Bearing witness to sexuality and voluptuousness, pornographic literature has travelled to the four corners of the world, including Babel, the epitome of translation. By crossing – and often transgressing – multiple cultural boundaries, it has been translated and adapted. Yet this transcultural journey raises a thorny question: how can we ‘traduire pour faire jouir’ (Boulanger, 2013)? How do you translate the transgressive poetics of pornographic literature? Translating the pornographic inevitably means engaging with the dominant discourse and shifting representations of sex, gender, sexuality, bodies and identities. Hence, of course, that the translation of the pornographic requires particular attention to the target language and culture. If the translation is supposed to reflect an “equivalent” sexual imagination, it prompts us to question the ways in which cultures shape what is perceived as erotic or even pornographic. Lexical choices and the semantic field employed in the translation therefore play a crucial role in reconstructing the erotic nature of the text. Another question is the relationship between translation and the double reading of pornographic literature: depending on the applied translation strategies and the accompanying peritextual apparatus, the translation may favour a literary or, on the contrary, an aphrodisiac reading. Building on the ideas of Toury (1995), how does the acceptability of pornographic translation adjust to what the target culture deems adequate?

Therefore, echoing Kaminski (2018), we might ask whether this cultural and ideological intertwining might not cause pornographic translation to slide into a form of pornographic adaptation. Indeed, adapting, circulating and publishing pornographic texts in translation, and thus texts with a strong transgressive charge, sometimes requires the implementation of innovative strategies to recontextualise the work in the target culture: to what extent do paratexts reveal positions taken within the societal and ideological debates on pornographic literature? An attentiveness to the reception of these translated texts may reveal why we translate texts that we tend to conceal. If this literature is, by its very nature, transgressive, could it not be argued that translating is in itself a transgressive act?

In the wake of these reflections, contributors are encouraged to rethink translations of pornographic literature in terms of its double reading, to consider these translated texts from a philosophical perspective, to interrogate the ways in which translation reformulates or reconfigures notions of the pornographic, the obscene and sexuality across cultural boundaries, and to reconsider the impact of the sexualisation of culture on literary and translational production. Although this conference’s working languages will be French and English, we welcome case studies from any language combination, from any historical period, as well as theoretical or methodological submissions.