Elise Robbins is a second-year PhD student in the Department of English at Ohio State University. She studies early modern English literature, with focused interests in devotional poetry, theology, women’s writing, and translation. Her current research focuses on early modern issues surrounding Bible translation, translation authority, and the circulation of translations, in theory as well as in practice.
Abstract: What is the relationship between a mother and her translation? Much ink has been spilled regarding the gendered connection between creation and procreation in women’s original literary works. In her chapter “Creativity and the Childbirth Metaphor: Gender Difference in Literary Discourse,” (1989) Susan Stanford Friedman argues, “the women’s birth metaphor suggests that her procreative powers make her specially suited to her creative labours.” The current paper considers whether something similar can be said of translation, particularly biblical translation/imitation, for early modern women writers. If we consider the literal meaning of translation, the Latin translatio ‘to carry across,’ childbirth is a physical act of translation, with the mother as the translator carrying the child from womb to world—as Mary, the mother of Jesus Christ, carried God from Word to womb to world. I examine evidence from writers Mary Sidney and Aemilia Lanyer to see where women’s mothering (and here I distinguish, as Adrienne Rich does, the distinction between institutional “motherhood” and the experience of “mothering”) informs how they carry across the word of God to their audience. I propose that, in the patriarchal milieu of early modern English Protestantism, such translations assert the embodied experience of mothering as a spiritually generative, perhaps authoritative, position.
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