Gender performance in Alba Bouwer 's Afrikaans translation of the etiquette book Sybille: Sjarmante vriendin /Gender-performance in Alba Bouwer se vertaling van die etiketboek Sybille: Sjarmante vriendin

• Published in: Tydskrif vir geesteswetenskappe 2022-03, Vol.62 (1)
• Main Authors: Smit, Lizelle, Stander, Danie
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Analysis; Etiquette; Translating and interpreting
• ISSN: 0041-4751
• DOI: 10.17159/2224-7912/2022/v62n1a11

In this article we investigate the Afrikaans journalist and children 's book author Alba Bouwer 's Afrikaans translation of the anonymously published German etiquette book, Charmante Freundin: Sybille (1959), as Sybille: Sjarmante vriendin (1968). Mention of Bouwer's translation of Sybille has thus far been omitted in Afrikaans literature reference sources, a remarkable oversight given Bouwer 's magisterial canon position in Afrikaans literature and the general thoroughness that characterises sources on her writing. Furthermore, notable lacunae exist of analyses or discussions of the Afrikaans etiquette book genre. To date, Afrikaans texts in this genre have not been examined or analysed and neither has the genre as such been defined in relation to the cultural milieu of its Afrikaans readers. This article seeks to initiate a discussion of not only this unexamined genre, but also this particular neglected text and its significance regarding Bouwer 's oeuvre. International theorists of etiquette books stress the status thereof as a typically female-targeted genre preoccupied with the establishment of normative feminine values, and we thus read Sybille as a script advocating a standard (Western) hegemonic gender performance. We employ Judith Butler 's theories of gender performativity and gender performance to analyse Sybille's advice offered to her female readers, arguing that the speaker 's prescribed suggested female ideal concurs with normative hegemonic expectations of women in the socio-historical context in which it was translated. Similarly, her advice hinges, semantically and in general, on women never performing their gender in an excessive or demonstrative way that she describes as "too" much. We conduct a close reading of the text itself, scanning it for the rhetorical techniques employed, specifically with regard to the narrator 's seductive self-presentation and the manner in which she addresses and engages the model reader to generate a process of gendered subject formation. In this section we identify and discuss both Sybille's performed and performative dimensions as well as how these two distinct but interrelated concepts interact in the text and in its desired social outcome. By adopting a descriptive (as opposed to a prescriptive) translation theory lens, we focus on the translated text's position and function in the culture of the target language community in the late 1960s rather than on that of its original 1950s German production cont