| An examination of ancient myths, literatures, and feminist and psychoanalytic theories of the body, this thesis examines how the conventions of narrative creation in the West have been structured by the taboos that surround man's mediation of linguistic space and divine intention. Suggesting that anxiety surrounding the process and product of translation has long displaced a fundamental prohibition of human and bodily agency in all narrative creation, I attempt to make visible a translating body within a tradition where it has long been occupationally bound to erase itself in deference to the text's Author. This thesis, therefore, sharply shifts the focus on translation from the fidelity of its product to the intricacies of its process, largely unknown and unexamined by translation discourse. Hoping to renew interest in the vulnerability of the most basic of language laws in their crossing---that is, in their translation---from one body to another, this thesis investigates the physical and mental processes of the translator as the site at which our own narrative conventions and laws for creation find themselves uniquely exposed. Until the intricacies of the translating process are as much an object of study as the fidelity of its product, the potential contribution that the process of translation may yield to our understanding of language taboos and our assumptions about the origins of narrative remains untapped. |
