| Abstract | This project calls for and offers the beginnings of a new and substantially different translation of Aristotle's dissertation, the Rhetoric. My undertaking is neither to offer just another translation nor to invent one more "new rhetoric"; but it is to recover very old discourses that may predate Aristotle, means of communication that he intends to suppress. These are the discourses (1) of women, (2) of wordsmiths, and (3) of weavers of ideas from one mother tongue into another. In more contemporary terms, they are (1) feminisms, (2) rhetorics, and (3) translations.^The approaches that the project borrows from most are Jacqueline Jones Royster's "afrafeminism," Krista Ratcliffe's "rhetorical listening," and Kenneth Pike's "tagmemics." I have coined the phrase "feministic rhetorical translating" as a combination of feminist, rhetorical, and translational methods to expose Aristotle's suppressive aims.^Traditional translators of Aristotle's texts have been ostensibly faithful to Aristotle's authorial intention. Thus, classicists have brought into English the linguistic and philological aims of this writer of various treatises; philosophers have rendered into our language his epistemic and logical goals; and some rhetoricians have translated the Rhetoric as if Aristotle really intended to be "rhetorical" (assuming that his treatise is the definitive canonical statement on rhetoric and what it is to be rhetorical).^Likewise, while recognizing Aristotle's intentions as sexist, absolutist, and elitist (or phallogocentric), some feminist scholars ironically mirror phallogocentrism in their own absolute, gender-based opposition to his text. In contrast, a feminist rhetorical translating of Aristotle's central text on rhetoric demonstrates that Hellene discourse is womanly, is full of wordplay, and is richly translational even when Aristotle might intend it to be otherwise.^This project, then, refuses the limited choice of either (1) the reception of the Rhetoric on the author's own terms albeit as imagined by the translator or (2) the rejection of his work, a rejection as suppressive as Aristotle's. A feminist rhetorical translating, rather, embraces the agency of a translator who would recognize the prejudices of Aristotle and yet would render these biases from her own perspectives, in her own language, in order to rectify them by her own intentions. |
