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84 LETTERS IN CANADA 1988 s'etonner du fait que l'homosexualite et l'inceste sont des themes communs. Ces deux themes seraient-ils de simples symboles de preoccupations nationales? Translations BARBARA GODARD 'Although human beings have been translating for thousands of years, they have only been teaching courses in how to translate for roughly the last forty,' observes Jean Delisle. This development of translation pedagogy has resulted from a change in the institutionalization of translation practices. With an increase in the frequency, rapidity, and importance of international relations in the contemporary world, there has been a phenomenal growth in general translation. No longer is literary translation the dominant institutional instance for the interface of cultures. Nor are contemporary translators generalists. Many develop specialized fields of expertise, such as scientific, legal, or advertising translation, each with its specialized lexis. The vocabulary and rhetorical skills needed to transcode these latter texts are considered to be more easily learned than the complex knowledges needed to interpret literary texts. Consequently, training programs have been established for translators whose status as a profession has been confirmed through legislation setting out the criteria for the legal recognition of translators' skills. At the same time, there has developed a new academic discipline, 'traductologie ,' or 'translatology,' that is the body of knowledge which scientifically studies the operations of translation (Harris, TTR, 91-6). With its massive commitment to official bilingualism since the 1960s, Canada is one of the countries where this transformation in the institutions of translation has had a marked effect. The change is manifest in a number of different translation activities during 1988. Most obvious, perhaps, is the selection of a non-literary text, Diane Hebert's Second Chance (Un second souffle, Lester and Orpen Dennys), as recipient of this year's Governor-General's Award in translation in contrast to the practice of earlier juries privileging literary translation. Granted, Philip Stratford, the prize-winning translator, is a much acclaimed literary translator who has not previously won the award. His entire oeuvre is recognized in this gesture. However, three of the four books short-listed for the award were non-fiction titles. The exception was David Homel's translation of Laferriere's Comment faire l'amour avec un negre sans se fatiguer (Coach House), reviewed last year; then, too, the John Glassco Prize has gone to Charlotte Melan~on for her translation of Northrop Frye's Shakespeare et son theatre. But the shift in the relative balance is evident also in a slight TRANSLATIONS 85 decline in the number of literary translations published this year, despite the increasing volume of government translation now that Manitoba is translating its legislation. Ifthe number of literary works in translation has decreased slightly, the number of theoretical studies on translation has proportionately increased . Moreover, in these publications may be witnessed a shift in the focus of theorizing translation from Comparative Literature to the new field of Translation Studies, an independent field of study where interdisciplinary teams examine translation activities from a number of different perspectives. Ultimately, this involves an increased emphasis on translation as communication rather than on translation as hermeneutic . The relative approaches are evident in two important collections of essays. Published in Canadian Literature (119, Summer 1988, University of British Columbia, subscription $20.00) are papers presented at the Learned Societies in Saint Boniface, May 1986, during a special session on the translation of Canadian literatures held by the Canadian Association of Comparative Literature, where the focus is on literary analysis and interpretation. In contrast, the collection of papers published in TTR (1: 2 [1988], Universite du Quebec a Trois-Rivieres, $12.00) constitutes the proceedings of the first conference held by the newly formed Canadian Association for Translation Studies/Association canadienne de traductologie at the Learned Societies in Windsor, May 1988, which foregrounds the variety of translating institutions. The difference in the field of analysis is immediately evident. While the former volume includes anecdotal accounts of translation practices by writer-translators such as George Woodcock, Joyce Marshall, and Robert Melan<;on, an essay on the theme of non-translatability in Rudy Wiebe's The Temptations of Big Bear, and a sample translation complete with exchange between translator (Ben Shek) and translated (Michel Van Schendel), the latter encompasses wide-ranging theoretical studies on literatures as varied as thirteenth-century translations from Arabic into Latin which occurred in Spain (Clara Foz), eighteenth-century French translations of Homer (Andre Lefevere), and contemporary German translations of the French Resistance hero Saint-Pol-Roux Goachim Schultz), along with practical essays discussing pedagogical strategies. Several of these essays analyse the development of the academic field of Translation Studies, especially Jose Lambert's 'Les Strategies de traduction dans les cultures: Positions theoriques et travaux recents,' which offers an introduction to cultural theories of translation, and Brian Harris's historical notes on the term he coined for this new field of studyI 'traductologie,' 'What I really meant by "Translatology.'" Moreover, translation practices are analysed across a wide variety of institutional instances from ethnology (Sherry Simon, 'Excursions ethnologiques: Contextes pour penser les pouvoirs de la traduction') and insurance 86 LETTERS IN CANADA 1988 agencies (Candace Seguinot, 'Pragmatics and the Explication Hypothesis ') to government agencies. Discussing the latter, Brian Mossop argues for the importance of a theory of translating institutions ('corporations, churches, governments, newspapers,' 65) in the models of translation. As he claims, it is the goal of the translating institution which determines the approach taken to translations it produces: 'whether they are relatively literal or free, whether the language is conventional or innovative, whether metaphors are eliminated or retained' (65). In this, Mossop provides a framework for a number of explicit studies of institutional norms such as that of Christine Klein-Lataud ('Les transports de la metaphore,' Canadian Literature, 81-92) on the politics of the handling of metaphors in newspaper articles; Annie Brisset's two texts on Quebec theatre and its telescoping of the concepts of translation and parody in the intralingual transcoding practices of Quebec theatre which rewrites French and other theatrical classics in joual (,Translation and Parody: Quebec Theatre in the Making,' Canadian Literature, 92-108, and 'Le Public et son traducteur: Profil ideologique de la traduction thecHrale au Quebec,' TTR, 11-18); and Kathy Mezei's study of the variant modes of non-translating English when it appears in Quebec texts ('Speaking White: Literary Translation as a Vehicle of Assimilation in Quebec,' Canadian Literature, 11-23). All these contributors agree with Mossop that the term 'mistranslation' should be used in a limited sense for mechanical reading and writing errors. There is no 'correct way' of translating but a series of strategies that may be deployed by the translator, strategies that are cultural, though mediated by specific institutions which are both socio-economic and ideological entities. In synthesizing these two collections, I have somewhat homogenized the theoretical presuppositions of the contributors by placing them within the general frame of cultural or communicative theories of translation in which pragmatics or the interchange between addressor and addressee takes priority over the textual system in conceptualizing the activity of linguistic transcoding and the resultant production of meanings. Most of the contributors to these volumes would agree with D.G. Jones that context is of major significance in literary translation, that it is context, not text or word, which is translated ('Text and Context: Some Reflections on Translation with Examples from Quebec Poetry,' Canadian Literature, 6-10). But this is no firm consensus: there are still some who adhere to linguistic theories of translation which focus on the translation of words rather than of utterances - though with the changing nature oflinguistics as a diScipline, this is no certain assumption either, as we learn (Ton That Thien, 'Linguistique appliquee: Quelle linguistique appliquer?' TTR, 97-105). What linguistics? What translation theory? For help in distinguishing the implications of TRANSLATIONS 87 these competing theories of translation, linguistic, cultural, and communicative as well as semiotic, the interested reader should consult Jean Delisle's Translation: An Interpretive Approach, recently translated in an abridged edition (minus the French-language examples) by Patricia Logan and Monica Creery (University of Ottawa Press, 125; L'Analyse du discours comme methode de traduction: Initiation Ii la traduction franraise de textes pragmatiques anglais, theorie et pratique, Les Presses de I'Universite d'Ottawa 1980), where these various positions are explicated before the author turns to elaborate his communicative theory grounded in the importance of analysing discourse rather than language in order to translate texts. Important here is the distinction to be made between two types of 'equivalents,' 'transcoded' and 'contextual' (30). This latter in semantic transfer serves to fix the unitary meaning of the message in a specific communicative utterance. An important step in formulating this communication theory of translation is the distinction Delisle makes between literary and non-literary texts. Literary texts are characterized by the predominance of both polysemy and the expressive function and are consequently connotative rather than denotative. The importance accorded to this distinguishing element might undermine Delisle's other presupposition, that only in the literary work is form 'important in and of itself' (14), for this is to acknowledge the specific function of formal properties separating the 'non' from the 'literary.' It is beyond the scope of this review to analyse the implications of Delisle's work for translation theory. However, it is important here to note the separation he makes between literary and non-literary translation, since this distinction is constitutive of the new discipline, translatology. This distinction also helps conceptualize the current debates on literary translation in the Canadian context where the whole issue of theory in conjunction with translation is itself a moot point. These conflicting models structure the translation issue of Canadian Literature as an instance of stichomythia. Writer-translators spin metaphors about their activity as 'dialogue,' 'identity' ('flowing straight from my pen'), or as successive rewritings within the framework of a humanist understanding of the solitary writer engaged in the hermeneutic task of producing knowledge of the Other. On the other hand, translatorprofessors develop theories of translation as misprision, as the deferral or mishandling of meaning. Consequence of any cultural mediation of the literary work, this continual slippage is all the more complex in the case of translation when two cultural institutions are implicated in the dissemination of representations and two very different contexts govern the production of meaning. For the one group, translation aims to discover truth, while for the other its process of doubling produces ideological representations. Translation for the latter is a political activity whose norms and forms of power their analysis seeks to discover. 88 LETTERS IN CANADA 1988 The uneasy coexistence of these two theoretical positions, which one might roughly label humanist and post-structuralist, may be seen in Mapping Literature: The Art and Politics of Translation, edited by David Homel and Sherry Simon (Vehicule, 125). This volume brings together the discussions which took place during the annual meeting of the Literary Translators Association in Montreal, October 1986, to which were invited translators of Canadian literatures from many different countries. As the introduction announces, 'translation as a vehicle through which cultures travel' informs the debate as Canadian literature is viewed through the eyes of others and carries out the Romantic nationalist mandate: 'Translation is the self-realization of a culture.' But translation is also a practice of reading and writing. The book announces this mandate in the first frame of its subtitle, 'Art and Politics.' That the two sit somewhatuneasily together and polarize readers is suggested by a recent review of the book, which attacked the panel on feminist translation (Mezei, Godard, Simon, and Susanne de Lotbiniere-Harwood) for advancing an argument that language is always political and that good translation attempts to work with rather than against the textual politics of the source text, and, instead, praised the numerous anecdotes by translators - especially foreign translators of Canadian literature considered far more interesting (Paul Wilson, Globe and Mail, 29 April 1989). Proportionately, the political frame occupies one-third of the volume, albeit the central one. In addition to the panel on Feminist Poetics there is a discussion of the institution of literary translation in a comparative framework with a panel on the important legal questions of 'Contracts and Copyright,' not to mention government support, which have established literary translation as a profession and have guaranteed the signature which doubles that of the author on the cover of literary works in translation. Questions of identity, subjectivity, and legal structures were also the focus of the panel on 'The Battle of Large and Small Cultures,' where the minority position of Quebec culture within Canada and ofthe various Canadian literatures with respect to world literatures in the same languages is placed in an international framework along with such other multilingual or minor cultures as those of Belgium, Yugoslavia , and Finland so as to underline the complex political struggles which mark both the production and reception of texts in translation. The politics of translation remains important in the third section of the book, 'Literary Identities,' especially for the panel of Quebec writers discussing 'Quebec Writing Today.' Jacques Godbout leads off with 'Politics, the Quebec Novel and Translation,' tackling the political impetus behind recent translation of Quebec literature, whose volume is directly 'proportionate to the fear that English Canada had of seeing Quebec separate'; Jean Royer continues by affirming the preoccupationof TRANSLATIONS 89 quebecois literature with the question of identity, with the 'we' and the 'I,' the nationalistic statement as well as the individual obsession. Against this, Monique LaRue argues for the international destiny of Quebec literature in a global cultural environment written from a multilingual city, where an experience like Kafka's as a 'guest in the German language' becomes a possibility for many writers. The political implications of the choice of language in which to write are developed in the contributions of Alice Parizeau, 'From Poland to Quebec,' and Marco Micone, 'Quebec'the Difference,' where the politics of minority writing has changed from the opprobrium of the epithet 'maudit Italien' to the expressions of good fortune that greet the'ethnic' writer today. This debate on the politics of language provides a frame in which to examine 'Canadian Literature through Foreign Eyes.' Here it becomes clear that 'natural affinities' between cultures and languages are less important in determining what gets translated than socio-literary trends. The impact of Canadian women's writing in Nordic countries, emphasized by Annika Preis (Swedish translator of Aritha Van Herk), Kristiina Rikman (Finnish translator of Alice Munro), or Annelise Schonnemann (Danish translator of Margaret Laurence), is due not only to the stature of these writers in Canadian literary circles but also to the fact that (in Denmark specifically) 'the best and most avid reader is a woman between twenty-five and forty.' In three of the best essays in the volume, these translators analyse the texts they translated, outlining the specific problems of language faced by the translator of Laurence with her neologisms, rhyme, and rhythm, of Van Herk with her lyric prose and feminist perspective, and of Munro with her attention to the meaning and effect of social background on the lives of women and men. Translating Canadian feminist texts inevitably raises political issues for the translator. But so too does the translation of Quebec locutions into Finnish for Jukka Mannerkorpi and especially the translation of Michel Tremblay's joual into Serbo-Croation for Borjanka Jolic-Ludwig. The clash of languages in Yugoslavia offered a solution here: the numerous words of Turkish origin have special significance in Serbo-Croatian, speaking to another colonialist context. When cultures diverge radically, there may be more difficult problems to resolve, as Tai Lai Wong, Chinese translator of Marcel Dube, points out. The need to take Chinese tastes and values into account and the weight of moral censorship in China mean that many Quebec texts remain untranslatable there because of their explicit sexual content. In the first section, 'Translating as the Making ofLiterature,' the politics of language and the ideologies of institutions are of less concern. Indeed, on the panel concerned with 'Translating for the Stage,' the focus is on the collective nature of the creative enterprise within the theatre, where the ultimate value is performance (Matthew Ward), or on the necessity of maintaining theatrical rhythms in translation (Maryse Pelletier). Aesthetic 90 LETTERS IN CANADA 1988 norms of the specific institution become the determining criteria of effective translation practices. In this, the panel extends the implications of the first panel on 'The Writer as TranslatorlThe Translator as Writer' to the institutional from the personal. Here writer-translators open the conference by developing metaphors of the translation process which emphasize the personal enrichment of the interchange, whether in the form of the growth of friendship, the bonding with another writer, which Barry Callaghan identifies as the result of translation, or the increased understanding and love of the English language experienced by George Johnston and Joyce Marshall. Incidentally, Marshall and Robert Melam;on give shorter versions of their Canadian Literature contributions. The focus on the aesthetic in conjunction with knowledge but divorced from an analysis of power is striking in this section where are concentrated the greatest number of Anglo-Canadian translators. The importance of this book in setting up outside/inside as a frame through which to view the translation of Canadian literatures is inestimable . It gives a brief and lively overview of current debates and positions. Indirectly, it suggests some of the politics of translation, both national and international, when English-language contributors speak of aesthetics and love and those of smaller and less prestigious language groups talk in terms of socio-cultural issues at work in translation. Translators of feminist texts are the exception here: the work upon language effected by both francophone and anglophone women writers in this country has forced their translators to develop creative strategies in their own languges and to theorize this activity within a larger socio-linguistic and/or post-structural framework. While the current ferment in Translation Studies is clearly explored in these volumes, it is also now possible to view with hindsight the development and theorization of literary translation in this country, thanks to the bilingual, extensively annotated bibliography published by Kathy Mezei, Bibliography of Criticism of English and French Literary Translations in Canada/Bibliographie de la critique et des traductions litteraires anglaises et fram;aises au Canada (University of Ottawa Press, 177, $19.95). Including in her corpus articles, introductions to translations, theses involving translation, and book reviews, Mezei provides the skeleton for a history of translation practice and theory in this country since 1905. While the book is thus invaluable as a stimulus to further research, it foregrounds the importance of viewing translation practices historically. Each age retranslates for its own period and within its own paradigms, as Sherry Simon has argued in her discussion of the translation of Canadian historical fiction (Canadian Literature, 40). When, then, will the literary translation of Canadian literatures have its history? While waiting, we may view the contemporary debate within both an international framework and a limited historical perspective. Mezei offers TRANSLATIONS 91 tentative notes to the history in her introduction, where she outlines the theoretical frames that have shaped the discussion of translation since 1950: issues of free, literal, or faithful translation; translation as a 'bridge between two cultures'; 'nontraduction' as creative response to the translation of poetry; and translation within the literary polysystem. As she concludes, there is a great need to go beyond these fragmented statements to develop a more comprehensive history and theory of translation. . While the conceptual tools for this analysis are being forged, it is clear both from this historical overview and from the contemporary debates that there is, as Simon commented with regard to the handling of literary dialect, 'no unified tradition of Canadian translation.' There is no consensus regarding the existing models for translation or the impact of the socio-political context of translation. While this indeterminacy may be a feature of translation theory, there is a certain consistency in translation practice, at least regarding the selection of texts for translation. This year, as usual, there is a text ofhistorical interest, poetry and drama texts, some novels from the 1960s and 1970S overlooked when they first appeared, and a scattering ofcontemporary fiction. Translations by Quebec feminist writers continue to figure prominently in this group, the translation of feminist theory and writing constituting the most active area of crosscultural connection at present. While Toronto continues to be the chief locus of publishing activity, as it has been for Quebec translations since the 1970s, there is some renewal of interest in Quebec writing in the United States, where it is framed within the category of 'emergent literatures' and consequently within the efforts of the American academic institution to expand the canon. One instance of this decentring of the canon through translation which foregrounds the difference and need for the manipulation of Quebec literature is the special issue of Translation: The Journal of Literary Translation, 20, Spring 1988 (Translation Centre, Columbia University, $9.00). Awkwardly subtitled 'Canadian Feature Issue: English Literature and Litterature du Quebec,' the volume is splitbetween ninety pages of poems and stories by English Canadian writers selected by Roch Carrier, ninety pages of Quebec texts in translation selected by Sheila Fischman, and one hundred pages of translations of varied authors from different languages into English. Quebec literature here is positioned in an international context. However, the selection is limited, and with. the exception of forthcoming translations of Roland Giguere's poems by Donald Winkler, the Quebec contributions - ranging from Henriette Dessaulles to Pierre Nepveu, by well-known translators such as F.R. Scott, John Glassco, Joyce Marshall, Alan Brown, and Fischman herself have all previously appeared in print. A more significant testimony to a change in American reception of 92 LETTERS IN CANADA 1988 Quebec literature is the appearance of Anne Hebert: Selected Poems (Brockport, NY: Boa Editions, 158, $20.00 cloth, $10.00 paper) translated by an American poet and translator of Rilke, A. Poulin, Jr. A FrancoAmerican , Poulin writes in his afterword, 'Poetry and the Landscape of Epiphany: On Translating the Poetry ofAnne Hebert,' about the personal quest he has fulfilled in producing this book. Growing up in a small town in Maine with French as his first language, he did everythingin his power to assimilate to 'WASP society.' Having achieved these dreams as a professor of English, however, and returning to teach in Maine in the 1960s, he discovered that there was not only a rich Quebec literature but also a celebrated poet, Anne Hebert. In poems like 'Poetry: Loneliness Broken,' he identified an existential need for discovering and naming a country of the heart in order to overcome his alienation as one of the 'White Niggers' of America. In foregrounding an emancipatory vision, Hebert's poetry also performs a politicalfunction, stimulating this need to explore a marginalized ethnic heritage. Here Poulin joins with many other Americans in reclaiming ethnic and regional voices to challenge the myth of the American melting pot. In a concrete and creative manner, his translation testifies to the strong interest in Quebec literature manifested by many of Franco-American descent which is stimulating Quebec Studies in universities in New England and Louisiana. Not only did Quebec rediscover her Americanness with Kerouac in the seventies, but Americans (re)discovered the French presence in North America. Poulin does not limit his claim for an American audience's attention to the personal. Providing a bibliography of Hebert's work in both French and English, outlining her career and the many prizes she has won, Poulin makes a case for her as one of the greatest poets in the French language and a 'natural' candidate for a Nobel Prize (154). These are heady claims. That he is ambitious is already clear, since in tackling Hebert's poetry he is accepting the challenge of some of Canada's best translators. For this is the fourth version of Hebert's work to appear in English. In comparison, Poulin holds his own. Generally he has a good sense of the tight rhythms of Hebert's poetry: his versions are more condensed, with shorter lines than F.R. Scott's, and his diction and images are more precise than in Alan Brown's translation. Take, for example, these lines from 'Nos mains au jardin': Nous avons eu cette idee De planter nos mains au jardin Branches des dix doigts Petits arbres d'ossements Chere plate-bande Tout Ie jour Nous avons attendu I'oiseau roux ... TRANSLATIONS 93 Pour une seule fleur Une seule miniscule etoile de couleur Un seul vol d'aile calme Pour une seule note pure Repetee trois fois ... Alan Brown renders these lines: We had this idea Of planting our hands in the garden Branches the ten fingers Little bony trees Cherished flower-border. All day we Waited for the russet bird ... For a single flower One tiny single star of colour A single sailing wing One single note pure white Given three times ... Poulin's version is in a number of respects more literal than Brown's: his bird is 'red,' not 'russet.' But this, along with the choice of images like 'saplings' and 'swoop,' increases the emotional power of the poems. We got this idea To plant our hands in the garden. Branches of ten fingers Saplings of bone Cherished rock-garden. All day long We waited for the red bird ... For just one flower One small star of colour The swoop of one calm wing Just one pure note Repeated three times ... Presenting Hebert's poems to an American audience, Poulin draws parallels between the metaphysical and oracular element in her later 94 LETTERS IN CANADA 1988 poetry, a 'visionary ethics' in which she invokes 'a primal earth-mother Eve' to reinvent an image of a habitable human place, and the visionary strain of 'Planetarium' by American feminist poet Adrienne Rich. Despite Poulin's sensitivity to feminist discourse and his awareness of the earlier translations of Hebert's poetry, it is interesting to note that he is not alert to the implications of gendered pronouns in his translation of 'Le Tombeau des rois.' The line 'Cette enfant fut-elle liee par la cheville / Pareille aune esclave fascinee' is translated as 'Was this child's ankle bound / Like a spellbound slave.' That it is a girl child descending into the tomb to be raped by the seven kings, a girl child repeating the descent of the goddess Inanna, is crucial to the meaning ofHebert's poem, as several commentators have pointed out. All the male translators ofHebert's work have fallen into this trap, despite the fact that Hebert challenged F.R. Scott on this question in their dialogue. Subsequently, he changed his translation to read 'Was this child tied by her ankle / Like a fascinated slave,' a detail which more recent translators, including Poulin, have failed to note. In this case, the bilingual reader may consult the French text on the facing page and make concrete the female presence in the poem. Indeed, the bilingual format of the book is one ofits most attractive features, for the reader can negotiate the text through both languages, aware always of translation as repetition and difference. The unilingual reader, however, is still waiting for the illusory 'perfect' translation. Exploring Quebec literature in its Americanness, as a literature in French rooted in American myths, is also the frame through which Jacques Godbout's novel An American Story (University of Minnesota, 162; Une histoire americaine, Edition,S du Seuil 1986) is smuggled into American literature. Ostensibly, however, Yves Saint-Pierre's translation is positioned within a different discourse, since the book is published from the prestigious post-structuralist University of Minnesota Press in a new series called 'Emergent' literatures in company with the work of the Brazilian Clarice Lispector, among others. While this context would imply a less ethnocentric approach to literature developing within the American academy, this is belied by the novel itself, Godbout's seventh, which is a dystopia, a cross between a confessional narrative and a detective novel. A worthy sequel to Aquin's Prochain Episode, this novel explores the Quebecois obsession with its dark double, America. Presenting the diary of a Quebec intellectual and politician who has gone to California to do research on happiness and found himselfin jailon double charges ofrape and arson, the novel sets out to demystify the dreams ofEI Dorado which in the nineteenth century took the Poulins and the Kerouacs from Quebec to New England and on across the continent in their quest for a country. The translator in this case is a Canadian with a degree in Comparative Canadian Literatures from the Universite de Sherbrooke. On the whole, TRANSLATIONS 95 Saint-Pierre has produced an accurate and eminentlyreadable translation with an excellent ear for the colloquial tirades of Godbout's narrator, Gregory Francoeur, as is evident in his choice of 'frenzy' to render 'delires' in the following outburst: Les delires californiens, l'assassinat ala mitraillette des clients innocents et affames d'un McDonald, les lames de rasoir introduites dans les fruits frais d'un supermarche, les bonbons ala strychnine, Ie gout du sang, l'envie de devenir millionaire et tout-puissant ne s'attrapent pas en arrivant al'aeroport comme se respirent des virus, que je sache! (14) In translation, this becomes: California frenzy, the machine-gunning ofinnocent and famished McDonald's patrons, razor blades in supermarket produce, strychnine-laced candy, blood lust, and the passion to become an omnipotent millionaire, does not, as far asI know, afflict one like some virus, the moment one steps off the plane! Especially inventive is his rendering of Godbout's pithy and colourful epigrams, such as 'Ie coup de bambou' which becomes 'jungle madness.' In contrast, however, there is a dismaying omission ofphrases. In the first ten pages, two were dropped without explanation, including the important denial of the second charge brought against the narrator ('II n'avait jamais incendie quoi que ce soit, il ne fumait pas!' 11), and the witty play on the political context of the fiction, the phrase 'libre change' (17), positioned at the end of a paragraph in which Gregory and his friends in Montreal have been suggesting over their Beaujolais that the future of Quebec lies with the United States! That this latter omission might have been a deliberate decision is suggested by other translation strategies tending to efface the conflict of cultures that is the motor for the novel's plot. Consistently, references to institutions, especially the educational institutions which Francoeur has attended, are Americanized . He no longer goes to 'college' (classique) but to 'school: What he learned 'en classe de versification' he now learns in 'high school.' As well as effacing these cultural particularities of Quebec classical and humanist .education, rooted in the values of the past, education that marks Francoeur as a foreigner in California, the translation fails to indicate phrases that were in English in the original text. In the opening pages, the words of the procureur are frequently presented in brief English phrases in the expository section, then partially echoed in Francoeur's diary entries. Then, too, there are references to Californian social mores, like 'surfboys,' and snippets of conversation overheard or exchanged. These position the detective story within a specific political context, one where an alien Quebecois finds himself at the mercy of powerful American 96 LETTERS IN CANADA 1988 institutions. The novel instead becomes yet one more story about the failed American dream. This change in the discursive impact of the novel is similar to that which would be effected by an Americanization ofDenys Arcand's Le Deciin de l'empire americain: the radicality of the discovery of Quebec's roots in this continent rather than in Europe is muted. No longer positioned as exotic foreigner, Godbout's novel is now the reinscription of the same, easily assimilable: just a crime novel, no great threat to the canon. Business as usual describes the case ofliterary translations published in Canada this year in that most of the translations continue established patterns. There is, for instance, the on-going project of self-translation by Helene Brodeur of her novels in the Chroniques du Nouvel Ontario series, Rose-Delima: A Saga ofNorthern Ontario (Watson and Dwyer 1987, 210; Entre'l'aubeet Ie jour, Quinze 1983) appeared to jointhe first volume in the series, Alexandre: A Sage ofNorthern Ontario (Watson and Dwyer 1983, Chroniques du Nouvel Ontario: La quete d'Alexandre, Quinze 1981). Then, too, there is the publication of Maurizia Binda's continuing translation ofMarco Micone's work. Two Plays: Voiceless People, Addolorata (Guemica, 178; Gens du Silence, Guernica 1982, Addolorata, Guernica 1984) contains two of Micone's plays, which explore the problematic of power and expression, the psychological landscape of ethnic culture within the nexus of language, both the relative status of languages within Quebec and the question of the choice oflanguage for the writer who would speak with authority. Voiceless People, which deals with these issues in the context of a generational quarrel within an Italo-Quebecois family, was previously published in translation in 1984 in an edition which had been changed significantly for stage production in English. Lengthy passages ofpolitical debate were excised from the French text, whole scenes in fact, so that the politics of language choice was generalized beyond the particularities of the Italian situation to deal with immigration in general. In this edition, it is joined by Addolorata, a play which explores these tensions within the context of the life of an Italian woman in a sexist community. Treated as an object by her father and then by her husband, Addolorata walks out on them both" at an interval of ten years. The extreme limitations of her situation are conveyed through the parameters of her life: 'At home, after the language issue, the sauce is the cause of most arguments.' But 'Lolita's (as she calls herself) understanding of the language issue is shallow, lacking any conception of the power politics underpinning her choice of language: 'With my four languages, I never get bored. With my four languages, Ican watch soaps in English, read the French T.V. guide, the Italian fotoromanzi, and sing "Guantanamera.'" This statement is prefaced by the pronouncement that 'For us Italians, school is practically useless.' Micone's satire is blunt here: Italians' linguistic facility is superficial, leaving them stranded between worlds TRANSLATIONS 97 with no economic power to change the situation. This linguistic melange is a metaphor for the dramatic conflict in both plays, which are verbal debates where conflicting versions of reality confront each other uncomprehendingly . Played out within the family are the games of language as an instrument of power. The conservative view of a dominant male confronts the lucid voice of a woman seeking emancipation. Certain characters, such as the announcer, inject a third symbolic voice, which generalizes the conflict. The irony of cultural poverty in the midst of the linguistic wealth of multilingualism, the politics of the production of hybrid languages these themes are developed at length in an afterword, 'Speaking with Authority: The Theatre of Marco Micone,' by Sherry Simon. Here, she outlines the complex activities of translation within Micone's texts in his production of hybrid languages, analysis that has been further stratified by Joe Pivato into five levels: verbalizing the everyday life of the Italo-Quebecois, translating this into French in a dramatic text, then translating these plays into English. For the second phase, Micone must invent a language, the language Italians would speak if they did speak French, since most of the Italian community has assimilated to English in North America. When the texts are translated into English, the text moves from a marginalized culture into the majority one, a shift that effects an additional dislocation in meaning. Especially challenging for the translatoris the question ofthe hypothetical language Micone has created for characters should they one day express themselves in French. This involves a judicious use of Quebec locutions such as 'A part de <;a' by the characters. On the other hand, the narrator speaks a more 'international' French, as befits his symbolic role. The English translation ignores these differences in levels of language. It also overlooks another important feature of the language politics of the play: Johnny/Giovanni undergoes a mutation in the course of the ten years under investigation, from an optimisticyoung man to an authoritarian patriarch. Significantly, the pattern of his swearing changes from the English of his youth: 'Fuck your cousin too, I don't give a damn' is replaced by 'Porcane,' an Italien epithet, as he ages. Throughout the play, Binda has substituted the Italian phrase for the English, so that the change of Johnny into Giovanni and his merging with Lolita's tyrannical father is effaced in the linguistic sign. This is symptomatic of a blunting of the political thrust of this play, like that of Voiceless People, in English translation, most apparent in scene xii, a short interpolated scene in a non-realistic mode typical of the Brechtian distancing technique used by Micone. It involves a contest for the 'Queen of the Household' where the two masked prize-winners sing a song. The English version of the song is in rhyming quatrains with a couplet as refrain, 'I'll be queen for a long time / This trophy will be mine.' This contrasts markedly with the varied 98 LETTERS IN CANADA 1988 four-line refrain of the French text, which insists on the paradox of these women with aching backs, at the beck and call of their men and children, who are the empresses of the household but work at minimum pay. The single line, albeit the last one, of the English text, with its ironic . expression of resignation to a hard lot because 'I'm only an immigrant after all,' contrasts with the explicit denunciation of economic oppression in the final verse and refrain of the French text: Au salaire minimum, rna job est trop payante. <;a diminue d'autant les profits de Westmount, Une nuit, j'ai gaspille, dans une salle d'urgence, Les fonds publics acause d'une defaillance. J'fus reveillee l'matin par une immigrante, Sa moppe s'etait coincee sous rna chaise roulante. Soyons moins exigeantes, nous les reines immigrantes. La preuve qu'on n'a trop c'est qu'on est vivantes. Soyons moins exigeantes, nous, les reines immigrantes. La preuve qu'on n'a trop, c'est qu'on est vivantes. Vivantes, vivantes, immigrantes. Not only is the tone of the French more mordant, but the details of economic exploitation are more specific. The problem of the lack of places in day-care centres, as it is articulated in the French song, becomes the ambiguous 'Day-care centers are not for me' in English. No translator's note is offered in explanation for these changes. Perhaps these were adaptations for a specific dramatic production, as was the case with the changes in Voiceless People. The effect, nonetheless, is striking: from political protest in French, the play becomes ethnic folklore in English. While this is implicit in the transfer of meaning from minority to majority culture, where the different becomes the exotic, the clown, this shift is accelerated by the translation strategies selected, which have not only blunted the political edge of the play on levels of language but elected for rhyme over revolt in the songs to camouflage their subversive edge. Another established collaboration is that of David Homel, Robert Marteau, and Exile Editions. A French writer who lived in Montreal for some years, Marteau pursues a difficult spiritual quest through an engagement with a highly symbolic landscape of western France in Voyage to Vendee/Voyage en Vendee (Exile 1987, 89, $9.95 paper). This poetic novel begins with a man coming up from the combes and scraping mud offhis feet, and ends with a vision of 'the Lady ofIntimate Sky'in the form of Botticelli's Venus. Details about some of the more obscure allusions to poems of the troubadours and to alchemical and cabalistic learning are provided in endnotes, which Homel has carefully translated. Marteau's work poses difficulties for the translator seeking the right tone to render TRANSLATIONS 99 the prose, which in a single extended paragraph leaps from history to myth to description of the smells rising from the meadow to meditation on sounds related to the phonemes of Vendee to the feminine principle and the virgin birth. This whirlwind movement among subjects is controlled by-balanced sentences. Homel closely follows Marteau's lead: 'Neither eye nor lotus has yet emerged from the clay, but the eel watches at pelagiC gates like the serpent above the church's entrance.' The result is a compelling blend of the hallucinatory and the restrained. As with many other translations of Marteau and other poets, Exile has published a bilingual edition so that the reader can share in the translator's negotiations between texts and be fully cognizant of his manipulation of the French text. Marteau's is the only text published this year which might be termed poetry. The other perennial category, translation of a literary classic, is this year represented by A Man ofSentiment: The Memoirs ofPhilippe-Joseph Aubertde Gaspe, 1786-1871 (Vehicule,461, $30.00, $15.95 paper; Memoires, Desbarats 1866), translated and annotated by Jane Brierly. This excellent translation, short-listed for the Governor-General's Award, is also the fruit of long collaboration, having been first presented as a thesis at McGill University in 1982. While this text was written by one of the founding fathers of the Quebec novel, and contains many anecdotes and adaptations of oral narratives, it is of more interest today as a historical document about life in nineteenth-century Quebec as observed by a lucid participant. Consequently, in translating the text Brierly has chosen not only to translate all the author's own footnotes but to add more of her own, which provide archival information about the identities of people and places named in the text or fuller descriptions of customs and costumes than are offered by Aubert de Gaspe. Complete with index and introduction situating the text within its historical context and with respect to events in Aubert de Gaspe's life, this translation will be of great interest to historians. It will also be of interest to literary scholars, for the introduction makes a strong case to justify the translator's change in the original title. 'Memoires,' as Brierly points out, refers explicitly to a genre oflife-writing that focuses on the generalized historical event: it presents a picture of a particular time in the past through the eye of a participant reminiscer. Autobiography establishes a different pact with its reader, focusing on the inner along with the outer landscape. By establishing parallels with Madame de Stael, Rousseau, and Sterne's Tristram Shandy, with regard to details and prose rhythm, narrative flow, point of view, and manipulation of time to describe the birth of the persona, Brierly makes a convincing argument for this book as 'one of Canada's great autobiographies .' Consequently, the English title focuses on the narrator whose inner world is being described. The thoroughness and insight into this 100 LETTERS IN CANADA 1988 text which mark the introduction are evident also in the translator's note which precedes it and explains the functioning of footnotes, the spelling of place names, punctuation practice, and especially the decision to eliminate the many single-sentence paragraphs from the first edition. - Brierly thus foregrounds the translator-function, the creative intervention of the translator in shaping the text. Despite this awareness and the consequent precision of the translation with regard to registers of language and completeness, however, the translator has neglected to foreground the language politics of Aubert de Gaspe's period and text. Bilingual, de Gaspe in his text comments on the inadequacies of the French language to express certain concepts which he finds more precisely rendered in English. Brierly fails to signal by footnotes or italics such instances when de Gaspe resorts to English, as in his sentence 'celui qui ne respecte pas la femme et la fille d'un frere d'armes s'expose aux plus terribles avanies dont la coventry est la moindre punition,' which is rendered as 'sent to Coventry,' with no comment. Another book likely to be of great interest to scholars is Writing Quebec (University of Alberta Press, 120, $24.95; $14.95 paper), the collection of Hubert Aquin's essays translated by Paul Gibson, Reva Joshee, and Anthony Purdy, who also acted as editor and wrote the introduction. Most of the essays appeared in periodicals between 1961 and 1976, and were collected in Blocs erratiques (Quinze 1977). The exceptions are 'Occupation: Writer,' which was reprinted in an earlier collection of essays, Point de fuite (Cercle du Livre de France 1971) and ~The Cultural Fatigue ofFrench Canada,' translated by Larry Shouldice and included in his Contemporary Quebec Criticism (University of Toronto Press 1979). This latter text has undergone slight revisions for the present edition. Despite the collective nature of this undertaking, the translations seem of a piece, testifying to the careful editing work which has been undertaken. In his introduction, Purdy writes not at all about his intervention in the text, but attempts to interest the contemporary reader in the essays of this important Quebec novelist. The reasons are the traditional humanist ones that have governed Anglo-Canadian translation: knowlege of oneself through knowledge of the other; greater understanding of 'what Quebec wants,' and hence more accurate political knowledge about Canadian society. This is the discourse of truth as ethnological document, identified by Simon as the dominant Anglo-Canadian discourse of/in translation, though updated here to a multilingual version. The essays, suggests Purdy, are all concerned with the question of identity, with both political identity in a nationalist context and the identity of the writer, especially the question of his relationship with society, as 'enracinement' rather than 'engagement.' Consequently, Purdy asserts, Aquin can tell today's reader what it is like both emotionally and intellectually to be 'a minority in a country of minorities' TRANSLATIONS 101 (xii) and the ways in which this precarious identity is bound up with questions of language. Nonetheless, there is an important gap between the separatist activist Aquin and his heady dreams in the 1960s and the polyglot citizen of multicultural Canada in the 1980s, the difference of a historical tradition and a geographical homeland. As with Aubert de Gaspe's Memoires, Aquin's flamboyant essays, designed to write this new country into being, will be read more out of historical interest than political pertinence. ButAquin's reader too will encounter high standards in the translated text. As an example of the happy blend of fidelity to the source language and fluidity in the target language that is characteristic of this text, one might take the translation of the following metaphor: 'D'aucuns croiront que je suis flambe comme une crepe suzette et que je suis determine a rna non-ecriture par des facteurs nevrotiles.' In 'Profession: Writer,' this becomes: 'There are those who will think that I am as nutty as a fruit cake and that my refusal to write can be explained in terms of my neuroses.' Here the culinary vehicle of the metaphor is maintained in translation. Though different, the desserts in question are archetypal symbols of their respective cultures. On a linguistic level, this translation aims to be an equivalence between textual systems and not between words OJ individual texts. The other traditional category of book in translation is the novel. As usual, this year it is the largest category and dominated by the productions of the country's two full-time literary translators, Sheila Fischman and David Lobdell. They continue to follow well-traced paths, introducing prize-winning novelists to an anglophone audience or translating recent works by other such honoured writers. In both cases, these are also ongoing collaborations between translators and writers. Sheila Fischman has only one translation to her credit this year, her third collaboration with Jacques Poulin, Volkswagen· Blues (McClelland and Stewart, 213, $22.95; Volkswagen Blues, Quebec-Amerique 1984). This is another version of the paradigmatic novel of the year, the male novel of mid-life crisis in which an intellectual - in this case a novelist -seI£reflexively explores his relation to social and literary traditions within the context of his preoccupation with issues of identity, especially as these entail Quebec's rediscovery of its American imperial destiny. Here the writer, known only by his English pen-name, Jack Waterman, sets off at forty in pursuit of his long-lost brother, whose last postcard came from Gaspe years ago. Jack traces the inscription on the card to a passage from Jacques Cartier's travel narratives and locates his brother's last address in St Louis. With a copy of Jack Kerouac's On the Road on the seat beside another book with the title The Penetration of the American Continent by the French Canadians - 'brick red' not blue in colour to emphasize its revolutionary potential- he sets out with a Metis girl and her cat on a trip to California on which he retraces the route of the voyageurs and enters 102 LETTERS IN CANADA 1988 into intertextual dialogue with American novelists from Hemingway through Salinger to Brautigan. Fischman's translation exhibits its usual careful attention to detail and moves easilybetween the levels oflanguage of the more formal expository portions and the colloquial dialogue. But the translation also exhibits a perennial oversight, neglecting to signal passages which originally appeared in English. As in Godbout's novel, this device in Poulin's fiction is of primary importance in dramatizing on the level of language the confrontation of francophone Quebec and anglophone American cultures. In this novel, the use of English increases as the setting shifts to the United States. In the final pages, not only are the characters eating 'bacon-double-cheeseburger a midi' but they are speaking to each other in English. '- Don't talk to me about heroes! dit l'homme. - Why? fit-elle. - I've travelled a long way and all my heroes ...' These phrases are repeated verbatim in the English translation with no indication that they were in English in the original version. On the other hand, the translation maintains the use of French by significant American characters on these final pages, as in the case of Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who greets the travellers with 'Soyez les bienvenus .' While the Quebec conquest of America is signalled in the English text, the corresponding anglicization of Quebec culture has been effaced. Similarly, the use of English for a key symbol of Quebec culture in the early pages of the book, in a passage where Jack the voyageur is reminiscing about his childhood, has not been translated. Here the repeated use of 'snow' for a snowmobile indicates that English has infiltrated even the heart of rural Quebec on those fabled 'quelques arpents de neige,' in the pastoral of childhood. Fischman's text silently substitutes the correct form 'snowmobile.' Most significantly, the title is retained without any comment. But the meaning has shifted. Alluding as it does to the novel as a homage to the beat culture, the transgression of claiming an American literary inheritance rather than a French one from Balzac and Flaubert through Sartre and Camus is muted. In this respect, Fischman's strategies have shifted from her early translations of Roch Carrier's work, where she so scrupulously retained the French 'sacre' to mark cultural difference. Now her Quebecois have abandoned terms like 'sacre ton camp' for the ordinary English 'screw off.' This attempt to make the Americanness of the text more concrete extends to reproducing a photo of the Beat Angels taken by Diana Church at the Cafe Trieste, San Francisco, in 1977, which is only alluded to in the French version. The unidentified man in the middle of the picture, Jack claims, is his missing brother. This addition heightens the play on the referential paradox in this historiographical metafiction. The theme of the double and the writer is taken up again in one of David Lobdell's translations this year, Gaetan Brulotte's Double Exposure (Oberon, 140; L' Emprise, Les Editions de I'Homme 1979), winner of the TRANSLATIONS 103 Prix Robert Cliche for the best first novel in the year of its publication. Another metafiction, this novel focuses on the complex relationships of the writer with his character and reader rather than on his intertextual relations, as in Poulin's novel. The French title foregrounds the power nexus in the act of writing, for it literally means 'ascendancy' or 'hold' over someone, highlighting the movement of the fiction as the character and the thematized reader progressively take charge of the narrative. Lobdell has changed the title in his English version, and consequently the focus on the exploration of writing, to centre on perception. The photographic metaphor emphasizes the major activity of the c~aracter who 'occupe ainsi ses semaines aobserver ce qui se passe et ce qui passe autour de lui' (11). Waiting and looking are what he does. But the introduction of 'double' in the title also brings into play the theme of the double, with the twinning of lucidity and madness in the'unheimlich' or 'uncanny,' as Freud has characterized the creative act, and, consequently , offers a psychological rather than a political reading of the excesses and alienation to which the author is compelled. Lobdell's translation of this text exhibits his general flair for colloquial turns of phrase in English but is marred by his habitual carelessness. By the second page he has already dropped one paragraph ('II espere peut-etre aussi tout simplement la fin du monde' and shifted a major concept: 'II debusque des quantites de signes et les deguste tels quels' is translated as 'He drives a number of things out from under cover and digests them, one by one.' Brulotte is a teacher of literature with a doctorate in semiology directed by Roland Barthes. When he writes 'sign' he does so with the full knowledge of the word in its relation to the meaning-making activities that are the writer's field. The introduction of 'sign' in the opening lines of the novel alerts us to the self-reflexive nature of this text: this process of looking and waiting is the writer's business, a metaphor which blurs the lines between reality and representation that Lobdell's substitution of 'things' would maintain in isolation from each other. The double appears in another of the fictions Lobdell translated this year, Negovan Rajic's Seven Roses for a Baker (Oberon, 76; Sept roses pour une boulangere, Pierre Tisseyre 1987), in the form of the Other, the trouble-making alter ego of the protagonist of this narrative, who has pushed him, the son of a schoolteacher, into revolting against the Great Idea and into exile. In France, he is eking out a pitiful existence as a refugee. This narrative is the third of Rajic's to be translated by Lobdell. While its general plot outline, the exile's wanderings through the underside of Paris, is similar to Rajic's own experience as a post-war refugee in France, it is cast, as is his custom, in a surrealistic frame. This narrative is being told or remembered, hallucinated or dreamed by a man who is dwelling at the bottom of a steel cistern from where he is trying to 104 LETTERS IN CANADA 1988 convince the man who from time to time passes by with food to deliver seven roses to the woman in the bakery who had been a beacon to him in that dark period. A proverb from his native country said that a good man's heart would be as soft as the inside of a loaf of bread, but, through her charity, she had shown him that man lived on more than bread. As usual, Lobdell's translation is eminently readable in English but relatively free in its rendering of the French. A typical example is the following passage, where Lobdell interprets the images and introduces the terms 'trance' and 'void,' which are implied rather than explicit: Mais les essieux Ie bercent doucement et la tiedeur du wagon est si agreable! Lentement, son corps se vide de toute volonte. II n'aspire qu'a l'apaisement, l'oubli, Ie sommeil. II faut s'abandonner .. , se laisser glisser vers ce mysterieux pays ou tout serait calme, serenite. In English, this becomes: But it wasn't long before the rocking of the car lulled him once again into a trance. It was so nice and warm in the train. Slowly, stealthily, he felt himself being emptied of all will. All he wanted was to sleep, to let himself go, to slip into the void, the mysterious country of oblivion where all was calm and serene. Passages which have been interpreted rather than translated, omissions , shifts in titles which effect changes in the range of meanings of the text - all these characteristics of Lobdell's translation practice are to be found in the third book he has translated, Michele Mailhot's Coming of Age (Oberon, 87; Veuillez agreer ..., Editions la Presse 1975). Like many of the other novels to appear this year, this is a fiction ofmid-life crisis which is also a self-reflexive novel about writing. But it is this second facet of the novel which is obscured in Lobdell's choice of title. The French title literally means 'Yours truly,' and is drawn from the letter in the text which Judith writes to the cleaning woman who comes at night to clean her office. Writing shapes her life at this point: writing to this woman and imaginging the details of her work and life are the signs of Judith's break with the routine of office work. Symbolically, it is her letter ofresignation. It is also a repetition of an earlier long letter, quoted in the text, which she had written to her husband's lover. But the force of this writing herself into being is shifted in Lobdell's title to the rite of passage rather than the means through which it is effected. Moreover, in light of Judith's maturity, it is the wrong rite of passage he has invoked. In this narrative, the present decision to walk out on the job that has made Judith so servile has reduced her to the submissive one-liner 'Veuillez agrt~er,' and is counterpointed to an earlier period in her life TRANSLATIONS 105 when, after much deliberation and hesitation, she left her husband and children. Most of the narrative follows Judith's memories of that difficult separation, narrated in the imperfect. The actions of the present which frame this memoire are narrated in the present tense. In his translation, Lobdell has used the past tense for both, blurring the two gestures towards freedom where the French text develops a system of counterpointing or doubling. The cumulative effect of many such small changes in the text is to shift the balance of Judith's narrative from discovery to struggle. This is, for example, the effect of the shifts in the following sentence: 'Or void que, coup sur coup, Ie plaisir d'habiter sa peau la gratifie.' In English, the pleasure in selfhood is missing: it is something that must be conquered. 'But now, on two separate occasions, the experience ofbeing in control of her own life had struck her as singularly gratifying.' This is an extension of the shift from having to acquiring which was made on the first page of the translation when 'alors qu'il s'agit de les avoir toutes' is rendered as 'when it was a matter of mastering them all.' In this particular instance, when the person in question is a woman, the use of 'mastering' could be seen as an example of sexism at work in translation. What Lobdell's text does in these two instances is what Judith's husband does within the fiction: tries to convince her that she doesn't have a world of her own. Of Lobdell's three translations, this presents the greatest divergence between the meanings of source and target texts. On the otherhand, in this text for the first time Lobdell makes use of footnotes to signal double meanings and problematic passages. In this, he amplifies a feature of the source text to foreground the translator-function, a gesture which may imply a future shift in translation strategies. Coming of Age, a novel by a prolific female novelist of the sixties and seventies, is the type of translation project that Lobdell has been much engaged in recently with his translations of Claire Martin, Louise Maheux-Forcier, and others. Like them, Mailhot was busy writing about feminist issues at a time when this was not a respectable orprofitable field of writing. Consequently, her work was overlooked when it was . published. Translation is perhaps anindication ofrenewed interestin this period, an earlier and less well known phase of Quebec feminist writing than that which has since proven to be the most active point of cultural contact between Quebec and anglophone Canadian cultures. It is also, as Simon and Homel point out in their introduction to Mapping Literature, the area oftranslation activity which has proven most productive in terms of translation theory. Excellent examples of both theory and practice abound this year, showing it to be a continuing site of innovation. An excellent starting point is Inkand Strawberries: AnAnthologyofQuebec Women's Fiction, edited by Beverly Daurio and Luise von Flotow (Aya Press, 89), which offers a sampling of innovative writing, self-reflexively 106 LETTERS IN CANADA 1988 exploring the act of writing and sensory pleasures, by Quebec feminists ranging from such established writers as Marie-Claire Blais, Nicole Brossard, and Madeleine Ouellette-Michalska to such newcomers as Lori Saint-Martin and Danielle Drouin. The range extends to genre, since Brossard's contribution is a section from her novel, Picture Theory, while France Theoret's selection is a prose poem, 'Walking.' While several of the texts, like that of Helene Le Beau, were first published in the popular feminist periodical La Vie en rose, others are collected from left-wing publications such as Liberte, as is Carol Dunlop's contribution, and yet others from avant-garde literary publications such as La Nouvelle Barre du jour. Within this considerable variety of contemporary feminist writing is included Suzanne Jacob's text 'Strawberry Time,' from a forthcoming collection of her work in a translation by Susanna Finnell. The work is introductory in another sense in that it is the debut of translator Luise von Flotow. These are promising translations, although some are a little stiff. For instance, while von Flotow works well to maintain the paragraph-long sentences and complex syntax of Dunlop's 'Sunday,' the register of language in this sensual text varies. 'Inebriating' seems excessivelyformal and Latinate as a translation for 'enivrant' in this context. In Saint-Martin's 'The Story of,' the translation elides the complex play on past and present, passive and active, implied in the contrast between the title 'Histoire de' and the final line of the first section, 'Histoire ane pas suivre,' which is translated as 'A story not worth finishing.' This word-play is a bitlike Hamlet's hesitation over to be or not to be. Will the story go on, or has the life come to an end? This ambiguity is also missing from the opening sentence, which, in French, is presented in the active voice, an ominous warning of another death in active preparation: 'A quinze ans j'ai rate mon premier suicide.' In English, this is turned into the passive: 'At fifteen my first suicide attempt failed.' Again, the opportunity for word-play is lost in English when 'Corps apeine esquisses' is translated as 'hardly sketched bodies' rather than as 'barely.' While von Flotow has done very good work translating the first section of Brossard's Picture Theory, there are many instances of word-play, especially the many sound connections which serve instead ofnarrative links in this text, that are not taken into account in the English version. 'Casques' and 'cascadeur' are translated literally as 'helmeted' and 'stuntman,' when the sentence might have been rendered with the insertion of something like 'plummeted' to give the echo effect of sound producing sense: 'John has seen only men lightly dressed and helmeted. Caught in the trap of his vision. Seduced. Plummeted, stuntman in the subway 'of dreams (his head in his hands).' This would also create a . bilingual pun on 'plume,' further linking the helmet and the fallen and trapped man. There are word plays on 'miroir,' 'miroitement,' and 'repetition' as both repeating and rehearsal which could be explored. Von TRANSLATIONS 107 Flotow has rendered a complex text accurately and fluently, which is a major accomplishment. That translating this book may have already served as apprenticeship is evident in her translation of Theoret's 'Walking,' where many of these same potential problems have not materialized in a translation attentive to the colloquial, the active and the subtle effects of repetition, 'the echo of things.' In contrast, Yvonne Klein is an experienced translator and the winner ofa Governor-General's Prize for the translation ofJovette Marchessault's Lesbian Triptych. Currently, she is at work on Marchessault's semiautobiographical trilogy, Like a Child of the Earth (Talonbooks, 176, $12.95 paper; Comme une enfant de la terre: Ie Crachat solaire, Lemeac 1975), which won the 1976 Prix France-Quebec, will be followed immediately by the second volume in the series, La Mere des herbes. Marchessault's writing zigzags between the bitterly satiric and the visionary. This fiction falls within the second category in that it is Marchessault's epic of origins shaped from the Great Mother's cosmic egg. Written in twelve cantos, where echoes of Virgil and Walt Whitman may both be heard, the fiction relates the flight of the persona through space and time to the moment of her arrival, 'the solar spit' from the mating of the Great She-Bear and the polar star, into a family of women. The protagonist casts her nomadic wanderings prior to her incarnation as a girl into a hallucinatory litany ofher readings from Kerouac to the Popul Vuh by way of Kateri Tekakwitha, Iroquois saint, and Mere Marie de l'Incarnation, pioneer writer, saint, and visionary, who was the founding mother of Quebec literature. In this, the fiction with its self-reflexivity, its quest, and·its American influences is a female version of the QuebecAmerique theme that has predominated in the fiction translated this year. However, Marchessault's feminist version of this cultural narrative develops the archetypes of the feminine, as in her sculptures of 'telluric women,' within the context of the re-emergence of goddess reverence in contemporary North America. It is this visionary characteristic of Marchessault's work that makes it difficult to translate. Rapid shifts in perspective and subject matter threaten to drag the narrative from the sublime to the ridiculous. To prevent this, it is important to find the right tone, the register oflanguage which can encompass extremes while avoiding any of them. This was the particular strength of Klein's prize-winning translation of Marchessault's shorter narratives as it is again in the novel. Klein's translation is relatively free, but her key strategy is the use of a relatively formal level of language with overtones of biblical syntax. Reading it is like hearing the King James Version read aloud through lead doors: the cadences pass through muffled. While this is a general feature of the translation, it is most evident in the opening pages and in the visionary climax to the novel, where the language of religion is appropriately evocative: 108 LETTERS IN CANADA 1988 C'est elle! Elle, la Grande-mere, la Grande-Oursonne, la mere de l'espece. Et void qu'elle bAille. Reculez-vous! Reculez-vous! Et void qU'elle enfante un sommeil a l'abri des contraires ayant pour toujours quitte la nuit obscure. Et voila qu'elle va decouvrir d'autres tresors, d'autres brins d'herbes, courants marins, etoiles de couleurs en perpetuel bouillonnement. Une adoration perpetuelle pourrait me saisir la; me petrifier pour l'eternite que jamais je n'eprouverais un seul regret. In English, the formality of 'gaping' instead of 'yawning' for 'bailIe' and the use of 'behold' for'et void' establish the 'high style' of the text: It is she! She, the Grandmother, Great She-Bear, the mother of the race. And behold, she is gaping wide. Step back, step back! And behold how she gives birth to sleep in the shelter of the contraries~ since she has left the obscurity of night forever. Behold, she is going forth to discover a new continent. And behold, she is going forth to discover other treasure, different blades of grass, ocean currents, coloured stars perpetuallyon the boil. Had perpetual adoration seized me there and turned me to stone for all eternity, I would not have experienced a single regret. A highlight of translation this year both in the excellence of its practice and in its theoretical sophistication regarding translation politics is Marlene Wildeman's version of another major feminist text from Quebec, Nicole Brossard's The Aerial Letter (Women's Press, 163; La Lettre aerienne, Editions du remue-menage 1985), a collection of theoretical texts and conference papers, in which this prominent theorist advances her concept of a lesbian poetics. The volume includes an informative introductory essay by Louise Forsyth, who is currently writing a book on Brossard, and a translator's preface by Wildeman in which she develops ideas about her feminist translation praxis. In her introduction, Forsyth explains the importance of language in this collection of essays. Brossard's philosophical project has been to critique the dominant symbolic order with its hierarchy of meanings, especially with respect to the separation of the intelligible and the sensible, the conceptual and the material. Language is one of the symbolic practices maintaining these hierarchies and Brossard's project is grounded in a disruption of the transcendence of the logos by an insistence on its immanence. For her, 'sens' is a word whose multiple meanings/senses must be followed in all their directions and meanderings. Wildeman has underlined this projectby her decision to translate 'sens' not as 'meaning' but as 'sense' throughout this text and to develop the potentialities in .English for the play on the material signifier that Brossard initiates in French in her attempt to disrupt stable meanings. For instance, 'epreuve initiatique' is rendered as 'initiation w/rite,' which might be seen as a TRANSLATIONS 109 compensation for 'une bete de somme(il),' rendered literally as 'his dozing beast of burden,' or the echo effect of 'souvenir' and 'survenir,' which is also lost in translating for meaning rather than translating the letter. Wildeman has written a detailed preface in which she discusses these types of problems and outlines the strategies she has adopted. Translat-' ing explicitly for an Anglo-Canadian lesbian community of readers, Wildeman encounters the greatest difficulty with foregrounding the feminine presence in the more gender-neutral constructions of English. All the insistence on the feminine plural with its syllable'elles' has to be awkwardly rendered with the introduction of the word 'woman.; In one case, Wildeman has opted for retaining the French, 'essentielle.' Other translators of Brossard such as de Lotbiniere-Harwood have played with the sound possibilities of 'she'll' in this context. In this practice, Wildeman is not consistent, for she regretfully translates the French 'jouissance.' In some ways this is surprising, since this term has become widely accepted in English versions of post-structuralist theory since Barthes's The Pleasure of the Text was translated more than a decade ago. However, the question of audience is addressed by Wildeman, who explains that her main aim has been to reach a feminist audience presumed to be unfamiliar with such theory. Consequently, she has minimized 'code' words and translated meaning into concrete terms, as, for example, in the complexweb ofmeanings/associations evokedby 'une ecriture de derive,' which self-reflexively evokes the surrealist strategies Brossard deploys and which is variously rendered as 'writing adrift' (a translation) or as 'writing that deviates from the sense one would have expected the text to take' (a definition). The play of intertextuality is thus diminished in the English version of these essays as is to a certain extent the complex integration of intellectual and sensory concepts. One of Brossard's key terms is 'inedit,' which means most literally 'unpublished' or 'unrecorded' and is used frequently in connection with women's experiences or knowledges. When translated, as it frequently is, by the term 'unknown,' the self-reflexive element disappears from the statement and Brossard appears to be discussing the sensations of the body rather than the problematic of representation of the body. This drift towards essentialism is one which Wildeman's strategies might encourage , though she has foregrounded the options clearly in herintroduction, instructing her reader how to negotiate the space between cultures. On the other hand, the result is a book ofimmensely readable essays in which Brossard's lyric voice resounds. In comparison with earlier versions of many of these texts by other translators, Wildeman's text has escaped from the awkwardness of stilted, Latinate diction, though in the process it has become much more comprehensible, more 'readerly' and easily consumable. 110 LETTERS IN CANADA 1988 What is important about Wildeman's preface is thatit clearly articulates the politics at work in the translation and identifies its implied reader and discursive context. She foregrounds the differences between languages, cultures, and interpretive communities rather than neutralizing the conflict in a silent policy of assimilation such as we have seen in the translation of the post-modern self-reflexive voyages into the heart of writing America that have dominated translations this year. This may, of course, in part be because these feminist texts were the most challenging to translate this year, in the absence of joual novels or Acadian narratives and with a minimal presence of poetry and drama. The poetry texts were presented in bilingual editions, the play was accompanied by an afterword explicating its language politics. What these translation practices exemplify is what we might call, with Michel Van Schendel in his contribution to Canadian Literature, 'signs of mutual transculturalism.' This, he suggests, is an alternative, one of paradox that explores a third possibility for the translator, one which avoids the traditional alternatives of a translation oriented towards faithfulness to the meaning and one dictated by fidelity to the word. It is a practice of hesitation which attends to the polysemic possibilities of the text, negotiating self-reflexively between two textual systems. It is a practice which exemplifies the indeterminacy that Simon sees as characteristic of English Canada's conceptualization of the Other, one which oscillates between literary and ethnographic truths. This negotiation among subjectivities is figured in another metaphor in Ellipse as the encounters of lovers and friends in embrace or dialogue across cultures. This year marks the twentieth anniversary of this magazine devoted to the translation of poetry. Faithful to its tradition, it is also, this year, forward-looking. Louise Dupre and Sharon Thesen have coedited number 39, devoted to 'La Nouvelle Poesie amoureuse/New Love Poetry,' where many women are included among the young poets. Issue 40 is retrospective in nature, including translations by many long-time contributors along with anecdotal history ofthe founding ofthe magazine and reciprocal translations undertaken in the spirit of friendship and continued negotiation. Just as the past is well documented, the future seems assured. Forlhe moment. This double chiasm between future and past, like the metaphor of negotiation, foregrounds the provisionality of the translator's rewriting and highlights yet again the ambiguous theoretical context in which Anglo-Canadian translation takes place. No change in the balance has occurred since last year between those who conceptualize meaning as unitary and recoverable, hence transferrable between transparent languages , and those who understand texts to be always already written and meaning to be elusive. The translator remains faced with Walter Benjamin's impossible contradiction, the call to translate which makes HUMANITIES III translation impossible, rewriting that extends the life of the text by defamiliarizing it, making it foreign. And, since the rewriting is historically and discursively bound, the translatoris condemned to do it all over again tomorrow. Humanities Kathleen Wall. The Callisto Myth from Ovid to Atwood: Initiation and Rape in Literature McGill-Queen's University Press 240. $29.95 Kathleen Wall's The Callisto Myth from Ovid to Atwood is exemplary myth criticism fulfilling several important functions simultaneously. By recovering the story of Callisto from relative obscurity and establishing it as a principal myth about woman's experience, the book installs itself firmly in the recently evolved feminist school of myth criticism. It notices not only the recurrence of the myth in literature but also the variations it undergoes. Wall is an accomplished comparatist. Through her analyses of the myth according to Hesiod, Apollodorus, Hyginus, Ovid, and Pausanias, she summarizes the aspects dominating the interpretations by male scholars of the classical versions of Callisto and redefines them in terms of woman's experience. She builds her re-definition from the basic myth: . A nymph in Diana's following, nature was [Callisto's] 'nunnery' and her refuge from the patriarchal society that had defeated her father. The greenworld villain is Zeus, who rapes her as she rests in the forest, tired from the hunt. Diana's band of virgins exiles her; Hera in her anger transforms her into a bear. Hence the forest now becomes the place of involuntary exile and her metamorphosis makes her part of that landscape. Because she is a bear, she cannot raise a human child; thus her motherhood is dramatically wrenched from her. The final element in her story combines both death and apotheosis: she is nearly killed, but Zeus rescues her at the last moment and enshrines her in the sky as the Great Bear constellation. Acknowledging her indebtedness to Annis Pratt, Wall builds her study on the premise that rape is a masculine expression of power and possession and a feminine experience of initiation. The nine main chapters determine how the Callisto myth in one or in a combination of the five models informs selected narratives from the Middle Ages to the present and from British, American, and Canadian literature. Wall concludes by comparing woman's experience in literature to her experience in life and demonstrates the relevance of the Callisto myth to ...

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