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It is our firm conviction that translation is a ‘house of many rooms’ and that these different rooms are often simply different discourses and perspectives on a common object of interest - translation.

Neubert and Shreve 1994: xii

1. Introduction

This paper performs a comparative analysis of two translations of Flora Tristan’s travelogue to Peru, Pérégrinations d’une paria (1838),[1] namely Jean Hawkes’ English translation, Peregrinations of a Pariah (1838/1986)[2] and Emilia Romero’s Spanish version, Peregrinaciones de una paria (1838/2003).[3] This analysis reveals that the two translators chose different approaches to their task, thus inhabiting two different rooms in the house of translation (Neubert and Shreve 1994: xii). Special emphasis is placed on their representations of slavery and the concept of women as slaves in marriage.

A brief summary of Pérégrinations d’une paria provides some context for the current project. In her two-volume book, Flora Tristan wrote a first-person account of her travels in Peru from 1833 to 1834. To help her readers understand the perspectives of her travelogue, French-born Tristan narrated the events and circumstances that led to her travel to Peru in the Preface and Foreword of her account. Flora was the illegitimate daughter of Don Mariano Tristan de Moriscos, a Peruvian creole of noble birth who served in the Spanish army, and Therese Laisnay, a French woman. The untimely death of Don Mariano left Flora and her mother in dire financial straits. Flora was then forced by her mother to marry her employer Andre Chazal, a lithographer. This abusive and disastrous marriage resulted in three children of whom two survived. To escape her abusive husband, thirty-year-old Flora undertook a voyage to Peru on April 7, 1833 to seek the protection of her father’s family, headed by Don Pío de Tristan. Before this, she had supported her children for eight years after separating from her husband. Upon the counsel of one of her paternal relatives, she embarked on this peregrination to Peru, disguised as an unmarried woman. Her untenable situation as a married woman, enforced by France’s laws against divorce, as well as the need for financial security motivated her travels. Her pilgrimage to Peru was a story of claiming her paternal legitimacy and inheritance. Tristan stated that, contrary to her expectations, she was denied her paternal rights by her uncle Pío and was given but a meager monthly allowance. However, Flora focused her energy on advocating for women’s rights, a calling that she continued after her return to France in 1835. In Pérégrinations d’une paria (1838), she identified with women who were oppressed under patriarchy and she celebrated female superiority, leadership, and excellence. She also criticized heavily patriarchal systems and religious institutions, as well as the seeming lack of leadership and progress in post-independence Peru. She saw the condition of women as similar to slavery, with both slaves and women being in need of emancipation. In her book, slavery is not only a construct concerning race, but also gender. The section below describes the theoretical framework of the article.

2. Theoretical framework

This project relies on the translation theories and practice described in Kadish and Massardier-Kenney’s edited volume, Translating Slavery (1994/2009). The volume presents translation from humanistic, critical, and ideological points of view. The translators writing in this volume incorporate social issues such as race and gender, providing different perspectives on the original text. This project uses one of their approaches: that is, a contrastive and comparative method, examining the differences between the original and the translated texts, especially looking at the interventions of the translator.

Furthermore, Massardier-Kenney’s chapter on translation theory and practice asserts that the principal relevance of any (theory of) translation is its ideological and critical outlook. She portrays translation as a “legitimizing process for the writer” (Massardier-Kenney 1994/2009: 5) through which the translator actively chooses the text she translates. In addition to the authority brought to the text through translation, meaning is created, the literary reputation of the author is stated, the colonized, the oppressed, the forgotten are given a voice; and the difference and hybridity in cultures are celebrated. She recommends that a translator be deeply invested in issues of race and gender before translating texts of this nature. Not only should a translator maintain the voice and spirit of the original text, s/he should also be conscious of the usage and history of racially sensitive terms. This underscores the fact that translation is a self-reflective process where the translator determines whether to be faithful to the source text, or radicalize or neutralize the differences in the original text. The following section describes in greater detail the methodology used in this project. A brief translation history of Pérégrinations, with the target texts, is provided, in addition to analysis of selected passages from volumes I and II.

3. Method

3.1. Selected texts

The two-volume Pérégrinations d’une paria was published in 1838 and contains over 900 pages. Volume I has eight chapters, as well as other sections such as a Dedication, a Preface, and a Foreword; Volume II has ten chapters. Soon after the publication of Pérégrinations in 1838, it underwent ten translations (Cross 2007). However, after Tristan’s death in 1844, interest in her work faded and it would take more than 75 years for Pérégrinations to be available in print again in France. Hawkes (1986a) also writes that Tristan’s writings fell into oblivion after her death and had to be rescued twice in the 20th century: first, interest in Tristan surged in France after the First World War which coincided with the revival of the women’s suffrage movement, and secondly, interest increased in the 1970s, thanks to the rise of feminist studies. A search for Pérégrinations in the World Cat database reveals about 150 editions published between 1838 and today; some are reprints and abridged versions of the original, while others are full or abridged translations in English, Spanish, German, and Japanese. The two female translators analysed in the current project both used the original French edition as their source text. Emilia Romero was the first to completely translate the two volumes of Pérégrinations into Spanish in 1925 (André and Bueno 2014). Other editions of her Spanish translation appeared in 1941[4] (with the selection, prologue, and notes by Luis-Alberto Sanchez) and 1946[5] (with a prologue by Jorge Basadre). Another edition appeared in Peru in 1946 and included translator notes. This version has subsequently been reproduced in other editions, including the 2003 edition considered here. The 2003 edition was jointly published by the Centro de la Mujer Peruana Flora Tristan and the UNMSM Press as a tribute to Tristan. Its prologue was written by Mario Vargas Llosa, a knowledgeable scholar on Tristan and her famous grandson Paul Gauguin, and its introduction was written by Francesca Denegri.

To date, there are no complete English translations of Pérégrinations d’une paria. The two English translations by Jean Hawkes (1986) and Charles Salis (1986)[6] are abridged versions. Both versions have a translator’s note explaining the choice for an abridged version. Salis’ French source text was the Maspero (1980) edition[7] which contained about three-quarters of Tristan’s original text. In Salis’ translation, Richardson comments that the abridgment was necessary because Tristan was repetitive and it offered “a racier, more readable account, while losing nothing of great value” (Richardson 1986: viii). The English translation chosen for this project is Jean Hawkes’s version (1986), published by Virago, a feminist press. Hawkes eliminated about a third of the original text, a choice that she justified in her introduction. She explains that “considerations of space and economy have obliged me to reduce it by more than one-third, much to my regret” (Hawkes 1986b: xxix). Hawkes goes further to indicate the materials she cut out including the preliminary texts in volume I, minor characters, moralising descriptions, a political conversation and letters. For this project, the Spanish translation of Romero (1946, 2003) was chosen because it is complete and has been republished many times. Hawkes’ translation into English was chosen because it is widely used for academic analysis, and a complete English translation is not available. The strengths and weaknesses of both versions were assessed.

3.2. Analysis

As was mentioned earlier, structurally, the eight chapters of the first volume are preceded by three preliminary sections (a Dedication to Peruvians, a Preface, and a Foreword), and there are ten chapters in the second volume. Hawkes’ English translation (Tristan 1838/1986) contains all eighteen chapters of the original, albeit abridged, preceded by a Translator’s Introduction and Note. Hawkes omitted the three preliminary sections which explain Tristan’s radical stance. Romero’s complete Spanish translation, Peregrinaciones de una paria (Tristan 1838/1946, 1838/2003), includes the three preliminary sections, in addition to a tribute by Vivian Vargas of the Centro de la Mujer Peruana Flora Tristan. Additionally, this version contains footnotes by Romero. The passages selected for the current project focus largely on Tristan’s overarching theme of liberation in the face of oppression or slavery. The analysis begins with the preliminary sections of Volume I, followed by selected portions of the main narrative in volumes I and II.

3.2.1. Preliminary sections (Dedication, Preface, and Foreword)

The first volume of Tristan’s book contains three preliminary sections: Dedication to Peruvians, Preface, and Foreword. For many books, such preliminary sections may be of limited importance. However, in the case of Tristan’s book, those three preliminary sections are vital for the deliberate construction of a public image of Tristan, and hence their total omission in the English translation by Hawkes defeats Tristan’s purpose in writing them. Guiñazú’s (2002) study of the Dedication, Preface, and Foreword highlights their importance for Tristan as they justified her actions and tried to garner the support of her readers in her favour. In Guiñazú’s (2002) words:

Los tres textos que preceden el relato de viaje: la dedicatoria, el prefacio y el prólogo responden a un cuidadoso montaje de autopresentación y justificación por parte de la autora. Escritos después de terminado[sic] el relato, presentan la imagen pública que Tristán quiere para sí. Surge aquí la figura de la autora experimentada que escribe con conocimiento de causa y que difiere de la imagen de la viajera presentada en el transcurso del relato.

Guiñazú 2002

What warrants translation in these sections? Beginning with the dedication, Aux Péruviens, Tristan predicted that her travel account would offend the national pride of many Peruvians and that she might be perceived as ungrateful after the warm welcome she received in Peru. But more importantly, she uses her Peruvian identity to justify her criticism and advice to her fellow citizens:

As demonstrated in the text above, Emilia Romero performed a literal translation, usually mirroring the sentence structure and using a word choice similar to that of the original text. Her choice of Spanish words and phrasing closely matches the French. Illustrations can be seen in Romero’s translation of the upper class as deeply corrupt (profondément corrompue, profundamente corrompida), motivated by selfishness (égoïsme, egoísmo) to carry out antisocial endeavours (tentatives antisociales, tentativas antisociales). All things considered, her translation is impeccable and she faithfully transmits Tristan’s main message that Peru’s local populace was oppressed and in need of liberation.

In the Préface, Tristan justified revealing her marital woes, a social taboo in her time. She claimed that her revelation was motivated by truth and not publicity, and she encouraged women to follow her example by narrating their trials. She also criticized women who fictionalized their life histories using male pseudonyms, lamenting the apparent lack of impact of this practice in changing the social order. She believed that speaking the truth about one’s experiences and revealing the evil practices of others helped to prevent future occurrences. Most importantly, she linked the oppression of women to slavery and posited that women around the world were enslaved.

Once again, Romero does a good job in transmitting Tristan’s message that women are facing a fate similar to slavery by using similar words. Furthermore, Tristan blamed social prejudices for making women suffer in silence and portrayed herself as a pioneer for attacking the status quo. Once again, she universalized the oppression of women. Tristan is sometimes criticized for being too dramatic, hyperbolic, duplicitous, and self-important (Law-Sullivan 2010: 65), primarily for comparing her personal trials to more serious issues such as slavery.

Scholars such as Susan Grogan (1998) have indicated that Tristan had a tendency to exaggerate her uniqueness, as she was certainly not the first woman to have asked for a divorce or to have gone against the social order. The French feminists of her era, with whom she was familiar, had already been vocal in this area and had been the first in France to appropriate the term white slaves to represent the social condition of women. Nonetheless, translators have a responsibility to the author to translate her views. Romero achieved this by performing a complete and literal translation into Spanish, while Hawkes chose not to include the Preface in her English translation.

Finally, in the third preliminary section, Avant-Propos, Tristan went into details about her life, by recounting the circumstances that propelled her travel to Peru:

Tristan’s fraught emotional and mental state, caused by her untenable situation and constant anxiety, nearly made her commit suicide:

Romero’s faithful translation into Spanish is accompanied by her footnotes which supply additional information about the people mentioned, the historical context including the exact dates when events occurred, and recommended supplementary readings. One of the translator’s footnotes contradicts Tristan’s claim that she never loved her husband. Romero refers readers to La vie et l’oeuvre de Flora Tristan (1925), in which Jules L. Puech documents that Andre Chazal, Tristan’s husband, presented love letters written to him by Tristan during their long judicial battle. These letters proved that Tristan and Chazal had been lovers before marriage, perhaps providing the real reason for her being forced to marry him. Hence, Romero not only translates but critically analyses the source text.

The latter part of the Avant-Propos demonstrates that Tristan’s decision to travel to Peru was not taken lightly. She was hesitant about travelling because of uncertainty about what awaited her at sea and upon arrival, and because of her love for her daughter. However, she blamed her status as a slave for propelling her to travel to Peru.

The selected passages thus far show Tristan’s personal struggles in an alleged unhappy marriage and her fight against the oppression of women. She blamed society and the laws that kept women dependent on men. In her view, the indissolubility of marriage made women second-rate citizens and, in her words, a slave bound by the chains of her husband. Hence, the Dedication, Preface, and Foreword portray the philosophy, beliefs, and projected image of Tristan, as well as her clarion call for freedom for all who were oppressed, and they set the tone for her travel account. Therefore, the complete removal of these three sections by Hawkes in her abridged English translation seriously weakens Tristan’s principal message.

In her Translator’s Note, Hawkes (1986b: xxix) states that her decision not to include the three preliminary sections, thereby cutting out a third of the original text, was motivated by “considerations of space and economy” as the original text has “908 pages and runs to over 180,000 words.” She claimed that, although she had omitted the preliminary sections altogether, she had summarized the pertinent information in her introduction (Hawkes 1986a). However, an examination of her text casts doubt on this claim. For example, Hawkes avoided mentioning any association between marriage and slavery. She did refer to Tristan’s pioneering act of exposing her personal woes and calling upon other women to do the same. Hawkes’ summary of Peregrinations was as follows: “This was the story of her visit to Peru in 1833-1834 to claim her share of the family fortune, a journey she undertook as a last desperate resort after leaving her husband Andre Chazal and trying for eight years to support herself and her children” (Hawkes 1986a: x). Tristan did not want her story to be about a search for financial security. Hawkes (1986a: xviii) commented that Tristan’s 22-page Preface was “more remarkable for grandiloquence than logic;” yet, by not translating this section, she does not allow readers to form their own opinion. Hawkes also remarked that Tristan was too emotional and exasperating sometimes, a view that affected Hawkes’ decisions about editing the text.

Additionally, Hawkes’s Translator’s Note alerts readers about omissions she made in her abridged version. Hawkes makes some critical decisions in relation to the source text:

In the narrative proper, I have eliminated a number of minor characters…and the ladies Tristan met in Lima, including Calista Thwaite, who translated Byron in Spanish, and Caroline Riva Aguero, the Dutch wife of the first president of Peru. I have cut much of Tristan’s moralizing, telescoped descriptions of people and places, and excised a long conversation about politics between the officers of the Mexicain. These cuts vary in length from a few words (superfluous adjectives, pious exclamations, etc.) to twenty-five pages (letters…she quotes in full) […] An abridgement seldom satisfies anyone who knows the original work, but I trust there is enough of Flora’s attractive and contradictory personality in these pages to engage the interest and the affection of readers, even if, like me, they find her exasperating at times.

Hawkes 1986b: xxix-xxx

In sum, readers get the sense that Hawkes was more interested in presenting the main issues at hand without incorporating too much sentimentality and self-righteous indignation. Perhaps, her decision to dampen the emotional content was to counteract the perception that the tone of Pérégrinations was too dramatic or overwrought.

Hawkes’ introduction is to be commended for providing additional information about Peru’s political upheavals before Tristan’s arrival. She further added that Tristan’s publication of Pérégrinations was in retaliation for her husband’s memoir (1838)[8] about her being an unfaithful wife and unfit mother. Hawkes also praised her inquiring mind and observational skills while noting an inability to capture fully the Peruvian landscape. For Hawkes, Peregrinations was more than a travel account, it was “a personal odyssey, a record of temptations [Flora Tristan] had to face in the course of her transformation from a self-centred young woman into a single-minded champion of the oppressed” (Hawkes 1986a: x-xi). She concluded her introduction with a brief review of her other literary works. Hawkes’ introduction gives a general overview of Tristan the author but underrepresents her state of mind and her radical stance towards marriage, divorce, slavery, and women’s rights. In the next section, analysis of the main text in volume I is provided.

3.2.2. Selected passages from Volume I

This section examines selected passages on marriage and slavery in volume I. The first passage to be considered is Tristan’s encounter with the Portuguese slave port, La Praya (Praia), off Cape Verde in Chapter 2. This was her first encounter with land after setting sail from France. Her racist reaction to the presence of slaves in this instance strongly contradicted the anti-slavery image Tristan sought to portray:

Romero’s literal translation did not omit or paraphrase anything. Hawkes’s translation into English, while capturing Tristan’s reaction, did not translate everything the author wrote. Hawkes tried to soften the language by not highlighting the so-called smell of the negro and using effluvium Africanum, a unique Latin term to replace the plural exhalaisons africaines.

Additional information about Tristan’s opinions about slaves and slavery was provided by her conversation with the Frenchman M. Tappe, a missionary turned slave-trader. Tristan was repelled by his wicked and inhuman attitude to slaves. In her opinion, he was no longer human, but rather le mouton anthropophage (carnero antropófago, cannibal sheep). To her credit, she referred to slavery as ce monstrueux outrage à l’humanité (Tristan 1838a: 70) – rendered that monstrous outrage against humanity (Tristan 1838/1986: 29) in English and ese monstroso ultraje a la humanidad (Tristan 1838/2003: 129) in Spanish – and talked about the paralyzing effect of slavery on the enslaved. She also intervened in the beating of a slave. In Paulk’s reading of Tristan’s initial reaction to slaves in Praia, she affirms that “even though she is guilty of the same racism that justified the practice of slavery, Tristan deplores the institution itself” (Paulk 2010:124). The English translation by Hawkes omitted the crew’s encounter with Brandisco, a slave trader/goods trader who tried to sell them two of his slaves. Hawkes also omitted Flora’s monologue about the destructive effect of slavery on Praia’s population who were malnourished, plagued by numerous diseases and suffered a high mortality rate.

As usual, Tristan did not pass up any chance to highlight her enslavement to her husband. Throughout her voyage she would look keenly for signs of oppression. After the crew embarked at Praia (Chapter 3), Tristan contemplated a relationship with the ship’s captain, Chabrié, a man who, she believed, loved her truly:

Hawkes omits Tristan’s exclamation about the impossibility of her union with Chabrié, the man who loves her. This is in line with Hawkes’s choice to eliminate overly emotional texts. Additionally, the English translation reduced the emotional tone, avoiding the use of slave and yoke to translate the original, and only using the word chain to express the sense of imprisonment. Later, Tristan fantasized about a happy relationship with Chabrié and their probable residence in California, and she blamed absurd laws and man’s machinations for being responsible for slavery and indissolubility of marriage. Tristan makes the point that a fugitive slave is no more a criminal than a married woman fleeing her husband.

Hawkes did not translate Tristan’s allusion of her marriage circumstance to that of a fugitive slave, perhaps considering it to be another example of Tristan’s tendency to exaggerate.

Hawkes informs the readers that she eliminated some minor characters while editing, although she fails to mention them by name, including the Frenchwoman, Madame Aubrit (in Chapter 4). In the English version, she owned a guesthouse in the Chilean sea-port town of Valparaiso that had a high rate of French immigration. Madame Aubrit was more than a hotel owner for Tristan, she was an example that marriage in France makes women second-class citizens as they suffer many injustices. Tristan informed readers of her resilience, and the trials and hardship she endured after running away from her husband. She eloped to Valparaiso with a young man who died after six months, leaving her pregnant. She preferred to stay in an unknown country rather than return to France where she was a pariah. As a prosperous woman running her own business, however, to Tristan, she was a symbol of female power, strength, and stamina.

Tristan used strong words such as victimes du mariage (victims of marriage) and infortunée (unfortunate) to describe the state of thousands of women such as Madame Aubrit. She refers to marriage as a hell, horror, and misery women suffer. In this quote, Tristan blamed society for its complicity in the hardship, poverty, and abandonment that women endured by closing the doors of opportunity, hence preventing the advancement of abused women. While Romero provides a faithful translation in Spanish, readers are denied this portrait in the English translation. There is no mention of Madame Aubrit in Hawkes’s main text and Translator’s Note. Hawkes denied Tristan the opportunity to back her claim that marriage was oppressive to other women as well.

In contrast, when translating the story of Flora’s cousin, Carmen, in Arequipa (Chapter 8), another tale of marriage enslavement, Hawkes preserved the language and wording of the original, using words such torture, yoke, slave, tyranny, oppression, masters, victim, and torture to describe the plight of women. Her translation transmitted the heightened tone of desperation, caused by the indissolubility of marriage, found in the original text. Furthermore, she faithfully translated the original text’s depiction of the racial hierarchies as white (European), brown (Indian), black (Negro), and coloured. She even translated Tristan’s mockery of “several ladies who passed as white, although their skin was the colour of gingerbread” (Tristan 1838/1986: 127).

Tristan commented on the processions during Holy Week which she considered vulgar and unspiritual. Her racist statements showed her contradictory nature to slavery. For example:

In this selected passage, Tristan made a racist comment, referring to négresses, with their black skin and kinky hair, as hideous. Both Hawkes and Romero omitted this particular racist sentence in their translations. This omission is ethically questionable as it acts to cover-up a racist attitude by the author. On a lighter note, Romero changes the adjective économique (economical) to cómico (funny), which in no major way affects the general sense of the sentence. However, the original text pointed out the fact that flour was a cheaper alternative to paint-filled eggs. In the following section, selected passages in the second volume are analyzed.

3.2.3. Selected passages in Volume II

Tristan described the epic escape of her cousin, Dominga, from the convent of Santa Rosa (in Chapters 3 and 5). Both translations reveal her admiration and support for her cousin and her criticism of society for its ignorance and superstition in isolating her. They also record a sense of frustration from the reaction of the local people, including her own family (only two members supported her), who refused to allow her to reintegrate into society. She was constantly reminded of her status as a nun wherever she went.

Chapter 8 recounts the story of the powerful, smart, superior, and very free women of Lima. Both translations captured Tristan’s envy or desire for their freedom, and her appreciation of their charms and their unique dressing outfit, the saya y manto. They also captured her criticism of these women’s lack of education. However, Hawkes’ English translation omitted the three women whom the author considered to be the most distinguished in Lima: Mme Riva Aguero, Calista Thwaites, and Manuela Ricos. Although, in her Note, she says she omitted “ladies Tristan met in Lima” (Hawkes 1986b: xxix), her description of these ladies did not do them justice. For instance, she wrote that Calista “translated Byron to Spanish” (Hawkes 1986b: xxix) and that Caroline Riva Aguero was the “Dutch wife of the first president of Peru” (Hawkes 1986b: xxix), but this is just part of the story.

The role of the three women in the theme of the book was related mostly to their superiority over the men of their generation. Nonetheless, the story of la señora de la Riva-Aguero fits into Tristan’s theme that women are marital slaves.

In this long quote, Tristan once again identified with women in forced marriages. She referred to Caroline Delooz and her mother as slaves and wrote that in Dutch society women were even more enslaved than in France. Tristan projected her trials onto other women, as if to prove that she was not the only one in this situation. This supported her assertion that women were universally enslaved.

The Spanish translation by Romero omitted the phrase that M. de la Riva-Agüero fell in love with Carolina and hence asked to marry her. This could have been an oversight, but several corrections made by Romero in relation to this story suggest that it might have been deliberate. Romero provided a footnote that clarified the situation. It affirmed that princess Caroline Arnoldina de Looz-Corswaren was Belgian, yet born in Holland, and whose father was a Duke. Romero further stated that Tristan gave an erroneous date about the expatriation of Riva-Agüero and that it should be 1824. In addition, Riva-Agüero was a little over forty years old and not fifty-five as claimed by Tristan. Also, Romero contradicted Tristan’s portrayal of Riva-Agüero as a liar or scheming man who deliberately misled the family of Carolina Delooz. Romero claimed that Riva-Agüero played an important role in the fight for independence against Spain. He was elected the first president of Peru on January 28, 1823 and was deposed on July 23, 1823 by the same Congress. After a four-year spell of exile/expatriation in Europe, he returned and held some high level governmental positions. In light of this information, it seems possible that Tristan repeated this story from an unreliable source. This is an example of the usefulness of Romero’s footnotes in correcting/clarifying details.

Chapter 9 concludes with Tristan’s last encounter with slavery before she returned to France. She visited the Lavalle sugar refinery and had a long conversation with the owner. Her stance against racism was clear in this encounter. She believed in the gradual emancipation of slaves, a position similar to that of the abolitionist movement of her time. She wanted sugar beets to become a reliable source of sugar production so as to decrease or eliminate slave labour. She visited a cell where two négresses had been imprisoned for infanticide and refers to one of the slaves as “very beautiful” with “a proud noble soul,” who belonged to the group of negroes with “indomitable spirits who suffer torments and die without ever submitting to the yoke” (Tristan 1838/1986: 286). Therefore, Tristan positioned herself as a voice against slavery and oppression.

Both the Spanish and English translations were faithful to the original text in this instance, and accurately conveyed Tristan’s emotionality against slavery. A footnote by Romero indicates that General Ramon Castilla abolished slavery in Peru on December 5, 1854, some twenty years after Tristan’s visit.

4. Translation styles, analysis, and conclusions

The question as to which translation approach is the best has plagued translators and academics for a long time. Whereas critics differ in perspective, many share the belief that the principal idea that should guide a translator is the transmission or conversion of meaning. Hoberman (1985: 58) believes that a good translation is a conscious and competent effort to transmit fully the meaning of the original text without including additional meaning. For him, it is a matter of intellectual honesty. As discussed in detail above, Romero and Hawkes, the two translators studied here, decided to delete a racist statement from the text, and Hawkes decided to do an abridged English translation of Pérégrinations d’une paria. Ethically, according to Antoine Berman (cited in Simon 1996: 36), a translator is at liberty to do as she is ideologically inclined so long as she is open about her intentions with the source text. Although Hawkes informed readers in her Note that she removed some emotionally charged and moralizing content in her abridged English edition, she did not provide enough information as to what that entailed. Even though she indicated her omission of certain characters, a more detailed description of that process in the Translator’s Note would have been needed. Romero and Hawkes, like all translators, were faced with several important decisions as they determined the best approach for the purpose of their work. Having decided to whom they owed their loyalty, they had to negotiate between the author and her text, the target audience and the text, and finally the organization publishing the translation. In all likelihood, this process also involved some linguistic, cultural, economic, and ideological considerations in relation to the choice of grammar, vocabulary, syntax, structure, and the tone or effect of the text.

Both Romero and Hawkes were not invisible translators as defined by Venuti (1995: 1). In her introduction and Translator’s Note, Hawkes documented the decisions she made. She provided a critical analysis of Tristan that, in a way, alerted readers to her excessive and exasperating nature. In this way, she may have influenced readers on how to interpret the book. Romero, for her part, inserted footnotes beginning in the preface and continuing throughout the book. These provided supplementary information and recommended readings, as well as correcting factual errors made by the author. Some critics believe that it is not the translator’s role or responsibility to provide extra information, but many academic translators do this.

Romero and Hawkes can be evaluated as per the criteria described by Luise von Flotow (1991) for feminist translators. Von Flotow identifies three main practices used by feminist translators. The first, supplementing, is when translators add additional information to make the text clearer to the reader. The second, prefacing and footnoting, the most popular of the three, calls attention to the work of the translation as well as explains the translator’s decisions. The third, hijacking, is when the translator manipulates, changes, or politicizes the text contrary to the intentions of the author. Based on these criteria, Romero and Hawkes did not supplement their translations of Pérégrinations d’une paria, but they did use footnotes and prefacing, respectively. Romero faithfully translated the French text into Spanish, and did not hijack the text. However, there was some degree of inverse hijacking in Hawkes’ English translation as, already convinced of the excessive emotional content of the original text, she decided to neutralize it for the most part. She also hijacked one of the principal themes of Tristan’s book, the association of marriage with slavery, a point that was so important to her that she reiterated it many times. This decision to excise this connection between marriage and slavery does indeed qualify as hijacking.

Closely associated to these points is the question of fidelity or equivalence in translation. Is there such a thing as absolute fidelity in translation? Romero’s Spanish translation is very faithful to the original, not only in meaning but in form, as she clearly used a literally or formally equivalent style. Although her choice of diction and structure fairly resembled the original, sometimes longer sentences are restructured into many shorter sentences. Hawkes’ style is one of dynamic equivalence; she employed natural, contemporary English. She transmitted the main ideas of the book, but she decided to dampen the emotional tone of Tristan’s writing style. In spite of the abridged nature of her version, Hawkes still portrayed the author as a strong advocate for women’s rights. Her decision to condense the book may have been influenced by her commercial partner, Virago in terms of economy and space.

In conclusion, Romero and Hawkes are skilled translators who took different approaches towards Tristan’s Pérégrinations d’une paria. Romero translated the entire book into Spanish, being very faithful to the original text in both meaning and form. In doing so, she did not dampen the emotionality of Tristan’s writing or diminish her association of marriage with slavery, but she did, however, remove at least one racist comment by Tristan. The translator also provided informative footnotes in the text that gave additional information and corrected factual inaccuracies in the original. Taken together, these characteristics of Romero’s translation make it attractive for academic use. Hawkes, on the other hand, decided to produce an abridged English edition that eliminated about one-third of the original. By not including the Dedication, Prologue, and Foreword, this abridged edition omitted important information about the philosophy, beliefs, and projected image of Tristan. Hawkes made a conscious decision to decrease the emotionality of her writing, and she removed the repeated association of marriage with slavery. More than Romero, Hawkes deleted and softened some of the racist statements made by Tristan. This translator provided a useful Introduction and Note with her translation, but did not use footnotes. The abridged nature of Hawkes’ English translation and her editorial decisions limit its usefulness as source material for academic study, but make it more attractive commercially as a book targeted for the general public.

Certainly, Romero and Hawkes inhabited “two different rooms” when it came to the translation of Tristan’s Pérégrinations d’une paria. Romero allowed Tristan to express her outrage, frustrations, grievances, pains, emotions, exclamations, hyperboles, and indignations about the indissolubility of marriage and low status of women in society. Her Spanish translation gave Tristan the platform to portray women as slaves of marriage universally and show women as superior to men intellectually. She showed Spanish readers how strongly Tristan felt about society’s treatment of women who dared to flee their unhappy marriages. She preferred to use footnotes to make her points. Hawkes was more interested in relaying Tristan’s story without the excessive emotions, repetitions, and moralizing. In so doing, she diminished Tristan’s principal message that marriage, backed by societal laws, enslaved women. Hawkes diluted Tristan’s message that being a woman is to be a slave by omitting Tristan’s comparisons between marriage and slavery. In spite of the two approaches, both translations have been widely received and are valuable texts for research.