ABSTRACT
In Spanish, adjectives, pronouns, nouns and participles are gendered. This grammatical gender is crucial in transgender memoirs where the author uses language to express a shifting gender identity. Catalina de Erauso, who was also known as “The Lieutenant Nun,” does just this, using both masculine and feminine gender markers in hir seventeenth-century Spanish memoir. Michele Stepto, who translated the memoir in 1996, believes these switches cannot be translated into English, that they are an “insurmountable” problem for the translator. This chapter argues against such a concession to linguistic untranslatability, showing that Erauso’s switches can be translated through the use of an innovative “gendered font.” Going beyond seeing shifting gender as simply a linguistic problem, and simultaneously dismissing cultural untranslatabilty, this chapter also shows that early-modern gender identity can be translated for a twenty-first-century readership using the palimpsest. Erauso’s text shows that all gender is in some way queer and all texts are both translatable and untranslatable, and a palimpsestuous translation expresses both sexual and textual undecidability.
