Translations/Traductions

Literary translation continues its valuable endeavour to encourage understanding and communication across linguistic and cultural borders, but its task is increasingly challenging in a Canadian publishing context ever more vulnerable to global market forces and their univocal focus on commercial goals. As I write this year’s column, yet another prestigious English Canadian press, Vancouver-based Douglas & McIntyre, has put itself in receivership, marking the end of its forty years of promoting Canadian authors, including francophone writers in translation. The Canada Council list of 2011 texts submitted for the annual Governor General’s Award for Translation shows that the gap between francophone and anglophone translation activity continues to grow incommensurably. Even if there are some indications that anglophone publishers are not submitting all their translations for the award, a poor sign in itself, the presence of only thirteen translations from 2011 on the list of submissions, compared to some thirty-one translations from English into French, is evidence of a catastrophic decline in French–English translation activity in Canada. The financial trouble at Douglas & McIntyre, a press that has consistently published translations, will only exacerbate this negative trend.

Some Topical or Political Essays

Essay choices for translation this year built on ongoing initiatives, including a title, Wilfrid Laurier, from Penguin’s Extraordinary Canadians series, edited by John Ralston Saul, and a sequel to Max and Monique Nemni’s biography of Pierre Trudeau, Trudeau Transformed 1944–1965, as well as topical subjects, such as André Cédilot and André Noël’s Mafia Inc.

André Pratt, editorialist in chief for the Montréal newspaper La Presse, offers a somewhat superficial portrait of Canada’s first francophone prime minister, Wilfrid Laurier. One wonders whether Ralston Saul has chosen Pratt for this biography more for political and commercial than intellectual reasons. Often, Pratt’s goal appears more to promote allegiance to contemporary Québec federalists’ choices than to contextualize Laurier’s actions and political decisions, particularly with respect to French-language rights and Louis Riel. Some of this not-so subtle federalist agenda resurfaces in the translation. Curiously, the following promotional paragraph appears in English, but not in French, at the end of the prologue: ‘If we knew our history, we would know that this extraordinary Canadian personified an ambitious vision of this country better than anyone else. And we would see him as a powerful inspiration for pursuing the extraordinary ideal called Canada.’ While generally effective, the translation cannot avoid issues of perspective. An experienced journalist, Pratt immediately places his reader in context. From the first line of his introduction, francophone readers are with the author in Québec City, looking with him for the statue of Laurier, here (‘ici’) in Québec’s ‘basse ville’:

Québec. Nous sommes à l’angle des boulevards Charest et Langelier, au cœur de ce qu’on appelle ici la « basse ville ». À la frontière de deux vieux quartiers ouvriers de la capitale provinciale. C’est là, sur un terre-plein, face à une station-service, qu’on découvre une statue de Wilfrid Laurier, chef du Parti libéral du Canada de 1887 à 1919, premier ministre du Canada de 1896 à 1911

Pourquoi a-t-on choisi un site aussi banal, aussi triste, pour rendre hommage à l’un des plus importants politiciens de notre histoire? Le monument s’y trouve à ce point isolé que le parcours du quartier suggéré aux touristes n’en porte pas mention.

In English, however, the first effect is one of distance. A gap is created between the anglophone readers and the anonymous francophone ‘they’ who name this part of Québec City:

Québec City, at the corner of Charest and Langelier boulevards, in the heart of what they call the Lower Town, at the boundary between two old working-class neighbourhoods in the province’s capital. Here, on a raised platform across from a service station, we find a statue of Wilfrid Laurier, leader of the Liberal Party of Canada from 1887 to 1919 and prime minister of Canada from 1896 to 1911.

Why did they choose such a sad, banal site for a monument to one...