Retranslating Fictional Gender Dissidence into Spanish: The Case of Ursula K. Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness

Abstract

Dissident gender identities are more readily represented in English than in Romance languages such as Spanish, where gender inflection is mandatory and binary. This poses significant challenges for the equitable translation of non-binary identities within the English-Spanish language pair, as adherence to grammatical norms may result in erasure. These difficulties are compounded by the Real Academia Española’s refusal to recognize the increasingly widespread use of the -e morpheme as a non-binary grammatical marker. The problem intensifies when translating multiple dissident identities: Spanish offers only this relatively established neutral alternative, while English allows a broader range of pronouns and identity markers. These challenges are especially evident in the translation of Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness (1969), which depicts the planet Gethen, inhabited by humans without fixed sexual characteristics outside periods of kemmer. Gethenian society lacks gender roles, and the protagonist’s struggle to interpret this reality underscores the novel’s social critique. This paper analyzes the 1973 Spanish translation of the novel, examining its handling of gender dissidence and proposing alternative strategies to recover nuances lost in translation.