A Sociocritique of Translation: Theatre and Alterity in Quebec, 1968-1988 (review)

The question of Québécois theatre’s negotiation of alterity is a pressing one, perhaps even more so than it was in 1990 when Annie Brisset’s monograph first appeared in French from Les Éditions du Préambule (Montreal). The recent translation into English is a welcome expansion of this wide-ranging and provocative book’s readership and re-energizes debates concerning identity in post-referendum Québec.

Sociocritique focuses on the ideological regulation of the translation of theatrical texts in Québec from 1968 to 1988, a period marked by the search for a national identity. Through detailed comparative analyses of the original texts and their Québécois translations, Brisset reveals the ethnocentric relation to the Foreigner that emerged in the translation of theatrical texts. She writes, “theatre translation in Québec was regulated by phenomena that ultimately revolve around the concealment of alterity” (195). Brisset isolates three modes of translation operative in Québécois translations of dramatic texts during this period: iconoclastic translation, an ironic and parodic mode; perlocutory translation, a persuasive mode; and identity-forming translation, a nativist mode. Each coincides with a stage in the development of a distinct Québécois identity and a Québécois theatre.

As Brisset shows, the first stage of the Québécois theatre’s development was associated with the “naturalization” or “Québec-ization” of foreign plays through processes of translation and adaptation. In chapter 1, “The Foreigner in the Theatrical Institution,” Brisset asserts that the translation of foreign plays in Québec validated the concerns of the emerging nationalist Québécois theatre instead of introducing what was unusual or original in the foreign work to the Québec market. Those foreign plays chosen for translation had themes that coincided with Québécois tropes of colonization, alienation, marginalization, and independence. Publication practices like minimizing the original author’s name and the foreign work’s original title on the covers of Québécois translations exemplified the suppression of the foreign text’s alterity. Translation co-opted foreign works into the repertoire of Québécois drama “as if the original play had never existed in any other form except its Québécois adaptation or re-creation” (29).

During Québécois drama’s second stage, the act of translation itself became the subject of dramatic writing and a parodic mode of translation that disarticulated canonical plays came to the fore. In chapter 2, “At the Other’s Expense: Iconoclastic Translation,” Brisset performs a deft close-reading of Jean-Claude Germain’s foundational work, A Canadian Play/Une plaie canadienne. She explores how the act of translation became a metaphor for the deformation that occurs when there is contact with the (English) Other, a contemporary reincarnation of the traddutore, traditore (translator/traitor) motif. The remainder of the chapter is devoted to iconoclastic translations of canonical works by Corneille, Molière, and Shakespeare, among others, in which the foreign text was imported only in fragments. This disarticulated form was then employed by Québécois dramatists as re-usable material in the construction of a national Québécois drama.

With the burgeoning Québécois theatrical canon came the need for a linguistic code distinct from the Franco-French code. Brisset’s stunning reading of Michel Garneau’s translation of Shakespeare’s Macbeth and the development of a Québécois code in chapter 3, “Shakespeare, Québécois Nationalist Poet: Perlocutory Translation,” constitutes the heart of Sociocritique. Brisset shows how Garneau’s translation choices—line excisions, removal of references to Scotland—produce a Macbeth intelligible to and assimilable by a Québécois public. She also documents at length Garneau’s attempt to re-create a Québécois native language in his re-writing of Macbeth, his use of the Gaspésie dialect, his phonetic transcriptions of the vernacular, and his...