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- Title
CHAPTER TWO: THE DOUBLE LIFE OF SALOMÉ: SEXUALITY, NATIONALISM AND SELF-TRANSLATION IN OSCAR WILDE.
- Authors
Richmond-Garza, Elizabeth
- Abstract
A little earlier than Samuel Beckett, but in a continuum with that other Irishman's Francophone plays, Oscar Wilde undertakes a project of self-translation in preparing his text of Salomé in French, with the assistance of Pierre Louis and others. I would like to suggest that his choice to "francisier" his theatrical practice, is not merely an aesthetic and linguistic one, however. Nor is it exclusively a strategy to ensure that a play that could not be performed in English in London might have a premier in French either in London, which was always rather unlikely, or more probably in Paris. The double life of this play entails implications for both for Wilde's sexuality and his Irishness as well as his aesthetics. It carries a desire linguistically and ideologically to resist the hegemony of Anglophone, hetero-normative, neo-Roman London through a recourse to a Francophone, Hellenized Palestine. In its many verbal and visual instantiations, Salomé serves as a répétition, in the French sense of a performance as well as an iteration, of the double life of Wilde himself perhaps, but even more so of the what we might now call a queer resistance founded upon an insistence upon nuance, multivalence and the aporetic, just those features that lie at the core of the practices of translation, sexuality and nationalism. With the Douglas translation and the first published versions, however, the text raises the matter of translation of media as well, of the role of an author's publication choices as themselves translations of his work, with the binding of the first edition and Aubrey Beardsley's illustration being the most salient instances. The matter of this displacement, one might even say replacement, of the original verbal French text is crucial as this Franco-Irish text lives now through its English graphic visualizations and its strange English textual variant almost exclusively.
- Subjects
SALOME (Play); WILDE, Oscar, 1854-1900; STORY plots; HUMAN sexuality in literature; NATIONALISM in literature
- Publication
Dialogue (15749630), 2012, Vol 15, p21
- ISSN
1574-9630
- Publication type
Literary Criticism