George Heriot: Postmaster-Painter of the Canadas by Gerald Finley (review)

502 LEITERS IN CANADA 1983 the polyglot poet's own mock-epic, 'The Hitleriad.' Basil D. Kingstone's 'Jean Ethier-Blais's "Translation" of Ruben Daria' provides a theoretical framework for Madoffs essay when it terms translation the transposition of any message into another sign system. Kingstone explores the intertextual play of Ethier-Blais in 'Le manteau de Ruben Daria,' which quotes from the Nicaraguan poet's work and life and from Verlaine's poetry, to transform meaning through a change of context, by means of selection, rather than through changes in fact. Marketa Goetz-Stankiewicz's 'A Literary Bridge between Canada and Central Europe - Thoughts on the Translation of Josef Skvoreck}"s New Novel The Engineer of Human Souls' is a fascinating discussion of the socia-linguistic traps posed by this novel of exile, where the successful creation of a Canadian-Czech dialect requires the creation of a new dialect of Canadian English to reproduce effectively its complex irony. Because of its novelty, this may yet fail to capture the meaning. Such a broad definition of translation would have allowed discussion of some interesting homolinguistic or phonetic experiments by poets working from French to English. These were excluded by the narrow focus on the operations of the market place in the section on Quebec translations; this narrowness will have to be overcome if translation is to become an art in this country. Hope is held out in the elegantly written concluding essay, 'The Anatomy of a Translation: Pelagie-la-Charette.' Philip Stratford provides a possible solution for Skvorecky's translator when he describes how, in response to Maillet's idiolect, 'Mailletois,' he created 'Stratfordese.' The personal note of this anatomy, which records the problems to be solved and the processes of translating, is appropriate, although it reinforces the impression (confirmed by the collection on the whole) that translation in Canada is stilI very much a discrete and unorganized activity - in theory at least; the material organization by the Canada Council has made translation a fact. The book shows a desire to change this situation in the future. (BARBARA GODARD) Gerald Finley. George Heriot: Postmaster-Painter of the Canadas University of Toronto Press. xx, 310. illus. $37.50 In 1979, Gerald Finley published a booklet on George Heriot in the Canadian Artists Series in which he hinted at the volume of material on Heriot and his paintings that was available for study. His latest full-length critical biography of the Scottish-born painteritravel-writeripostmaster satisfies general and scholarly curiosity on many counts while dangling some unanswered questions. Finley gracefully balances biography and art criticism as he guides the reader adroitly and sensitively towards an answer to the question he HUMANITIES 503 asked in '979: ' what impact did the Canadian experience have on Heriot's art and life?' Flanked by a chronology and a check-list of Heriot's pictorial reuvre (which, excellent in itself, might have proved more valuable had it catalogued prose works as well), the critical biography establishes the aesthetic milieu of the eighteenth-century gentry's appreciation of landscape and landscape painting, and follows with discussions of Heriot's years in the West Indies, the training from Sandby at Woolwich, the 1789-92 period about which nothing before was known, the years (1800-16) as deputy postmaster general at Quebec, and the later European tours and residence in London. Meanwhile Finley dissects Heriot's artistic growth, identifying (and I simplify) phases of topographical linearity, picturesque vigour, and slightly precious decorativeness. He maintains that Heriot found his artistic vision of Arcadia during the middle phase and while in Canada. His argument is most compelling when he is able to compare watercolours of the same landscape from different stylistic periods, as in two versions (from '795 and 1801) of Lac St-Charles (pp 89- 90, and figures 21 and 37). This illuminating comparison of topographical and picturesque schemata is followed by a quotation of the descriptive passage of the lake in Heriot's Travels through the Canadas (1807). And here questions begin to dangle. Why is the print of Lac St-Charles in Travels, which differs from the 1795 topographical and the 1801 'almost Claudean' (p 89) watercolours, not...