“Even when those in power try to silence them, female characters craft clever ways of recovering new and creative methods of bearing witness,” Stephanie McCarter said.
On April 3, McCarter spoke for the Humanities Studio’s Connections series about restoring female agency and voice in literary translation. McCarter is a classics professor at the University of the South in Sewanee and the author of several books, most recently “Women in Power: Classical Myths and Stories from the Amazons to Cleopatra.”
She is most well-known for being the first woman in 60 years to fully translate Ovid’s “Metamorphoses,” an 8 A.D. Latin epic poem about mythology.
Kevin Dettmar, professor of English and director of the Humanities Studio, considers McCarter’s work to be a contemporary rejuvenation of “Metamorphoses.”
“Within Ovid’s stories, we get tales of, to quote Dr. McCarter, ‘failed connections, physical connections, textual connections, visual connections,’” Dettmar said. “[Her] translation does an amazing job of bringing these 2000-plus-year-old stories back to life with fresh language that makes the stories feel present.”
McCarter’s approach to “Metamorphoses” draws from film theorist Laura Mulvey’s theory of the male and female gaze, from her seminal 1975 essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Mulvey defines the male gaze as the looker having an active, masculine and dominating role, while the object of the gaze is sexualized and passive.
McCarter formulates her feminist, female spectator lens on “Metamorphoses” using this theory.
“A female spectator can place herself as an observer of the whole process that takes place between male gaze and visual female visual object,” McCarter said. “These female spectators, in turn, can become narrators of the violence they have seen.”
Attendee Emrys King PO ’25 found this perspective to be particularly thought-provoking.
“I have some experience with translation theory, and it was refreshing to hear someone say that a rhetorical lens through which you want to analyze the text can be directly a part of the way that you translate it. I think that perspective is missing from a lot of translations,” King said.
McCarter’s first example of using this gaze was in translating the story of Callisto, a nymph and devotee of the goddess Diana who is raped by the god Jupiter. Callisto attempts to hide her loss of virginity from Diana, but her fellow nymphs realize what has happened through the “mille notis,” or 1000 marks, on her body.
“[Callisto’s] body itself … threatens to reveal the crime throughout the story… It is those with a discerning female gaze, one based in their own experiences of the world, who can interpret correctly,” McCarter said.
McCarter notes that sexual violence, no matter how much one denies it, transforms the body. With regard to the translation of “mille notis,” McCarter chooses to view this phrase both literally and metaphorically.
“Her body is therefore much like a text that does not lend itself to easy intelligibility and relies upon the witnessing eyes of knowing others,” McCarter said.
McCarter carefully chose words that do not romanticize sexual violence and avoided introducing sexualized language that is absent from the original text, which is not usually the case in canonical translations by people like Allen Mandelbaum and David Raeburn.
Attendee Clara Meyers PO ’25 found that the lecture completely changed her perspective on literary translation.
“I didn’t realize how wrong other translations were, and how much translators have historically inserted their own biases into the text, and just how vastly that changes the meaning of the work,” Meyers said.
Following an explanation of her approach to translation, McCarter presented a close reading of the myth of Apollo and Daphne. As Apollo chases Daphne, attempting to rape her, she runs toward the river and asks her father, the river god, to protect her. He turns her into a laurel tree.
“Her body is therefore much like a text that does not lend itself to easy intelligibility and relies upon the witnessing eyes of knowing others.”
In popular translations, translators use adjectives that objectify Daphne and overemphasize her beauty, creating a male gaze.
“Her story is about the danger of being viewed solely as a body and the dehumanizing violence of [this] … Translators objectify Daphne while she is a person, [but] they personify her once she becomes an object,” McCarter said.
In her translation, McCarter protects Daphne’s agency. Near the end of the story, when Daphne is turning into a tree, most canonical interpretations translate “ora” as face or head — “Her face was lost in the canopy,” for example. McCarter chooses to translate this word as mouth — “The tree top takes her mouth.”
This choice allows the reader to be a witness to Daphne’s objectification by the male gaze, emphasizing the violence of losing one’s voice.
“‘Face’ and ‘head’ focused us on the experience of seeing Daphne as if we were Apollo, whereas ‘mouth’ suggests a function she has lost. It is this loss of voice that is the most psychologically devastating for the transformed [women] throughout the epic,” McCarter said.
While these small differences in word choice may seem trivial, they are critical to reimagining narratives under a female spectator lens.