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76 LETTERS IN CANADA 1987 '11 y a quelque chose de derangeant et, disons-le, d'odeur fasciste,' a commente un critique lors de la creation. II n'empeche que Ie texte est d'une grande force, malgre l'echec de la piece ala scene. Le bilan de la production de cette annee? II se peut qu'il soit plutot negatif dans la mesure ou certaines pieces ne sont que partiellement reussies, negatif aussi quand on n'a presque rien de l'avant-garde au feminin, rien de parodique non plus. Mais Ie bilan est positif quand on voit les editeurs qui commencent apercer dans Ie domaine de l'edition theatrale, domaine qui n'est pourtant pas de tout repos. Positif aussi quand on pense que plus de pieces seront publiees au cours des annees a venir. Si pour Ie moment c'est Ie texte qui prime, ceci n'est pas forcement mauvais signe, encore moins indice de stagnation. C'est peut-etre meme la voie royale ... du moins, pendant quelque temps. Aussi longtemps qu'll y aura des dramaturges comme Michel-Marc Bouchard, Marie Laberge, Rene-Daniel Dubois, Michel Tremblay (et j'en passe) il ne pourra pas etre question de crise d'auteurs dans Ie theatre quebecois. Translations BARBARA GODARD 'Translation' is the title ofthis review of the year's output ofliterary works originally written in French and now rewritten in English. But what precisely is translation? In attempting to define this activity, translators and theorists have used a number of terms such as Shelley's 'transfuse'; T.S. Eliot's 'translucid'; Walter Benjamin's 'transplant'; the Platonist's 'transmigrate'; Schopenhauer 's 'transpose'; 'transport,' relating to the Latin original, translation; 'transfer' and 'transmit,' referring to the communication of meaning; and 'transform,' designating adaptations. These multiple names which describe varied stylistic approaches are of little help in explaining the activity of translation, let alone in isolating the specificity of literary translations. All these terms are associated with translation only metaphorically , since they denote diverse other activities. Nor does this semantic multiplicity function as in the middle ages, when a different name was applied to different types of language and text because texts were written in specific languages - religious, philosophic, and scientific texts in Latin, literary texts in the vernacular, etc. Consequently, to translate into Latin, latinisier, is not the same thing as to translate from Latin, volgarizzare, enromanchier. The boundaries between one person's speech and another's, between one text and another, were not as sharply drawn in the medieval period as they are today. When everything was discourse on another discourse, TRANSLATIONS 77 when every text was the reworking of a previous text redoubled by a commentary, translation was not perceived to be a specific function of textual production distinct from any other form of recreation, adaptation, or commentary. This non-distinction was a heritage from the classical period. The Greeks had several words for translation - metapherein, hermeneuien, and metaphrazein - which was considered to be a particular type of metaphorical, hermeneutic, or reformulating activity. Likewise, the Romans had multiple terms for translation, the latest of which were transferre and translatare, both referring to all forms of metaphor. However, the latter term had many additional connotations. It could refer to the physical transportation of objects as well as to the displacement of people, to the transfer of legal jurisdiction or of ideas as well as to interlingual transfer: it could connote being carried away in transport as well as taking possession of something. In practice, the semantic field was more restricted, foregrounding the activity of transfer. This semantic richness has extended to the present day in 'translation,' which primarily connotes to circulate translinguistic contents conceived as separate from the language in which they have been expressed, language in turn being understood as a pure translative medium. 'Translation' is the common English word for interlingual transfer, but French uses 'traduction' for the same activity, a word with a very different semantic field and theory of language. In a bilingual country, where translations bridge the language gap (the Conquest, Quebecers joke, created a new career: translation, which employs today some five thousand people in a $50o-million-a-year business...

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