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lation inaugurates a literary conversation that had only started to emerge at the time—as far as the novel was concerned—with Sir Charles G.D. Roberts’s translation of Philippe Aubert de Gaspé’s Les Anciens Canadiens . In the now-legendary introduction to his 1890 translation, Roberts frames the tradition of literary translation to come: “We, of English speech, turn naturally to French-Canadian literature for knowledge of the FrenchCanadian people.”49 As one of the first novels to be translated from French to English, then, Maria Chapdelaine came to stand for Québec society as a whole. The “myth” of Maria Chapdelaine in both English and French is the idea that all of Québec society can be reduced to the same simple equations provided in the novel. Whatever its value as a representation of Québec society, Blake’s translation of Maria Chapdelaine must be considered what Antoine Berman calls a “historic” translation, a work we read not as only as a reproduction of the original, but for what it tells us about the poetics of translation. We read it, in other words, in order to catch glimpses of the translator’s vision as it drives and forms the new text. The match between Blake and Hémon is fortunate. That Blake thought of this translation as his own writing, that he considered it a major task, is evident in Hugh Eayrs’s description of the weekend at Lac Gravel. What Blake read aloud in front of the fire to his illustrious friends reflected a sensibility he recognized as his own. Blake’s respectful and affectionate relationship to language characterizes his work as a translator. He handles and manipulates words, holds them at a distance. His translations breathe the energy of language consciously shaped to aesthetic ends. Blake translates in the same way that he writes, as an amateur ethnologist fascinated by difference. This difference is historically and socially framed. Blake’s sense of the redemptive powers of French-Canadian culture was the result of a rearguard attempt to preserve an idealized vision of a culture. This conservatism, as much as Blake’s literary skills and his familiarity with rural Québec, was surely what made him an appropriate translator for a work whose verisimilitude was challenged even by its first public. At the same time, Blake’s translation captures the sense of stark otherness , of separate universes, which observers like artist Jori Smith have felt in relation to Québec rural life. Blake’s adoration of French Canada expresses that long-standing desire on the part of English Canadians to understand a culture that, though geographically close, remains mysterious. Because this distance corresponded to the gap between urban modernity and rural premodernity, the mystery represented a fullness of existence that moderns felt denied. 32 WILLIAM HUME BLAKE In both his essays and his translations, Blake displayed his keen knowledge of land, people, and language, and transformed these into stylish and lyrical prose. His translation of Maria Chapdelaine is an elegant hybrid. On the one hand, he makes strong stylistic incursions into the text, intensifying its dramatic qualities. On the other, he also gives a strong Gallic inflection to the novel, by maintaining words in French or by introducing a vocabulary of Gallicized English words. The resulting text is graceful yet innovative. This mixture is an expression of Blake’s affiliation with a shared cultural space. By accepting interference from French, his English translation suggests a sense of a shared linguistic environment. Through his gracious but occasionally strained English prose, Blake is trying to convey to his fellow English-Canadians the special qualities of rural French Canada. He is also translating himself into Charlevoix, and creating a place for himself in the landscape he loved. NOTES 1 Philippe Dubé, Charlevoix: Two Centuries at Murray. Trans. Tony MartinSperry . (Montréal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1990), p. 36. 2 Paul Socken, “Hémon, Louis,” in the Oxford Companion to Canadian Literature , 2nd ed., ed. Eugene Benson and William Toye (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 526. 3 Dubé, Charlevoix, 46. 4 The entries on Blake in the Oxford Companion to Canadian Literature and History (1967) and the Oxford Companion to Canadian Literature (1983) both state that Blake was a grandson of Edward Blake. This is impossible. Edward Blake (1833–1912) would have been twenty-eight when William Hume Blake was born. 5 Dubé, Charlevoix, pp. 93, 94. 6 Dubé, Charlevoix, pp. 93, 94. 7 Hugh Eayrs, preface to...

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