The Translator in Limbo: Angela Carter’s “The Loves of Lady Purple” as a Metaphor of Translation

This article proposes a reading of Angela Carter’s short story “The Loves of Lady Purple,” often studied through feminist and psychoanalytic lenses, as a metaphor for the act of translation. Through the eerie symbiosis between the inarticulate marionette and the puppet master whose articulating fingers animate her, the paper investigates the interdependence between source and target languages. The puppet, lifeless yet suggestive of autonomy, becomes a simulacrum of the original text, while the puppet master performs the translator’s role, poised in a liminal space between the real and the semblance of the real. Drawing on Walter Benjamin’s concept of pure language, this article explores the marionette’s language beyond language as an echo of the utopian linguistic essence underlying all translation, an original language of grunt and bark that gestures toward the kinship of tongues. This study also examines the strange duet between the puppet and her master as a metaphor for George Steiner’s hermeneutic model of translation; this model offers a compelling framework for interpreting the relationship between the marionette and her manipulator. This article ultimately argues that “The Loves of Lady Purple” does not simply illustrate translation but rather enacts it, embodying the translator as a spectral figure who inhabits the no-man’s-land between presence and absence, voice and voicelessness, the living and the dead.