’s Call Me Ishmaelle (2025) reimagines Moby-Dick from the perspective of a cross-dressed female sailor, and Sandra Newman’s Julia (2023) offers a feminist version of Orwell’s 1984.

Women’s translations of history are especially relevant in the case of their calling into question the stories of the ancient world. Women’s stories are translations that are open to plural interpretations and are not only limited to those imposed by the hegemonic power of the victors. They exemplify Scott’s (Reference Scott, Bassnett and Bush2006/2007: 116) idea that translation itself “is constantly redrawing maps, redisposing the territories of language and cultures.” We shall see how women’s translating does not merely register change “but actively works to produce it” (Scott Reference Scott, Bassnett and Bush2006/2007: 116).

There are many rewritings of classical myths, such as Ursula K. Le Guin’s Lavinia (2008), a new vision of Aeneas’s wife, whom Virgil largely ignored. Also very well-known is Margaret Atwood’s translations of mythic archetypes like Circe in the “Circe/Mud Poems” (You Are Happy, 1974) and her Penelopiad (2005), which tells the story of Odysseus from his wife’s perspective and rewrites the women of the Odyssey in a feminist key (Estrada Reference Estrada2021). Similarly, Madeline Miller translates history in many of her novels. For example, in her Circe, it is not Odysseus who tells his story but Circe herself:

In Cassandra, Christa Wolf translates Homer’s masculine epic and its wars in terms of the untold story of women and their daily lives,Footnote ⁷ whereas in her Medea, she gives a new slant to this classical myth (Bernstein Reference Bernstein and Bachleitner2020). These rewritings make clear that all translation:

A particularly interesting example is Anne Carson, a poet whose work rewrites classical myths. Her poetry is an illustration “of the way in which translation can nourish the writing process, infusing the present with the emotions of another time … her goal is to rearrange and disturb the meeting of ancient and modern” (Simon Reference Simon, St-Pierre and Kar2007: 108). In fact, Carson’s rewritings are sometimes startling:

In Autobiography of Red (1998), based on the Gerioneid of Stesichorus, Carson changes the story of Hercules and the monster Geryon by adapting it to contemporary times. Locating the story in Ontario, Canada and Peru, she also adds a queer perspective, by mixing a homosexual romance with Greek myth, since Geryon and Herakles are lovers. In Nay Rather (2013: 32) she takes a small fragment of ancient Greek lyric poetry and translates it “over and over again using the wrong words. A sort of stammering.” Her translations are creative and feminist rewritings of the past (Bassnett Reference Bassnett and Steyn2022b). For instance, in An Orestia, the indefinite article of the title is a reminder that “this is not a translation of Aeschylus’ Oresteia, it is Anne Carson’s version of three plays by different playwrights about the tragic sequence of events concerning the cursed house of Atreus” (Bassnett Reference Bassnett and Jansen2022a: 246).

These examples and many others show that translation studies today has left behind narrow Eurocentric definitions of translation “as a univocal and unidirectional transfer of meaning from the source language to the target language, both of which are viewed as already polyvocal and hybrid” (Karpinski Reference Karpinski2012: 4). In these translations “translation is transformative rather than imitative in that it makes the target language grow at the same time as it ensures survival of the original by making a foreign text perform new meanings in the target culture” (Karpinski Reference Karpinski2012: 7, 8). A translation is understood here not as an act of preservation nor an act of recall “but an act of transmission (of handing on a text in what is deemed an appropriate form) and of reimagination … translation should seek to make the ST more incomprehensible, rather than pre-emptively predigesting it” (Scott Reference Scott, Bassnett and Bush2006/2007: 108). Women’s translations make “the ST more incomprehensible by making it progress through time” (Scott Reference Scott, Bassnett and Bush2006/2007: 108).

There must be something dangerous in the fact that women speak and that their discourses proliferate, to use Foucault’s words (Reference Foucault and Young1970/1981: 11). There are many women who, having understood that the story that has been told is not theirs, rewrite the stories that patriarchy has so far imposed. These stories rewritten by women tell again, for the first time, what has already been told. As women rewrite previously written discourses, they alert us to the fact that discourses can be both an instrument and an effect of power, but also a point of resistance.

In retelling for the first time what has already been told, women find themselves not taming words, but allowing them to maintain their magic, which is none other than the ability not to exclude. This will only be possible by questioning certainties and undermining foundations, in order to banish the dominant gaze in favor of the plural kaleidoscope.

4 Twice Upon a Time: Translating Children’s Literature Again for the First Time

In both literature and art, women translate stories that have already been told. Now women at last take the floor. They now have a voice to tell stories that men had previously told for them. Feminist rewritings criticize the traditional binary opposition systems of the West. Through gender studies, many of the stereotypes created for women are now being demolished in an effort to transcend all essentialisms. These translated stories have the potential to become new versions of themselves, merge with other stories and become something completely different. Women’s stories are thus open to multiple interpretations and are not limited to those imposed by the hegemonic power of the victors. From this perspective, translation has become a powerful vehicle for political, social and cultural change.

Of the many types of rewritings, this section focuses on feminist translations of traditional fairy tales.Footnote ⁸ Over the years, in children’s literature, there have been numerous translations of History into herstories. However, it should be underlined that this type of literature is never neutral, but is always a vehicle for ideology (Knowles and Malmkjær Reference Knowles and Malmkjær1996: 41–80).

There are many rewritings of classical stories that have been traditionally told throughout the ages.Footnote ⁹ According to Hasse (Reference Haase2004: vii), despite the existence of some previous work, scholarly research explicitly devoted to feminist issues in fairy-tale studies really began with Marcia K. Lieberman’s “Some Day My Prince Will Come” (Reference Lieberman1972) and Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s (1979) provocative analysis of “Snow White” in The Madwoman in the Attic (see Joosen Reference Joosen2011: 215–297).

Since then, there have been hundreds of feminist rewritings of fairy tales (Guran Reference Guran2016; Kérchy Reference Kérchy2011), and retranslations of histories into herstories (Deane-Cox Reference Deane-Cox2016). These rewritings have been analyzed in depth by authors such as Jack Zipes, Christina Bacchilega, Marian Warner, and many others. Thanks to their valuable insights, ideas about fairy tales have finally begun to change.

In their introduction to Inviting Interruptions: Wonder Tales in the Twenty-First Century, Bacchilega and Orme (Reference Bacchilega and Orme2021) highlight some of the publications that contributed to us no longer seeing fairy tales as narratives “just for children,” with no bearing on the ethical and gendered construction of the world of children. It was thanks to books like Jack Zipes’s Don’t Bet on the Prince: Contemporary Feminist Fairy Tales in North America and England (1987) that things began to change. This book was “a breath of fresh air, sampling stories by Margaret Atwood, Angela Carter, Anne Sexton, Tanith Lee, Jane Yolen, and others who were in different ways questioning and playing with dynamics of gender, genre, and power in classic fairy tales” (Bacchilega and Orme Reference Bacchilega and Orme2021: x). In the 1990s other highly relevant publications would appear, to widen the field of fairy-tale revisioning further.Footnote ¹⁰ These theoretical reflections along with many othersFootnote ¹¹ analyze the hundreds of rewritings of traditional tales in order to achieve what Angela Carter (Reference Carter and Tucker1983: 24) proposes in “Notes from the Front Line”: “I am all for putting new wine in old bottles, especially if the pressure of the new wine makes the bottle explode.”

However, this is not the place for an in-depth study of other types of children’s stories that are starting to appear in the twenty-first century which are not rewritings of traditional stories so much as narratives that attempt to bring young audiences closer to phenomena such as migrations.Footnote ¹² Suffice it to say that there are hundreds of stories that tell children about the experiences and hardships that refugee and migrant children are currently enduring in refugee camps or in countries that are foreign to them.

Still another type of modern story is that which deals with nontraditional families, such as Mommy, Mama and Me (2009), Daddy, Papa and Me (2009), or Heather has Two Mummies by Lesléa Newman, or Anna Membrino’s My Mums Love Me (2022). Still other stories raise issues that until now have rarely been addressed, such as LGBTIQ+. This is the case of Will Grayson, Will Grayson (2011) by John Green and David Levithan, which has now become a classic. Also relevant here is the section titled “Regendering Cinderella” in Hennard Dutheil de la Rochere, Lathey, and Woźniak (Reference de la Rochere, Martine and Woźniak2016: 143–254).

In this sense, Freckleface Strawberry (2007) by actress Julianne Moore is significant. This book was banned from schools in February 2025, just a few weeks after the beginning of Donald Trump’s second term in office. Perhaps the reason for this absurd censorship is that the book celebrates difference. The story is about a girl who is a little different from the others because she has freckles. As the girl grows up, her freckles do not go away, and she learns that it is precisely in difference, not in homogeneity, that we are enriched as human beings. So, the story ends with the line “she lived happily ever after,” a phrase that in this case has a different meaning from traditional stories. Clearly, difference, no matter how slight, frightens the powerful.Footnote ¹³

The objective of these re-visions of traditional tales is to raise “awareness of the fairy tale as a primary site for asserting and subverting ideologies of gender” (Hasse Reference Haase2004: 2). Accordingly, Anne Sexton’s Transformations (1971) rewrite and transform tales by the Brothers Grimm with echoes of Betty Friedan’s (1963) The Feminine Mystique and Tanith Lee’s (1979) “Red as Blood” (1979). In the 17 tales that she translates, Sexton criticizes “And they lived happily ever after” by including contemporary references, acerbic humor, and feminism. Her stories do not take place in fantasy realms but in the sphere of everyday life, without the magic that supposedly makes life perfect. Instead she brings to light the problems of domestic life and the secondary role of women.

There is great interest in the rewritings of classic children’s stories because this type of text is the one that most frequently stereotypes women in terms of the male gaze.Footnote ¹⁴ In practically all fairy tales, active and independent women are bad and ugly, whereas good women are only beautiful. They are fragile, passive objects at the service of others (Bacchilega and Orme Reference Bacchilega and Orme2021: xi, xiii). This vision was summarized decades ago by Andrea Dworkin (Reference Dworkin1974: 48–49), one of the feminists most critical of fairy tales. According to her, these tales have only two definitions of women:

It is thus curious that the most well-known fairy tales in the Western world are those of Charles Perrault, the Brothers Grimm, and Hans Christian Andersen, even though the author of the first fairy tale was Baroness Marie Catherine d’Aulnoy. Written in 1690, her tale was about an independent fairy queen who did not need men. Sadly, the origin of the fairy tale has since been forgotten, possibly because it was not considered to be of interest.

One of the first women to criticize the patriarchal perspective in fairy tales and speak of its consequences was Luisa Valenzuela (1938), author of “La llave” [The Key]. In this story, she warns her readers:

Her words are meaningful because they trace the path followed by many women writers and artists, who have now begun to tell the stories that others had already told for them. For instance, “Little Red Riding Hood” has been rewritten many times from different perspectives. As previously mentioned, over ten years ago, Sandra Beckett (Reference Beckett2013) published an anthology of international retellings of the tale, which revision Red Riding Hood throughout the world. The same has occurred and continues to occur with Cinderella (Hennard Dutheil de la Rochere, Lathey, and Woźniak Reference de la Rochere, Martine and Woźniak2016). There are also white, yellow, and green Little Riding Hoods –created by Bruno Munari– and punk versions of traditional fairy tales (Parrish Reference Parrish2021, Reference Parrish2019), among many other translations. The sheer abundance of this literature is eloquent proof that the feminist translations of traditional fairy talesFootnote ¹⁵ are very popular today.Footnote ¹⁶

One of the best-known examples is Angela Carter’s revisioning of Red Riding Hood in The Bloody Chamber (1979).Footnote ¹⁷ According to Sharon Deane-Cox (Reference Deane-Cox2016: 16), Carter’s tale is an example of “retranslation” because Cinderella: or the Little Glass Slipper “deliberately differentiates itself from Samber [a nineteenth-century predecessor] in order to renew the meaning of Perrault’s tale and its moral … a renewal which ultimately allows the work to fully covey the feminist retranslator’s own emancipatory message.” Angela Carter had also translated Perrault in 1977, transcreating him (Hennard Dutheil de la Rochère Reference Hennard Dutheil de la Rochère2019, Reference de la Rochère and Martine2013). Interestingly, these translations and transcreations were the first step toward her subsequent feminist rewrites of the stories:

Jack Zipes’s introduction to the Penguin reissue of The Fairy Tales of Charles Perrault (Reference Zipes and Carter2008) highlights the importance of Carter’s translation of Perrault in regard to her work. In fact, Carter not only made feminist translations of the stories but also multimodal translations since she experimented with fairy tales in her radio plays. Her radio plays were meant to recreate

In this case, multimodal translations, which involve various senses, are set in motion.

Carmen Martín Gaite’s Caperucita en Manhattan (1990) is a very different translation of Perrault’s tale. It is an ode to freedom and the difficulty of achieving it. In this rewriting, Sara Allen lives in Brooklyn. Although she goes to Manhattan with her mother every Saturday to take her grandmother a strawberry cake, she dreams of being able to go by herself. One day when Sara Allen runs away from home to visit her grandmother, a former music hall singer who has lived a life without restrictions, she gets lost. On her timeless journey, she meets Edgar Wolf, a multimillionaire pastry chef who lives in a skyscraper in the shape of a cake. She also encounters Miss Lunatic, an ageless beggar who by day hides out in the Statue of Liberty and by night ventures out to mediate in cases of human misfortune. And sometimes, when necessary, she may even gift an elixir capable of conquering fear.

Of the many feminist translations of “Little Red Riding Hood,” Niki Daly’s Pretty Salma. A Little Red Riding Hood Story from Africa (Reference Daly2007) is also worth mentioning because it is so different. This is the African version of Little “White” Riding Hood, in which Pretty Salma’s grandmother sends her to the market and warns her not to talk to anyone. Predictably, she disobeys and engages in conversation with the evil Mr. Dog. Set in Ghana, this rewriting, or “once upon a first and second time” of the new “Little Red Riding Hood,” includes African words such as ntama, Ka Ka Matobi, and Goema Goema. Without forests or wolves, this intersemiotic and multimodal translation takes us on a journey through time and space, which rewrites the colors, images, clothes, food, and many other referents of the tale. As there are no wolves in Africa, Daly replaced the bad character with a dog because Africa has many dogs.

Still another critical response to traditional fairy tales is Buhle Ngaba’s (Reference Ngaba2019) The Girl without a Sound, the story of a story that should have been told from the very beginning:

Significantly, although the book can be purchased in paper format, the digital version is free when downloaded from the website. It is available not only in English but also in Setswana, one of the co-official languages of South Africa, which is spoken in Zimbabwe and Namibia, and by the majority of the population in Botswana. The new protagonists of the stories no longer have to be white and blonde, but can also speak in hitherto minoritized languages.

In The Girl without a Sound, Ngaba tells the story in English and in other minority languages such as Afrikaans, isiNdebele, Siswati, isiXhosa, isiZulu, Sepedi, Sesotho, Setswana, Tshivenda, and Xitsonga. Her story is of a black girl who has no voice because a golden cocoon grows in her throat. She thus represents the thousands of women, ignored and silenced by a racist and patriarchal society. A woman with red wings and sun rays on her skin will help her find her voice through books and words. Ngaba thus responds to traditional Western fairy tales, inhabited by white, blonde, and blue-eyed princesses, and always told in Western languages. As Ngaba writes:

Another example is the Nigerian writer, Abi Daré, author of The Girl with the Louding Voice (Reference Daré2020). This a story is about girls who never receive an education because of poverty and gender discrimination. Daré speaks for those girls who are silenced yet who want to have a voice. The story is written in “broken English” because in this way, she thinks that the reader will be able to enter the story. Because she seeks a broader audience, Daré does not write in Yoruba. However, standard English cannot convey the images, sounds, and smells that reflect her culture. That is why she explains that she has to “break” it. The result is striking but very difficult to translate. Nevertheless, her nonstandard English must also be translated because it transmits a subtle but important part of the meaning of the text:

A different retelling is Babette Cole’s Princess Smartypants (1986), who prefers her motorcycle, dragon friends, and independence to getting married. In Prince Cinders (1987), Cole introduces us to a new (male) Cinderella, who has three large hairy brothers and is forced to do all of the household chores. This feminist version of Cinderella tells the story for the first time, once upon a time, but from a different perspective than that of the male gaze.

Still another first time again can be found in the many existing Alices, a character that contrasts with the Victorian “Angel in the House” who has been a rich source for feminist literary criticism (for instance studies by Judith Little and Megan S. LloydFootnote ¹⁹) since she defies the passive ideals of Victorian womanhood. Contemporary rewritings include Maeve Kelly’s Alice in Thunderland (2002) or the head of Alice in Wonderland as seen from within by the viewer in Jaume Plensa’s sculpture titled Wonderland (2013). A particularly interesting translation of the traditional Alice is Nancy Sheppard’s aboriginal translation entitled Alitji in Dreamland/Alitjinya Ngura Tjukurmankuntjala (1992). Set in aboriginal Australia,

The book is presented in two languages, and each page has the text in both languages – Pitjantjatjara and English.Footnote ²¹ In this multimodal text, as in most children’s literature, images are as important as the text. Donna Leslie, a First Nations woman of the Gamileroi people, translates this Alice visually, through illustrations whose colors, forms, and bodies are completely different from the traditional Western ones.Footnote ²²

What Bacchilega and Orme call “wonder tales” is a comprehensive term for the moment in which now we find ourselves, where publications such as their own edited volume or the Routledge Companion to Media and Fairy-Tale Cultures (Greenhill et al. Reference Greenhill, Rudy, Hamer and Bosc2018) invite us to continue translating these tales, to include all possible voices, and “to consider media studies, eco-criticism, disability studies, and Indigenous studies as relevant to your understanding of wonder tales” (Bacchilega and Orme Reference Bacchilega and Orme2021: xix).

The examples that continue to emerge with the advance of the twenty-first century reveal the urgent need to translate these stories for the first time again through a feminist lens instead of through the traditional male gaze. If afterward, we make interlinguistic translations of that first translation that rewrote History into herstories, the elements in these new translations should still allow readers to glimpse the “original” text while at the same time giving it a new reading. For example, Snow White’s seven dwarfs can be transformed into the most diverse characters:

Publishers have also realized the importance of these rewritings. Vintage, for example, published its Feminist Fairy Tales series, consisting of four rewritings by important authors such as Rebecca Solnit, Malorie Blackman, Jeanette Winterson, and Kamila Shamsie, who have created “fairy tales reimagined for modern boys and girls – transformed into stories of liberation that don’t need a happily ever after.” In fact, some of these rewritings have enjoyed unprecedented editorial success, such as Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls by Elena Favilli and Francesca Cavallo (2016). Despite the criticism received (Castro and Spoturno Reference Castro, Laura Spoturno, Bracke, Bullock, Morris and Schulz2021: 230–234), its success has been confirmed by its many literary awards and its translations into almost fifty languages.Footnote ²³

Likewise, Disney has also attempted to update fairy tales, whether for ethical reasons or for purely economic ones. For this reason, many of its most emblematic characters (not just princesses) have evolved considerably. Nevertheless, in many cases, this apparent translation of traditions fails to convince, perhaps because at a deeper level, the “Disneyfication” of fairy tales continues.Footnote ²⁴ In the DisneyizationFootnote ²⁵ process, the source material is sugarcoated and any real-life problems are eliminated in order to appeal to mass audiences (Leduc Reference Leduc2020; Wright Reference Wright2016). This is typical of Western society, grounded in consumerism (Bryman Reference Bryman2004; Holliday Reference Holliday and Amy2019; Whelan Reference Whelan, Howe and Yarbrough2014). There is also the fact that in many cases, Disney surreptitiously continues to perpetuate traditional stereotypes:

Consequently, there is still much to be done. The good news is that we are beginning to move toward what Jack Zipes (Reference Zipes2011: 26) called a few years ago “De-disneyfication.” All these translations are the beginning of new interpretations in which all the colors of Haroun’s Sea of Stories come to light through the creation of new originals:

In all these cases, translation is not an act of preservation (of a definitive text), Scott argues, nor is it an act of recall (of a text that inevitably belongs to the past), “but an act of transmission (of handing on a text in what is deemed an appropriate form) and of reimagination … Translation itself is constantly redrawing maps, redisposing the territories of language and cultures … Translation does not merely register that change, that change’s inevitability, but actively works to produce it” (Scott in Bassnett and Bush 2006: 109, 116).

5 Women’s Translations of Men’s Literature

Many women writers have dedicated works to rewriting stories told by male writers in literature. Thus, rewriting his-stories into herstories avoids the danger of a single story, for example in Yedda Morrison’s Darkness, where she erasures and thus rewrites the first chapter of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, unmaking its colonialist, gendered discourse.

Another well-known case is Kathy Acker’s novels. She states that “by repeating the past I transform it … I try to destroy every law, every limitation.” In her feminist punk rereading of Don Quixote, Don QuixoteFootnote ²⁶ is a woman and all the other elements are also translated from a feminist perspective. Still another example is her novel The Adult Life of Toulouse Lautrec, in which Lautrec is actually a woman who narrates the life of her brother, Vincent van Gogh, while the prostitute Giannina describes the erotic memories of her experiences with the poet Ron Silliman. Acker also did a rewrite of Great Expectations. The story in novels like those by Kathy Acker questions convention and originality. Her relationship with the past is ironic, but at the same time it is intimately linked to what she wishes to undermine. These novels are rewritings of the past. They are translations of stories that are updated by transposing them into a more modern context. Because each text is many texts, as observed by Julia Kristeva, each word is an intersection of word, and each text is an absorption and transformation.

6 (Un)concluding Remarks

The last section of an Element that has approached translation as a never-ending process, always in movement, cannot be conclusive but necessarily open-ended. Women will never stop writing again for the first time the stories already told. All these women writers, translators of the stories already told by what Eduardo Galeano calls the hunters, show that different narratives can be constructed from the same set of records. They also demonstrate that in the twenty-first-century “meaning” is not an easy concept (Malmkjær Reference Malmkjær and Malmkjær2018) and that fidelity and equivalence “are not, of course, simple terms, and have become increasingly relativized in both translation practice and translation studies” (Scott Reference Scott2011: 215). Translators are “creative agents” (Pernau and Rajamani Reference Pernau and Rajamani2016: 51). Translations are not processes of recalling “but of transmission” and “of reimagination” (Scott Reference Scott, Bassnett and Bush2006/2007: 108) and therefore translation continues to generate powerful representations (Baker Reference Baker, Bermann and Porter2014) which women in many instances contest and undermine.

Translating is a constant journey between identities; it is continuous movement between spaces, languages, and cultures. Translations are palimpsests,Footnote ³⁷ the sound of steps on a street that echo in other streets. Translating means crossing borders, geographical, linguistic, and ideological borders. Translation here “emerges as the central category for the negotiation of difference beyond representation,” which means “viewing translation not as a unilateral activity but as a dialogical negotiation – a negotiation, however, that does not need to be harmonious and never takes place outside of power relations” (Pernau and Rajamani Reference Pernau and Rajamani2016: 52). The previous examples have shown how women translate History again for the first time in order to allow new perspectives to be heard. This, no doubt, is not easy and it implies ethics:

Women who translate History also show, as suggested before, that “translation per se is always creative” (Malmkjær Reference Malmkjær2020: 3), that “translating is not copying” (Malmkjær Reference Malmkjær2020: 38). As opposed to History conceived as a linear sequence of the development of presence, they show us many different stories conceived as a differentiated and contradictory series. The following step, translating interlinguistically those stories women have previously translated again for the first time, will be a real challenge, since translating will mean here rewriting many voices, layers, palimpsests. As Nguyen states, these translations should be a way to get out of our chairs and go out in the world.

Translating implies here recreating into new materialities. It implies that there is not a single original text but a “previous” text, as Coldiron (Reference Coldiron2016: 315) states. A very relevant change of perspective, since speaking about a previous text instead of an original means that:

These translations do not offer a general history but rather displaced histories. And, as we travel with women, we realize how important it is for the past to make us hear disturbing cacophonies. Their translations show that

The way many women writers approach translation is based on difference, not on homogeneity and universalism. Their translations are “necessarily experimental, unable to draw exclusively on the known, begetting knowledge, not meaning” (Scott Reference Scott2018: 63). Their texts are constantly in movement; they are never stable but unstable, continually reinventable, always “at the text’s widening periphery. What do I mean by ‘widening periphery’? Through time, through processes of translation, the text fans out into multiple versions of itself, not just interpretations of its meaning, but performances of the experience of reading it” (Scott Reference Scott2010: 155).

They seek to listen to all the stories contained in the Ocean of the Streams of Story. In these cases, it is “absurd,” Bassnett would say, to consider translation as a straightforward activity of substitution. On the contrary, “[t]ranslating a text means reconfiguring it … No translation can ever be the ‘same’ as the original, for translation involves so much more than the linguistic, though obviously language is a crucial element … translators have to deal with more than just words which may or may not have dictionary equivalents” (Bassnett Reference Bassnett2022c: vii). Women’s original stories are translations of previous ones and have the capacity to become new versions of themselves. They manage to join with other stories and to metamorphose into something different. Women’s perverse stories are open to plural interpretations and not only limited to those imposed by the hegemonic power of the hunters. They are daring lionesses who write again for the first time stories previously told by men.