GRAMMATICAL GENDER AND THE POETICS OF UNTRANSLATABLE INTIMACY

Grammatical gender is usually treated in linguistics as a formal agreement system, a matter of noun class and concord with limited semantic content beyond a small residue of natural-gender nouns. This article argues that in poetic and other highly wrought literary registers, grammatical gender frequently ceases to be semantically inert and instead becomes a resource for a specific, difficult-to-translate kind of intimacy: an implied relationship, address, or affective coloring between speaker, addressee, and object that depends on the target language's own gender system and has no stable equivalent in languages that either lack grammatical gender or distribute it differently. Drawing on comparative examples from Romance, Slavic, and Germanic poetic traditions, and on the theoretical literature on linguistic relativity, poetic translation, and untranslatability, the article develops the concept of gender-mediated intimacy: affective or relational meaning that a poem generates through the gendered agreement patterns linking speaker, beloved, object, and abstraction, meaning that is structurally dependent on a grammatical system rather than merely decorated by it. The article reviews the linguistic-relativity literature bearing on whether grammatical gender shapes habitual conceptualization, and situates its argument as a claim about poetic effect rather than about cognition as such: even where gender's influence on ordinary thought is contested, its availability as a compositional resource in poetry is not. Through close comparative analysis of translation choices in a range of published literary translations across gendered and non-gendered target languages, the article shows how translators consistently face a forced choice between preserving semantic content and preserving the gendered relational structure that generated the poem's intimacy, and that this trade-off is rarely made visible to readers of the translation. The article concludes by considering what a translation practice more attentive to gender-mediated intimacy, rather than to gender as mere grammatical noise, might look like.