In « Withholding the Name, Translating Gender in Cather’s ‘On the Gulls’ Road’ » (2000), Judith Butler identifies Cather’s nameless and genderless narrator as a figure of the translator and as what she calls « translative movement », relying in particular on Walter Benjamin’s vision of translation such as articulated in « The Task of the Translator », while pointing out Sarah Orne Jewett’s reductive reading of Cather’s story as a lesbian tale in disguise, as the translation of a narrative of homosexual love into a more conventional one. I argue that, while border crossing may be seen as a central motif in Cather’s story – primarily as the narrative of a journey between Europe and America and as staging a genderless (Butler) or cross-gendered (Jewett) narrator –, its subtitle, « The Ambassador’s Story », allows for its interpretation as an early example of « transfiction ». Meanwhile, it will be useful to read Butler’s 2000 article in the light of her other major contribution on translation issues, a 2004 article entitled « Betrayal’s Felicity » – in which she offers a reading of Barbara Johnson’s Mother Tongues, itself in part a reading of De Man as reader of Benjamin – as the latter further uncovers the vertiginous sense of suspended identity that possibly any account of translation, be it fictional or not, entails.< Leer menos