Olga Tokarczuk’s House of Day, House of Night: Gendered Language in Feminist Translation

Abstract

This article proposes a reading of Tokarczuk’s 1998 House of Day, House of Night as a feminist text and critiques the English translation, published in 2002 as House of Day, House of Night, for omitting most of Tokarczuk play with gendered language and her challenges to the patriarchal structures of Polish. Reading Dom dzienny, dom nocny through the lens of feminist theory brings to surface the central goal of Tokarczuk’s text—her aim is to break the hegemony of patriarchy by deconstructing its language. As a feminist text, Dom dzienny, dom nocny questions the conventional patriarchal categories and creates a linguistic space in which it becomes possible to tell the story of the Other. While the article acknowledges that the transmission of gender-specific linguistic concepts from the source to the target language is necessarily difficult, it argues that such a transfer can be possible for an English translation of Tokarczuk’s text because both Polish and English are part of the Western tradition, clearly reflecting gender prejudice. Tokarczuk’s play with language can be “rewritten” in English—although English lacks pervasive grammatical gender, it does not lack corresponding cultural and patriarchal constructions. The feminist theory of translation, which provides a model for the transfer of gender differences from one language to another, can provide a framework for such a “rewriting”—Tokarczuk’s text could be successfully translated from the source to the target language only by employing analogies of patriarchal linguistic structures in English.