Translation’s Trail

Page 17 September–October 2009 Translation is a Love Affair Jacques Poulin Translated by Sheila Fischman Archipelago Books http://www.archipelagobooks.org 160 pages; paper, $14.00 If, as the Italian adage claims, traduttore traditore , translators might want to conceal their treachery. The owner’s manual to a Toyota Prius or a Toshiba laptop does not identify the persons responsible for transposing turgid Japanese into turgid English. Even when title pages disclose the name of the translator, many translations aspire to invisibility, trying to lull readers into believing they are turning pages of the original text. Not so Translation is a Love Affair, whose very title puts the process of switching languages into question. Itself a translation of Jacques Poulin’s 2006 novel La traduction est une histoire d’amour, it is a tender allegory about the relationship between a Quebecois author and the woman who translates him into English. Early in his career, Poulin, a leading French Canadian novelist, worked as a commercial translator, and he offers a translator, a free-spirited young woman named Marine as narrator of this, his eleventh novel. (His twelfth, not yet published in English, also sports a title that announces language as a theme; L’Anglaise n’est pas une langue magique (2009) translates as English is Not a Magical Language ). The ventriloquism of using a woman’s voice to tell the story is yet another instance of Poulin in translation. While studying translation at the University of Geneva, Marine acquired a copy of a novel written by a fellow Canadian publishing under the nom de plume Jack Waterman (who also happens to be a character in Poulin’s best-known novel, Volkswagen Blues [1984]). Because it is about the Oregon Trail, which she had visited while hitchhiking alone across the US, Marine was especially drawn to the book and longed to translate it into English. When she returns to her native Quebec, Marine encounters Waterman in what Hollywood would call “meet cute.” Standing before the graves of her mother, sister, and grandmother , she encounters an older man reading Ernest Hemingway on a cemetery bench. It is of course Waterman, and Marine, convinced that “If there was a way to get close to someone in this life—of which I was not certain—it might be through translation,” elicits Waterman’s permission to translate his Oregon Trail novel into English. He even sets her up to work in an idyllic chalet on Île d’Orléans, while he labors over les mots justes in the tower he inhabits in nearby Quebec City. Lest readers get the wrong impression about the relationship between an elderly, ailing writer and the perky translator who imagines him as the father she never knew, Marine assures us: “The business of sex doesn’t concern Monsieur Waterman and me.” What do concern them are the delicacies of verbal expression and the construction of what Marine, a damaged, lonely soul, calls “the old house of language , midway between earth and heaven.” Midway also between author and translator, it is “a place, a domain, a universe in which I was safe from the woes of this world, in which there was a possibility that Monsieur Waterman and I, in spite of our age difference, had the possibility of meeting.” As if translating, like acting, demanded surrender of personal identity and appropriation of another’s, Marine wears the author’s clothes while reworking his prose. Both agree that finding the precise words is not as crucial as getting the tone right. In translating, Marine insists, “We must embrace the author’s style.” She reinforces her view of translation as erotic exchange by recalling the title of a course she took at the University of Geneva, “Translation is a Love Affair,” and quoting an apocryphal statement by Franz Kafka’s translator, Milena Jesenská: “‘Every day, to keep me faithful to your text, my words hug the curves of your writing, like a lover nestling in her sweetheart’s arms.’” Yet the love affair that constitutes the substance of this novel is not only remarkably chaste; it occupies the borderland between the gentle and the bland. We are told that a bad back, a...