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90 Lh'1TJ::U{~ IN LANAUA lyOO on the cover of the book, which presents itself as writing, not as rewriting . David Lobdell translates almost exclusively for Oberon Press. This year he has translated three celebrated Quebec novels which appeared several years ago: Gilles Archambault's Standing Flight (Oberon, 110, $23.95, $12.95 paper; Fuite immobile, I'Actuelle 1974); Louise Maheux-Forcier's Governor-General's-Award-winning A Forest for Zoe (Oberon, 141, $23.95, $12ยท95 paper; Une foret pour Zoe, Cercle du Livre de France 1969), and Claire Martin's The Legacy (Oberon, '49, $23.95, $12.95 paper; Quand j'aurai paye ton visage, Cercle du Livre de France 1962). Only collections of short stories by the latter two authors had hitherto appeared in English. The appearance of these novels in translation is long overdue. While Lobdell's translations are eminently readable in English, they are extremely free ones. Words and paragraphs are omitted, as on the first page of AForest for Zoe when the repetitive effect is effaced in translating 'alors je me sens rassuree. Consolee: as 'Then I am reassured: these are ... 'On that first page alone, two words are omitted, and two words have their meaning skewed: 'hallucines' becoming 'mesmerized: 'possible' becoming 'not-improbable: a shift to the figure of litotes. These flubs could be corrected with tighter editing: they are the sort of omission or shift that most translators make in early drafts of their work. In aggregate, this year's translations are of very high quality. Both in degree of polish and textual difficulty, these translations mark an enormous improvement over the translation work of a decade ago. What is especially noticeable is the increase in the number of writers who are also translators, and the encouragement this has been to the translation of poetry. Translation practices have also been changing; prefaces are becoming more frequent, translators are signing their transformations more clearly. This increase in self-reflexivity enriches the reading experience for the unilingual person who is enabled to read the text doubly in this way, to experience the text as a voice from another and a different culture. Translation indeed is no longer translation: translation is the creative transformation of a text into a different linguistic system, an activity or re-writing. Humanities James Miller. Measureso[Wisdom: The Cosmic Dance in Classical and Christian Antiquity University of Toronto Press. x, 652. $60.00 Measures of Wisdom is a study in Platonism from the fourth century Be to the sixth century AD, from Plato's Timaeus to Pseudo-Dionysius. It treats HUMANITIES 99 of the parallel between the dance of the stars and planets and the dances of men and women, and how the attitude to pagan gods and the Christian (or Gnostic) God is reflected, as well as formed, in the attitudes of the spectators and performers of the dances of mankind; it tells of how the material world foreshadows, represents, or distorts the dances of whatever immaterial beings a Platonized world can propose or conjure up. The scope of the project is huge, and well beyond the capacity (let alone the imagination) of many learned men. (Miller in fact proposes to cover the next thousand-odd years in a second volume.) But amazingly, Miller is almost up to his self-imposed task. He has read widely, almost recklessly , in the Platonic and patristic worlds (as well as in the Platonic and patristic underworlds), and displays great skill in analysing and synthesizing vast masses of material, most of it still less than illuminated by more pedantic modem scholars. Naturally, at times, he is a bit out of date in his handling of the secondary literature, and sometimes unaware of what might have helped and corrected him in a few details, but in the opinion of this reviewer, his boldness and flexibility of mind amply compensate for the occasional scholarly lapse. Miller seems aware of one of his own weaknesses. He remarks (p 523) that 'time will expose in a ruthless manner any faults in my thinking presently concealed by a gilded overlay of words.' There is, indeed, a problem here, for Miller is attempting far more than a...

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