Can the Historical Materialist Be a Woman? On the Woman Question in Walter Benjamin
Image provided by smith. This year I agreed to be a part of a translation project: alongside two fellow academics, the aim was to translate the fifty-something page Walter Benjamin essay, “Eduard Fuchs, collector and historian.” An issue soon arose concerning whether or not we should change the pronouns—which in the essay is usually “he”—to the gender-neutral “they.” I had initially suggested this change without giving it much thought. Another translator did not agree with my view that this was a relatively harmless change, rather insisting that we ought to maintain the translation of the pronoun as “he,” citing the necessity of “fidelity to the text.” To his mind, if this word was what was on the page, then we had to translate it as literally as possible: a one-to-one match. Translation must be free of interpretation, since interpretation is subjective, and subjectivity is, my colleague seemed to express, a bad word in the world of translation. I thought at the time, and still do, that this seemed a little odd considering how much of …
