Translating gender ambiguity in narrative: Jeanette Winterson’s Written on the Body

Starting from various definitions of the term ‘gender’ in both grammatical and natural terms, we aim to show the particular difficulties related to the translation of grammatical gender when gender markers operate differently in the languages paired in translation (in our case English and Italian). We do this by examining a literary text by Jeanette Winterson in which the natural gender ambiguity of the protagonist is made possible in the original by the use of first-person narration, while the translator has to contend with the fact that Italian grammar makes gender marking obligatory, risking to disambiguate the sex of the narrator.