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"A Case of Sorcery" 1963
- University of Ottawa Press
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Adrien Therio Translated by David Homel A CASE OFSORCERY Born in Saint-Modeste, near Riviere-du-Loup on the lower St. Lawrence, on August 15, 1925, Adrien Therio wasfive when his family moved thirty miles inland, to the CheminTache that appears in many of his short stories (including "A Case of Sorcery"). He began his studies at the Seminaire de Rimouski in 1947, later spent four years in a sanitorium recovering from a respiratory illness, then attended the University of Ottawa and Universite Laval, where he received his doctorate in literature. He began his teaching career at Bellarmin College, in Kentucky, and subsequently taught at the University of Notre-Dame in Indiana; the University of Toronto; the RoyalMilitary College, in Kingston (where he met Gerard Bessette, and founded the magazine Livres et auteurs quebecois and the publishing house Les Editions Jumonville); and the University of Ottawa, from 1969 to the present. He helped found the influential literary magazine Lettres quebecoises, and is an outspoken proponent of Quebec culture and literature. A prolific writer, Therio has published more than fifteen books since his first novel, Les breves anne'es,appeared in 1953. Among the rest are three works on Jules Fournier, a journalist and thinker of the nineteenth century, and his first book of stories, Contes desbelles saisons (1958). A second novel, La Soifet le mirage, appeared in 1960, and Mes beaux meurtres, a second book of stories, was published in 1961. His anthology Conteurs canadiens-fran^ais, published in 1965, was the first anthology of modern Quebecois short stories: in his introduction, he wrote that "a new country has been brought to light in these contemporary stories, a country that breathes to the rhythm of the modern world." Therio began writing what has been referred to as the chronicles of Chemin-Tache with Les breves anne'es, and A CASE OF SORCERY 231 continued them in such later novels as Le Printemps qui pleure (1962), La Colere du pere (1974); CV.it id que le monde a commence (1978); and Marie-Eve, Marie-Eve (1983). "L'Enchantement," translated here as "A Case of Sorcery" by David Homel, is from Ceux du Chemin-Tache (1963). "It took me many years to realize just how much that barren piece of land had left its mark on me," Therio told Donald Smith in an interview published in L ''Ecrivain devantson aeuvre (1983; Voices of Deliverance, 1986). Though its origins are in early folktales of magic fiddles, "A Case of Sorcery" is also about how a country can be transformed by art. "A Case of Sorcery" is a translationof "L'Enchantement" published in Ceux du Chemin-Tacbe (Montreal:Editionsde 1'Homme, 1963). 232 ADRIEN THERIO [54.205.179.155] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 03:00 GMT) I you'd visited the Chemin-Tache fifty years ago, and were to pass by it again today, you wouldn't recognize a thing. Everything has changed! I might as well tell you that the land I come from is anything but fertile. Sitting on a mountain, a mountain that turns into a plateau once you get there, a wide plateau with an evil glare that first shows you its notches and crags, its tortuous hills and its lowlands where your feet bog down in the bad earth, it seems to defy the horizons and all the human beings who ever ventured there. I never knew that time and it's difficult to imagine such a thing. But the old folks from where I come from still talk about those days with a misty kind of horror in their eyes, a kind of regret that's hard to describe, part satisfaction and part pride. Because they're the ones who brought the big change! Or rather, they were the witnesses of the event that changed the whole country. If you saw their eyes, one evening when they were in the throes of nostalgia, you might be able to imagine what the Chemin-Tache once was. A hard land, difficult to get to, it was opened to settlement late. For a long time, a bad road ran through it, and only the bravest would cross over to the neighbouring villages , and never would they stray from the path. One day, surveyors arrived, divided the plateau into lots and, shortly after, offered these new parcels to whomever showed up. They even promised help for the building of houses and barns. But everybody had been warned and settlers were few...