Abstract
This article discusses how a trans-disciplinary exploration of two translations from French and Spanish to English of two early modern transgender memoirs could create a new angle on the translation of trans identity. Translation equals manipulation and the power to re-present certain identities in texts: could trans identities be legitimized in order to expose all gender as unstable or could they be celebrated as unintelligible? The author looks in detail at the English translation of an eighteenth-century French memoir written by the Chevalier d'Eon. The author compares this to a translation of a seventeenth-century Spanish memoir written by Catalina de Erauso. D'Eon and Erauso use both feminine and masculine gender markers to refer to themselves, sometimes in the same sentence. This article examines how queering translation in order to preserve transgender identity can promote all identity (transgender or cisgender) and all writing (“original” or translated) as multilayered and queer.
