Canadian Cultural Exchange / Echanges culturels au Canada: Translation and Transculturation / Traduction et transculturation (review)

We owe this seventh volume in Laurier’s Cultural Studies Series in many ways to the interdisciplinary ma in the humanities at Laurentian University, where two public lectures in 2002 and 2003 by Neil Besner and George Elliott Clarke prompted the co-editors (professors of Hispanic studies and philosophy) to initiate this larger project, to which they conscripted several colleagues in Sudbury and at a dozen other universities. The contributors to this collection, representing eight disciplines, argue that ‘we are not simply a bilingual and bicultural country’ but rather ‘pluricultural,’ as they lead us through Canada and beyond, to embrace its connections to South America, Eastern Europe, and South Africa. Organized thematically to encompass explorations of not only the proverbial two solitudes (via Rilke and MacLennan) but also cultural appropriation and the transcultural body, these twenty essays (five of them in French) often echo common concerns originating in the concept of ‘transculturación’ in the work of Cuban anthropologist Fernando Ortiz. Such wide-ranging explorations have the merit of broadening our awareness of little-known writers linked to Canada but operating outside our bilingual traditions: Saravia (Bolivia), Etcheverry (Argentina), Rodriguez, Urbina, and Torres (Chile), Giurgiu (Romania), Nortje (South Africa), and others.

But Stephen Henighan’s essay on Romanian-Canadian literature as a ‘reduced solitude’ sounds a cautionary note as counterpoint to the optimists when he demonstrates how easily immigrant writers might fall between the solitudes and get lost in the space separating their native land from Canada, with the longed-for integration ultimately an ‘unrealizable dream.’ He offers a superb historical survey of literary solitudes other than English and French in Canada, thereby building on his signal accomplishment in When Words Deny the World: The Reshaping of Canadian Writing (2002). Also of interest and value are Ann Ireland’s account of the origins of her novel Exile, Clarke’s advocacy for Arthur Nortje as ‘Canada-oriented,’ and Judith Woodsworth’s article on the depiction of translators in the 2003 novels by Shields and Taylor. Nowhere in this volume is the complexity of transculturation more engagingly explored than in Besner’s fascinating account of how an English-Canadian academic, raised in Brazil, met the challenges of translating the biography of an American poet’s life with a Brazilian architect. The volume concludes with a very useful ‘Subject Index’ that facilitates a profitable and illuminating investigation of thematic interconnections.

The collection has, on the whole, been carefully edited by Cheadle and Pelletier, but there is a curious inconsistency in the spelling of ‘descendants’ throughout, at times in a single essay. The substantial presence of George Elliott Clarke as both subject and author in the book makes the exclusion of reference to his 2005 novel George and Rue decidedly odd. Indeed, there is at least a two-year delay between the latest historical references in the essays and their 2007 publication. While the volume will be primarily of value to bilingual (English/French) readers, occasionally that reader will need to be trilingual, since a few Spanish passages have not been translated. Some of the essays are not satisfactorily integrated into the book’s overall argument – for example, Beverley Curran’s account of how Highway’s Dry Lips was performed and received in Tokyo.

Nevertheless, Curran’s work does prompt other questions: if this, then why not also other Canadian writers’ work and presence in the broader world, such as Gallant in France, or Richler, Laurence, and Levine in England? If, as Clarke argues, Nortje’s residence in Canada ties him to the culture of this country, is it now time to revisit the status of Malcolm Lowry? Can we henceforth more vigorously defend against detractors the case of Brian Moore as a Canadian? Attention to Ukrainian-Canadian writing is notably absent; and the passing references to Škvorecký and Faludy leave the reader wanting much more of them, and others. But...