ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that translators can adopt three stances when faced with the haunting presence of queerness in literary texts: the misrecognizing translation, the minoritizing translation, and the queering translation. It distinguishes between three modes of translating queer literary texts. Whereas the misrecognizing translation simply ignores and/or conceals the queer dimension of a text, the minoritizing translation reduces the complexity of the web of connotations and the multilayered nature of queerness to a simple game of denotations and equivalences—a strategy favored by identity politics. Respecting the queer meaning potential of a text should therefore be a central focus of queering translations, as this practice is instrumental to undoing the strategic erasures or assimilations of misrecognizing or minoritizing translations. Minoritizing translations, therefore, could be said to be primarily interested in denotation, that is, in finding strict equivalences between one word and another, even if the text's queerness may suffer in this process.
