In this article I discuss the classical receptions of Romanian playwright Saviana Stănescu and particularly her continued engagement with the works of Ovid, tracking the feminist methodology which links her varied work. While Ovid's self-definition against the 'barbarian others' he encounters in Tomis is crucial to an understanding of the exile poetry, in a postcolonial world the ideologicallyloaded nature of the term barbarus must be recognized, and its use and replication in modern translations and receptions interrogated. With an astute critical awareness and a committed engagement with politics, Stănescu's classical receptions draw out the damaging real-world consequences for a people labelled 'barbarians'. Her work offers a defence of the reviled Black Sea inhabitants of Ovid's exilic poems by providing a critique of the colonial representations of the 'barbarians' therein, and exposing the power mechanisms of ancient and contemporary imperialism alike. ARTICLE I dreamt I was back in Rome […] We need to make our empire grow. We need to have everyone speak Latin. The language of culture and civilisation […] But Caesar, I whispered, I am not a soldier, I'm a poet. Nonsense […] The Barbarians must learnLatin. You are the only one who can teach them. We'll help you. The soldiers will be there with you to fight, to kill, to conquer, to extract the gold from those Barbarian lands, to get their riches as you will enrich their spirit. It's just a fair trade.1 My title is taken from The Empire Writes Back: Theory and practice in post-colonial literatures (Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin: 1989), a title which references Salman Rushdie's 1982 article for The Times, 'The Empire Writes Back with a Vengeance', itself an allusion to George Lucas' 1980 film The Empire Strikes Back. I would like to thank Elena Theodorakopoulos for her help with the preparation of this article, and my two anonymous reviewers for their advice and suggestions.
d-lectu re-2011d-lectu re- [accessed 17 February 2017. My sincere thanks are extended to Tessa Roynon, who read earlier versions of this manuscript, and whose generosity and critical insight as an editor is acknowledged with gratitude.2 Existing scholarship on Smith and Ovid comprises: F.
This essay frames Ali Smith’s novel Girl meets boy (2007) as a ‘queer translation’ of Ovid, Metamorphoses 9.666-797. I argue that Smith’s presentation of a contemporary genderqueer Iphis and Ianthe not only fictionalizes the critical argument proposed by Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble, but uses Gender Trouble as a queer translation manifesto. Reading Girl meets boy through this Butlerian lens, which foregrounds multiplicity and insists on the politically subversive potential of repetition, I show how Smith translates, re-translates, and re-writes Ovid’s text, to make queer identities that are made to disappear in the Latin ‘loosed’ in translation. I also propose a new reading of the conclusion of Ovid’s episode informed by Smith’s queer translation. I discuss Smith’s politicized use of repetition throughout the novel to produce queer translations which disrupt the surface homophobic discourse of the original text; and I situate the novel’s publication within its historical political context — before the legalization of same-sex marriage in England, Wales, and Scotland. In conclusion, I argue that a queer translation practice, as evidenced by Smith’s novel, is an activist project which combats homophobic discourse (ancient and modern) and allows ancient queer bodies and identities to retain their multiplicity in translation.
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