The Quebec Anthology: 1830-1990

"The Torrent" 1947

Anne Hebert Translated by Sheila Fischman THE TORRENT Anne Hebert was born August 1, 1916, in Sainte-Catherinede -Fossambault, the daughter of literary critic Maurice Hebert and the first cousin of the great Quebecois poet Hector Saint-Denys-Garneau. A childhood illness prevented her from attending school, and she was educated at home by her parents. With her cousin, she began writing poetry and stories at an early age; in 1939 she began publishing in several literary journals,including L,e Canada frangais and Ameriquejrangaise. She attended College NotreDame -de-Bellevue and Merici, and in 1942—the year before Saint-Denys-Garneau's death—she published her first book of poems, Les Songes en equilibre, which won the Prix David. She began working as a scriptwriter for RadioCanada and the National Film Board in 1950. Four years later she made her first trip to Paris; she stayed three years, then began dividing her time between France and Montreal, until finally moving permanently to Paris in 1967. Hebert has written many important novels. The first, Les Chambres de bois (1958; The Silent Rooms, 1974), won the Prix France-Canada. Her subsequent novels include Kamouraska (1970), Les Enfants du sabbat (1975), Heloi'se (1981), Les Fous de bassan (1982; In the Shadow of the Wind, 1983), Le Premierjardin (1988; The First Garden, 1990) and L'Enfant charge de songes (1992; Burden of Dreams, 1993), the last four translated by Sheila Fischman, who has a beautiful affinity for Hebert's delicate but incisive prose style. The short story "Au bord du torrent" waspublished in October 1947 in Ameriquefran$aise,and appeared in book form in 1950, when Le Torrent won the Belgian Royal Academy's prize for the best book in French by a nonBelgian . Its theme is the death of the old regime, personified THE TORRENT 183 by the dark and dominating mother of the hero, Fra^ois Perrault. Often called Quebec's first modern short story, it occupies the same niche in Quebec as do the early stories of Alice Munro in English Canada.The critic Ben-Zion Shek has noted that "Le Torrent" is written in the form of "a powerful allegory ... in starkly tragic and violent images, pessimistically announcing that the breakdown of the old would not necessarily usher in a new,freer social climate," and it is true that Perrault does not seem to be significantly better off followinghis mother's death. But after the publication of "Le Torrent," there waslittle doubt that the old order was gone, and that a new kind of literature was being written. "Le Torrent," first translated by Gwendolyn Moore in 1973,is presented here in a new translation by Sheila Fischman. "The Torrent" is a translation of "Le Torrent" published in Le Torrent (Montreal: Editions Beauchemin, 1950); first appearedas "Au bord du torrent" mAmeriquefrangaise, October 1947. 184 ANNEHEBERT I Iwas a child bereft of the world. A will that took precedence over my own decreed that I was to renounce any possession during this life. I touched the world in fragments , only those that were immediately indispensable to me and that were taken away as soon as their usefulness had ended: the notebook I was to open, but not the table on which it lay; the corner of the stable to be cleaned, not the hen that perched on the windowsill; and never, never the countryside that was offered through the window. I would see my mother's big hand when she brought it up to strike me, but I did not see my mother in her entirety, from head to foot. I only had a sense of her terrible grandeur and it chilled me. I did not have a childhood. I have no memory of any leisure before the singular experience of my deafness. My mother worked without respite and I accompanied my mother, like a tool in her hands. After she rose with the sun, the hours of her day fitted together so precisely there was no room left for any recreation. Aside from the lessons she gave me until I entered boarding school, my mother did not speak to me. Therewas no room for speech in her order. If she was to depart from that order, I had first to commit some infraction or other. Which is to say that my mother spoke to me only to reprimand me, before she punished me. On the matter of...