SOURCE: Carrington, Ildikó de Papp. “The Portugal of Joyce Carol Oates.” Studies in Short Fiction 31, no. 4 (fall 1994): 675-82.

In the following essay, Carrington explores the metaphor of translation as well as other aspects of the stories in The Poisoned Kiss and Other Stories from the Portuguese.

Remembering Adrienne Rich's “Notes toward a Politics of Location,” Elspeth Probyn cautions against dangerous maneuvers for women writers and critics: “In creating our own centers and our own locals, we tend to forget that our centers displace others into the peripheries of our making” (176). When we open Joyce Carol Oates's volume of short fiction, The Poisoned Kiss and Other Stories from the Portuguese, we experience these supposed translations as deliberate displacement of Portugal and its literature into a marginalized other, to a periphery where they are possessed, appropriated, and expropriated in a literary act that seeks to explore the ironic pretense of...