Women looking at men looking at women

Meena Kandasamy is unfortunately unable to attend the festival. The program will go as planned, with Kristin Fridtun and Kari Jegerstedt.

Tamil Indian Meena Kandasamy and Norwegian Kristin Fridtun have examined translations of ancient classical works from their own parts of the world, that have several features in common: both are more than a thousand years old and both have erotic content. In both cases, the books have previously been translated by men.

What happens to these works when the male viewpoint is replaced by a female one?

Fridtun has compared translations of Håvamål and found among other things how, as an example, Billing’s maid becomes prettier and sillier in the Norwegian translation from Old Norse. Kandasamy has translated the two-thousand-year-old text Kamattu-p-pal from Tamil to English and discovered how for instance a word such as nirai – fulfilled – has been translated as ‘pure’ or ‘chastity’, or how people that have sex together become a married couple in the translation.

Kandasamy and Fridtun have a conversation with gender and literature researcher Kari Jegerstedt.