Teaching and Translating Taboo: Reflections from a Critical-Thinking Community
Translating & Teaching Taboo is an interdisciplinary colloquium that explores the implications of children and students engaging with erotic material in the teaching environment. Whether in the ancient world or in contemporary classrooms, we wanted to ask why—and how—sexually-charged canonical works interact with translation as well as with the particular needs and objectives of the pedagogical setting. The aims of our workshops were to bring our participants’ respective disciplines to bear on the over-arching inquiry outlined above, while also exploring the cultural specificities and approaches that differentiate how erotic/”taboo” material might be handled in very different geographic, cultural and temporal contexts.
The end product of our workshops has been an open-access annotated bibliography. This reading list is aimed at scholars writing in, but not necessarily working from materials in, English, whether they are just beginning their enquiry into this area or are coming from a place of expertise. Each source’s annotation indicates (sometimes in quite straightforward terms!) what its relevance might be, as well as in some cases flagging controversial or contested findings. We hope this will be a useful resource for our own future projects, as well as those of other scholars who find themselves working and/or teaching at the intersections of these fields.
Our work is ongoing, and no reading list could possibly be comprehensive. Consequently, this is a living document, which we hope to add to and continue to refine over time. We welcome new entries, suggestions, or further context. Please do email us at lucy.fleming@new.ox.ac.uk or christie.carr@wolfson.ox.ac.uk with any feedback or additions.
Below, five of the participants in our workshops have contributed a brief reflection on our discussions.
Rowan Anderson (Trinity College, Oxford)
Before participating in the workshop series, I had thought a lot about how taboo texts have been taught in an abstract sense, but hadn’t really considered how they functioned as objects within a classroom. One instance that shed light on this was Christie’s example of Sumerian scholars using bite marks on a clay writing tablet in order to assess that the tablet’s writer was about 12 years old: it brings the idea of the student to life in a way that might be overlooked in theoretical work. [An image of this tablet, excavated in Nippur, can be seen above.]
Another example is a student’s copy of Catullus, in an edition that has omitted the English translation of Catullus XVI. Famously, Catullus XVI is a poem describing shocking sexual violence, providing only the original Latin; this was a common technique for avoiding taboo content in modern editions of Classical texts, as it assumes that the only reader able to decode the original text would be well-educated enough to view the mature content. However, in this particular copy, a student has provided their own translation in scrawled blue ink, adding the helpful annotation ‘they didn’t translate this part’. Examples like this have been helpful in thinking through my own research, in which I study the interaction between censorship and translation, as it shows that the printed translation doesn’t necessarily have final say on how a student reads the text, or how a text exists in the world.
Christie Carr (Wolfson College, Oxford)
My hopes coming into the workshops were to find examples from other disciplines that could frame how to approach the “taboo” topic of erotic material in the pedagogical environment. These questions were based on my work on Sumerian literary texts from the Old Babylonian period (2000-1600BC), which often feature erotic and sexual imagery, and whose likely context is the “scribal school” where young scribes learnt how to write in Sumerian by copying literary material.
The most significant outcomes of the workshops for me have been the way our different texts and contexts have shed light on how we define “the child” and “eroticism”. We have often addressed the difficulty of categorising “the child” and “the student”, highlighting constructions of childhood as a state of innocence, purity and “deferred sexuality”. This has made me reflect on our modern assumptions and anxieties about sexuality in the classroom, and how the creation of the school in Western society actually forced a reconceptualisation of “the child” that was to be kept separate from the “adult”. Attempting to theoretically pin down a definition of “eroticism” throughout the workshops, and whether it is always taboo, has provoked much contemplation about how the erotic is consumed differently depending on age/experience, and when and to whom the erotic is inappropriate.
Lucy Fleming (New College, Oxford)
Our discussions as part of the Teaching Taboo workshop series were illuminating in a variety of areas, but for me one of the most valuable was the opportunity to reach across disciplinary boundaries. My field, Anglophone children’s literature, has historically leaned towards universalising statements like those of Philippe Ariès, who famously wrote that “[I]n medieval society the idea of childhood did not exist” (Centuries of Childhood, 124). Children’s literature in general is a discipline that has depended in large part on establishing its own novelty: the idea that even if childhood existed in premodern times, that somehow a literature “for children” did not exist; or that the modern idea of the child is unique in some way. While each of these statements can be unpacked much further, what was fascinating and incredibly useful about our discussions during these workshops was the chance to stretch out the timeline and to challenge each of these beliefs with a diversity of cross-cultural examples.
I’ve found myself reflecting a lot on Ariès during the course of this year – what his study gets wrong, of course, but also what he gets right: what a leap it is to try to think about ‘the child’ not as a cultural universal, but as a concept rooted in time, language, culture, and place. Childhood did exist in the European medieval period – but it did not necessarily take the same shape that it does in the England of today, or for that matter, the cities of ancient Sumer. Neither does the idea of ‘the erotic’ or even ‘taboo’. I loved that our discussions could range from a twentieth-century sex manual to a multi-millennium-old incantation to a graphic novel of Proust.
Although we didn’t come near to answering all of our questions, being able to ask and explore them in this cross-disciplinary environment was enormously valuable. This came to the fore in our final meeting, when we each brought a ‘never-before-seen' example to the group of a text, image, or piece of media to which we could apply our new framework of questions. We considered, among other things, the song “Brochan Lom,” which Rowan had learnt in primary school in Scotland – but which is essentially a long analogy about ejaculation (“thin porridge”). We ended up asking: Who is “in” on the joke? Why does that matter? If part of ‘growing up’ in a certain society means ‘getting in’ on the joke, what does that mean for the idea of ‘age’, which we found so poorly matches up with the fluid and polysemous idea of the ‘child’?
Julyan Oldham (Magdalen College, Oxford)
This bibliography provides an overview of studies of ‘the child’. Among other areas, we cite research into the age of consent; the queer child; children in archaeology; temporality and the child; and the child reader. In looking at research across time, space, form and language, our bibliography invites scholars to question the concept of ‘the child’. What race, gender, sexuality or age is imposed on this abstract figure? Do we assume, and even hope, that a child is passive in the face of eroticism, or can a child be aware of – and perhaps participate in – erotic or sexual dynamics?
Such questions feed into my work on early twentieth-century virginity. Virginity and childhood share social expectations of innocence and immaturity; sexuality is deferred but considered inevitable (see citations on compulsory sexuality). This project has helped me to unpack assumptions about who a child is and how children relate to sexuality. For instance, the 1909 educational pamphlet Youth and Sex advocates prolonging adolescence up to the age of 25. The reasoning here is that ‘children’ may be protected from (external and internal) sexual forces, while ‘adults’ may not. Our bibliography problematises and enables the deconstruction of statements like this.
William Skelton (Wolfson College, Oxford)
When I first heard about this workshop, I was initially sceptical as to what insights it could provide for my work. The notion of ‘taboo’ is culturally specific, and I feared interpretations might fall into the trap of Orientalist exceptionalism. My research area of Ancient Near Eastern medical and magical literature from the late Bronze-early Iron Age (ca. 1200-600BCE) is already highly distinctive from many other comparable disciplines. Additionally, the pedagogic environment is rapidly changing and is generally poorly understood in antiquity. My concerns were thankfully dispelled quickly. The thought-provoking discussions and presentations of sources caused me to reflect on the delineations of ‘the taboo’, and by extension how societies attempted to circumvent or circumlocute taboo topics in an educational context.
What struck me in particular was the flexibility of the approach to a given text: to avoid violating a taboo, great swathes of nuance or significance could be altered or even erased to make the subject palatable for the perceived audience. Moreover, this audience, usually ‘the children’, is a fluid category, with diverse social groups being designated as unfit or unsuited to engaging with uncensored material. By contrast, in the incantations and formulae of ancient Assyrian and Babylonian scribal training, graphic depictions of sex, violence and criminal behaviour were in theory accessible to quite young audiences of students. However, the intersections of class, gender and familial connection greatly narrowed who would be permitted to engage with these texts in reality. The use of obscure terminology and abstruse metaphor also distanced potential listeners (these texts were as much for performance as for study) from meanings deemed too esoteric or harmful. Seeing similar techniques deployed in substantially different contexts, such as the censoring of queer undertones in early modern literature or the Bowdlerising of ‘children’s versions’ of folktales and literary classics made me consider the competing reasons to want to present a given text to an audience, even in spite of its transgressive themes.
In these cases, the ideology of what a text represents can often eclipse the text itself: Shakespeare and Chaucer are deemed important enough to the identity of ‘English’ literature and culture that they must be taught to children, in spite of the sex, violence and prejudice that in our culture requires censorship. Similarly, the aetiologies and beliefs articulated in ‘canonical’ ancient literature must have been important enough to justify children of those societies encountering their infohazardous content.
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We’d like to thank all of our colleagues at TORCH who helped make this workshop series possible – in particular, Sarah Clay, Nikki Carter, and Krisztina Lugosi. We’ll certainly be continuing these conversations, and it was a real pleasure to be able to get them started with TORCH’s help!
