ABSTRACT
Jacqueline Risset, the French poet and translator of Dante, has described the translator as both midwife and mother. As midwife, the translator delivers the foreign speech from its possibilities in the other speech. The construction of a ‘Holy Trinity’ of French feminist theory not only blurs or defaces what the writers effectively do but it says a great deal about the needs from which it stems. The need to dialogue with positions which, being foreign, inherit the left-wing prestige of theory and thus make it possible to challenge the more interesting, theory-minded element of the Anglo-Saxon establishment. Toril Moi’s influential Sexual/Textual Politics is more sophisticated than the Ruthven, better informed, and generally conducts its arguments at a higher, more mobile and inventive level.
