Can we translate ambiguity?

Winterson is a postmodern feminist writer who, in her novels, seeks to deconstruct the dominant patriarchal discourse to consciously and deliberately subvert the authority of patriarchal society. Her novels focus on how gender and gender relations are constructed and are aimed at subverting the traditional gender roles by introducing characters whose gender identity is either unknown or ambiguous as well as characters who are, to some extent, marginalised because of their sexual orientation or grotesque bodies. In Written on the Body, in particular, Winterson manipulates gender and gender roles to the extreme through an ungendered narrator. Her language manipulation is cleverly achieved in her novel, but what happens when translators are faced with this kind of manipulation? Can they easily find a way to maintain such ambiguity in their translated versions? Does it matter whether the source text (ST) ambiguity is lost in the target text (TT)? The aim of this paper is to examine the Italian translation of the narrator’s ambiguous gendered identity in Winterson’s novel Written on the Body to determine whether the sense and degree of gender ambiguity is maintained in the TT.