Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and the borders of Romanian translations

1 Introductory remarks

Ever since the Romanian cultural sphere came into contact with the canons of western civilization, namely the second half of the nineteenth century, the latter perpetually managed to influence it in every possible aspect, linguistic, structural, thematic, etc., and the impact became even more perceptible through literary translations that somehow succeeded in transgressing their primary function by stirring the cultural, theoretical, and historical perspectives and making way for the concept of cultural translation, in perfect alignment to the new waves of anthropological shifts determined by globalization. And even if it struggled to normally develop through the almost 50-year period of oppressive communism, the field grew stronger and existed without discontinuance, at its own pace, even though in an atypical manner. The early 1990s translations were the fruit of incoherent translation policies imposed by the blossoming publishing industry that was driven only by mercantile purposes and so a range of what some might call ‘low genres -’ flooded the market.

The novelty of the post-communist period of reception is that along with the cheap novels and minor genres, the Romanian public also got acquainted with new genres such as dystopian or Canadian romance fiction. The reading public received with enthusiasm massive translations of Canadian postmodern authors like Margaret Atwood, Leonard Cohen, or Michael Ondaatje. In addition, a number of translations that saw the light of day in the inter-war and the Second World War years were being republished at the beginning of the 1990s. The easy access to the screenings of dystopian works has eased the reception progress and helped dystopian literature find a secure position in the Romanian polysystem.

2 Margaret Atwood’s vision and inspiration for The Handmaid’s Tale

Originally published in 1986, The Handmaid’s Tale was first introduced to the Romanian public in 1995, under the title Galaad 2195 (Gilead 2195) at Univers Publishing House, a choice that the editor probably thought would sound more appealing to the science fiction readers than its literal translation. The following publications however used literally translated titles: Povestirea cameristei in 2006 and Povestea slujitoarei in 2017.

Set in a future patriarchal misogynistic New England society, the novel tells the story of the handmaid called Offred (a strange name deriving from that of her male master that literally alludes to her appurtenance through the possessive form ‘of Fred’), and we soon find out that the normal order has been disrupted by a totalitarian, Christian theonomy that has dissolved the United States government. The plot is mainly concentrated on the exploration of the status of women and their struggle to regain their identity and ultimately their independence.

The author’s speculative fiction, as she prefers it to be called, in order to distance it from the invented facts of science fiction, is actually inspired by events that happened at some point in time in the world and that could still occur in the absence of vigilance at the human tendency to suppress freedoms:

‘What inspired The Handmaid’s Tale?’ I’ve often been asked. General observation, I might have said. Poking my nose into books. Reading the newspapers. World history. One of my rules was that I couldn’t put anything into the novel that human beings hadn’t actually done. I began the actual writing in West Berlin, in the spring of 1984. In 5 years, the Wall would topple and the Soviet Union would disintegrate, but I had no way of knowing that. I visited East Berlin at the time, as well as Poland and Czechoslovakia. I’d followed events in Romania – where women were forced by the ruling regime to have babies – and also in China, where they were forced not to. I’d been to Iran and traced the advent of the repression of women under the Ayatollahs (Atwood cited in Domville 2006).

The author’s writing technique is very often appreciated because of its intricate rendering of political, social, national, historic, and even environmental controversies; however, its distancing in time of the fictional realm from the contemporary world is the key factor that characterizes her futuristic, dystopian novels. By utilizing already existing circumstances and fast forwarding them into an imagined future, the author designs a genre-crossed narrative in which current social, scientific, and political events are twisted into possible catastrophic situations. For Atwood, the narratives represent means of exploration:

They can explore the consequences of new and proposed technologies in graphic ways, by showing them as fully operational. … They can explore the nature and limits of what it means to be human in graphic ways, by pushing the envelope as far as it will go. … They can explore the relationship of man to the universe, an exploration that often takes us in the direction of religion and can meld easily with mythology – an exploration that can happen within the conventions of realism only through conversations and soliloquies. … They can explore proposed changes in social organisation, by showing what they might actually be like for those living within them. Thus, the utopia and the dystopia which have proved over and over again that we have a better idea about how to make hell on earth than we do about how to make heaven. (Atwood 2022, 62)

Atwood also displays easiness in changing direction from satire and fantasy and crossing the boundary towards traditional realism. At a closer look, it can be observed that her earlier work presents an emphasis on internal borders (the setting moves between Canadian provinces, between urban and natural spaces and in the psychic spaces of her characters) whereas her later narratives present a more obvious tendency towards the exploration of transitional spaces in which national, gender, and personal identities are problematized and framed in the text through all kinds of discourses (about limits and borders, spaces and realms, insides, and outsides) that are meant to determine when and where one ends and the next begins, without getting contaminated.

Since the novel validates a wide range of identities, its own identity is not subordinated only to the text but is inter-textually connected to a plethora of various literary forms since it has been categorized as being dystopic science fiction, women’s writing, and Canadian literature alternating with texts belonging to parody, fantasy, literary criticism, or even journalistic writing.

When it comes to viewing The Handmaid’s Tale from a cultural perspective, one might be inclined to link it with theories of Marxism and feminism taking into consideration Atwood’s imagined society that has obviously had to suffer extreme changes in a short period of time and which proposes a reality in which the role and status of women have been altered from that of equality to men to a position in which they are valued but only because they are an essential element in the system of procreation, as ‘two-legged wombs’ but stripped of their rights, of their name, forced to dress in a sort of uniform and denied literacy.

One could even argue that the new world order described in The Handmaid’s Tale almost qualifies as a regular post-apocalyptic Atwoodian scenario that permanently crosses the faint threshold between the real and the imagined: “She reserves a fifth stage for some level of mystical transcendence, which she does not analyze, not necessarily because it is outside her experience, but because it is not possible to explain in words. When she does approach those airy spaces in the upper canopy of the psyche in her work, it is from a sense of earthly rootedness” (Fand 1995, 233).

As a consequence of its escalading popularity after the release of the HBO series in 2017, the novel has been translated into more than 40 languages and three times into Romanian (in 1995, 2006, and 2017). The power of language is evident even from the very title of the novel (handmaid: a personal maid or female servant, someone whose essential function is to serve or assist – Merriam-Webster Dictionary) even though the Romanian translations have proved to have their limitations at certain points. The 2006 Romanian title, Povestea cameristei, seems a little too far from the original sense since Offred is much more than a ‘chamber maid’, she represents the hope of the Gileadean society in the crisis of fertilization and is forced to serve (in Romanian, ‘a sluji’) without asking questions, so the 2017 variant, Povestea slujitoarei, renders the original meaning with much more accuracy.

3 The manipulative potential of language

Atwood takes advantage of the manipulative potential of language and transposes it into her imagined reality where freedom of speech is non-existent and language becomes an instrument of control. The official language of Gilead corrupts and warps the new order having the already set purpose of serving the needs of social authority. This change, and the extent of the power authorities have gained, is best portrayed in the discrepancy between Offred’s recollection of her old life and her current situation:

Luke and I used to walk together, sometimes, along these streets. We used to talk about buying a house like one of these, an old big house, fixing it up. We would have a garden and swings for the children. We would have children. Although we knew it wasn’t too likely we could ever afford it, it was something to talk about, a game for Sundays. Such freedom now seems almost weightless.

We turn the corner onto a main street, where there’s more traffic. Cars go by, black most of them, some gray and brown. There are other women with baskets, some in red, some in the dull green of the Marthas, some in the striped dresses, red and blue and green and cheap and skimpy, which mark the women of the poorer men. Econowives, they’re called. These women are not divided into functions. They have to do everything; if they can. Sometimes, there is a womanall in black, a widow. There used to be more of them, but they seem to be diminishing. You don’t see the Commanders’ Wives on the sidewalks, only in cars (Atwood 1986, 24).

Along with repression, which is one of the oldest and most primitive methods of controlling the masses in dictatorial systems, the Gileaden patriarchal government is proficient in using another more advanced, stealth, and efficient method of manipulation, namely the ideological discourse, governing gender and power roles, a domination device that has at its centre the linguistic system: “The author’s originality resides is her rhetorical virtuosity, and the mastery with which the satiric view shifts back and forth from amused detachment to moral indignation. Metalinguistic play with both polysemy and paronomasia are notoriously recurrent devices in The Handmaid’s Tale to critique the institutional linguistic practices serving to promote ideology” (Howells 2006, 123).

Language is also used by the propagandistic machine to romanticize the past, which strangely enough resembles our present times, and the text itself contains more than linguistic features; it encapsulates the way in which language systems frame thoughts. In ‘Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale: False Borders and Subtle Subversions’, three language models are identified: the Gilead (‘a fixed system dominated by empirical realism, rigid binary oppositions and implacable boundaries’, the narrator’s system (that ‘threatens to disrupt Gilead’s patriarchal power by a slippery poststructuralist refusal of fixity and truth’) and the academic rhetoric of the novel’s closing ‘Historical Notes’ (that ‘poses as an open, liberated discourse, but, in effect, in its insidious insistence on univocal representation, is a repetition of Gilead’).

The Gileadean disinformation structure also uses euphemisms to name the roles assigned to the population. Everyone they reject and would like to see gone is denoted by terms that are meant to annul them entirely, by just adding the prefix ‘un-’ to the notion; thus, feminists are categorized as ‘unwomen’ while children with malformations are called ‘unbabies’. Moreover, the majority of the names have religious or biblical echoes that are meant to reinforce the feeling of theocratic dictatorship: ‘Children of Ham’ makes reference to black-skinned nations in Genesis, the shops ‘Daily Bread’ (a line from the Lord’s Prayer), ‘Loaves and Fishes’ (alluding to Jesus Christ’s miracle described in Matthew 14: 17 of multiplying loaves of bread and fish to feed a hungry), and ‘All Flesh’ (warning in Isaiah 40: 6 that human life is fragile and transitory).

By using a patronymic name for each of the handmaids, the regime strips off the women of any remaining trace of self-identity and brands them as the possessions of their Commanders:

This woman has been my partner for two weeks. I don’t know what happened to the one before. On a certain day she simply wasn’t there anymore, and this one was there in her place. It isn’t the sort of thing you ask questions about, because the answers are not usually answers you want to know. Anyway there wouldn’t be an answer. This one is a little plumper than I am. Her eyes are brown. Her name is Ofglen, and that’s about all I know about her. She walks demurely, head down, red-gloved hands clasped in from, with short little steps like a trained pig’s, on its hind legs. During these walks she has never said anything that was not strictly orthodox, but then, neither have I. She may be a real believer, a Handmaid in more than name. I can’t take the risk. (Atwood 1986, 16)

After they have their names assigned, they become Offred, Ofglen, Ofwayne, Ofwarren, etc., and their identities have been erased. For example, the protagonist’s name can be assumed that comes from her Commander’s first name Fred and the preposition ‘of’ only emphasizes ownership. Translating their names into Romanian would have no logic since the wordplay would be impossible to capture in the target language so the translator must use an explanatory note in order for the readers to understand its importance and receive all the necessary information.

Language control affects communication which is already heavily restricted between handmaids. They are trained to stick to the indoctrinated phrases continually because of the elimination of certain words and the approval of only a few accepted terms. The handmaid’s linguistic field is drastically limited, and they can only use standard biblical greetings for their encounters: “Blessed be the fruit” (“Binecuvântat fie rodul”) with its corresponding response “May the Lord open” (“Să dea Domnul”), as well as the agreement “Praised be” (“Fie lăudat”) with its designated counterpart “Under His Eye” (“Sub ochii lui”). The specific expressions everyone uses that represent the church-state regime have the role of displaying the extension of the surveillance machinery that has alienated people and transformed them into robots that are constantly afraid of showing emotion:

A shape, red with white wings around the face, a shape like mine, a nondescript woman in red carrying a basket, comes along the brick sidewalk towards me. She reaches me, and we peer at each other’s faces, looking down the white tunnels of cloth that enclose us. She is the right one.

“Blessed be the fruit,” she says to me, the accepted greeting among us.

“May the Lord open,” I answer the accepted response. (Atwood 1986, 15)

Pe trotuarul roșu vine spre mine o arătare în roșu, cu aripi albe în jurul feței, o arătare întocmai ca mine, o femeie în roșu greu de definit, cu un coș pe braț. Ajunge în dreptul meu și ne uităm intens una la alta, scrutând chipul celeilalte aflat la capătul tunelului de pânză ce-l înconjoară. E persoana care trebuie.

— Binecuvântat fie rodul, îmi recită ea salutul nostru reglementar.

— Să dea Dumnezeu, dau eu răspunsul reglementar.

(Povestea Cameristei 2006, 23)

O siluetă roșie cu aripi albe, asemenea mie, o femeie îmbrăcată în roșu, fără nicio trăsătură care s-o individualizeze, vine către mine pe trotuarul de cărămidă, ducând un coș. Ajunge la mine și ne cercetăm una alteia chipurile, privind în jos prin tunelurile albe de pânză care ne înconjoară. Ea este persoana potrivită.

— Binecuvântat fie rodul! Îmi spune ea, folosind salutul nostru convențional.

— Să dea Domnul! îi ofer, la rândul meu, răspunsul meu convențional.

(Povestea Slujitoarei 2017, 29)

Words that are attributed different meanings than their standard definition and word-formation devices work as means of introducing some odd traditions that might be shocking for the readers but are perceived as normal occurrences by the inhabitants of Gilead. Thus, the sex ceremony is described as being ‘sacred’ and not as a nonconsensual act, ‘salvaging’ is devoid of its literal meaning, that of ‘saving’, and in Gilead, it stands for the killing of those disobeying the laws, etc. ‘Particicutions’ is a compound noun from ‘participation’, and ‘execution’ while ‘Prayvaganzas’ blends the meaning of two different words, ‘pray’ and ‘extravaganza’, standing for the mandatory public formal ceremonies typically attended by the women of Gilead – Aunts, Marthas, Handmaids, Econowives and the Wives and their daughters – where people gather to celebrate arranged marriages. Obviously, the meaning of the word ‘Prayvaganza’ is rather difficult to convey in Romanian since the literal translation of the two components of the word, ‘rugăciune’ and ‘extravaganță’, have a different signification than in the source language so, through the choice of the translator ‘Ceremonia de Rugăciuni a Femeilor’, it is given a general connotation.

Even if the dynamic between the handmaids and the heads of the households should have been restricted to the monthly ceremony in which they tried to impregnate them, our protagonist manages somehow to befriend the Commander as she spends time alone with him even if it is against the rules. Curious about the English translation of a phrase she had discovered written in the cupboard in her room, probably by her predecessor, and wanting to connect and understand what she went through, Offred asks him, only to discover that the woman who had a tragic ending could not have known the motto herself and she had probably heard it from him:

‘Tell me’, he says. Distanced, but more alert, or am I imagining it?

“Nolite te bastardes carborundorum” I say […]

“But what did it mean?” I say, “Which?” he says. “Oh. It meant, ‘Don’t let the bastards grind you down.’ I guess we thought we were pretty smart, back then.” I force a smile, but it’s all before me now. I can see why she wrote that, on the wall of the cupboard, but I also see that she must have learned it here, in this room. Where else? She was never a schoolboy. With him, during some previous period of boyhood reminiscence, of confidences exchanged. I have not been the first then. To enter his silence, play children’s word games with him. (Atwood 1986, 166–9)

The 2017 version captures the evolution of the relationship between the two and keeps the same style and sentence structure as Atwood’s text. The English translation of the Latin phrase, “Don’t let the bastards grind you down,” which transmits the message be strong, do not let them bring you down, is put into Romanian as “Nu-i lăsa pe nemernici să te doboare” and manages to transmit the empowering essence of the phrase:

— Ia spune-mi, zice el.

E detașat, dar mai prudent – sau doar mi se pare mie?

— Nolite te bastardes carborundorum, zic eu. […]

— Dar ce înseamnă? Întreb eu.

— Care? Zice el. A, însemna: “Nu-i lăsa pe nemernici să te doboare.” Pe vremea aia aveam impresia că suntem deștepți, presupun. Mă silesc să zâmbesc, dar acum înțeleg totul. Îmi dau seama de ce a scris ea asta pe peretele dulapului, dar îmi dau seama și că trebuie să fi aflat expresia aceea aici, în camera asta. Unde altundeva? N-a fost niciodată băiat de școală. A aflat-o stând alături de el, când rememora lucruri din copilăria lui, când își făceau confidențe. Deci n-am fost prima care a pătruns în tăcerea lui și a jucat jocuri de cuvinte pentru copii. (Atwood 2017, 244, 247)

The 2006 translation also resembles the target language in terms of style and message but resorts to a more complex meaning for the verb ‘to grind’, as it uses a Romanian verb that is closer to war vocabulary, ‘a nimici’ with the sense of ‘to destroy’, and in this way, it distances from the original text, transmitting a more powerful and stronger message than intended:

Spune-mi-o, continua el. Detașat, dar parcă mai alert, sau mi se pare mie?

— Nolite te bastardes carborundorum, zic eu […]

— Dar ce însemna? întreb eu.

— Care din ele? zice el. Oh, însemna: Nu-i lăsa pe nemernici să te nimicească. Cred că ne socoteam foarte isteți pe atunci. Mă forțez să zâmbesc, dar acum văd totul. Înțeleg de ce a scris ea inscripția pe peretele dulapului, dar înțeleg și că a învățat-o aici, în camera asta. Unde altundeva? Ea n-a fost niciodată școlar. A învățat-o de la el, în altă perioadă de amintiri din copilărie, când și-au făcut confidențe unul altuia. Deci n-am fost eu prima care a pătruns în tăcerea lui, care a jucat jocuri lingvistice pentru copii cu el. (Atwood 2006, 189–91)

Although Atwood predominantly portrays male characters as the most vicious and dangerous, she pays particular attention to the female villain of the story, Aunt Lydia, whom she describes from Offred’s point of view as dominant, cruel, indoctrinated and as the person who forces the handmaids into submission:

They made mistakes, says Aunt Lydia. We don’t intend to repeat them. Her voice is pious, condescending, the voice of those whose duty it is to tell us unpleasant things for our own good. I would like to strangle her. I shove this thought away almost as soon as I think it. A thing is valued, she says, only if it is rare and hard to get. We want you to be valued, girls. She is rich in pauses, which she savours in her mouth. Think of yourselves as pearls. We, sitting in our rows, eyes down, we make her salivate morally. We are hers to define, we must suffer her adjectives. I think about pearls. Pearls are congealed oyster spit.

This is what I will tell Moira, later; if I can.

All of us here will lick you into shape, says Aunt Lydia, with satisfied good cheer. (Atwood 1986, 100)

In the 2006 Romanian translation the expression used by Aunt Lydia to make the handmaids understand the importance of the training period they have to go through before entering the barren families and help them have children – ‘All of us here will lick you into shape’ – is rendered through the word-for-word method, with reference to how all the Aunts will transform the fertile women, similar to how pearls come into shape. However, the word-for-word translation proves inefficient here as “Noi toate de aici o să vă lingem până veți căpăta forma dorită” not only sounds strange in the target language but also fails to transmit the original message:

Ei au făcut greșeli, zice Mătușa Lydia. Noi nu intenționăm să repetăm greșelile lor. Are un ton pios, condescendent, tonul celor a căror datorie este să ne spună lucruri neplăcute spre binele nostru. Aș vrea s-o strâng de ă gât. Alung gândul aproape imediat ce mi-a venit.

Un lucru e apreciat, zice ea, numai dacă e rar și greu de obținut. Vrem să fiți apreciate, fetelor. Face pauze din abundență, parcă savurându-le gustativ. Socotiți-vă ca niște perle. Așezate în șiruri, cu ochii în jos, o facem să saliveze din punct de vedere moral. Suntem obiectele ei pe care vrea să le definească, trebuie să-i suportăm adjectivele

Mă gândesc la perle. Perlele sunt scuipat de scoică solidificat. O să-i spun asta Moirei, mai târziu; dacă o să pot.

Noi toate de aici o să vă lingem până veți căpăta forma dorită, zice Mătușa Lydia, bine dispusă și satisfăcută. (Atwood 2006, 115)

On the other hand, the 2017 Romanian translation uses adaptation for the same expression and takes into consideration the process through which a pearl comes into shape while changing the connotation so that it sounds more natural; the verb ‘a șlefui’ is used to transmit the idea that just like pearls, the women’ behavior and attitude will be polished into submission:

Au făcut greșeli pe care noi nu intenționăm să le repetăm greșelile. Are un glas pios, condescendent, glasul celor a căror datorie este să ne spună lucruri neplăcute, spre binele nostru. Îmi vine s-o strâng de ă gât. Alung gândul ăsta aproape imediat ce-mi vine în minte.

Un lucru e considerat valoros doar dacă e rar și greu de obținut. Noi vrem să fiți prețuite, fetelor. Face o mulțime de pauze, parcă le savurează ca și cum ar gusta ceva bun. Gândiți-vă la voi ca la niște perle. Iar noi, cum stăm așezate în șirurile de bănci, cu ochii aplecați, îi producem o salivație morală. Ea este cea care trebuie să ne definească, iar noi trebuie să-i suportăm adjectivele

Mă gândesc la perle. Perlele sunt saliva solidificată a stridiei. Asta am să-i spun Moirei mai încolo; dacă o să pot.

Noi, toate cele de aici, o să vă șlefuim, zice Mătușa Lydia, binedispusă și satisfăcută. (Atwood 2017, 151)

4 Concluding remarks

Just like the author herself confessed in a number of essays and interviews, “The Republic of Gilead is built on a foundation of the 17th-century Puritan roots that have always lain beneath the America we thought we knew” and the ideology of the American New Right of the 1980s. Besides having a very complex structural construction, the novel abounds in the use of toponyms, notional categories, and biblical proper names and references. The labyrinth-like plot is a succession of the protagonist’s stream of consciousness that gradually puts together the series of unfortunate events that led to the installment of the oppressive fundamentalist social order that dominates society. Ultimately, Atwood’s goal is to reveal to the reading public new outlooks for the post-capitalist future by means of satire and science-fiction or speculative fiction, as the author likes to call it, and this is the reason behind the design of the regular succession of the present and past events climaxing with an ending that signifies a decisive juncture in the characters’ force to chose their own fate. There is also a dual employment of light and darkness through the power of words and the theory that “the self inscribes life on the page of the story transforming its white sterility, like that of a Canadian winter, into survival by taking root in the dark earth underneath. Atwood’s idea of wholeness seems to be not a blank page of consciousness like a ‘vegetable’ in primordial union with nature, but the inscribed human page, an integration between the words that fragment us and the spaces between them.” (Fand 1995, 16)

In front of the accusations that her writing style is overwhelmed by pessimism, she describes her work as “an act of faith, hope, and charity because it cannot deny that the world consists of every place from Heaven to Hell… It is the duty of the writer not to turn down a visit to any of them if it’s offered. Some… only live in a couple of these places, but nobody lives in just one… Writing is an act of faith that someone is listening, hope that things will be better, and charity to write without flinching or bitterness” (Atwood 1982, 349). Her characters’ survival and the slight change in their situations, even though most of the times they are yet again trapped in similar positions and barely escape the near-death circumstances, stands as evidence for the ray of hope that Atwood implies in her tales.

Both speculative fiction and trauma theory break the thresholds between the fantastic and the real: “The future as imagined in dystopian speculative fiction must be simultaneously recognizable and unrecognizable, both like and not-like the present. In order to grasp the caution offered by the tale, we must see the imagined future in our actual present and also recognize the difference between now and the future as imagined. Thus, the reader of such fiction must sustain a kind of double consciousness with respect both to the fictionality of the world portrayed and to its potential as our own world’s future” (Snyder 2011, 470). Atwood’s narratives dictate the pace with which time passes and the speed with which events occur and this delay is, according to trauma theorists, both a coping mechanism and evidence that disturbing emotions are still present and the trauma is “not experienced as a mere repression or defense, but as a temporal delay that carries the individual beyond the shock of the first moment. The trauma is a repeated suffering of the event, but it is also a continual leaving of its site” (Caruth 1995, 10).