Joanna Studzińska Instytut Filologii Romańskiej Uniwersytet im. Adama Mickiewicza Poznań, Poland TRANSLATING PERSONIFICATION ACROSS GENDERED LANGUAGES 1. Introduction In gendered languages, the labels masculine, feminine and neuter reflect the biological gender of the referents of some animate nouns, but for most other nouns the notion of ‘femaleness’ or ‘maleness’ is irrelevant. Langacker (2008: 337) confirms the common-sense notion that the basis of categorization is grammatical rather than semantic: Linguists are fond of pointing out the inadequacy, if not the downright folly, of such labels. On what rational basis can one say, for instance, that German Löffel ‘spoon’ is masculine, Gabel ‘fork’ is feminine, and Messer ‘knife’ is neuter? These classes are posited not because their members exhibit any consistent meaning, but rather because they pattern alike grammatically, in terms of their inflectional endings and the forms of co-occurring elements (like articles, demonstratives and adjectives). But as Taylor (2007: 399) points out, while the grammatical gender of an inanimate noun is devoid of symbolic function, it is not wholly arbitrary. Quoting Köpcke & Zubin (1984), he claims that the grammatical gender of a noun is motivated by morphological, phonological and semantic aspects. 2. Personification: Cross-language clashes The claim that grammatical gender of inanimate nouns is devoid of symbolic value does not apply to personification. It seems reasonable to assume that more often than not the gender of the personification will correspond to the grammatical gender of the word. In translation this poses a problem if the gender in the source and target language does not match. For instance, Death is portrayed as male in the Germanic tradition, while in the Slavic culture it is female, in keeping with the grammatical gender of the word (cf. Ger. der Tod (m) vs. Russian смерть (f) and Polish śmierć (f)). The image of Death as a woman is very strongly rooted in Polish culture: a 15 th -century Polish poem, Rozmowa Mistrza Polikarpa ze śmiercią ‘Master Polycarpus’ Colloquy with Death’ specifically states that Master Polycarpus saw czlowieka nagiego