International feminist movements, the transnational circulation of literature, and the role of cultural mediators: Michèle Causse translates Alice Ceresa

This article examines the ways in which the emergent international feminist movement in the 1970s impacted the reading and the reception of literary texts written by women writers. It focuses on the transnational circulation of literary texts and on the role of feminist translation in this process through the analysis of a case study: the work as translator of Michèle Causse, a French radical lesbian writer, and, more specifically, her translation of Alice Ceresa’s first novel, La figlia prodiga (1967), published in 1975 by the éditions des femmes. Through the analysis of Causse’s translation strategies this article shows how Causse’s translation represented a major step in the international reception of the original and changed the interpretation of Ceresa’s work considerably, by inscribing it in the subfield of feminist experimental literature, and by associating the Italo-Swiss author with the political category of women writers. Causse’s work is a powerful example of how translation, far from simply communicating and rearticulating meaning, profoundly modifies it, and of how it can function both as a form of literary criticism and of political interpretation of literary texts.