My local vet once referred to her dog, which was about to have a litter, as a bitch, and I thought nothing of it. Or rather, what I thought was that she, the vet, was using the word correctly and also perhaps somewhat provocatively. She, the vet, is also a somewhat unusual person, uses crystals and homeopathic remedies in her practice, and this too seemed to corroborate my dim feeling that someone else in the same circumstances might not have used that particular word. The context was clear, so it wasn’t that terribly provocative, and there was no chance that anyone would have confused her use with regard to a female dog about to have a litter of pups with using the word to refer to a female person. The provocation in this case, if I’m right in hearing it in her usage, was about using the right word for the circumstances and refusing to change her word choice just because some people today might not use the word under any circumstances for fear of being thought misogynistic. Enter translation, where the specific term for a female dog in another language might not be so loaded as the English term “bitch.” It might be loaded, in fact probably is loaded, but is also very likely not loaded in the same way.
Translationese would tend to soften and explain, and so “female” would likely rise to the surface as the best option. And of course as an isolated case, in the midst of, say, a long prose work, using the word female would not likely be seen by anyone but the most self-righteous language police enforcer as problematic at all. It would be akin, I think, to finding the right idiom for something conveyed in a very specific way in the source language, for instance, “to stand someone up” for the French poser un lapin à quelqu’un. The French phrase uses the words “put” and “rabbit” in a very distinctive way, but as long as the “putting” and the “rabbit” are not thematically relevant (an interpretation the translator would need to decide on), it would not be a terrible loss to substitute “standing” and “up.” On the contrary, this move would create other interpretive avenues to English language readers, enriching the text rather than impoverishing it. This is an aspect of the “remainder” that several translation theorists have commented on. And if the text were older, something from the nineteenth century, for instance, again there would not be much of a problem. Readers would tend to read with a principle of charity, understanding that many of the contemporary associations we might have with words would not apply to a book from a hundred years ago or more. If the story in question is both about rabbits and contemporary, however, then all bets are off.
And so in a story about dogs that take on human characteristics, a story like the very last chapter of the 2013 novel Kin, which is entitled “Sarajevo Dogs,” what is the right way to consider the use of the quite specific word “bitch”? In an earlier section of the same book, my author uses bees as the human surrogates, and bees too have their own very specific lexicon, with drones and workers and queens. Now “queen” might begin to take on some of the complicated social and political implications that “bitch” immediately conjures, but the context is clearer somehow, and this kind of slippage seems less likely. Is it because bees are not mammals? A female dog (bitch) has nipples, after all, but a queen bee is an abstraction, almost a metaphor.
At this point I am leaning towards “female” because “bitch” seems more of a distraction and because the uses of the term kuja or, even more, the diminutive kujica (little bitch?) do not appear to be laden in this text with the associations of the English term. This is my interpretation, of course. I am also aware, however, of my own reactions in reading the work, which become much harsher towards it if I allow for the possibility that such bitchy associations might be intended by the author. I don’t think they are there, but I also recognize that I do not want them to be there. And given the choice, I prefer not to have them in the English version. I am of course thinking of audience here, so this strategy can be understood within a rhetoric of translation, which I have written and published about elsewhere, most recently here.
Russell Scott Valentino 