In Translation: Honouring Sheila Fischman 9780773589858

Citation preview

in t r a n s lati on

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In Translation Honouring Sheila Fischman

Edited by

s h e r ry simon

McGill-Queen’s University Press Montreal & Kingston • London • Ithaca

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© McGill-Queen’s University Press 2013 ISBN ISBN ISBN ISBN

978-0-7735–4195-5 (cloth) 978-0-7735-4196-2 (paper) 978-0-7735-8985-8 (e P DF ) 978-0-7735-8986-5 (e P UB)

Legal deposit third quarter 2013 Bibliothèque nationale du Québec Printed in Canada on acid-free paper that is 100% ancient forest free (100% post-consumer recycled), processed chlorine free This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Cole Foundation. McGill-Queen’s University Press acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for our publishing activities.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Simon, Sherry, compiler, interviewer In translation: honouring Sheila Fischman / edited by Sherry Simon. Includes interviews with Fischman and a selection of rarely printed prose by Fischman herself. Includes bibliographical references. Issued in print and electronic formats. ISBN 978-0-7735-4195-5 (bound). – ISBN 978-0-7735-4196-2 (pbk.). ISBN 978-0-7735-8985-8 (eP DF ). – ISBN 978-0-7735-8986-5 (e P U B ) 1. Fischman, Sheila – Criticism and interpretation.  2. Fischman, Sheila – Relations with authors.  3. Fischman, Sheila – Influence.  4. Translating and interpreting – Canada.  5. Canadian literature – Translations – History and criticism.  I. Fischman, Sheila, translator, interviewee II. Title. p306.92.F 57I6 2013

418'.02092

C 2013-902184-1 C 2013-902185-X

This book was typeset by Interscript in 10.5/13 Sabon.

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Contents

Introduction Sherry Simon ix pa rt o ne

b e gi nni ngs

That Summer in North Hatley Patricia Godbout 3 F.R. Scott and the Poetry of Translation Graham Fraser 13 Notes on the Birth of a Translator D.G. Jones 26 The Agency of Sheila Fischman: A Tribute Kathy Mezei 32 pa rt two

t he a rt o f t r a nsl at i o n

The Ongoing Commedia Alberto Manguel 41 Nothing in My Formative Years Indicated That I Might Become a Translator Pierre Anctil, translated by Donald Winkler 52 Creatively Re-transposing Christa Wolf: They Divided the Sky Luise von Flotow 65 To Foreignize or Not to Foreignize: From a Translator’s Notebook Michael Henry Heim 83

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Contents

A Handful of Metaphors: What I Do When I Do Literary Translation Lori Saint-Martin 92 Edouard Roditi: A Polyglot in the Twentieth Century Sherry Simon 98 pa rt th r e e

wo r d s of she i l a f i s ch m an

Water Sheila Fischman

113

The Anguish of the Heron Gaétan Soucy, translated by Sheila Fischman 120 Interviews with Sheila Fischman Sherry Simon 133 pa rt fo ur

t é mo i gnage s

My Translator, My Sister … Gaétan Soucy, translated by Donald Winkler

149

What I Learned from Her Lise Bissonnette, translated by Donald Winkler

151

Translations Dominique Fortier, translated by Donald Winkler

154

All You Read Is Love Jean Paré, translated by Donald Winkler 160 Sheila’s Bridges and Cuisine Louise Desjardins, translated by Donald Winkler In the Moon’s Wings Mélanie Gélinas, translated by Donald Winkler

165 169

Editing Sheila Fischman James Polk 177 Sheila Fischman and the True Nature of Federalism: A Fable Karl Siegler 181 Pure Memory J. Marc Côté 186

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Contents

The Language Alchemist Ivan Steenhout, translated by Donald Winkler

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199

Merci, Sheila! Roch Carrier, translated by Donald Winkler 201 Poem Donald Winkler

206

Complete List of Translations by Sheila Fischman Contributors

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Introduction Sh erry S i mon

In his wanderings across Latin America in the 1960s, the journalist and poet Alastair Reid met – and later translated – the two most influential writers of the time. Pablo Neruda’s poetry was expansive and lyrical; Borges’s was intricate and sceptical. As different as they were, Reid became “obsessed, haunted” by both of them, and his life would become increasingly intertwined with theirs. Visits, conversations, publications marked ever-new stages in their friendship and collaboration over the years. As they had been his guides to Latin America, he was their companion in the English-language world. Translation is too often regarded as a one-way delivery system. In fact, the process can be reciprocal, a form of creative entanglement. As Reid explained so well, he was profoundly affected by his relationship with the two writers.1 Translation became for him a kind of conversation that he was able to continue even beyond their deaths. But the process of being translated not only opened doors for both Borges and Neruda: it gave them new insight into their own writing. Both would experience versions of their poems as further interpretations of their work. That translation has ongoing and sometimes unexpected effects is suggested by both the Latin word vertere and the medieval French term tourner. In contrast to the more mechanical idea of “carrying over” (transferre), these terms for translation emphasize the way that new versions turn a work in fresh directions. The winding circular ziggurat of the famous Tower of Babel painting by Brueghel (an image often used to represent translation) evokes a pattern of spirals, suggestive of the outward and inward journeyings that fill a

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translator’s life. The rich career of Sheila Fischman has been the occasion for many such translational turns and returns. Fischman is the author of some 150 book-length translations from French into English. In a career spanning more than forty years, she has accompanied Quebec authors through their literary careers, forming associations that have been enduring and have involved unusual forms of reciprocity. Perhaps the most striking is the example of Jacques Poulin. Fischman “discovered” Poulin very early. In 1973, she wrote of an “unjustly neglected young Quebec writer” whose work was sidelined because its tone was so different from that of the  political writers of his generation. She admired his “grace and humour,” the “humanity of the attitudes and characters.”2 And by 1979 she had translated Poulin’s first three novels as The Jimmy Trilogy. She went on to translate many more of his slim, idiosyncratic novels, including the best known, Volkswagen Blues – books that have made Poulin one of the most beloved writers in Quebec and in English Canada. Fischman has described the surprising challenges and satisfactions she found in recreating Poulin’s “perfectly limpid sentences.” She was inspired by the rigour of his writing process, and his sentences nourished her own taste for spare prose. Her respect for “how he sweats and bleeds over every fragment of a sentence, how he strips away and strips away and strips away,” has informed her task and shaped her own writing.3 But the experience of translation was also of consequence for Poulin himself, and here is another turn. Poulin’s characters are fascinated by language, and in his novels characters puzzle over words, discuss their meanings, and sometimes debate questions of translation. One novel has translation at the very centre of the plot. La traduction est une histoire d’amour (2006) (Translation Is a Love Affair, 2009) tells of the affectionate relationship between a writer and his translator, a complicity stimulated by their common respect for words. In an interview, Poulin explains that the plot was inspired by his experience of being translated by Fischman. Playing on the resonances of the unusual French word love, he says, “On dirait qu’elle se love dans ma façon d’écrire” (It is as if she curls up into my way of writing).4 That a writer should be influenced by the experience of translation – to the point of writing a novel about it – is a rare occurrence. But

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what Poulin expressed in fiction has been articulated in other forms. Borges, for instance, wrote about the power of translations to influence our reading of the originals. He had a deep reverence for the act of translation, and thought that a translation could become in some ways more powerful than the underlying text. In one of his essays he famously reversed conventional logic by declaring that an original could be “unfaithful to its translation.” By this he meant that translations take on a life of their own and can alter our understanding of the work itself. But it is in the language of affection that many authors have spoken of the experience of being translated – and this is the case with Sheila Fischman’s authors. They speak of the connections that come to link author and translator, the shared passion for careful prose and love for words. And they marvel at the intimacy and difficult self-examination of the translation process, what Poulin (himself a translator) calls a “formidable school of sobriety.” In this volume, Lise Bissonnette, Dominique Fortier, and Louise Desjardins all speak of the revelations that translation can bring. Bissonnette became curious and appreciative of the play with language that comes with translation; Desjardins “discovered her own work from another angle, as if the story gained in precision and depth.” Gaétan Soucy marvels at the “density and sumptuousness” his text seems to acquire in Fischman’s English. Fischman’s careful reading inspires in authors a renewed engagement with their own words. These revelations make clear that no literary translation can be a “copy” of the original. All translations are imperfect doubles. The uneven fit between one language-world and another means that there will always be bulges. These irregularities have an important function for readers too: they remind us that we are experiencing an enlarged world. One of the reasons that translation matters so much, writes Edith Grossman, is because it infuses a language with influences and alterations it would otherwise not have.5 The more a language embraces new elements, the larger and more expressive it becomes. Canadians have had long and close experience with translation. Daily exposure to the mirror-image doubles of national institutions, the matching paragraphs that line up two versions as equal, provides one image of translation. But the exchange of poetry, novels, essays, and plays across the country provides another. This movement has become a familiar and honoured part of Canadian cultural life. Over

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the past forty years, the library of Canadian literature has been augmented by hundreds of works from the other language – both Quebec literature translated into English, and English-Canadian literature appearing in French versions. But here, the doubling is uneven. Translations are read differently by a second readership; interpretations diverge. It is the impossibility of a perfect fit, of the identical mirror image, that constitutes the challenge and the promise of literary translation. The arc of Fischman’s career corresponds to the coming of age of Canadian literary translation. Her work was among the first to be funded by the newly established Canada Council program (1971). By the late 1970s and 1980s, literary translation was emerging as an organized and collective endeavour, tied into Canadian cultural policy and embraced by Canadian publishers. Fischman worked closely with publishers, operating a kind of individualized wire service delivering news of the latest developments on the Quebec scene. She has become one of Canada’s most respected literary translators and its most prolific. She has now translated an entire library of Quebec literature, including most of the names that have marked Quebec letters in the past four decades: Anne Hébert, Michel Tremblay, Jacques Poulin, Gaétan Soucy, Elise Turcotte, François Gravel. Her commitment to the profession is singular. She is known for championing young authors and for her subsequent commitment to their entire oeuvre. She has made translation her life and embraced the devotion it demands. She has also achieved unprecedented recognition, rewards that honour both her personally and the literary activity she has brought to visibility. This volume recognizes all these facets of the singularity of Sheila Fischman and is an homage both to the translator and to the art to which she has brought honour. It combines essays on translation and personal expressions of recognition to Sheila, and includes prose poems, an interview, and a translation by Sheila herself. It grows out of the circles of reciprocity she has inspired.

 Fischman’s career as a translator began when she moved to the village of North Hatley in the Eastern Townships near Montreal. Born in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, in 1937, she spent most of her childhood in Elgin, Ontario, and then moved to Toronto to go to

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high school. She completed a master’s degree in anthropology at the University of Toronto. Her French was still somewhat rudimentary when she moved to North Hatley, but the milieu in which she found herself inspired her to become more deeply involved in Quebec culture. Like many translators, Sheila fell into her calling by accident. But this “accident” was common to a cohort of anglophone newcomers to Quebec who arrived in the early 1970s and were swept up in the cultural excitement of the Quiet Revolution. Following their inclinations and talents, many took up forms of cultural reportage. Malcolm Reid’s classic book on the parti pris movement of Quebec writers, The Shouting Signpainters, brought to English Canada the news of a  revolutionary cultural movement. Linda Gaboriau plunged into Montreal counter-culture and then into the Montreal theatre scene as a translator and dramaturge. Philip Stratford brought Quebec literature into the English-language departments of the university. Following the lead of the handful of already published translators (Alan Brown, F.R. Scott, Joyce Marshall, John Glassco, D.G. Jones), a motley crowd of improvised passeurs slowly grew into a cohort of distinguished professionals living in Quebec and elsewhere, including Ray Ellenwood, Betty Bednarski, Wayne Grady, David Homel, Barbara Godard, and others. The story that Patricia Godbout tells of Fischman’s immersion in the literary community of North Hatley conveys a strong sense of the combined excitement and discomfort of those years. Godbout sets the scene, describing the double literary community and its nationalist tensions. As she reminds us, North Hatley was a remarkable corner of Quebec – an extraordinary breeding ground for literary translators, the likes of John Glassco, F.R. Scott, Larry Shouldice, and D.G. Jones, rubbing shoulders with the rising talent of the new Quebec – Gérald Godin and Pauline Julien in particular. Godbout focuses on a bilingual poetry reading that Fischman innocently organized, and the fiasco that ensued. The event becomes a lens through which one can glimpse the energies that were brewing in that microcosm of Quebec society. That the poetry reading would be a failure was written into the historical script of the period. The equality of English and French in nationalist Quebec was impossible, and English would gradually have to retreat to a secondary role. Godbout’s detailed reconstruction of the event revives the fraught atmosphere of the times. It also sets up the event as a foundational moment for Fischman.

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To be a translator across the troubled divides of the time meant navigating opposing currents of attraction and mistrust. How does the translator fit into the world she chooses to translate; how does she maintain allegiance to the community for which she is translating? If Fischman seems to have been successful at finding and maintaining her balance, the task was surely more difficult for F.R. Scott, a native-born Anglo-Quebecer of the previous generation, and a lawyer, activist, poet and translator. Scott was without doubt one of the most important influences on literary translation in Canada, and Graham Fraser’s engaging and thoughtful portrait of this legendary figure casts important light on his role as a friend of French Canada, a commissioner on the Laurendeau and Dunton Commission (better known as the B and B Commission), a poet, and a literary translator. Fraser gives a sensitive reading of the contradictions that sustained Scott’s attitude towards Quebec – his admiration of the revolt against conservatism, his enthusiastic solidarity with left-wing intellectuals, his commitment to constitutional change, his inspired understanding of the importance of translation. But Fraser also brings out the bitterness of Scott’s later years, as he defended the ideal of a bilingual Quebec against the pressures of linguistic nationalism. Scott’s conception of translation tellingly encapsulates the array of forces that he confronted in relation to the otherness of French Quebec. His legendary respect for the primacy of the original text is evident in the correspondence with Anne Hébert that became Dialogue sur la traduction, what Fraser calls “a remarkable document of collaboration between poet and translator.” Scott wrote revealingly about the condition of the translator, who is “unfree and yet free at the same time,” who writes “as it were, to order, yet must create while obeying the order.” Scott published three versions of Hébert’s The Tomb of the Kings in the 1960s and then began to revise it again in 1977 until his final illness. That Scott returned to translation confirms the defining powers this activity held for him. And Fraser wonders if, among all his many activities, he might not have been most successful as a translator. Certainly his scrupulous attention to the poetic text set high standards for the generations to come. But Scott also showed that, for the literary translator in Canada, there is no escaping the tensions of politics. Kathy Mezei’s recollections of her years in the North Hatley milieu emphasize Fischman’s strong and infectious dedication to translation

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– at a time when few had chosen that vocation. Mezei pays respect to “Sheila’s role as a vital yet subtle agent of translation in Canada.” How does this idea of “agent of change” mesh with Fischman’s repeated affirmations that she is just a translator, that she herself has no style, that her work is always in the service of the author? For Mezei, there is no doubt but that Fischman has been exerting a “quiet but impressive power” over the years, as she has continued to produce her own brand of translations. She may seek to “draw a cloak of invisibility around her presence in the text,” yet she is undeniably present, an active force in Canadian culture.

T h e A rt o f T r ans lati on Fischman’s beginnings as a translator in North Hatley in the early 1970s (she now lives in Montreal) introduced her to the roil of cultural life in Quebec, and to the ways in which translation became a form of literary activism. But she also entered a milieu where the esthetics of translation were taken seriously. The next series of essays in this volume offer first-hand observations on aspects of the art of translation. Alberto Manguel presents an understanding of translation as “the lingering shadow of the text,” the accumulated readings that add to and enrich classic texts like Dante’s Divine Comedy. Pierre Anctil, Luise von Flotow, Michael Henry Heim, and Lori Saint-Martin articulate their own approaches to translation, and I offer the portrait of an important cultural mediator of the European twentieth century. In his commentary on versions of Dante’s Divina Commedia, Alberto Manguel beautifully captures the active nature of translation. “Entering a text, taking it apart, rebuilding it in words and sentences that obey the rules of different ears and eyes and minds: all this allows a text to begin life again, but this time conscientiously, aware of its own workings and its debts to chance and pleasure.” The difference between the first text and the second is that of greater purposefulness: “Translation brings to a text a logic and an articulation of purpose that the original disregards, or rejects, or is shy of.” It is clear then that a translation is not a copy but rather a rewriting. For Manguel, as for Borges, translation is the deepest form of reading. This is especially evident in successive versions of a classic like the Commedia. Translations are fresh approaches to the text as

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they move through time, as they advance towards us. Each version provides a renewed sense of “the same inexhaustible Commedia” – “Every verbal construction, simultaneously carrying sense and sound, exists in the time and space of its reading, but also in the wake of that reading, once the words have been said, when only the shadow of sound and sense linger on. It could be said that a translation (or at least a good one) renders visible that lingering shadow of the text.” Dante’s text is itself built out of forms of translation, and this doubling of the creative process enhances the potentiality of translation. “All art is approximation,” concludes Manguel, and the drafts and rewritings of any great text point to the incessant migration of meaning. It is through these “multiple voices” that an imaginative world can be recreated. The idea of translation as “a greater articulation of purpose” is fleshed out admirably in the essays by translators. The first of these, by Pierre Anctil, describes the surprising voyage that led him to becoming a translator. This was a journey involving gradual, hardwon steps. From his first encounters with foreign accents in New York where he was studying social anthropology, to his discovery of a haunting language of the past in Montreal, Anctil evokes the stages that brought him to the Yiddish language and his influential role as translator into French. Thanks to influential mentors like David Rome, the French-Canadian Anctil was encouraged to take Yiddish classes, then immersed himself in the poetry of J.I. Segal. It is the powerful evocation of his entry into Segal’s poetry that gives Anctil’s story particular resonance. He recalls the frustrations of approaching texts that belonged to traditions half-forgotten and cut off from the lively streams of interpretation. His description of his very material struggle with dusty and opaque Yiddish-language books recalls the “grapplings and embraces” evoked by A.M. Klein. In a fragment of a short story describing his character Pimontel’s difficult task of translating old Hebrew texts, Klein speaks of the “ceaseless unrelenting struggle” in which vocabularies stood “in opposed deadlock, the intransigent Hebrew meaning, the Saxon syllables aloof and unaccommodating,” the words of the Hebrew poets echoing against “his Canadian forests and the resonant rock of his mountains” (Klein 1994, 134). Anctil’s task has many of the same dimensions. He must make his way into the poetry, devising special annotations to ease his progress, experiencing occasional frustrations but then finally the increased

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confidence that allowed him to begin his systematic translation of the distinguishing works of Yiddish language literature and culture in Montreal – the translations not only of J.I. Segal but of Hirsch Wolofsky, Simon Belkin, Israel Medresh, Sholem Shtern, and many others. Luise von Flotow describes another kind of rescue through translation – this time the freeing of a novel from the constraints of an ideologically driven interpretation. Von Flotow draws on her experiences as an academic and translator in Germany at the time of the fall of the Berlin wall to evoke the curious case of the socialist translation of Christa Wolf’s Der geteilte Himmel (1963, The Divided Sky 1965). Christa Wolf was at the time (and probably still is today) the East German writer best known in the West, well known for her novel Kassandra (1983), and an important and respected figure on both sides of the Wall. Her first full-length novel, set just before and immediately after the building of the Wall, had a very controversial reception in East Germany and was translated by an East Berlin publishing house. Von Flotow describes the kinds of pressure brought to bear on this first translation, an unusual example of a translation prepared “at home” for export. While almost all translations are undertaken in the receiving country, by translators mandated by foreign publishers, there have been agencies created for the purpose of sending ideologically driven translations abroad. Soviet Russia published the great Marxist classics for export, and China continues to have its agency for the export of translations. Von Flotow describes how her new translation restores the ambiguities and stylistic innovations of Wolf’s novel and rescues Wolf from the confines of the embattled ideologies of the time. Michael Henry Heim chooses to take on the controversial question of what has become known in translation theory as foreignization. This debate comes out of a distinguished tradition initiated by the German Romantics and best articulated by Walter Benjamin in his “Task of the Translator,” in which he favoured acknowledging the “foreign” origins of translation by introducing elements into the receiving language that stretch the limits of the language. This is both a philosophical position and a translation strategy. While the philosophical position has been attractive to many, the difficulty of actually enacting such foreignization is a different matter. Heim puts in a plea for a non-dogmatic approach, suggesting that the translator should evaluate each case. How foreign are German and American to one to other, he asks, especially as Germany has become

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increasingly Americanized? Should a Latin maxim, given in Latin in the German original, be given in English? Heim says yes to this latter question, but warns against finding an English equivalent for such historically specific terms as Gauleiter. “From my practice of translation over the years, some of which I have distilled into the examples given here, I conclude that translators who decide a priori that domestication or foreignization is the valid approach do themselves a disservice.” For translator and writer Lori Saint-Martin, the only way to describe what actually happens in the process of translation is to rely on metaphor. Bringing in examples from a prolific career of translating with her husband, Paul Gagné, from English into French, SaintMartin proposes a series of images. Translation must be concerned with music, she argues, and with finding a voice. If you speak more than one language, you are more than one person. Like Manguel, she insists that translation is the closest, the most intimate form of reading. It is also a “tightrope dance.” Like Anctil, she evokes the struggle with otherness that constitutes the essence of translation. Encounters with the other – the other language, words, culture, voice – ultimately reveal the otherness of one’s “own” language and even one’s “own” self. But this discovery of otherness paradoxically comes through closeness: “Translation is what in French is called a corps à corps. Literally ‘body to body,’ this expression means both ‘hand-tohand-combat’ (notice the French expression is more intimate) but also close and tender physical contact.” The final contribution to this section is my own portrait of the polyglot and erudite Edouard Roditi (1910–1987). Poet and essayist, interpreter at Nuremberg and for the United Nations, Roditi was an exceptional mediator across continents and languages, a translator of such diverse poets as Surrealist André Breton and the medieval Turkish Sufi Yunus Emre. With a career spanning much of the twentieth century, Roditi stands at the intersection of an astonishing number of literary, cultural, and political currents. Today his name is virtually unknown, and yet he was a friend to many of the most important European and American literary figures. What is most fascinating about Roditi is precisely his invisible presence at the heart of twentieth century culture, his innumerable contributions to little magazines nourishing the flow of ideas. Translation was part of  what he did as an intellectual, putting to use the languages he acquired in childhood (English, French, Ladino) as well as the many

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languages he learned later (Portuguese, Italian, Spanish, Greek, Danish, and some Turkish). There was nothing amateurish about Roditi’s extravagant multilingualism. He was a serious scholar of language and a meticulous translator. At the same time, he saw translation as a way of influencing and stimulating literary cultures, infusing them with new insights and stylistic innovations. Reconstructing the career of a middleman like Roditi, a passeur, provides an unusual perspective on the history of twentieth century literature.

T é m o ig nages Whether for her legendary modesty and generosity, her gardening and culinary prowess, or her important services as a promoter of Quebec authors, Sheila Fischman is celebrated by authors, colleagues, and publishers. Translation reveals itself to be a formidable engine of friendship and fast literary bonds. What we learn in these sketches of the literary life is the way that Fischman has been passionately involved with people. She has not been a public figure, largely devoting herself to her work and avoiding speaking engagements or pronouncements about her work. Yet these contributions show her to have been a very active player in relations with publishers and authors in the decades that saw the foundation of translation collections in English Canada. James Polk, Karl Siegler, and Marc Côté, editors and publishers, respectively, of House of Anansi, Talonbooks, and Cormorant, chart the progress of Quebec writing in English, recalling the different kinds of decisions that would define the perception of Quebec in English. James Polk’s affectionate and engaging memories of many years of friendship with Fischman include editorial discussions of vocabulary choices with surprising implications. Karl Siegler recalls debate over a question – whether to put the translator’s name on the cover of a translation – with huge politico-ontological consequences. Should the English-Canadian reader be persuaded to consider Michel Tremblay “one of us” (“on the barricades of an emerging, unified Canadian nationalism”), or should the translation of his work be identified by the difference of his language and origins? Siegler’s cautionary tale of his misguided activism (which included striking the translator’s name from the cover of the book) ends with the acknowledgment that we have no choice but to call a translation a translation. Marc Côté’s vignettes of the literary life

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emphasize Fischman’s constant work as discoverer and promoter of Quebec authors. For authors, translation is most certainly a gift (it’s a prize that endures, says Lise Bissonnette), but the flip side of the experience can be sometimes humiliating revelations of imprecise language or faulty logic. Sometimes the revelation is more positive: for Gaétan Soucy, to read his work in English was to discover that his novel was comic, though he hadn’t realized it. Soucy considers Fischman “the sister” of his work, suggesting a kind of co-creation in the translation of a book like La petite fille aux allumettes, considered Fischman’s most virtuosic translation. Each of the authors here articulates some sort of debt towards Fischman, one that has inspired reflections on the connections triggered by translation. One unusual piece in this collection is by Mélanie Gélinas, who has not yet been translated by Fischman but whose dream of translation is interwoven with her experiences of Fischman’s generosity and friendship.

 “A room, where you grope for the light switch.” This is the image proposed by poet, scholar, and translator Anne Carson to evoke the enigmatic character of translation, but also its sudden illuminations. Because all art is approximation, Manguel reminds us, translation replicates the mystery of all verbal creation. But outside the dark room, as Sheila Fischman’s career shows, translations have clearly visible effects. They sustain the communities, networks, and reciprocities that give life to literature.

Not e s 1 In a remarkable New Yorker article, “Neruda and Borges,” by Alastair Reid, 24 June 1996. 2 Cited in André Lamontagne,“L’autre Poulin,” ttr 15, no. 1 (2002) 45–63. 3 See “Interviews with Sheila Fischman” in this volume. 4 Christian Desmeules, “Jacques Poulin et la petite musique des mots,” Le Devoir, 25 March 2006. http: / / www.ledevoir.com / culture / livres / 105124 / jacques-poulin-et-la-petite-musique-des-mots. 5 Edith Grossman, Why Translation Matters (London: Yale University Press 2010), 1.

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pa rt on e

Beginnings

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That Summer in North Hatley Patr icia G odbout

In a recent biography of John Glassco, Brian Busby shows the complexity of the interrelation between living and telling, memory and memoirs, throughout Glassco’s life and oeuvre. Busby emphasizes the significance of the summer of 1929 that the nineteen-year-old “Buffy” Glassco spent in Paris along with his friend Graeme Taylor, at a time when a host of writers and artists like Hemingway, Scott Fitzgerald, Stein, and Picasso – whom Glassco may or may not have actually met – were all living there. The period was to be memorialized and fictionalized a number of times. For example, on the part of the American expatriates, before Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast was published posthumously in 1964, Robert McAlmon had written Being Geniuses Together (1938), a memoir later continued by Kay Boyle (1968). The Canadian visitors were not outdone: in the 1930s Morley Callaghan published a short story called “Now That April’s Here,” set in Paris in 1929 – a story Glassco intensely disliked. Callaghan revisited the period much later in a memoir titled That Summer in Paris (1963). And, of course, Glassco had his own way of composing and recomposing the past in his Memoirs of Montparnasse (1970). From the late 1930s onward, Glassco lived most of his life around Foster, Quebec, in the Eastern Townships. As Busby notes, his friend F.R. (Frank) Scott began to spend his summers in North Hatley, fifty kilometres from Foster, in the early 1940s. Hugh MacLennan was summering there as well. In the early 1960s, Ronald Sutherland, Ralph Gustafson, and D.G. Jones settled in the village. A.J.M. Smith was spending many summer months in the area at a cottage on Lake Memphremagog, while Louis Dudek had a summer home in nearby

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Way’s Mills. Such a concentration of writers in the vicinity, writes Busby, led Glassco to refer jokingly to North Hatley “as the Athens of the Eastern Townships.”1 This phrase found its way, in a slightly different – magnified – version, in the title of two articles on literary life in North Hatley and the immediate neighbourhood: “The Athens of the North,” by Ronald Sutherland (1989), and “The Decline and Fall of the Athens of the North: Literary Production in the Eastern Townships,” by Michael Benazon (2007). According to Sutherland, it was not Glassco but A.J.M. Smith who – no doubt ironically – gave North Hatley the epithet. Sutherland, who does not underline in his article the term’s hyperbolic character, maintains that it refers to the fact that “a truly extraordinary number of writers, artists, potters, weavers and other practitioners of the arts and crafts had somehow congregated” in that place.2 Thus the important force at work seems to have been the accumulation of literati in a single space, forming what one could call a “scene.” The beauty of the village’s setting on the northern tip of Lake Massawippi also acted as a binder. Or perhaps one could speak of a centripetal force, given that the village is accessed down one steep hill or another. Sutherland himself underscores as much when he tells how, on a car trip from Sherbrooke in the spring of 1961, he and his wife first “came to the top of a hill, and suddenly the lake and the whole town were in front of our eyes.”3 Several years earlier, David Homel, in an article on the writers of North Hatley published in Books in Canada (1984), had observed that as one approaches from Montreal, North Hatley appears “at a bend in the narrow road, coming down from Sainte-Catherinede-Katevale”4 – one of those hyphenated place-names fairly common in the Townships that juxtapose the name of a Catholic parish and an older English toponym. The phase of North Hatley’s literary life that Sutherland highlights is the rise of this “congregation” of writers and artists, although his text ends on a meditation on ghosts, after the deaths of many writers like Scott, Smith, and Glassco in the 1980s. As for Benazon, as can be readily construed from his title, he clearly emphasizes not only the “decline” but the “fall” of this once-bustling centre of literary and artistic activity that Sutherland, following Smith, had “ventured to call … ‘the Athens of the North’” (194). According to Benazon, its golden age covers a twenty-five-year period extending from 1963, the year of the creation – by Sutherland – of the Comparative Canadian

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Literature program at Université de Sherbrooke, to 1988, at a time when the “literary plenitude” enjoyed until then seemed to have “exhausted itself.”5 In that particular instance, the downward movement Benazon emphasizes appears to coincide with the topographical features of the place. David Homel quotes Doug Jones as saying that “the summer of 1983 signalled the beginning of the end of the North Hatley community because, on the occasion of Frank Scott’s birthday [on August 1st], there was no commemorative picnic on his land, as there had been for the last decade or two.”6

A Bil in g ua l P o e t ry R e a d i ng at The Pottery If there is one literary event that is of particular significance in this quarter-century, it is the poetry reading organized by Sheila Fischman in North Hatley in the summer of 1968. This event stands out for many reasons, one of them being that it was told and retold over the years by many people. I’ve been able to trace six versions of it, and there may be more. Sheila Fischman herself recounted the evening and its circumstances in an article published in Matrix in 1986. She acknowledges that this “Poetry Reading,” an event that when it took place “wasn’t even capitalized,” did deserve, in retrospect, “the lettres capitales of the last line of one of Roland Giguère’s poems.”7 Before her, in 1984, David Homel had done a round of interviews with many members of the Townships literary community, including Fischman, and come up with his way of describing the literary evening. Ronald Sutherland reminisced about it in his piece for Les Cantons de l’Est (1989). Avrum Malus gave a version of the story in the same book, in a text called “Townships Poetry: Is There a Tradition?” (1989). Michael Benazon also narrated the event in his text published in 2007. The last to my knowledge to have produced yet another version is Brian Busby in A Gentleman of Pleasure: One Life of John Glassco (2011). One is tempted, mutatis mutandis, to draw a parallel with the summer of 1929 in Paris as told and retold by many people, one of them – Glassco – having been a participant in both literary communities. Sheila Fischman’s account of the event is of primary importance, not only because she chose to commit herself to narrate it but because she does so in such a subtle and enriching way, taking the opportunity to explore the phénomène de mémoire, to use a phrase by Gérard de Nerval. When Fischman’s text appeared in Matrix, that magazine was then published out of Lennoxville (now part of the city of Sherbrooke).

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The magazine was based on Bishop’s University campus, which, as Avrum Malus notes, “has been the centre of English literary activity in the Eastern Townships since the late nineteenth century.”8 Its editors were Philip Lanthier, Michael Benazon, and Marjorie Retzleff, then English professors at Champlain College; Malus, a professor in the Département d’études anglaises of Université de Sherbrooke; and one of his students, Maria Van Sundert. At the time Benazon was conducting important interviews for Matrix with Montreal writers such as Leonard Cohen and Irving Layton, and was preparing a literary guide to Montreal that was, unfortunately, never published. That issue of Matrix was “devoted to work by writers of Quebec’s Eastern Townships.” The introduction was written by Phil Lanthier, who was later to compile, in collaboration with Richard Giguère and others, a bilingual Anthologie de la poésie des Cantons-de-l’Est au 20e siècle (1999). Ronald Sutherland published a paper on Neil Tracy, an Eastern Townships poet who had just died. Alongside a short story by Joyce Marshall, who attended a school in the Townships in her youth and gave her papers to Bishop’s University, and a text on Sutherland by Ronald Ewing, one could read a four-page text of reminiscences by Sheila Fischman, on “A Night in August” some eighteen years earlier, in North Hatley where she had just arrived from Toronto. The question of trust in one’s or someone else’s words, which translators are so familiar with, is announced at the start: “What follow are my recollections. They can’t be trusted fully.”9 Fischman’s story begins on the eve of St-Jean-Baptiste Day, in 1968, with a bonfire by the lakeside. Its onset is thus elemental, as in some of Frank Scott’s poems: fire, water, sweet summer solstice air, and Appalachian rock. During the evening a film by Pierre Perrault is projected; Fischman says she couldn’t “make out more than a few scattered words of the dialogue.” One can see here the intent to understand, to cut through the wall of unknown words and sentences. Her recollections thus very much emphasize the ear, what she can decipher – for example, a simple sentence in French spoken by Roland Giguère, who was then also spending time in North Hatley, that she is thrilled to have understood (24). Her work of decoding was already under way. As she explains, it was during those early days of the summer of 1968 that she came fully to realize there were indeed two communities in the village: francophone and anglophone. But she is quick to add in a parenthesis that she later learned “there were five, at least.”

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In this way, she shows an awareness of the coexistence of “multiple memories,” as E.D. Blodgett puts it, of the necessity to “recognize the legitimate claims of other autonomies.”10 The coexistence of French and English is given an amusing twist in her narration when she talks about French potters and English potters in the village. This terracotta politics is of importance, as the event she’ll organize will be held at a place called The Pottery. The arts and crafts were then very much alive in North Hatley. In the 1930s, Emily LeBaron and Mrs A. Virgin had opened a weaving and art school called the Flying Shuttle, which was described as the “nucleus” of much of the village’s artistic activity in an article published in April 1961 aimed at attracting tourists. The text also underlined the activity of potters such as Gaétan Beaudin, “a ceramics graduate of the Montreal École des Beaux-Arts,” and silversmiths like his brother Marc-André.11 The idea to organize a bilingual poetry reading came to Fischman after she met Gérald Godin – also new to the place – and others at the St-Jean-Baptiste: “The idea was a social one,” she writes, adding, “the banal organizational details are of no interest.” I can’t help thinking, however, that this “banal” work is often vital, and that Sheila Fischman was to do a lot of that some time later when she founded the periodical ellipse with Doug Jones, her husband at the time. The date that she gives for the event is 8 August 1968, but soon adds, “Perhaps that’s wrong. In any case, it was a Saturday.” If so, it would most probably have taken place on 10 August. Fischman is quick to situate the event in a broader social and political context when she specifies that it was “before the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia” – on 21 August 1968. She mentions another “certainly true and verifiable” detail: “Quebec was, at the time, in the throes of a liquor strike.” Employees of the Quebec Liquor Board were indeed on strike from the middle of June until the end of November. As she goes on to explain, however, that didn’t prevent alcohol from flowing at the poetry reading: “Who but Buffy Glassco would have known a bootlegger, who I believe worked as a rural postmaster in his spare time? Perhaps there was a postal strike as well.” (There had been a postal strike earlier that summer, but it was over.) The reading took place in the large living room of local potter Mildred Beaudin, wife of Gaétan Beaudin. Their place, called The Pottery, “functioned as a kind of cultural meeting hall,” according to Ronald Sutherland.12 The poets were F.R. Scott, A.J.M. Smith, John

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Glassco, D.G. Jones, Roland Giguère, and Gérald Godin. At the reading, Sutherland introduced in English one of the anglophone poets. As Fischman recalls, “From a corner of the room came one of the best-known voices in Quebec; and though she was shouting now, not singing, everyone knew it was Pauline Julien who chanted tauntingly: ‘En français, en français.’” Avrum Malus describes Julien’s outburst as being “fundamentally harmless but provocative.” However, “it was met by strong reaction on the part of a few.”13 Even though his text appeared in 1989, Malus had conducted personal interviews as early as 1985 with three protagonists of this event, Fischman, Doug Jones, and Mildred Beaudin.14 He is the only one to have collected Beaudin’s testimony. According to his account, she apparently replied to Pauline Julien, in French, “Vous oubliez que ce n’est pas la procession de la St-Jean-Baptiste, c’est une soirée bilingue. C’est ma maison. Si vous n’êtes pas heureuse ici, je vous prierais de quitter.”15 The juxtaposition implied by bilingualism wasn’t coming naturally to many people, it seems. Michael Benazon writes that “Sheila Fischman was visibly upset that her attempt to bring two groups together was being challenged in this manner.” After underlining the role played by alcohol, he concluded that “in fact, the evening seems to have ended happily enough with a boisterous party in Ron Sutherland’s basement.”16 In David Homel’s article, which was also aimed at presenting more generally the anglophone literary life of the Townships, the event was used to illustrate the fact that “skirmishes have broken out around the issue of language” there as well.17 Among the many people Homel interviewed was Gérald Godin, who had by then become the minister of cultural communities and immigration in the Lévesque government. On the topic of the poetry reading, Godin recalled that “when works were presented in English only, the French contingent raised a protest. Fuelled by alcohol of various sorts, the event took on apocalyptic proportions.” For Godin, “it was all a question of temperament,” because for the French, an evening of any sort isn’t successful if there isn’t “a good brawl.” (One is reminded here of Gérard Bessette’s La bagarre.) As for Sheila Fischman, she treasured “a long letter from Gérald Godin, written after he returned from his journalist’s trip to Prague to cover the invasion for Radio-Canada, in which he assured me that, on that evening, we were all truly québécois.”18 In a sense, then, a certain definition of the term québécois has something to do with this capital and capitalized soirée de poésie.

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The title of Homel’s article, “Green, Wonderful Things,” was taken from a poem by Raymond Souster that Louis Dudek was quoting from when Homel interviewed him: “Green, wonderful things are enemies never to be forgotten.” Interestingly here, the connotations, from the beginning of the line to the end, change from a potentially welcoming world to a treacherous space, leading one to foresee that an element may be changing into its opposite. “True to form,” writes Homel, “Dudek looks at those ‘green, wonderful things’ as a struggle of stunted forms of life for survival.”19 Survival or survivance was definitely in the air. Homel stresses some distinctive traits of the Townships when he notes that North Hatley is “more New England than Quebec (no church steeple dominates the town).” He goes on to explain that one of its monuments, Hovey Manor, “is a replica of a southern mansion, the fruit of American ex-Confederates who wanted to escape the summer heat without having to reside on Yankee territory. Doug Jones tells about people hearing Negro spirituals sung in the park on Sundays – the servants attached to the Manor.” This presence of black servants accompanying the families of Southerners summering in North Hatley as early as the 1890s is not often mentioned in publications related to the village’s history. But sources confirm the presence of black servants from Baltimore, Savannah, or Alabama in the village in those days and into the early twentieth century. For instance, in a book of reminiscences about “the old Hatley days” published in 1961, Hally Carrington Brent tells about what she terms “a preponderance of negroes, who seemed almost to outnumber their white employers. Bands of them on their ‘days out’ could be seen parading the roads.” Almost every Southern family, she writes, had one or more black servants.20 Add to that the First Nations (Abenaquis) who were the original inhabitants of the area, and you begin to get a more complete picture of all the people who shaped the place.

V a r io u s E f fects Although Sheila Fischman was “in tears” when she realized the turn her poetry reading had taken, that evening “was the beginning of the rest of [her] professional life”: “I determined I would devote the energy and skills I could muster to attempting, only attempting, to break down some of the barriers between French- and English-speakers. My

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chosen medium was literature, for I would later discover I had a certain knack for translating fiction from French into English.”21 In North Hatley, she met Roch Carrier, who had just published La Guerre, Yes Sir!, and she undertook to translate it into English. It was to be the first of an impressive list of books by writers such as Jacques Poulin, Michel Tremblay, Anne Hébert, and countless others. As Fischman writes, “that simple soirée de poésie would also give birth to ellipse which I co-edited with Doug Jones for the first five years of its existence.”22 The October Crisis of 1970 was underlined in a special way by ellipse’s editorial board. Following the adoption by the Canadian government of the War Measures Act, several poets such as Gérald Godin and Gaston Miron – whose poetry had been translated in the periodical and whom the editors knew well – were sent to jail. In an issue titled “Octobre/October” (1970), one can read a poem by Paul Chamberland, “Manifeste des enfants libres du Kébek,” translated by Sheila Fischman, one of the very few poems she has translated. For the editorial board of ellipse it was important to support their jailed friends while at the same time showing their francophone readers that many English Canadians were aware of the linguistic, social, and political situation that they shared. Other members of North Hatley literati such as Frank Scott were in favour of the War Measures Act. “The October Crisis separated us,” Godin told Homel.23 As for John Glassco, “writing to Smith [in December 1970], he complained that Sheila Fischman, D.G. Jones, Ronald Sutherland, and others in the province’s anglophone literary community were ‘over-truckling’ to their francophone counterparts.”24 It thus seems that the October issue of ellipse hadn’t gone unnoticed. Other poetry readings were to follow the capitalized one. As Avrum Malus wrote, “Seven years after the Pottery reading, the first annual Seventh Moon poetry reading was held in North Hatley … Because of the difficulties of the bilingual reading at the Pottery, the first five Seventh Moon readings were unilingually English; by 1980, the political climate had changed.”25 The remaining readings were bilingual. They lasted until the early 1990s. To play on the title of one of Sherry Simon’s books, “translating North Hatley” – or Quebec more generally – wasn’t always easy. But the expert and steady work Sheila Fischman has done as a major translator of Québécois literature since those North Hatley days is a formidable contribution to the task at hand.

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no t e s 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

8 9 10 11

12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25

Busby, Gentleman of Pleasure, 171. Sutherland, “Athens of the North,” 266. Ibid., 270. Homel, “Green, Wonderful Things,” 6. Benazon, “Decline and Fall,” 200. Homel, “Green, Wonderful Things,” 8. Fischman, “Night in August,” 24. The line “j’écris ton nom en lettres capitales” is the second to last of Giguère’s poem “Un amour au long cours” in L’Âge de la parole, 43. Malus, “Townships Poetry,” 284. Fischman, “Night in August,” 23. Blodgett, Five-Part Invention, 297. Reade, “Eastern Townships’ Culture Centre,” 8–9. I wish to thank Judy LeBaron of North Hatley for having brought to my attention this text published in Happy Motoring (sponsored by Esso) and for providing me with information about the Flying Shuttle, her aunt Emily, and the history of North Hatley more generally. Sutherland, “Athens of the North,” 269. Malus, “Townships Poetry,” 284. Could it be that after being interviewed by Malus and Homel, Fischman decided it was her turn to take up the pen? Malus, “Townships Poetry,” 284. Benazon, “Decline and Fall,” 196. Homel, “Green, Wonderful Things,” 9. Fischman, “Night in August,” 27. Homel, “Green, Wonderful Things,” 9. Brent, North Hatley Story, 55. Fischman, “Night in August,” 26. Ibid. Homel, “Green, Wonderful Things,” 9. Busby, Gentleman of Pleasure, 238. Malus, “Townships Poetry,” 285.

B i b l i ogr ap h y Benazon, Michael. “The Decline and Fall of the Athens of the North: Literary Production in the Eastern Townships.” In Language Acts: Anglo-Quebec

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Poetry, 1976 to the Twenty-First Century, edited by Jason Camlot and Todd Swift, 194–201. Montreal: Véhicule Press. Blodgett, E.D. Five-Part Invention: A History of Literary History in Canada. Toronto: University of Toronto Press 2003. Brent, Hally Carrington. The North Hatley Story. Privately published, 1961. Busby, Brian. A Gentleman of Pleasure: One Life of John Glassco, Poet, Memoirist, Translator, and Pornographer. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press 2011. Callaghan, Morley. Now That April’s Here and Other Stories. New York: Random House 1936. – That Summer in Paris. New York: Coward-McCann 1963. Fischman, Sheila. “A Night in August.” Matrix 22 (Spring 1986): 23–7. Giguère, Richard, Philip J. Lanthier, and André Marquis. Anthologie de la poésie des Cantons-de-l’Est au 20e siècle, Montreal: Triptyque 1999. – “Un amour au long cours.” L’Âge de la parole: Poèmes, 1949–1960. Montreal: Éditions de l’Hexagone 1965. Glassco, John. Memoirs of Montparnasse. Toronto: Oxford University Press 1970. Godbout, Patricia. “‘Passant par Paris …’: Les exercices de mémoire de John Glassco.” In Passeurs d’histoire(s): Figures des relations FranceQuébec en histoire du livre, edited by Marie-Pier Luneau, Jean-Dominique Mellot, Sylvie Montreuil, and Josée Vincent, 297–305. Quebec: Presses de l’Université Laval 2010. Homel, David. “‘Green, Wonderful Things.’” Special issue, “The Writers of North Hatley.” Books in Canada 13, no. 1 (January 1984): 6–10. Malus, Avrum, Diane Allard, and Maria van Sundert. “Townships Poetry: Is There a Tradition?” In Les Cantons de l’Est: Aspects géographiques, politiques, socio-économiques et culturels, 281–6. Sherbrooke: Éditions de l’Université de Sherbrooke 1989. McAlmon, Robert. Being Geniuses Together. London: Secker & Warburg 1938. Revised with supplementary chapters by Kay Boyle. New York: Doubleday 1968. Reade, Clive. “Eastern Townships’ Culture Centre.” Happy Motoring 22, no. 1 (April 1961): 8–9, 15. Simon, Sherry. Translating Montreal. Montreal and Kingston: McGillQueen’s University Press 2006. Sutherland, Ronald. “The Athens of the North.” In Les Cantons de l’Est: Aspects géographiques, politiques, socio-économiques et culturels, 265– 71. Sherbrooke: Éditions de l’Université de Sherbrooke 1989.

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F.R. Scott and the Poetry of Translation G r a h a m Fras er In a letter to Anne Hébert,1 Frank Scott quotes Robert Frost as having said that “poetry is what is lost in translation.” Says Scott, “This is a truth but, I believe – and your letter encourages me in the belief – not the whole truth. Not all is lost or need be lost.” The exchange, which took place in 1959, is a remarkable dialogue on translation between two major intellectual figures: Scott, a law professor at McGill and a poet in his own right, Hébert, a novelist and poet who had moved to Paris five years earlier. Scott’s scrupulous respect of the intentions of the author, his disciplined literalism, proved to be highly influential: Sherry Simon, while critical of the limitations of his approach, acknowledges that “Scott is nevertheless recognized as the defining influence for the next generation of Englishlanguage translators.”2 Scott went on, writing a passage that reveals much of his idealism about translation and how it connects to his idealism about the country. It speaks to his almost spiritual desire for connection with French-speaking Canadians, and his inherent, perhaps surprising, conservatism: “Translation is itself an art, and one which surely has helped every writer to understand much of the other literatures of the world. Perhaps today we need to practice and encourage this art more than ever, since otherwise we deprive ourselves not only of great experiences but of that mutual respect between races which is an imperative in the modern world. In Canada we have particular need of it, depending as we do so much upon the chief cultural traditions which are at the base of our native arts.”3 After observing that English Canadians are in greater need of translation from French than French Canadians are of translation

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from English, he observes that the poet speaks a language that “even his own compatriots are often unable to understand. To translate him is the greatest challenge the translator can face.” Scott goes on to describe one of Anne Hébert’s remarks as expressing an ideal for every translator: “I believe with you that he must first appreciate the original poem, must feel it deeply inside himself as the author feels it in the process of creating it. The translation then becomes another making, demanding the same kind of ability and vision as the author possessed with the same careful selection of words, phrases and sounds. The difference is that the translator is given an external criterion of the appropriateness of his writing, in the poem to be translated. He writes, as it were, to order, yet must create while obeying the order. He is unfree and yet free at the same time.”4 There is in this passage a kind of yearning, a desire for connection and recognition that is almost poignant. This bittersweet quality, this desire to be more than just a bridge between Canada’s two linguistic realities but to achieve an almost spiritual bond, is a reflection of Scott’s broader professional life, not just as a translator of poetry but as a Canadian intellectual and political activist. At the same time, his description of the constraint of the translator, who is writing “as it were, to order, yet must create while obeying the order,” being “unfree and yet free at the same time,” expresses the same kind of paradox that Robin Skelton uses to characterize Scott’s poetry in English: “He is a splendid versifier, and an intensely intelligent writer, a wit and a man of deep feeling; nevertheless, though his stated opinions are often radical, liberal and sophisticated, his modes of operation are so dependent upon already established modes and attitudes that poetically (and in the context, not of Canada but of the English-speaking world) he must be regarded as a conservative.”5 Scott was a practitioner, according to Simon, of “cool forms of translation,” which she defines as those that “make translation a sign of enduring distances and a respect for difference.”6 As she explains, “Nowhere is this cool form of translation better illustrated than in the political agenda and literal translations of Frank Scott. The limits of his translations were set both by the sociopolitical situation and by his own aesthetic goals.”7 It is an honour and a great pleasure to be asked to contribute to a festschrift for Sheila Fischman, who is not only Canada’s leading literary translator but a friend. Frank Scott was also a friend of hers, for several years a neighbour when she lived in North Hatley, and, in

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some ways her predecessor as Canada’s most distinguished literary translator. He was, in the words of political scientist Allen Mills, “arguably Canada’s most accomplished all-round public intellectual” of the twentieth century.8 He was a giant in the fields of Canadian politics, jurisprudence, and constitutional law and a poet and a translator as well. My parents and the Scotts were co-owners of a cottage in North Hatley, and I have vivid memories of Frank Scott’s wit and his laughter. I recall his describing having learned from a scientist in Montreal that there was a pleasure spot in the brain – and that an experiment had shown that rats would continue to stomp on a lever to stimulate that spot, ignoring food, until they collapsed with exhaustion. From then on, whenever Scott and the scientist spotted each other, their faces would light up and they would lock eyes and stomp away furiously. Of all the principles Scott defended throughout his career, the pleasure principle was certainly one of them. The late Michael Oliver once observed that everyone knew a different Frank Scott. In his extraordinary career, the translation of poetry brought together several of his concerns: his love of language and poetry, his affection for French-speaking Canada, and his desire to build bridges between Canada’s two linguistic communities. When he died in 1985, he was worried that he had lost his fight for bilingualism. He had hoped that Quebec’s bilingualism would be a model for the rest of the country and was furious about Quebec’s language laws. He feared they would provoke a backlash against the French language in the rest of Canada, and he was angry about what he felt were the myths being propagated about Quebec’s English-speaking community. It is true that his vision of a bilingual Quebec inspiring a bilingual Canada did not come to pass. Over the years, Scott moved from being a defender and explainer of French language rights to a sometimes bitter defender of the English-speaking minority in Quebec. But with a little distance, it is possible to see now how important his influence was in fighting for a charter of rights and in defining language as a human right. He saw the Constitution as the vessel that contained the philosophical rules and principles that governed relations between individuals and cultural groups and their relations with the state. Those relationships are as critical now as they have ever been. “If human rights and harmonious relations between cultures are forms of the beautiful, then the state is a work of art that is never finished,” he wrote, bringing together in two sentences his life’s work

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both as a lawyer and as a poet. “Law thus takes its place, in its theory and practice, among man’s highest and most creative activities.”9 Scott’s life, as his biographer Sandra Djwa put it, “contains much of what we recognize as central to the Canadian experience … The creative imagination of one constitutional lawyer, political activist and poet has both reflected and helped to shape the cultural and political climate in which we now live.”10 It was a life that also shaped his approach to translation. Born in Quebec City in 1899, Scott became a Rhodes scholar at Oxford University, who, on returning to Montreal, engaged not only with English-speaking political and cultural life but also with French Canada. His best-known commentary on bilingualism was in a poem first published in 1954 entitled “Bonne Entente”: The advantages of living with two cultures Strike one at every turn, Especially when one finds a notice in an office building “This elevator will not run on Ascension Day”; Or reads in the Montreal Star: “Tomorrow being the Feast of the Immaculate Conception, There will be no garbage collection in the city”; Or sees on the restaurant menu the bilingual dish: DEEP APPLE PIE TARTES AUX POMMES PROFONDES.11 As friend and fellow poet D.G. Jones put it, “‘Bonne Entente’ is an ironic study in contradictions. Yet Scott’s ironic awareness is not merely satirical; it is one that Canadians of necessity have been forced to cultivate, which requires that one recognize contradictions without assuming, however, that either side can be wholly dismissed.”12 Scott never forgot his childhood in Quebec City. “When I was eight years old, I watched the great pageant on the Plains of Abraham celebrating the tercentenary of the founding of Quebec by Samuel de Champlain in 1608,” he recalled. “I grew up understanding the import of the nostalgic motto of Quebec – Je me souviens. Every St-Jean-Baptiste parade on 24 June portrayed scenes from the ancien régime. French Canada and its history were all about me.”13 Another of his early memories included the conscription riot in Quebec City during World War I – a memory that still haunted him years later.

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Scott attended Bishop’s University, then a small college, before going on to Oxford and subsequently returning to study law at McGill. He combined his interests in language and the law: as a summer student in a law office, he translated the Coutume de Paris, the source of Quebec’s civil law. It was an extraordinary achievement that spoke to his commitment to the law, to its particular language, and to the continuity that flowed back through time from the civil code to Napoleon to Old France and to Ancient Rome. In 1928, he started teaching law at McGill, and, as he put it, “the next year the whole North American economy collapsed. One could not live through the Great Depression and remain politically unaffected.”14 During the grim years that followed, he became politically active as one of the authors of the Regina Manifesto that created the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF), precursor to the New Democratic Party (NDP). At the same time, as he became engaged in the Montreal literary scene, he began to reach out to French-speaking writers and artists. However, his relationship to French-speaking Quebec was ambiguous. He was attracted by the language and culture but was cut off from much of what was going on in literary Quebec in the 1930s and 1940s. It was only later that he became the major translator of French-language poetry and, in particular, Anne Hébert’s work. And while drawn to rebels and reformers, poets and intellectuals, and sympathetic to the economic discrimination suffered by Frenchspeaking Canadians, he was repelled by the dominant ideology of clerical conservatism. Politically, he saw French Canadians as passive victims prey to manipulation by what he called “the provincial trinity: the Liberal Party machine, the Roman Church and St James Street … the theo-pluto-bureaucracy.”15 In 1947, Scott was attacked by McGill authorities for his public affiliation with the C C F and not long after was passed over for the position of dean of law. In the decade that followed, he withdrew somewhat from his academic career and devoted more energy to translation and poetry. (He also fought the Padlock Law, and successfully defended restaurateur Frank Roncarelli before the Supreme Court against the continued harassment by Quebec Premier Maurice Duplessis, who cancelled Roncarelli’s liquor licence to retaliate for his posting bail for Jehovah’s Witnesses. Similarly, Scott continued his involvement in progressive organizations in Canada and Quebec, where he had a major influence on a young lawyer and lecturer named Pierre Trudeau.)

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In addition, he organized social evenings of English-speaking and French-speaking poets, which, while friendly enough, were apparently somewhat awkward. “We were glad to meet them. They were glad to meet us. That’s about it,” recalled Louis Dudek years later.16 Similarly, several of the francophones found Scott’s French formal and literary, and his attitude, albeit unintentionally, patrician, paternalistic, and condescending. Micheline Saint-Pierre, a translator who was a kind of sounding-board for Scott, described this perception of him as coming from the fact that his French was formal, more literary than conversational, and sometimes difficult to understand. The two groups were often simply unable to comprehend each other, and SaintPierre had to be the go-between. This was difficult, “above all, when les Anglais were obviously, in the eyes of Gaston (Miron), the conquerors, the bad guys, who were trying to do what they could to help.”17 According to Patricia Godbout, “Scott’s paternalistic and condescending attitude was not helpful for creating rapprochement. We can link this to his deep Victorian and aristocratic roots, despite his sincere efforts to rid himself of them.”18 As Saint-Pierre has expressed it, “Convinced of the rightness of his position, Frank Scott did not really put himself in the skin of the other on the cultural level. His society had the upper hand. He did not really see why one would change it, because people like him were completely open to the improvement of the lives … of their inferiors!”19 Simon sums up: “What remains is the image of a cultivated, well-intentioned and polite gentleman-poet who was slightly out of synch with the community he wanted to join.”20 Jacques Ferron used Scott as a symbolic representation of English domination of Quebec in his novels, in the character Frank Archibald Campbell in La Nuit (1965), La Charrette (1968), Le Ciel de Québec (1969), and Les Confitures du coing (1972).21 He attacked Scott publicly: “He’s always been the Anglo. He’s on the side of the exploiters.”22 Scott’s support of the War Measures Act during the October Crisis in 1970 only confirmed Ferron’s view. That this view emerged as a dominant one is a reflection of the polarization that occurred in the 1960s, reaching a friendship-breaching climax with the October Crisis. However, the view undervalues the pioneering quality of Scott’s work as a translator. For, as D.G. Jones has pointed out, “Scott, A.J.M. Smith, and John Glassco are among the first to take the francophone culture of Quebec seriously and to become intimately involved in translating it. This is no mean feat, since it often involves a real appreciation of the other, of one’s opposite.”23

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It was in the mid-1950s that Scott began developing a relationship with Anne Hébert, culminating in their correspondence in 1959, which generated what Albert Braz has called Scott’s “famous dialogue.”24 That dialogue has an interesting history. It began with the exchange of letters as part of Scott’s translation of a number of Hébert’s and SaintDenys-Garneau’s poems. The letters were first published in Les Écrits du Canada français in 1960, and the book of translated poems appeared in 1962.25 The second version of the translations appeared in that book and in The Poetry of French Canada in Translation, published by Scott’s friend John Glassco in 1970. “Certain minor revisions in my text were made by me in the course of these rereadings and reprintings,” Scott wrote in Dialogue sur la traduction, published in 1970. “I have taken this opportunity of having a fresh look at the dialogue between Anne Hébert and myself, and I am now persuaded that there are some further changes I should make.”26 Dialogue sur la traduction was last reprinted in 2000, the year of Hébert’s death and fifteen years after Scott’s.27 Thus, the work emerged and re-emerged at different phases of Scott’s intellectual life and posthumous reputation: in 1960, when he was best known in Quebec for his legal challenges of Duplessis; in 1962, shortly before he was named to the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism; in 1970, at the time of the October Crisis; and, posthumously, after interest in him had been increased in English Canada by the publication of Sandra Djwa’s biography in 198728 and in French-speaking Canada through an essay by Guy Laforest,29 and then by the publication of Djwa’s biography in French in 2001.30 As Northrop Frye noted in the preface to Dialogue sur la traduction (and as Simon reiterates in Translating Montreal),31 Scott was a literalist as a translator: “Every one of Mr. Scott’s improvements is a step toward a more literal rendering.”32 Indeed, the dialogue between Scott and Hébert is one in which, line by line, Hébert pulls her translator toward her meaning. In his first version, Scott translates “J’ai mon coeur au poing” as “I hold my heart in my clenched hand.” Hébert responds by pointing out that this suggests that the bird is crushed in clenched fingers rather than being carried on the fist like a hunting falcon. Scott replies: “You bring out a point my version had obscured, namely the fact that the bird is free to leave the hand of its own volition. Yet in line 3 the phrase pris à mes doigts suggests also that it is perhaps fastened to the hand, caught as it were by its talons.”33

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Similarly, Hébert points out that Scott’s translation of “Cette enfant fut-elle liée par la cheville” as “Was this child tied by the ankle” did not capture the fact that the child was a girl. “How to convey the sex of the child bothered me; it is so easy in French,” Scott replies. “I tried girl-child, but this is forced. I think the whole context of the poem suggests femininity. But the simplest solution is to say her ankle instead of the ankle.”34 And so the exchange continues, line by line, peeling back the levels of meaning like onion skins in a remarkable document of collaboration between poet and translator. The translation of the poem led to the publication of the St-Denys Garneau and Anne Hébert volume in 1962 – and an attempt to organize a conference of English and French poets in the Eastern Townships in 1963. Ironically, because of the Quebec government’s insistence on security checks on all participants because of fears of separatist violence, only English-speaking poets attended.35 For almost fifteen years, Scott suspended his translation of poetry as his commitment to French-English communication took him in a different direction. In 1963, Prime Minister Lester Pearson asked him to be a member of the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism, to be co-chaired by André Laurendeau and Davidson Dunton. It was there that Scott’s views on language and bilingualism would be challenged, sharpened and, in some cases, rejected. Scott was named as the only representative of the English minority in Quebec. That role was a key to his identity in many ways: he knew all the Quebec members of the commission and, with the exception of Dunton, none of the members from the rest of Canada, even though he had a national reputation. Laurendeau and Dunton were co-chairs, but the real debate, intellectual and emotional, linguistic and national, was between Laurendeau and Scott. Both men had subtle minds, political idealism, personal charisma, and poets’ sensibilities. As Laforest puts it in his essay on the two men, both were “éminences grises:” intellectual leaders of Quebec and English-speaking Canada respectively.36 Scott’s view was that, although French Canada could legitimately be considered a nation, Quebec was – or should be – a bilingual society. (After a private meeting of the commissioners in 1964, he wrote, “In further conversation about the two-nation theory, I said ‘Quebec is a unilingual, unicultural society, while English Canada is a unilingual, multicultural society.’ Laurendeau agreed.”37) His ideal was that the bilingual model should be extended to Canada as a

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whole, so that the limited rights defined in the British North America Act would be extended and the language rights that had been extinguished in Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and Alberta would be restored. Laurendeau’s view, eloquently expressed in the blue pages of the first volume of the royal commission report, was that the survival of French in Canada and North America depended upon a strong, French-speaking society in Quebec. While Scott admired Laurendeau’s independence of thought and opposition to Duplessis,38 he occasionally fulminated at the myths he felt that Laurendeau perpetuated about the English community: “Only in the economic area do the English have a privileged place,” Scott observed. “In … other activities, as well as in politics, it is a handicap to belong to the English minority.”39 But both men were appalled by the ignorance and prejudice they encountered toward French in Canada during the commission’s visits to Western Canada. Both were also taken aback by the degree to which separatists were dominating public discussion in Quebec. Scott did not lose his quick wit during some of those stormy hearings. At a meeting in Sherbrooke, a young man said that he cared nothing about the French-speaking minorities outside Quebec, that the only minority that mattered was the English-speaking minority in Quebec, and it should leave as soon as possible. “J’y suis, j’y reste” (I’m here, I’m staying), responded Scott.40 In the discussions in the fall of 1967, he found himself in a minority: as he put it, “the only voice for a bilingual Quebec.” He ultimately dissented from the commission’s recommendations in volume 4, arguing that, by recommending the working language in Quebec be French, it was contradicting its earlier rejection of a territorial solution to the language issue. The final note that Scott struck was a pessimistic one: a ten-page, legal-sized document poignantly entitled “The End of the Affair.” Although undated, on the basis of the internal evidence it was written in 1970 before the October Crisis. Though the commission’s work was over, Scott wrote, the crisis in Quebec was not – and he warned that the recommendations could not solve all the problems of national unity. He closed “on a personal note”: “It is astonishing and also frightening for me to watch Quebec abandon so many of its ancient virtues and values in order to rush into the North American capitalist system with arms open for the embrace. The values of that system I learned to despise and reject in the 1930s. I had hoped that

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the Catholic tradition with its greater emphasis on social obligations would somehow mitigate the prevailing Protestant ethic of free enterprise.” It is a poignant sign of age that at seventy he nostalgically saw “virtues and values,” whereas at thirty-three he had denounced the church for interpreting the Depression “as a sort of punishment from God upon greedy individuals.”41 Then came the October Crisis of 1970: the kidnapping of James Cross and Pierre Laporte by the Front de libération du Québec, the invocation of the War Measures Act, and the murder of Laporte. Unlike many civil libertarians and progressives – including his wife, Marian – Scott supported the imposition of the War Measures Act, Once again he was haunted by the riots in 1918: “I heard the machine guns on the streets of Quebec City during the conscription riots, and saw for the first time a crisis leading to bloodshed which left deep and lasting wounds in the body politic.” He had seen students breaking up public meetings for delegates of the Spanish Republican government in 1936, two riots in 1969, and now two kidnappings in 1970 and what he concluded was “a further erosion of civil government.” Democracy had to protect itself, and the War Measures Act was the only instrument that could restore order. “A shock treatment was needed to restore the balance,” he wrote. “It was given and it worked. There was only one death, and it was not caused by the forces of law and order.”42 There was another casualty, however: for Scott, his position meant an irreparable breach with French-speaking writers and poets, nationalists who had previously been friends. “This support cost him numerous friendships among francophone intellectuals,” observed Jean-Louis Roy. “He regretted these breaks. But he stayed faithful to the analysis which persuaded him to accept this implacable law.”43 In 1977 Scott returned to the translation of poetry – and continued to revise Hebert’s Le Tombeau des rois – until his final illness.44 His final years were not happy; he raged against the language laws introduced in Quebec, first by the Bourassa government in 1974 and then by the Lévesque government in 1977. One of the last times I saw him was in the fall of 1978; he had just won the Governor General’s Award for Non-Fiction for Essays on the Constitution. While enjoying the honour, he was gloomy; he continued to be depressed about the language situation in Quebec, and he was not optimistic about the constitutional debate. As he saw me to the door, he remarked sardonically that he was re-reading Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.

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In 1980, Scott wondered if he had been a failure, if he should have focused on poetry instead of politics.45 It is unfortunate that he felt that way; for half a century, from the Regina Manifesto in the 1930s to the Roncarelli and Lady Chatterley’s Lover cases in the 1950s to the Charter of Rights and Freedoms in 1982, he had a major influence on how Canadians came to think about rights. His clarity of thought defining language rights as human rights laid the groundwork for an edifice of jurisprudence on language. And his insistence on the rule of law presaged the critical role the courts have played in defining language rights.46 And yet Scott was not wrong in reflecting on his legacy as a poet and a translator. Of all his books, Dialogue sur la traduction is the only one still in print. His status as a pioneer in translating Quebec poetry remains unassailable, and his candour in revealing his groping steps toward a translation of Le Tombeau des rois remains an inspiration to those who love language.

No t e s 1 In Dialogue sur la traduction, à propos du Tombeau des rois, Anne Hébert et Frank Scott (Montreal: Éditions HMH Limitée 1970). 2 Sherry Simon, Translating Montreal: Episodes in the Life of a Divided City (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press 2007), 53. 3 Ibid., 55 4 Ibid., 56. 5 Robin Skelton, “A Poet of the Middle Slopes,” Canadian Literature 31 (Winter 1967): 43–4. 6 Simon, Translating Montreal, 40–1. 7 Ibid. 8 Allen Mills, “Of Charters and Justice: The Social Thought of F.R. Scott, 1930–1985,” Journal of Canadian Studies 32, no. 1 (Spring 1997): 44. 9 F.R. Scott, Essays on the Constitution: Aspects of Canadian Law and Politics (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1977), ix. 10 Sandra Djwa, The Politics of the Imagination: A Life of F.R. Scott (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart 1987), 458. 11 Scott, Events and Signals (Toronto: Ryerson Press 1954). 12 “F.R. Scott as Translator,” in On F.R. Scott, edited by Sandra Djwa and R. St J. Macdonald (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press 1983), 160.

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13 http://www.ocol-clo.gc.ca/html/speech_discours_18112009_e.php. 14 Scott, Essays on the Constitution: Aspects of Canadian Law and Politics (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1977), viii. 15 “The Fascist Province,” Canadian Forum, April 1934 (published under the pseudonym J.E. Keith), reprinted in Forum: Canadian Life and Letters, 1920–70, Selections from The Canadian Forum, edited by J.L. Granatstein and Peter Stevens (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1972), 120. 16 Quoted by Patricia Godbout in “Les échanges littéraires à Montréal durant les années 1950,” Échanges culturels entre les deux solitudes, edited by Marie-Andrée Beaudet (Montreal: Les Presses de l’Université Laval 1999), 85. 17 “Surtout quand les Anglais étaient, évidemment, aux yeux de Gaston, les conquérants, les méchants, qui faisaient leur possible pour faire du bien à leurs vis-àvis.” See Patricia Godbout, Traduction littéraire et sociabilité interculturelle au Canada (1950–1960) (Ottawa: Les Presses de l’Université d’Ottawa 2004), 108. 18 Ibid. 19 Ibid., 109 20 Simon, Translating Montreal, 49. 21 See Susan Margaret Murray, “Le Canada anglais de Jacques Ferron (1960–1970): Formes, fonctions et représentations,” PhD diss., Queen’s University, May 2009, chapters 7–9; Djwa, Politics of the Imagination, 418–23 ; Godbout, Les échanges littéraires à Montréal, 86–7. 22 Pierre Trudeau’s second-hand account, quoted in Djwa, Politics of the Imagination, 421. 23 “F.R. Scott as Translator,” 160. 24 “The Creative Translator: Textual Additions and Deletions in A Martyr’s Folly,” 17, in Canadian Cultural Exchange/Échanges culturels au Canada: Translation and Transculturation, edited by Norman Cheadle and Lucien Pelletier (Waterloo, ON: Laurier Press 2007). 25 St-Denys Garneau and Anne Hébert: Translations/Traductions, translated by F.R. Scott (Vancouver: Klanak Press 1962). 26 Dialogue sur la traduction, 93–4. 27 Saint-Laurent, Quebec: Bibliothèque québécoise. 28 Djwa, Politics of the Imagination. 29 “The Meech Lake Accord: The Search for a Compromise between André Laurendeau and F.R. Scott,” in Laforest, Trudeau and the End of a Canadian Dream (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press 1995). 30 Djwa, F.R. Scott: Une vie, translated by Florence Bernard (Montreal: Éditions du Boréal 2001).

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Simon, Translating Montreal, 49 Preface to Dialogue sur la traduction, 13. Dialogue sur la traduction, 61–2. Ibid., 65. Djwa, Politics of the Imagination, 382. Laforest, Trudeau and the End of a Canadian Dream. F.R. Scott, Journal, 2–3 July 1964, 149, F.R. Scott Papers, LAC, MG30 D211, vol. 109, file 1. Le Devoir, 3 June 1968. F.R. Scott, Journal, 3 November 1964, 158. This was a phrase made famous by French general Patrice de MacMahon when he was advised to retreat during the Crimean War. “The Fascist Province,” 120. “Symposium on the War Measures Act,” caut Bulletin/Bulletin acpu 2, no. 4 (May 1971). Jean-Louis Roy, “Scott,” Le Devoir, 2 February 1985. Djwa, Politics of the Imagination, 383. Ibid., 436–7. See Valérie Lapointe-Gagnon, “Jeter un pont entre les Deux Solitudes: Le rôle de Frank R. Scott,” in Légiférer en matière linguistique, edited by Marcel Martel and Martin Pâquet (Quebec: Les Presses de l’Université Laval 2008), 53–4.

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Notes on the Birth of a Translator D .G . Jo nes

In an interview with the Russian-American poet Joseph Brodsky, printed in Brick #87, Sam Solecki pushes Brodsky to comment on translations of Akhmatova to the point where he finally exclaims, “The idea of translating a poet into a different language, well, perhaps it bespeaks chutzpah rather than intelligence.” But could it not be “chutzpah and intelligence”? When I read that Sheila Fischman had translated over 150 Québécois novels in the past forty years (has that much time passed?), I thought that must demonstrate some kind of chutzpah! Combined, of course, with the intelligence to stay away from poems, especially if you want to make a living. No, Sheila is not so crass, and truly more modest. When I first met Sheila Fischman in the mid-1960s during a meeting of the Learned Societies at l’Université de Sherbrooke, she was the representative of an academic publishing house. She wasn’t pushy or concerned to show her stuff; she was quietly curious and sprightly in her conversation. I assumed, as she assumed, her knowledge, her intelligence. And, since I was divorced with a house full of children, my attraction to Sheila was not altogether academic. And we did get together, and for some time it worked. We managed to take a car full of kids to Expo 67. We managed to go to St John’s, Newfoundland, for another Learned Society meeting. And while the children could be difficult, Sheila found that social life in North Hatley could be remarkably vibrant, with academics and students, poets and novelists, and others, anglophone and francophone. She could frequently manage a dinner for four or six with ease and enthusiasm. And I gradually realized she was much more prepared to do so in French than I was.

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Sheila had studied French throughout her years at the University of Toronto. At McGill, I had not, though I had recently read my way through a century or more of French-Canadian or Québécois poetry. Sheila knew how to speak the language; I really didn’t. Reading is one thing, speaking another, and writing another other – and translation? An anecdote: one of the features of North Hatley was the presence of summer people like Hugh MacLennan or Frank and Marian Scott and, on occasion, their old friends A.J.M. Smith and Buffy Glassco. Buffy was one of those ex-pats in Paris between the wars, as his Memoirs of Montparnasse is a trace: he was also a very fine poet and a sometime pornographer. He was a very polite man, with often a kind of stutter – which never left him speechless. One summer Buffy showed up in what looked like a 1930s roadster, and we all went trooping off to a wine and cheese. Quite a bit later, Sheila said, “Buffy was telling me all about his recent shipment of dildos and other toys from California when the Bishop’s head of English, Dr Harper, sailed up to welcome us. Then she sailed away, and Buffy continued our conversation, with the difference that the toys from California were now referred to as ‘Miss Harpers.’” I’m not sure if this bit of wit qualifies as an example of instant translation, but it made for a delightful afternoon. Yes, there were cordial relations between l’Université de Sherbrooke and Bishop’s, and traditionally the same was true of much of the Eastern Townships over the years. For the students who studied English at Sherbrooke, there were lots of occasions to attend bilingual parties outside classes: at Ron Sutherland’s next door; at Larry Shouldice’s house in North Hatley, where one might also meet guests from Montreal; and at Avrum Malus and Monique Martin’s farm, where sometimes guests might crash overnight. And sometimes at our place. But there were also tensions. The FLQ had already set off bombs in Montreal. In North Hatley – well, just outside – there had been brawls in the bar of the local ski hill, and cars in the parking lot had had their windshields smashed. Communication, yes. Confrontation, yes. And maybe one could add: translation. A.J.M. Smith had already translated a certain number of FrenchCanadian poems into English for his Oxford Book of Canadian Verse (1960) and was working on a translation of Saint-Denys Garneau’s complete poems. Scott had already published a selection of his translations, St-Denys Garneau and Anne Hébert (1962), and both continued to urge English-Canadian writers to translate Quebec

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literature. Elsewhere in English Canada, Malcolm Reid, for example, was translating Paul Chamberland’s L’Afficheur hurle (The Shouting Signpainters, 1972), perhaps as a kind of wake-up call for anglophone readers. Translation was in the air. One of the summer visitors to North Hatley in 1968 was Roch Carrier, who had just published his novel, La Guerre, Yes Sir! Sheila met him, found him charming, read and liked his comic and sometimes mordantly ironic story of a young man who cuts off his own hand to avoid being drafted for World War II, and wondered if she could translate it. Carrier obviously said he’d like her to try. Over the next year or so, Roch and his wife spent a number of weekends with us. I presume he and Sheila went over the text. I presume Sheila may have talked to Ron Sutherland next door about certain passages. I was of no particular use in the matter. However, when the English version appeared in 1970 and – especially considering the political climate of the time – was a real success, it became obvious: almost without my noticing, Sheila had become a translator. Here I would like to say that during this same period of time Sheila was responsible for my own public debut as a translator. I had resisted suggestions that I should translate Quebec writers, even though I’d tried on and off to translate certain poets from France, even Mallarmé, to try to understand for myself what was going on in those poets’ work. But my recent survey of the whole range of Quebec poets had opened my eyes: here was a distinctive body of poetry with some really outstanding individuals, not only Emile Nelligan, Alain Grandbois, Hector St-Denys Garneau, and his cousin, Anne Hébert, but also a raft of poets who were my contemporaries: Gaston Miron, Paul-Marie Lapointe, Fernand Ouellette, Roland Giguère, and others younger still. (Of all the poems I’ve translated, the most frequently reprinted has been “Speak White” by Michèle Lalonde.) Oddly, another incentive to translate and publish came from France, the poet Eugène Guillevic’s “Ellipse,” in which he sympathizes with that perfectly geometric figure that finds its stability arising from the tension between two centres “who don’t know each other / or are fed up with each other.” It sounded like Hugh MacLennan’s “two solitudes.” It also sounded like translation. I was seduced by the idea of a magazine for the translation of French-Canadian and English-Canadian poetry that would be called ellipse. But I had neither the authority nor the ability to do it alone.

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I’d have to get others, perhaps from Sherbrooke’s Départemente d’études françaises, perhaps from Montreal, to be part of the project. I mentioned the idea on and off to Sheila, to the point where she said, “Shit or get off the pot,” or something to that effect. So finally I did. And Sheila ended up translating Clement Moisan’s introductory article “The Contemporary Poetry of Quebec” and becoming an editor, for a few issues at least. An incident: Sheila invited the singer Pauline Julien, along with Frank Scott and Arthur Smith, to dinner, the latter two being the main performers at a poetry reading later in the evening. The food was good, the conversation lively; it seemed to be an auspicious evening. Frank took Pauline’s hand as we rose from the table, raising her until she stood on the chair, then on the table, proclaiming her the goddess of liberty. Oh-oh! Off we went to The Pottery, where the reading was to take place. I was to introduce A.J.M. Smith, though I wasn’t sure what I was going to say, except maybe that he’d been influenced in part by the French Symbolists. But even as I said the first few sentences, in English, Pauline began chanting, “En français! En français!” I was speechless. People began throwing mugs. I looked back at one point to see that Sheila had somehow managed to slide up under the woolly sweater of Roland Giguère. So she was protected – she had been taken into the bosom of the enemy! Mildred Beaudoin, who ran the place, rose to calm things down, saying in no uncertain terms that she wasn’t going to have people smashing her pottery. I don’t remember what happened after that. I suppose someone must have read. I might say here that Giguère was an artist and typographer as well as a poet, and he’d helped in the design of ellipse. He also joined us in exploring some of the wooded trails outside North Hatley. Later the Giguères became a kind of asylum for Sheila when the demands of our household became too great. Of course, by fall that refuge would be gone, as most of the summer people returned to their permanent homes. Eventually, Sheila also left for Montreal. Larry Shouldice, who maintained an apartment there, was helpful in getting her settled and in introducing her to yet other artists, writers, and translators. Her translation of La Guerre, Yes Sir! appeared in 1970, and Floralie, Where Are You?, her translation of Carrier’s second book, appeared the year after, with a dedication to John Glassco. It was the beginning of a long stream of novels in translation.

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What Sheila felt in the early 1970s was not chutzpah so much as elation. She had discovered her vocation, becoming in a short time one of the founding members of the Literary Translators’ Association of Canada, increasingly convinced that translation was not some kind of hackwork producing makeshift versions of masterpieces but an honourable profession, an art in its own right, and that she was indeed capable of practising it. I looked at a number of Sheila’s translations while working on this article, a random sample that included Floralie and five more recent samples: François Gravel’s Felicity’s Fool (1992), Michel Tremblay’s Beautiful Thing (1997), Lise Bissonnette’s Cruelties (1998), Anne Hébert’s Am I Disturbing You? (1999), and Dominique Fortier’s On the Proper Use of Stars (2010). I was impressed that, despite the variety of genre and tone, all were free of “translationese” – puzzling or awkward words or passages. Sheila’s work accommodated the style and tone of the original, from Carrier’s boisterous renaissance tale set in French Canada, which even includes a wagon load of travelling players who specialize in the seven deadly sins, to Gravel’s more sober realistic comedy. Fortier’s On the Proper Use of Stars retells the story of the Franklin Expedition to discover the Northwest Passage, largely from the points of view of Francis Crozier, Lady Jane Franklin, and her niece, a young woman Crozier speaks to as a junior officer on the Erebus. Both realistic and tragically ironic, the novel appears to suggest that Crozier’s telling stories of how he learned about the stars as a boy might be more effective in moving him into a young lady’s heart than his knowledge of celestial navigation later was in leading his and Sir John Franklin’s ships Terror and Erebus out of death’s way. Fortier must have read a good many of the books, articles, and blogs, mostly in English, that exist on the subject. And, in writing her original text, she was, broadly speaking, translating things she read into French. So too when she presented Lady Franklin and her niece wining and dining people in the Admiralty or government service to try to find out what happened to the men in their lives, she was inventing, or translating, her sense of nineteenth-century middle or upper-class discourse into a nineteenth-century French equivalent. (I can’t tell if that is exactly the kind of French we find in her original novel, but it sounded good to me.) Sheila’s job was to then translate Fortier’s French back into something like mid-nineteenth century British English. (Well, again, I can’t tell if that’s exactly what I read in

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the English version, but it sounded appropriate.) This is, after all, the “art” of translation. And from that point of view, both Fortier’s French and Sheila’s English versions are tours de force of translation. One thing not often said of this subject is that a translator needs to know not only a good deal about the original author’s language but a great deal about her own. Sheila Fischman really knows her English.

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The Agency of Sheila Fischman: A Tribute K ath y Mezei

“Are you happy with how your life has turned out?” was Sheila’s startling greeting to me one early morning in June 2007 at Banff.1 Not having seen each other for a number of years, we were having a quiet chat in the Banff Centre coffee shop. Sheila’s question was certainly poignant, for I had first met her and her then husband, the poet D.G. Jones, in 1969. Nearing the completion of my undergraduate degree and keen to study comparative French and EnglishCanadian literatures – not a subject offered by many universities – I had inquired about the master’s program in comparative Canadian literature at the Université de Sherbrooke. Doug, who was in charge of the program, invited me to come to North Hatley over the Christmas break, stay with him and Sheila, and check out the program and Sherbrooke. What a gracious invitation, and how difficult to imagine a similar offer in today’s highly bureaucratized universities. It was, as they say, a transformative experience. In the late 1960s, comparative Canadian literature was a new and somewhat controversial subject, while Canadian literature itself was only just beginning to be taught in universities as a discrete subject. And, although in the end I chose to do my master’s in Canadian Studies at Carleton, Sheila and Doug remained important influences and models for me, particularly throughout the 1970s. Their home in the picturesque Eastern Townships was a vibrant centre for writers, artists, publishers, and students from both francophone Quebec and the rest of Canada. Sheila had just embarked upon translating her first Quebec novel, Roch Carrier’s La Guerre, Yes Sir! – partly, as she has explained, to familiarize herself with French, since she was now living in Quebec. Not only her dedication and approach to the act of translation and her steadfast and passionate belief in its vital

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importance to Canadian culture but also her energetic immersion in and enthusiasm for Canadian and Quebec literature inspired me (and many others) and shaped the future direction of our academic careers. So how my life has turned out is in some way thanks to Sheila. She and Doug had also begun editing ellipse, each issue featuring an English-Canadian and Quebec writer in both the source and target languages and in thematic dialogue with each other. The project generated much discussion around their venerable pine kitchen table about the practice and effects of translation in a country at a point of political crisis. Being Jewish too, however, I immediately parried Sheila’s question that morning in June with one of my own as to whether she was happy with how her life had turned out. She responded with a thoughtful nod. Given her immensely successful career as a translator and the many honours and recognition she has received, her answer did not surprise me. And so I would like to pay respect here to Sheila’s role as a vital yet subtle agent of translation in Canada. The word “agent,” from the latin, agere, to act or to do, summons up images of perilous or secretive activity – double agent, agent provocateur – as well as the more commonplace activities of travel, real estate, insurance. Agents of translation like William Tyndale have performed risky and heroic acts, but others like Sheila have performed quietly and effectively and persistently as agents of change. The concept of agents in translation and of the agency of translators and translation has been receiving much attention in recent years, following the cultural and sociological turns in translation.2 John Milton and Paul Bandia describe agents of translation in the introduction to their book of the same name in appropriately broad terms as text producers, editors, commissioners, and publishers; they include translators themselves, who may “be patrons of literature [from the Medicis and the Earl of Southampton to Heinemann Education Books for African literature and the Canada Council for Canadian and Quebec literature] … salon organizers … politicians and companies … magazines, journals or institutions.”3 Agents of translation, they continue, have a central position in introducing new literary and philosophical concepts though translation. As “in other professions, in their training, future translators will learn certain norms from teachers and practitioners they will have to follow,”4 they point out, noting Daniel Simeoni’s emphasis on the agency of translators in the creation and maintenance of norms.5 And Hélène Buzelin’s comment that “translation is an engagement

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in social life and debates, a way to express one’s own agency” is relevant to Sheila’s own experience and expression of her agency.6 Returning to Sheila’s translation of Roch Carrier’s La Guerre, Yes Sir!, which not only launched her career as a translator but also famously shot Carrier into the literary limelight and furthered the process of introducing English-Canadians to politically engaged and innovative Quebec writing, I draw attention to her reflections, written in 1973, on the book: “I started to read it rather dutifully, as a polite gesture to a new friend. As I read, though, I began to realize that it contained information about the differences between Quebecois and English-Canadians, explanations for certain political trends of which I myself was only then becoming aware (this was 1968) and, most important, I liked the novel and thought that in similar circumstances I might have written something like it myself.”7 The desire Sheila alludes to here to bridge the “two solitudes” – that common trope in our cultural discourse – and to explain Quebec to the rest of Canada was of course expressed by many other anglophone translators in the 1970s (Philip Stratford, D.G. Jones, John Glassco, Larry Shouldice, Joyce Marshall, and Alan Brown among them). Through their agency, institutions and programs such as the Literary Translators’ Association / Association des traducteurs litteraire canadiennes, the Canada Council Translation Program, and publishers’ lists of translations were eventually established. While Sheila was instrumental in these developments and in promoting translation in Canada, her words above reveal another kind of agency that is less evidentiary but equally significant. “I liked the novel,” she says. This “liking” translated into her avid reading and promotion of a wide range of Quebec novels and her creative interactions and friendships with many Quebec authors; it resonates with her engagement in Quebec literary life, with publishers, authors, translators, her wish to share her enthusiasm and her pleasure in reading with a wider audience, and her energetic efforts to accomplish this. For example, she describes in 2000 how at the Salon du livre in Montreal, a publisher friend waved a new book by a new author at her. This was Gaëtan Soucy’s L’Acquittement, later translated by Sheila as Atonement. “I wanted to burrow inside it in the best way I’ve been able to come up with: by translating it,” she explained. She acted to ensure its prompt translation: “Soon, I was on the phone to an English publisher and before long, we had a translation agreement.”8 The pleasure in reading and in discovering new authors is a crucial, if unacknowledged form

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of agency, one that Sheila has consistently sought to convey in interviews, talks, and essays. As she explained to Pamela Grant, “My role is to share my enthusiasm, my passion for particular writers’ work. To share that with as many people as I can. I am one of those rather obnoxious people who will sit and talk about a book that I have liked and will say, ‘Here, take it, you have to read it.’ And so I am doing that I suppose on a larger scale by making these books accessible, available, to people who aren’t able to read them in the original.”9 In Daniel Simeoni’s emphasis on translators themselves creating and maintaining norms, we recognize Sheila’s insistence on her practice of inhabiting the author’s language and imagination. Burrowing inside a novel, as she described her reading of Soucy’s L’Acquittement, is one way she expresses her practice. Soucy’s next novel, La Petite fille qui aimait trop les allumettes, she initially deemed untranslatable, only to go on to tackle this “feast of prose that features old words, new words, dirty words, abstract words, neologisms, malapropisms – and certain tricks with gender.”10 She relates how she delved into the world of Soucy’s novel and “inhabited” it. In order to learn the French language as it is spoken in Quebec and to capture the English that would echo its rhythms and contexts, she suggests that one must read everything – novels, ads, junk novels, plays, poems – and listen to everything – pop songs and dialogue in films – must eavesdrop in stores and cafes, and on the street, in the metro.11 Thus, her habitus and agency are shaped by Montreal, the complex, divided, hybrid translating city described by Sherry Simon,12 for, as Buzelin points out, “the translator’s habitus and translatorial agency … make sense in relation to particular social and historical conditions.”13 With a couple of recent translations, Sheila demonstrates this virtuosity and practice in two quite different ways. In Dominique Fortier’s Du bon usage des étoiles, translated as On the Proper Use of Stars (2010), the story of the Franklin expedition juxtaposes two stories, the expedition itself and the world of women waiting in Victorian London. Sheila adeptly captures the Victorian prose without burdening the language with overly dated syntax and vocabulary. Recreating the world of polar expeditions and Victorian drawing rooms must have required much research into the texts and prose of the period and a fine balancing act with the original French. Sheila’s achievement here was recognized as a tour de force. Yet, equally difficult and accomplished with similarly deft skill was her translation, also in 2010, of Michel Tremblay’s The Blue Notebook, set in the

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1960s on Montreal’s The Main. It too required expertise and research in order to recreate and inhabit the multi-layered vocabulary and voices and the gay culture of that period. Sheila insists that her norm is to be invisible as a translator, to climb into the skin of the author, and to reveal no discernable style.14 And perhaps she expresses this habitus best in her afterword to her translation, A Suit of Light, of Anne Hébert’s Un Habit de lumière:15 A translator is above all a reader, a close and careful reader: she reads a work – in this case a novel – again and again, probing its deepest secrets, attempting to comprehend and reinterpret the author’s chosen images and words. I have performed this labour of love on six novels by Anne Hébert, and now on this, her final one. While a translator’s interpretation of a text will necessarily determine its form in the new language, the author’s way of looking at and interpreting the world of her fiction will mark the translator too. Anne Hébert has changed forever the way in which I view and interpret aspects of certain landscapes, landscapes both natural and emotional. Above all, she has left me, she has left all her readers, with a vision of a world in which, despite prevailing darkness, the ultimate victor is light.16 Yet, although Sheila Fischman, the translator, may seek to draw a cloak of invisibility around her presence in the text, as an agent of translation for Canadian culture she has exerted a quiet but impressive power and persistently pursued and articulated her characteristic translation norms and practices for others to emulate

No t e s 1 Joint Banff International Literary Translation Centre and Literary Translators’ Association of Canada meeting, Banff, June 2007. 2 See, for example, John Milton and Paul Bandia, eds., Agents of Translation (Amsterdam: John Benjamins 2009); Hélène Buzelin, “Agents of Translation,” in Milton and Bandia, Agents of Translation; Daniel Simeoni, “The Pivotal Status of the Translator’s Habitus,” Target 10, no. 1 (1998): 1–39. 3 Milton and Bandia, Agents of Translation, 1–2. 4 Ibid., 8. 5 Simeoni, “Pivotal Status of the Translator’s Habitus.”

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6 Buzelin, “Agents of Translation,” 6–12. 7 Fischman, “Translators’ Advice Often Valuable,” Quill & Quire 39, no. 6 (June 1973): 7. 8 Fischman, “Enough Said,” Globe and Mail, Saturday, 9 September 2000, D18. 9 Pamela Grant, “Sheila Fischman: The Consummate Professional,” Writing between the Lines: Portraits of Anglophone Translators, edited by Agnes Whitfield (Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press 2006), 186–7. 10 Ibid. 11 Fischman, “Translation Matters / En guise de traduction: In memoriam Philip C. Stratford, 1928–1999,” address upon receiving an honorary degree from the University of Ottawa, 6 June 1999. http://vehiculepress. com/transaddress.html. 12 Simon, Translating Montreal: Episodes in the Life of a Divided City (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press 2006). 13 Buzelin, “Agents of Translation,” 11. 14 Grant, “Sheila Fischman,” 182. 15 Prefaces, forewords, and translator’s notes are rare in Sheila Fischman’s translations, perhaps as sign of her determination to be “invisible.” Yet she rightly insists on the translator being visible, named, on the cover and title page. 16 Anne Hébert, A Suit of Light, translated by Sheila Fischman (Toronto: House of Anansi Press 2000), n.p.

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The Art of Translation

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The Ongoing Commedia A lb erto Manguel

For the longest time, I was unaware of the concept of translation. I was brought up in two languages, English and German, and the passage from one to the other was not, in my childhood, an attempt to convey the same meaning from one language to another, through a different set of words, but simply another form of address, depending on whom I was speaking to. A Grimm’s fairy tale read in my two different languages became two different fairy tales: the German version, printed in thick Gothic characters and illustrated with gloomy watercolours, told one; the English version, in clear, large type illustrated with black and white engravings, told another. Obviously they were not the same story. It was only much later, in my adolescence, that I realized that the changing text remains in essence the same. Or rather, the same text can acquire different identities through different languages, since every constituent part is discarded and replaced by something else: vocabulary, syntax, grammar, music, as well as its cultural, historical, and emotional context. As Dante puts it in De vulgari eloquentia, “In the first place, the purpose of song, in the second place, the disposition of each part in relation to the others, in the third place, the number of verses and syllables.” But how do these ever-changing identities remain a single identity? What allows us to say that the hundreds of translations of Grimm’s Fairy Tales, or The Arabian Nights, or Dante’s Commedia, are, in fact, one and the same book? An old philosophical conundrum asks whether a person whose every single body part has been replaced with artificial organs and limbs remains the same person. In which of our constituent parts lies our identity? In which of a poem’s elements lies the poem? This is the

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core mystery: if a literary text is all the various things that allow us to call it Grimm’s Fairy Tales or The Arabian Nights, what remains when every one of these things is exchanged for something else? Is translation a disguise that allows the text to converse with those outside its circle, like that worn by the caliph Haroun Al-Rashid to mingle among common folk? Or is it a usurpation, like that perpetrated in the Grimm story “The Goose Girl” by the maid who takes the place of her mistress and undeservedly marries the prince? What degree of “identity” can a translation claim? Between annotated editions, illustrated volumes, and translations, my versions of Dante’s Commedia fill five shelves in my library. Every time I read a new translation, I don’t have the sense of holding in my hands a different book: on the contrary, I have the impression of reading more deeply the same inexhaustible Commedia. Partly this is because the memory of reading Dante in the original never quite disappears. Even poor, unimaginative versions of the poem echo, in my memory, the lines of original; whether in the deaf man’s Spanish rendering of Conde de Cheste or in the stilted, donnish version of Henry Francis Cary, Dante somehow shines through. But is it possible to read Dante in translation alone? Is it fair to say, having gone through a series of English versions, for instance, that we have indeed read the Commedia? Dante himself gathered his knowledge of Homer, whom he calls poeta sovrano (sovereign poet), only through the glosses and translated snippets found here and there in the Latin authors available at the time (and perhaps in a very bad version from the third century BC by Livius Andronicus, which Horace had branded “archaic, unpolished and vulgar”). And yet Dante’s “reading” of the Homeric poems inspired essential passages in the Commedia. I’m not sure that the question has an answer, but an example may help us in asking a better question. In the fifteenth canto of the Purgatorio, at the end of the fifth afternoon of Dante’s journey, he and Virgil reach the third terrace, where they will meet the blessed souls purging themselves of the sin of wrath. Suddenly Dante sees a cloud of smoke rolling toward them, plunging the sky into complete darkness. The description takes up the seven last verses of the canto, the two final stanzas plus the single concluding line. This is one of those expressionistic moments that happily appear from time to time in the Commedia, lending the story a sensual reality of time and space through the shared and

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gradual perception of the itinerant protagonist. Here, as in so many other passages, we forget that Dante has invented it all: the questions and answers of the dead, the protagonist’s errors and the corrections of those errors, that which we are given to understand and that which we are only meant to intuit hazily. And, of course, the complex geography through which we are led, as if sharing an overwhelmingly real and private memory. Dante writes: Noi adavam per lo vespero, attenti oltre quanto potean li occhi allungarsi contra i raggi seronti e lucenti. Ed ecco a poco a poco un fummo farsi verso di noi come la notte oscuro; né da quello era loco da cansarsi. Questo ne tolse li occhi e l’aere puro. A literal English rendition of this would read: We were going through the evening, watchful as far as the eyes could strain forward against the shining evening rays. And now, little by little, a smoke moved towards us, dark as the night; nor was there room to escape from it. This took away from us the eyes and the pure air. Here are several twentieth-century versions. The earliest one is by Thomas Okey (1932):1 We were journeying on through the evening, straining our eyes forward, as far as we could, against the evening and shining rays; And lo, little by little, a smoke, dark as night, rolling towards us, nor any room was there to escape from it. This reft us of sight and the pure air.

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Dorothy L. Sayers (1955):2 So we pressed forward as the day sank down, Peering ahead as far as eyes could look Through the slant shining of the level sun, When lo! by slow degrees a cloud of smoke Came rolling toward us, all as black as night; No room to dodge it – on it came and took At once from us the fresh air and our sight. Allen Mandelbaum (1995):3 We made our way until the end of vespers, peering, as far ahead as sight could stretch, at rays of light that, although late, were bright. But, gradually, smoke as black as night began to overtake us; and there was no place where we could have avoided it. This smoke deprived us of pure air and light. W.S. Merwin (2000):4 We were walking through the evening, straining our eyes ahead as far as we could see against those rays and their late shining, when there, little by little, a smoke was coming toward us that was as dark as night, nor was there anywhere to escape from it; this took from us our sight and the pure air. There is little that needs explaining in these seven verses. Virgil and his Aeneid are omnipresent in most of the Commedia, and the first line of our passage might be a nod to Virgil’s famous “ibant obscuri sola sub nocte per umbram” (“on they went darkly, beneath

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the lonely night amid the gloom”), reminding us of Aeneas’s journey to the Underworld. The rolling black cloud is like that lazy smoke that the wrathful nurse within their hearts in Inferno VII: 121–6: ... Tristi fummo ne l’aere dolce che dal sol s’allegra, portando dentro accidïoso fummo. In Sayers’s translation, this reads: ... Sullen we were in the sweet air that is gladdened by the sun, carrying within us sluggish smoke. But smoke is also the punishment that God sends down on His flock in Psalm 74:1: “Why does thine anger smoke against the sheep of thy pasture?” It is also the darkness that contrasts with the afternoon light of the beginning of the canto, a light which Dante compares to that of dawn and which hits the travellers in the face as they move toward the setting sun. In line 139, vespero is simply “evening” and not Mandelstam’s ecclesiastical “vespers,” to which Dante has referred earlier in the canto. And in line 142, farsi is not “to become” but “to advance,” or “to rise,” like smoke. All these are more of less simple textbook clarifications. But once the vocabulary and (as far as possible) the sense is understood, what happens with the verses in translation? Certainly a displacement in time. Perhaps an essential aspect of any translation is the involuntary and inescapable time shift to which the text is subjected. When we read the Commedia, we become aware that, as readers, we exist somewhere in the poem’s future. While we, trapped in our present, read Dante’s words, the text itself continues to flow inside the geography of Dante’s time. Over this geography, successive generations of readers have layered their own harvests of knowledge and interpretation, transforming the original landscape into something that Dante himself would find far more unfathomable than his most recondite verses are to us. For instance, Dante’s personal conception of smoke, whether that of autumn bonfires or of the burning fields of war through which he travelled in exile, colour and shape the purgatorial smoke. But to that private experience we have added centuries of other dreadful smoke: the

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smoke of autos-da-fé, the smoke of Blake’s satanic mills, the smoke of Auschwitz, the smoke of burnt tires in bloody demonstrations, the smoke of ecological disasters. Like a monstrous chrysalis, the Commedia contains in itself all possibilities of migration and change. By means of ongoing readings, the original poem, though grounded in Dante’s time, becomes nomadic, and its translations, for better or for worse, render explicit the amorous progress of Dante’s words from the past to the reader’s present tense. The notion of “I too feel this” that the poem so often elicits is made obvious in the act of translation: it is literally put into words. Okey and Sayers, in their consciously classical style, distance us from the orginal by creating a pseudo-medieval past. Dante’s period rigorously distinguished between several forms of address, in both Latin and in the Florentine vernacular, and these Dante uses (as he uses everything else) to establish levels of intimacy, strangeness, guilt and grace, strengthened sometimes by means of archaisms, at other times by means of colloquialisms, invented words, or baby-talk. Okey’s and Sayers’s “lo!,” which lends a costume-ball atmosphere to the whole, belongs to neither Dante’s present nor the reader’s, but to the sort of arch Edwardian lyricism that Pound abominated. To give a similar example from a different language, André Pézard’s translation of the Commedia, produced for the canonical series La Pléiade, is in an archeological fourteenth-century French that at times requires its own translation; interesting as the exercise might be, it is not intended for the reader of Dante but rather for the reader of Pézard. The same might be said of Okey and Sayers. In Merwin’s and Mandelbaum’s versions, the rhythm is cleaner and softer, the tone more familiar. Merwin’s “nor was there anywhere to escape it” is lyrical enough without becoming melodramatic. However, Mandelbaum’s “and there was / no place where we could have avoided it” is too journalistic for my taste, as is his taut last line. Of the four translators, Merwin seems to me to show the deepest understanding of the original, and certainly lends greatest depth to the words without sacrificing any of the simplicity. And yet, unexpectedly, the four versions complement and reinforce each other. What is not obvious in the short extract I’ve chosen (in any of the four translations) is the narrative context of the entire canto. Dante is still confused by what is being gradually revealed to him, and Virgil must reassure him that a time will come when seeing divine things will not be a struggle but a delight. The entire canto is an

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advancement in learning, from external light and darkness of the soul in the first verses, to the beginnings of interior enlightenment and the all-encompassing exterior darkness of the end. At this point, Dante’s description of the sudden, oncoming smoke is (as Merwin’s version shows) utterly precise and present. I, as reader, am there with Dante and Virgil, on the narrow path, walking toward a black cloud from which there is no escape, and in which we must see and breathe with the heart alone. “Questo ne tolse li occhi e l’aere puro,” he writes: “This took from us our sight and the pure air.” Having said all this, I must repeat the question: is it possible to read the Commedia in translation alone? The incarnation of the poem in a text that is not the original is for me the clearest indication of the creative powers of the reader, since I believe that translation is the highest, deepest form of reading. Entering a text, taking it apart, rebuilding it in words and sentences that obey the rules of different ears and eyes and minds: all this allows a text to begin life again, but this time conscientiously, aware of its own workings and its debts to chance and pleasure. Translation brings to a text a logic and an articulation of purpose that the original disregards, or rejects, or is shy of. In the much-debated letter to Can’Grande della Scala of ca. 1316, Dante (if it was Dante who wrote it) proposed four levels of reading: the literal, the allegorical, the analogical, and the anagogical. I suspect that, in Dante’s case at least, four stands for infinity, since every proposed level breeds in turn four or forty more, and so unto the farthest shores. To those infinite levels of reading, we must add one more: that which remains after the reading is concluded, after the last word is reached and the book is shut. There are fortunate beings who know the entire Commedia by heart, but even for those of us whose memory is wanting, there remains in the aftermath of the reading the burning presence of the poet’s words, of the story and its loving details, of its music and its moments of silence – a memory like that pain of “recalling bliss in moments of unhappiness” of which Francesca speaks from the whirlwind, causing Dante to faint with understanding and pity. Every verbal construction, simultaneously carrying sense and sound, exists in the time and space of its reading but also in the wake of that reading, once the words have been said, when only the shadow of sound and sense linger on. It could be said that a translation (or at least a good one) renders visible that lingering shadow of the text. One might therefore say that it is possible to read the Commedia in translation alone.

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But what precisely is that shadow? Borges suggested that every writer produces a series of drafts of any given text, one of which he might decide to publish. This published version, though it has the prestige of being made public, does not, however, cease being a draft. Seen in this light, a translation can be considered as yet a further draft of that same text. Just as the published text (draft 9, let’s say) might be considered by its author to be better than an earlier one, a translation of the text (draft 9+) might be judged better than the socalled original. Of Beckford’s Vathek, written in French and then translated into English, Borges famously observed that “the original is unfaithful to the translation.” Though it is hard to imagine saying the same of any translation of the Commedia, the countless translations of the poem allow for the idea of a Gestalt-Commedia, a kaleidoscopic Commedia made up of all its many versions in dozens of languages over centuries of meticulous and inspired readings. The notion of a definitive Commedia, even when applied to the poem Dante finished shortly before his death in 1321, seems to limit uncomfortably what to any sensible reader must appear as an infinite poem. And yet, its collected translations outstrip that monstruous notion and propose instead a series of never-ending metamorphoses that, in spite of their occasional depth and originality, never pretend to supplant or ignore the original. The many translations of any single text grant it something like the miracle of Pentecost, allowing readers to hear the original words spoken in their own tongue. Pace my early intuition of utterly distinct entities, every translation is very much the same text, but the text questioned, re-examined, doubted, amplified, revised, moved into a different context, commented upon, brought up to date, and changed as the tongues of flame changed the speech and the thought of each of the twelve apostles. In this endless cumulative process, an infinity of translators might approach something like the perfect, definitive, archetypal text, fulfilling in its congress all its aesthetic possibilities and making explicit all its nuances of emotion and meaning. Giovanni Boccaccio, Dante’s near contemporary, copied into one of his manuscripts a curious account by a monk from the monastery of Santa Croce del Corvo, telling of an encounter with a stranger in the diocese of Luna. To thank the monk for his hospitality, the stranger offers him a few pages of a poem he has written in the Florentine vernacular. The subject and art of the poem are so lofty,

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so exquisite, that the monk asks the stranger why he chose to express “so much learning in plebeian garb.” The stranger explains that the vernacular was not his first choice, and that he had begun his poem in the language of Heaven, which is to say Latin: Ultima regna canam, fluido contermina mundo, Spiritibus quae lata patent, quae premia solvunt Pro meritis cuicumque suis. This is my literal translation: The furthest realms I sing, that have common boundaries with the fluid universe stretching far out towards the spirits who give rewards to each according to his merits. Boccaccio included these verses in one of the last chapters of his loving biography of Dante. If the anecdote is true, then the Commedia began as a translation from an unfinished Latin original. Certainly, the Commedia is at least a bilingual poem, even polyglot, if we include such occasional uses of other languages such as Arnaut Daniel’s Provençal in Purgatorio and the incomprehensible tongue of Pluto in Inferno. Latin lends nobility to Dante’s Florentine vernacular, while the vernacular gives Latin a companionable domesticity. And though the vernacular is the language in which the Commedia is written, Latin is its linguistic undercurrent, implicit in hymns, quotations from scripture, and glossed passages from Virgil and Statius, and explicit in the occasional Latin word appropriate to a certain character or episode. For example, even before Dante the pilgrim learns that the apparition outside the dark forest is Virgil, he addresses it in a mixture of Latin and vernacular, “Miserere di me” (“Have pity on me”). Much in the Commedia is translation of a very free kind, such as Dante’s wonderful neologisms for things that have (or had) no term in Florentine Italian: trasumanar (to go beyond what is human), or con l’ali si plaude (with the wings clapping, a formulation that adapts the Ovidian verb plaudere to suggest both clapping and flapping). Dante, of course, would not have recognized these forms of writing as translation. Rather, he would have known translation to follow the method adopted by St Jerome, Cicero, Horace, and

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Boethius. At the beginning of his learned commentary to Porphyry’s Isagoge, Boethius wrote, “I feel that I have been most useful if, in composing books of philosophy in the Latin language, through the integrity of a completely full translation, not a single letter of the Greek is found missing.” This method, which came to be known as verbum ex verbo (word-for-word) translation, is as far removed as possible from what we might label “translation” in our readings the Commedia. The hymns sung by the blessed on each of the purgatorial cornices, Dante’s personal version of the “Our Father” recited in Purgatory, the various glosses of passages of the Apocalypse in Paradise: these are all translations. Above all, the purpose of the entire journey, the divine final revelation, is presented by Dante not as a translation of the revelation but as the account of the failure of that translation: “A l’alta fantasia qui mancò possa” (“Here my exalted vision lost its power”). As every translator knows, there comes a point in the reading of any text when such dearth of power becomes all too evident, when words will not cross the conceptual border between this and the other language, when imagination fails to conceive perfectly, in a different tongue, a certain illumination that something other than the intellect has finally managed to grasp. This ultimate impossibility does not, however, render the translator’s task impossible: on the contrary. All art is approximation, and that which we construct out of words even more so. But perhaps if the wordsmith’s craft is attempted through multiple voices, through orginal drafts and successive translations, something of what the poet has imagined can begin to take shape. Paul Valéry (and Shelley as well) imagined that all poems are part of an unfinished universal poem. More modestly, the original text of any poem, together with its translations, can be read as a single stanza of that poem, which, like the entire inconceivable whole, is still in the process of being written. Magically, we readers have been granted the privilege to be present at the creation.

No t e s 1 Okey, trans., Purgatorio, book 2, The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri, translated by John Aitken Carlyle, Thomas Okey, and Philip H. Wicksteed (New York: Modern Library 1932).

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2 Sayers, trans., The Divine Comedy, by Dante Alighieri, part 2, Purgatory (New York: Penguin 1955). 3 Mandelbaum, trans., The Divine Comedy, by Dante Alighieri (New York: Everyman 1995). 4 Merwin, trans., Purgatorio, by Dante Alighieri (New York: Alfred A. Knopf 2000).

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Nothing in My Formative Years Indicated That I Might Become a Translator Pier r e A ncti l Translated by Donald Winkler

Nothing in my formative years indicated that I might become a translator. In fact, in my early twenties, I dismissed such a possibility out of hand on the grounds that it seemed insufficiently creative, too inclined to the strict and dogged reproduction of texts written by others. Of course, I was then thinking only of the transposition from English to French of official documents or government reports. I had not yet discovered that translation could take on a different guise when one was dealing with a work rich in meaning, harbouring a complex infrastructure of languages and literary traditions. Or rather, I could not yet imagine that I might play a role in passing on a culture for the benefit of other readers less capable of crossing borders between different worlds, sometimes half obscured in a text or barely visible on the surface of the writing. While I was living in New York, I read a great deal of American literature, especially the Beats and the San Francisco literary school, and developed an increased attachment to Jack Kerouac, who represented the passage from a French-Canadian state of being to an identity given over in its entirety to the plenitude of a continent that had become American and anglophone. I approached these works without truly realizing that I was reading them in their language of origin, so much had I – born in the unilingual francophone city of Quebec – become totally at ease in the byways of 1950s North

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American speech with its slang, its technical jargon, its dazzling semantic sleights of hand. On the contrary, it was Beat texts that had been translated into French that were incomprehensible, seriously diminished by linguistic approximations proper to another level of meaning, unreadable because more Parisian than American, both too learned lexicographically and falsely populist. There, translators obscured the discourse, distorted the meaning, and reduced the Beats to dandies lost and astray in a landscape of indigenous expression. Who would want to join such a tribe? Once arrived in New York to pursue my studies in social anthropology and armed with my Beat culture, up to then totally derived from books, I began to prowl the streets of the Lower East Side and Greenwich Village, alert for the correct pronunciation, the enlightening words, the exuberant verbal energy that had produced this literature. It was the middle of the 1970s, and Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, and Gary Snyder could still be seen roaming the neighbourhood. Putting into practice the anthropological method and the sociolinguistic principles to which I was being introduced at the New School, I would hang out at noisy intersections, in cosmopolitan cafeterias, and in public parks full of overexcited orators, drinking in each word, each phrase, stalking dialects, local pronunciations, and the unique pitch of every conversation. Above all, I paid heed to the foreign languages that abounded in the streets, the strange inflections that American English imposed on them, and the surprising body language of those, who, like myself – and they were legion – were trying to find their bearings amid the New York English-language rhythms with their many cultural variants. Then I would go back to class and share my findings with the professor, Dale Fitzgerald, who had perfectly mastered an African language and was a great jazz enthusiast. The cry of a taxi driver or the verbal admonition of a policeman would be translated into a phonetic alphabet and subjected to Saussurian analysis. A conversation seized on the run between two traffic lights became an opportunity to grasp the different language levels abroad in the city, or to study the polyphony a-buzz on street corners, bringing to light a bit more each day the surprising complexity of every oral outburst, every signifier in a megacity of a thousand linguistic horizons. I observed, by listening closely, that my building’s landlord on Second Avenue spoke a language shot through with a Germanic, East European music, that the janitor wielded an English born in the

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foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains in the heart of the Deep South, and that the Spanish-speaking worker who did small jobs betrayed his Puerto Rican origins in his exclamations. After several months’ residence I learned that speech could be deconstructed, that it bore historic traces that were rather easily identifiable, and that they were the result of a long cultural sedimentation. Then the day came when I made the return journey north to settle, not this time in the city of my birth (too univocal) but in the middle of an archipelago where waters converged from all directions – in Montreal. I had only come to this Quebec metropolis two or three times in my life, and that was to visit Expo 67. I knew Broadway better than Saint Lawrence Boulevard, Fifth Avenue better than Saint Catherine Street. And as an incomprehensible foreignness stimulates the desire to learn, I began to explore Montreal neighbourhoods as a newly arrived immigrant might have done, learning the names of the main arteries, trying to memorize the locations of the parks, just as I had done in New York two or three years earlier. Little by little the veil that was blocking my view lifted, revealing the many linguistic and cultural borderlines criss-crossing Montreal from one end to the other, in a complex overlapping of identities and historical allegiances. I saw two great geographic entities facing off in the city, and then, in the heart of the urban space, a multitude of later settlements, heterogeneous, a network working its way, zigzagging from street to street all the way to the horizon. The Montreal epicentre in particular seemed to abound in ingeniously hybrid cultural forms, some of them showing astonishing vitality in the midst of urban landscapes constantly being redefined. Elsewhere, sometimes right nearby, historical remnants dotted the neighbourhoods: the blackened wall of a tall factory, its doorway inaccessible; a few letters of an unknown alphabet; places of worship hard to identify, and, along the streets, other buildings whose purposes were obscured by the passing of years. Another text showed through, with complex cultural superimpositions, barely legible, and here and there fragments whose resonance was particularly strong, asserting themselves amidst a chaotic display of piecemeal testimony. At the very beginning of the 1980s, something clicked, triggering an impulse that would prove irresistible. I’d had a hint of it when I heard from afar the insistent sonority of a language that haunted me as I peacefully negotiated the historic ruins of the Plateau MontRoyal and Saint Lawrence Boulevard. Everywhere I walked, I picked

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up the nagging echo of a culture only yesterday dense and exuberant; everywhere, I stumbled upon the traces of a language so recently vanished that it still clung to the surrounding buildings, a language born on the edge of the universe. But what language? Too many strange inscriptions crowded the Main in a bewildering cacophony for anyone to pinpoint their origins and their exact nature. I came and went in the shadow of a presence I could not fully reach or grasp. In the sky and on the damp ground one could still make out the sulphurous exhalations of an intense fireworks display discovered by an onlooker arrived too late, the fires gone out and the public dispersed. And yet a few distracted witnesses still lingered here and there, warmed by a glow barely detectable in the wide, empty firmament. It was not too late to meet one of these wanderers, fast friends with nostalgia, still alive to feelings that had hardly diminished with the passing of years. One of them was David Rome, born in a province of the Russian empire, in the Lithuania of the gaon of Vilnius. I met him in the archives of the Canadian Jewish Congress and saw how he loved to surround himself with an indescribable and often incomprehensible mound of documents and books dealing with the history of Jewish Montreal. I remained by his side for weeks, then months. One day, while I was rummaging through this confusion to cast a bit of light upon the relationship between Jews and francophones between the two wars, Rome took me aside and began to tell me the story I was so eager to hear. I already knew Yiddish script from having seen it on the shelves at the Jewish Public Library – without being able to read it – but Rome knew how to approach it in a special way, with love and tenderness. He showed me some simply made books, published in Montreal, covered with Hebrew letters and with an emotional meaning that he imparted to me in small doses. Not everything that happened in Montreal was in English or French, he murmured, and the first generation that arrived from Eastern Europe brought with it a language and a culture that for one or two generations was the primary vehicle for the literary aspirations at the heart of the Montreal Jewish community. Rome also had the habit of going into his back room to pull out collections of poetry. And so I learned the names of the marvellous poets who had put their own discrete stamp on the Plateau MontRoyal and Mile End. I could not read these names, and their literary flights were now dormant in the archives. These were people who

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had arrived from another continent decades earlier, who had endured the trials of being uprooted and exiled, if not those of the Holocaust. They had picked up the threads of their lives through writing texts inspired by their childhoods, by the city that had gathered them in, or by the suffering that had shaped their souls. It was a unique moment, with a procession of discoveries in their pure state, as other Yiddish pamphlets emerged day after day, according to Rome’s whims, from worn boxes or obscure shelving tucked away at the back of a dim room. I had at my fingertips the rough texture of the paper and the unreadable letters lined up according to an indecipherable order. The smell of the dust, a bit pungent, that had accumulated on the covers, reached my nostrils. A trace remained of the historic moment when there appeared in Montreal, under circumstances as yet for me obscure, those bearing witness from across the seas. There were pages and pages of Yiddish literature that these immigrants had thought good to leave to posterity, and that had slaked their thirst for writing. Who read these works now? For a researcher discovering all unwary a horde of Montreal literature in a foreign language, this was unexpected, overwhelming. Nothing had prepared me for such an intense encounter, neither my relations with the Montreal Jewish community, which were after all quite wide ranging, nor my readings on the subject. There was of course a Yiddish spirit that prevailed in certain circles, in theatre or in music, and one talked here and there about the great cultural figures of Eastern European life, but there was little discussion of Yiddish literature. At that time, in the mid-1980s, the last great Montreal Yiddish writers had either passed away or entered the final phase of their literary careers far removed from the public eye. For a long time I advanced step by step through the maze of Montreal Yiddish culture, gleaning facts here and there, collecting images, scanning pages filled with a Hebrew script that was for me impenetrable. On ancient photos I saw faces out of another world, often sombre, looking gravely inwards, at times betraying clear signs of suffering. An Eastern European diaspora emerged in fragments before my eyes, defying the dominant parameters of late twentiethcentury Canadian Jewish life, escaping through the cracks, coming into view on the uncharted frontiers of collective memory. I remained transfixed for a long time, unable to confide in anyone, shaken by the discovery of a hidden cultural substratum that still shone through out of the shadows with a thousand mysterious lights.

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In the archives of the Canadian Jewish Congress from time to time, there also cropped up letters in Yiddish exchanged across the ocean with someone in Vilnius or Warsaw, notes hastily scribbled between two union meetings of Montreal tailors, or small wall posters full of slogans and imperious exclamation marks. Sometimes, when I was lucky, I came across posters in two languages, inviting the public to a poetry reading at the Jewish Public Library or to meet a great figure of Yiddish literature. Names and faces filed by: Yehoash, Chaim Zhitlowsky, Sholem Asch, H. Leivick, Kalman Marmor. At other times, Rome helped me to decipher a yellowed article from the Keneder Odler, left behind by accident in a file from the 1940s: “Yidishe Folks Biblyotek hot durkhgefirt ovent lekoved Yud Yud Segal,” or “Der 50-yoriker yubileum far Yud Yud Segal durkhgefirt oyf a zer shenem oyfn.” I despaired of giving some semblance of meaning to these disparate accounts, these last glimmerings of a ghostly culture that beckoned to me from afar. I was overwhelmed by a feeling of immense solitude and a bewildering lack of understanding as I came in contact with this world that had burned with a thousand fires in Montreal a half century earlier. I felt both a chill from the distant horizon at the end of day and the fiery breath of a star shining resplendent in the firmament. Having paced the streets of the Plateau Mont-Royal in search of elusive clues, and having spent months in the archives immersed in the community’s ruins, I had finally arrived at the wellspring, the Yiddish text, but an insuperable barrier stood in my way. I heard the bubbling of the limpid waters, but I could not drink. I stared at the eyes and mouths of the poets from where had sprung wonderful song, but I could not hear the powerful words. The pages covered in Hebraic signs remained mute. The letters exchanged between writers were like a pile of dead leaves scattered by the wind; the manuscripts were unreadable ancient relics; the photographs were images adrift between two exiles. How to place a value on all that? Spread out before me day after day was a mass of documents invested with a cultural verve long gone, and yet, with their graphic splendour, the boldness of the script, the sensed intensity of their elusive arguments, they were still alive with meaning. Between two conversations, Rome observed me for a long time in silence. He saw the astonishment and incredulity in my eyes. Behind the disordered pile of papers on his desk, where alone he contemplated the vast

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expanse of Montreal Yiddish culture, he waited for the moment that would have me scale the insurmountable. My path had been chosen since New York, and the reflex of anthropological linguistics carried the day. In the autumn of 1984 I found myself in a class at the Department of Jewish Studies at McGill University. Since I had some years earlier served an apprenticeship in the language of the Bible with Meir Ifergan, a cantor at Montreal’s Reconstructionist Synagogue, and since I knew the Hebrew alphabet quite well, I made good progress. My professor, Leib Tencer, a Holocaust survivor, was an exceptionally gifted pedagogue. From his lips Yiddish shone out in all its glory, no longer a scholarly literary vehicle but a mother tongue with its own unique inflections, capable of communicating intense emotion. Little by little I adapted myself to its guttural phonetics, its at times theatrical body language, its curses pronounced under the breath, its affectionate diminutives. Month after month, without rushing, I listened to the language that had dominated Saint Lawrence Boulevard, roused huge crowds during garment industry strikes, and echoed for decades on the stage of the Monument National. Tencer was now enunciating it before rows of neatly aligned seats, facing young students, some of them indifferent, but his Yiddish seemed very much alive, even elegant, infused with a deep experience of East European life. It took flight in that class, spiralling out in unforeseen ways, alighting on my attentive ears as a kind of caress. This Yiddish was also a symphony of learned and nuanced colours. It had a grammar, strict rules, a historical patrimony that preceded it. Tencer and I became close. I was now discovering, decades after the fact, the language that, streaming out of Europe, had taken root in Montreal and produced a third literature in the city.

 So it went for four years, until I received a post-doctoral grant from SSHRC to explore the work of a Montreal Yiddish poet I particularly liked, Jacob Isaac Segal, brought to my attention by Rome. Segal attracted me because his vision betrayed a profound sadness, and it seemed to me that his pain could only represent a total commitment to the literary ideal. His eyes had a solemnity that struck me from the outset; I detected in them an enduring vulnerability. Segal was the first Yiddish poet in Montreal to manifest an unusual talent, and

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between the two wars his reputation extended to New York, Warsaw, Vilnius, Buenos Aires, and beyond. He produced a dozen collections of poetry, some of them running to hundreds of pages. In Montreal, Segal was celebrated during his lifetime within the Jewish community, and his writing continued to resonate in circles that still cherished the memory of the great East European migration. I began to fumble my way through the monumental body of Segal’s work. The task was daunting. I found myself faced with Segal’s texts as before a mass of signs and symbols that I had to decipher one by one, to extract the meaning, the rhythm, and the music. Every page, every line, every letter required another mustering of concentration and effort. The richness of Segal’s writing and emotional landscape was clear to me, but I advanced on tiptoe, often plagued by doubt, incomprehension, and my imperfect knowledge of the language. An opaque scrim hid from me the value of the poetry I was trying to grasp. I had to make the transition from an oral language, admirably served by Tencer, cheerful, brightly coloured, to an abstract literary language, ethereal in nature, existing only on paper. I had before me a body of work suspended in time: I was confronted by a moment of grace under glass, inaccessible, untouchable, stilled. Line after line of Segal’s poems ran down the page, now mute, unpronounceable, forgotten if not unknown. There was an order here that at first escaped me. And I, from a francophone culture, approached these writings almost completely ignorant of their historical genesis and literary origins. I had to start from the beginning and engage in the struggle word by word. Worse, I could find no precedents for the task that I was so rashly undertaking. Segal, more than thirty years after his death, had almost never been translated, not even into English. There had only been a few isolated cases here and there, haphazard, with no overall plan, by writers who in their childhood had been immersed in the vast Yiddish world: A.M. Klein, Miriam Waddington, and a few others. It was a vast continent to explore with no sense of its geography, scale, or climate, and no capacity, either, to read rapidly through large swathes of Segal’s writing, through a single collection or even his correspondence. Many of his poems had also appeared in the Yiddish press, but they were now scattered through the yellowed pages of numerous Canadian and American periodicals, even Argentinean and Polish ones, with no hope of tracking them down in the short term. No biographical guide existed, not for his Ukrainian origins nor the unfolding of his

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life in Canada. The man had pride of place in Montreal at the apex of an astonishing literary tradition, but the pedestal on which his writing was erected was half buried, overgrown with weeds, its identifying inscription effaced. It was not quite like travelling all the way to Czernowitz (Tchernivitsi) or to Korets to seek out traces of pre1939 Jewish communities, but the damage was comparable. There the genocide, the sufferings during the war, and forty years of communism had uprooted the tree of life; here forgetfulness, the move to comfortable suburbs, and the striving for a new Jewish identity had stunted the growth of Yiddish literature and then stopped it in its tracks. I cast my eyes over books that had not been read for decades, pages never turned, sunk into the void. But my fascination at discovering a third literature in Montreal prevailed over the bleak situation in which I found myself. I decided to read one collection, poem by poem, and address myself first to the shortest and simplest texts. Because I was particularly attracted to its evocative title, I chose to begin with Lirik, a work of 326 pages, printed in Montreal in 1930. The poet’s fifth publication in twelve years, Lirik had much to offer and appeared at the height of Yiddish’s literary golden age in the city. Dictionary in hand, I took one page at a time. I tried to identify the verbs, then the adjectives, and finally the text’s overall rhythm. Sometimes the meaning came to me in a flash, and magnificent images emerged all at once, with no warning, from the mass of Hebrew characters. At other times I wrestled for hours with the angel of Yiddish poetry, only to be brought down by my lack of a nuanced knowledge of the language. I had embarked on this perilous journey with no guide, no charitable helping hand that could lead me toward an overall understanding of this author I was encountering for the first time. I began to make notes in the margins of the poems, on the subject being dealt with, on the author’s language, on the vibrant images that had emerged after a long and sometimes painful reading. For a long time I was blocked by certain forms of address used by the author. For example, Segal introduced into his poetry a character with whom he entertained a dialogue in a very familiar tone, like a close friend one is taking into one’s confidence: “In kranker roytlakhkayt iz durkhgeflekt di velt / nor du bist vays un ruyk, vi farnakht.” Who could this be, and how to deal with this literary strategy that cropped up so frequently? What did this du represent, this

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individual in whom the poet freely confided, without ever naming him, without ever giving him a precise form? I spent weeks and weeks trying to solve this mystery, only succeeding after prolongued study of the collection, and after having made my way through several poems that were for me extremely difficult. Segal was simply talking to God, an immaterial being he was addressing in supplication or as an intimate. Segal went to meet God in his celestial garden or abandoned himself to him in the course of his poetic wanderings in the Ukrainian landscapes of his childhood. In due course I realized, little by little, that all this effort at reading in a foreign alphabet required considerable long-term application, and the advances I had made on previous days tended to vanish if I was distracted even briefly. What had I understood exactly? What path had I taken into the heart of a poem? What remained of the emotion I had felt while reading a passage I had at last deciphered? And what really had I read? Everything slipped through my fingers like sand: Ikh hob aykh gelozt zikh bazetsn in di bargike un tolike yishuv’n in shreynes mit a goyish folkl. Zayre kloysterlakh klingen tsu mir, un der bloyer roykh fun zayre tfiles, gayt oyf un shlengt zikh far mayne oygn Dershmek ikh oykh zayer farvoglkayt Un dem tsar fun zayer farhorevet, farhorevet shvarts shtikl broyt. The Segalian text tended to float off into the firmament as soon as I raised my head, as soon as the passing of time came to blur what I had read. Over and over I found myself in front of a text I had to reread from the beginning, looking down on letters I had to pronounce one by one anew, to form words, then phrases, then complete lines. The reading I had absorbed, the routine memorization of a text already perused, the certain recapture of a discovered meaning, all disappeared at the first opportunity. I remained, to my great distress, a reader powerless to retain in his memory the text he had read: Ikh vel onnemen dayn klayne vayse hant, ir varimen baym otem fun mayn moyl.

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Hoykh iber unz – dos bargik-grine land, di zun – tsu mayrev vi a goldener zayl. To combat this troubling phenomenon I began to translate short passages here and there. Sometimes, inexplicably, the meaning of a poetic image came to me easily, as well as the words to transpose the meaning and rhythm into my language. I seized that inspiration on the fly. I decided to use two forms of annotation on each page, one that took account of the work accomplished to arrive at an objective understanding of the poem in the Yiddish language, through recourse to the dictionary and to historical information, and another that recorded these spontaneous insights. In this way I found I was able to translate entire lines, then whole poems. These new texts in French were the culmination of my efforts, sometimes rational, sometimes unconscious, to arrive at the heart of Segal’s poetic enterprise. They represented a summing-up of all my struggles, over an extended period, to decode a specific body of work. After several months I found myself with a hundred poems translated in part or in whole, often the shortest and the most imagistic, out of the three hundred in the collection. I had in hand, in the form of my literary translations, the log of an anthropologist who had leapt from page to page in quest of a now ephemeral cultural expression, in the same way that others in the discipline had conducted interviews over a period of time with representatives of an oral culture or chosen to live at the heart of a distant population. Poetry had offered me a path reflecting the emotional life of a young man who arrived in Montreal in 1910 and who bore within him the cultural grammar of traditional Ashkenazi Jewish life in Eastern Europe: I let you settle in these rolling hills along with a Gentile people. Their little churches speak to me from afar and the blue smoke of their prayers that drifts from them, wandering in search of my eyes. I see clearly their own wandering as well and the sadness of their hard and hard won scant black bread.

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Translation, to my great surprise, had over the months become a path to my understanding of Segal’s texts, and an effective form of apprenticeship to the Yiddish language. I, who had never thought of becoming a translator, and who refused to be paid for this demanding work, now belonged to the tribe. I found myself consulted as to the value of certain French words, on my way of working, and, once Segal’s poems were published in 1992 by the Éditions du Noroît, I had become part of the fellowship, not large, of those who render into another language a text whose music is at first glance incomprehensible. I also saw that a linguistic vehicle, for which there remained in Montreal only a few speakers outside the Hassidic community, could revive and be given voice through texts published in this very city at a time that was still quite recent. The Yiddish that had been spoken during the first half of the twentieth century on Saint Lawrence Boulevard could still be heard, thanks to an often journalistic and descriptive literature that filled the pages of Montreal’s Yiddish daily newspaper, the Keneder Odler, and in the memories of the first immigrants. In the mid 1990s I embarked on the translation of a small book published by Israël Medresh in 1947, Montreal foun nekhtn, which in 1997 became, under the title Le Montréal juif d’autrefois, the first book in Canada translated in entirety from Yiddish to French. Going through this text, which dealt with the period that saw the massive arrival of East European Jews before the First World War, I had the impression that the author was addressing me personally. In his mother tongue, Medresh told me the story of the Jewish community from 1905 to 1916. The experience enabled me also, without too much difficulty, to deepen my knowledge of Yiddish. I continued in the course of the following years, and through the medium of literature, a conversation with Hirsch Wolofsky, founder in 1907 of the Keneder Odler, and with Hershl Novak, an early militant Zionist Labour activist and an organizer of Yiddish schools at the beginning of the twentieth century. As my knowledge of Yiddish improved, I was also able to translate more learned studies of Jewish history in Montreal, such as that by Simon Belkin on the Poale-Zion, published in 1956, as well as the biographical dictionary of Haim-Leib Fuks (in English, One Hundred Years of Yiddish and Hebraic Literature in Montreal). I even, in 2001, undertook the translation of a novel by Yehuda Elberg (L’empire de Kalman l’infirme), and in 2006 the literary memoirs of Sholem Shtern (Nostalgie et tristesse).

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I was able to learn this language, no longer spoken in day-to-day life, by translating it. For twenty years I have been quietly absorbing Montreal Yiddish writing and gaining an appreciation of its historic significance through the medium of some of its principal Montreal authors. I have even become, all unawares, the most prolific translator of this literary tradition in the country. The most important turning point came in 2002 when I decided to publish in French the literary memoirs of Sholem Shtern, whom I came to know before his death in 1991. The book paints a striking portrait of Yiddish literary life in Montreal and its links with the world of New York Yiddish writers. These pages clearly reflect the intensity of Yiddish cultural life in the city and the disastrous impact on its creators of the Holocaust and the postwar period. In the wake of these projects, I decided in 2008 to risk the writing of a literary biography of the greatest Montreal Yiddish poet, Jacob Isaac Segal, which I am in the process of completing. During this journey of historical reconstruction, translation has played a decisive role, giving researchers access to a readable text that could be consulted on a permanent basis, enriched by annotations and explanations that cast light on its true meaning – all made available, systematically, to a new readership outside the Jewish tradition. I have of course been the first to benefit from this work, for the translator learns from his experience in deciphering texts and is transformed by it. The passage from one language to another is rich in cultural learning, and the act of translation can also be an immersion in another form of literary practice. The text, even journalistic, even unfinished, is a condensation of the feelings and daily life of the author. Written in a specific context and environment, it most often, once translated, has a striking authenticity. This is because he who produces it does not know that one day it will be transposed into another language, and does not think about it. Jacob Isaac Segal did not for a moment imagine that his poetry would one day be read by francophones. He simply fought with all his might to produce a body of work in the Yiddish language in Montreal. For him, that was more than enough.

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Creatively Re-transposing Christa Wolf: They Divided the Sky Lu ise vo n F lotow

In the late 1980s, during the years in which the East Bloc, along with East Germany, was heading into collapse, I spent several longer periods in East Berlin, officially attending courses for Germanists at the Humboldt University, unofficially getting to know the many different oppositional movements that were gathering strength there: the Initiative Frieden und Menschenrechte, the people who assembled at the Umweltbibliothek in the church buildings at the Zionskirchplatz and used an ancient hand-cranked Gestetner to produce their illegal Umweltblätter (information leaflets on environmental issues and social justice). I met with and interviewed young writers of the Prenzlauerberg – Rainer Schedlinski (later revealed to be a secret police informant), Wolfgang Koziol, and Uwe Kolbe – and acquired a few of their artsy, handmade samizdat journals. I talked to literature and art critics and organized a large travelling exhibition of hitherto unshowable artworks entitled Schrittwechsel (Change of gait) through the United States and Canada, with the help of curator Christoph Tannert. It was an intense time, especially as these younger, politically uncooperative, and critically creative people were news to the West. They were the generation of the so-called Hineingeborene – people who had been born into the system. At the time (and probably still today) Christa Wolf was the East German writer best known in the West. She had just published Kassandra (1983), a work often read as a feminist rewriting of the ancient misogynist and male-triumphalist myths around the Trojan War, and around war in general. Her status in the West was as important as in the East, though different. The younger generation

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of East Berlin writers that I was frequenting largely admired and respected her: for standing up to the ongoing pressures of East German Kulturpolitik, maintaining her integrity as a writer, and functioning in some ways as a protective guardian who would speak out for lesserknown, younger authors who had not yet developed the necessary connections in the West that would protect their critical voices. When in 1987 Wolf produced Störfall, a response to the Chernobyl disaster, I was witness to the wrangling over who should translate this into English – a rather surprising event, as postwar German literature has not often been of great sales interest in North America. In other words, Wolf was an important and respected figure on both sides of the Wall, and in German as well as English. Indeed, most of her work was by then available in English translation, though there were curious stories around some of these translations: Kindheitsmuster, for instance, where the title changed from A Model Childhood in its first incarnation to Patterns of Childhood in later ones. Perhaps the oddest English translation is the one done of Wolf’s first full-length novel, Der geteilte Himmel (1963, tr. 1965), which is set just before and immediately after the building of the Berlin Wall and had a very loud and controversial reception in East Germany. Despite the ideological “scandals” created around the book and its author, the English translation – Divided Heaven – appeared only eighteen months later, from an East Berlin publishing house, presumably in order to export a new young socialist talent to the West. In the late 1980s, an article about this translation surfaced via other Germanists,1 and opened my eyes to a very particular politics of translation that ruled this version, allegedly grossly distorting Wolf’s German text. I decided to one day retranslate the book. Living in Germany in the early 1990s, I corresponded with Wolf about this project, and tried to locate the translator, Joan Becker, and find out more about the publisher, Seven Seas, and its policies. But the disruptions caused by the recent collapse of the East Bloc presented enormous obstacles. While some help was forthcoming, it was not the moment to pursue matters. Now, almost twenty years later, I have found the time, the publisher,2 and some funding for the new translation I have just completed: They Divided the Sky.3 d e r g e t e i lt e h i m m e l :

the source text

Wolf’s first full-length novel, set in the two years preceding the raising of the Berlin Wall on 13 August 1961 and ending in the autumn

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of that same year, tells the story of Rita and Manfred’s doomed love affair. Rita, recovering in a sanatorium from a physical and nervous collapse, “re-members” their time together and certain incidents in her life before and with Manfred that are particularly poignant. In the process of this memory work, she recovers her health and reaffirms her belief in the new socialist Germany. The political and social tensions leading up to the building of the Berlin Wall repeatedly crop up in these memories, as people suddenly disappear from work or school to “go West,” and politics colour every conversation and many personal decisions. Rita, twenty years old and a teacher-training student, has a summer job in a train carriage production plant and is learning about industrial labour – as a good socialist teacher should. Both at college and in the factory, she experiences the effects of dogmatic ideology first hand: for instance, as an older and particularly zealous fellow student sets an intimidating Stalinist tone at college, and when the workers in her brigade engage in highly politicized stratagems around their production norms. Manfred, her lover, who is ten years older and a rather sceptical and increasingly disillusioned academic, does not believe in the new socialist regime or its discourse and decides to stay in West Berlin after an academic conference. Rita’s collapse follows closely upon a visit she makes to him there, during which she decides to opt for life in East Germany, thus giving up her love. Written in plain language, the story is told in flashbacks largely from Rita’s point of view, and from her hospital bed, an aspect of the text that some contemporary East German critics found not only displeasing but indicative of the author’s dangerously questionable political stance. The East German response to this book in 1963 was intense. First, Wolf (then in her early thirties) was awarded the Heinrich-Mann literary prize, the government’s highest award for literary achievement, worth 10,000 marks at the time – a fortune. And though the feuilleton and other critics admitted that Wolf was a gifted writer, there soon developed an aggressive ideological controversy fuelled by articles such as one by Dietrich Allert and Hubert Wetzel, published in the daily Freiheit (Freedom) on 31 August 1963, in Halle, the city where Wolf had herself worked in a train carriage production plant. The Freiheit critics suggested that Wolf’s view of the new socialist society was twisted and “decadent” and did not reflect its true nature: Von der alles verändernden Kraft unserer Gesellschaft ist in der Erzählung zuwenig spürbar. Überall schimmert der Gedanke

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durch, den die Autorin in einer Fernsehsendung nach Erscheinen des Buches äußerte: Sie habe auf das Unglück hinweisen wollen, das durch die Spaltung in Deutschland besteht. Ist das wirklich ein Unglück? [My translation: There is far too little evidence in this story of the power our society wields to bring about total change. The author’s notion, which she expressed in a recent television program after the book appeared and according to which the division of Germany is a tragedy, comes through clearly. Is this indeed a tragedy?] Further, critics objected to the characters Wolf devised, claiming they were too negative, too problematic, and that her portrayal of industrial workers was incomplete and out of synch with socialist reality: Männer wie Meternagel oder Ermisch können doch nicht in der von Christa Wolf gewählten Darstellung – allein und einzig den Genossen unserer Tage verkörpern. Damit wird die Wirklichkeit verzerrt. Auch hier kommt die dekadente Lebensauffassung bei Christa Wolf zum Ausdruck. [My translation: Surely men such as Meternagel or Ermisch, as described by Christa Wolf, cannot be the only representation of the contemporary comrade. This is a distortion of reality. Here too Christa Wolf reveals her decadent view of life.] Finally, they wonder if Wolf has in fact found the right tone for her portrayal of the new German society: while they admit that the book may be a literary success in how it describes and develops “intime Gefühle” (intimate feelings), they doubt that it properly describes “unser Lebensgefühl” (our feeling of life). They suspect that it has been deprived of “notwendige rationale Elemente” (necessary rational aspects) and declare it not “auf der weltanschaulichen Höhe unserer Tage” (not in line with “the apex of today’s Weltanschauung”). Wolf’s perspective is seen as riddled with ideological errors that cannot possibly lead to an acceptance of the true nature of and need for the division of Germany nor help smooth the way for the general public to see the positive impact of the Wall. These accusations of “decadence,” of a twisted and negative portrayal of industrial workers and other citizens of socialist East Germany, and of a wrong, irrational, and retrograde tone, set off a

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flurry of other commentaries in newspapers, journals, radio programs, and public meetings of the writers’ union and journalists’ union, public seminars at universities, and so on, many of which the author attended. And while the book continued to be available, Wolf went on to many other problems with the authorities, having later books such as Kindheitsmuster (1976) (Patterns of childhood) withdrawn from circulation or accepting censors’ demands in order to be published – as was the case, minimally, with Kassandra (1983). Despite the ideological scandals around it, Der geteilte Himmel became a film in 1964, with a screenplay by Wolf and her husband, Gerhart Wolf. And the book was prepared for export. The newspaper that originally set off the fuss around the book in August 1963 summarized the events a few months later as a demonstration of the extraordinary willingness and need within East German society to talk about “the problems of our contemporary literature” openly, freely, and in real confrontation.4 This willingness, it announced, was all the more necessary as new young writers took the “new society” and its problems and conflicts into their sights to turn them into literary works. Though the paper recognized Wolf’s literary talent, it reiterated its original condemnation of her work as revealing a decadent concept of life (“eine dekadente Lebensauffassung”). Indeed, it insisted, it was the paper’s job and the critics’ responsibility to “help” the new young GDR writers find the right tone and correct their mistakes. As one recent commentator has put it, East German doctrine of the time required that writers follow party discipline and write according to those partisan principles, regardless of the resulting literary quality of their work: Die Schriftsteller wurden in die Pflicht genommen: Wenn sie sich bedingungslos der Parteidisziplin und den Prinzipien der Parteilichkeit beugten, fanden sie höchstes Lob, unabhängig davon, wie es um die Qualität ihrer künstlerischen Leistungen bestellt war.5 [My translation: Writers were required to unconditionally bow to party discipline and its partisan principles; then they would earn the highest praises, regardless of the quality of their artistic productions.] It seems that this party discipline along with its partisan principles may be what guided the English translation, correcting Wolf’s inappropriate tone as well as her decadent descriptions of socialist society.

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E ng l is h R e c e p t io n o f the Translati on Charlotte Koerner, one of two critics to have taken an interest in this translation (Katrina von Ankum is the other), starts out her 1984 article in a tolerant tone: translation and adaptation of literature can only be “creative transposition.” She cites Roman Jakobson, claiming that “such is the nature of verbal art,” and adopts the new word “refraction”6 to describe what a translation often does to an original text. However, this tone, which recognizes the textual differences inevitably created by translation, soon subsides, and Koerner writes that literary translations, “the results of interlingual transposition – have always been expected (at least by the readership) to be nearequivalents of the originals’ message, meaning, tone and quality” (215). Her short outline of the “message” of Wolf’s first novel then quickly moves on to condemn the Seven Seas version of the book. The message, Koerner says, is the following: At its core, Der geteilte Himmel was meant to carry the author’s impassioned appeal to the citizens of the fourteen-year-old new Socialist state not to desert their homeland, to understand the permanent division of Germany as a moral necessity rather than the result of Big Power economic politics run amok and to accept even this latest blow – a Wall that was to keep people in, not just out – as an act of protection against fascism and war. Though never explicitly noted by the critics, this must certainly have been understood by those readers who had read the original closely and picked up its clues. Obviously, a translation of this kind of story should allow the foreign readership the same insights. Becker’s does not. (215; my emphasis) While Koerner identifies what is probably Wolf’s most obvious message (one she was to repeat twenty-five years later in her ill-timed attempt to move the masses assembled in East Berlin on 4 November 1989 just days before the Wall was opened), there are other, more subtle messages in the book, which Koerner views as equally important. The first and perhaps most important is Wolf’s “literary representation of candor and outspokenness – that is, her representation of freedom of thought and speech in the GDR” (214). Her characters are outspoken and opinionated; they engage in political talk and discussion that, given the tensions of the time, are daringly forthright

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and critical of existing conditions. But they are also vulnerable: Rita, who decides to stay in East Germany rather than follow her lover to the West, is shown to suffer enormous uncertainties and personal trauma in coming to this decision. Wolf thus creates a character who is embroiled in ugly and confusing political forces far beyond her control and understanding, yet must adapt her personal ethics and life in order to survive. Much of Rita’s pondering over this dilemma is related in the first person, an aspect of the narrative that is completely erased by the translation. As Koerner summarizes it, the translation “fails to render the book’s unmistakeable internal awareness that … ideological ‘truth’ has neither absolute nor eternal validity but rather represents an individually chosen commitment” (214). Other important themes that Koerner notes in Wolf’s text concern a woman’s “painfully unresolved ambivalence about her passions, her sexual role, her fulfillment as a complete person” (215), and this within a “new” society, where a “new” social order confronts deeply ingrained cultural traditions with a “new morality.” Wolf was to engage with this problematic in many of her subsequent texts: Nachdenken über Christa T., Kein Ort. Nirgends, Kindheitsmuster, and of course Kassandra. As Koerner succinctly observes, “The manner in which the love theme was handled in [Wolf’s] early narrative affords important clues about the conflicts to come – clues unfortunately lost in translation” (215). The same goes for the encounter between two moralities: tradition versus “new society,” where the text carries a “countercurrent of doubt,” a theme made glaringly obvious in the many political discussions and confrontations that Wolf relates. The translation of these details, says Koerner, could provide the English reader with a “cultural document,” an account and greater understanding of the conflicts that underlie the characters’ actions. The existing translation simply removed this material or toned it down. Finally, Koerner comments on the importance of Wolf’s innovative narrative style – a “message” in itself – since it annihilates the stance of the omniscient narrator and instead fragments the narrative perspective, an attempt on Wolf’s part to “convey certain inner truths as authentically and realistically as she could while arousing maximal reader involvement and identification” (216). Again, this concern of the author – which seeks to overcome the “artificial separation of the results of writing from the process” (ibid.) – is in its early stages in this book and was to develop further in her subsequent works.

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For an understanding of Wolf’s literary path and her innovative work at a moment of intense political control of writing, Koerner maintains, the translation needed to render this work on “process.” However, the existing English version conflated the voices and perspectives – the narrator tells it all – and returned the text to the most traditional forms of writing fiction. Katharina von Ankum’s 1993 essay on the same translation concurs with Koerner’s interpretation of the “meaning” of the original text. Ankum writes, “On a surface level [Der geteilte Himmel] reads like a political vote for the socialist experiment in the GDR as well as the writer’s support for the division of Germany.”7 She claims, however, that its very complex narrative style seeks to “express a female subjectivity” (225). While this may be debatable, it is true that Wolf uses a multifaceted style to tell the story, switching, sometimes in midsentence, from a first-person perspective and a narrative written in the present tense to a third-person narrative in the simple past, and interspersing the narrative with ironic or self-conscious commentary from both the characters and the narrator. Ankum notes that this unorthodox narrative process is evidence of Wolf’s exploring “specifically female ways of constituting the fictional self” (224), which brought her, Ankum tells us, into regular conflict not only with the advocates of Socialist Realism in the 1960s but also with the authoritarian Western journalists of the early 1990s.8 In regard to the translation, Ankum shows how it expressly undoes this narrative fragmentation, reducing the story to a third-person omniscient narrator perspective, thus removing the ambiguities and subjective uncertainties that the female protagonist voices and imposing the closure and certainty required by “Lukacsian Socialist realism” (226). Indeed, Ankum shows how translator Joan Becker brought Wolf’s text back to the expected literary form “by replacing the changing point of view by an omniscient narrator [and modifying] those passages of the text that contest and even ridicule the notion of fictional totality” (233). For Ankum, these are the translation’s most important characteristics, which clearly support the socialist dogma under which it was completed. Koerner concurs. Both critics emphasize the difficulties that Rita encounters and has to confront as a young woman in this new society where she faces the “often ambiguous and ambivalent play between the expression of a deeply ingrained cultural tradition and that of a ‘new morality’” (Koerner, 215). This theme, its beginnings clearly

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located in Der geteilte Himmel, was to become a constant thread in Wolf’s work, culminating in her rewritings of the ancient Cassandra and Medea myths. As Koerner puts it, “Two kinds of consciousness, two selves [are] at war [in this text]: a creative transposer must reproduce this style and structure to give the English-speaking reader a ‘cultural document’” (215). The English version of 1965, however, seems to undermine, if not annihilate, Wolf’s early musings around women’s roles in the GDR, destroying not only the coherence and innovative character of this particular text but that of Wolf’s work as a whole. It provides instead “a familiar formula” of a heroine facing a difficult life choice that is expressed in what the only US-English review (in The Nation in 1967) described as a “fatigued traditionalism of style and structure.”9 d i v i d e d h e av e n ,

t rans lated and p u b l is h e d b y s e v en s eas verlag Seven Seas Verlag was founded in 1958 by Gertrude Gelbin, wife of Stefan Heym, a German socialist. Both Gelbin and Heym had spent years in American exile, returning after the founding of the GDR/ East Germany in 1949. Seven Seas’ publication strategies and plans seem to have been at least partly inspired by the cultural politics of the new Germany, where literature was assigned a pedagogical role and was not only funded but also controlled by the state. As one recent piece of research on this publishing house puts it, given the recent Nazi dictatorship, a specific literary canon was considered necessary that would help construct a new society and form the “neue sozialistischer Mensch” (new socialist person) through an “emphasis on collective behaviour, a socialist humanism, work ethics, antifascism and the attempt to free the high literary canon from classbound access.”10 The literature was typified by “a positive hero whose actions serve as a model for identification for the ideal socialist society, the depiction of class struggle, socialist development and its successful realization and the depiction of workers and revolutionary situations”11 – not exactly what Wolf produced in Der geteilte Himmel. In terms of poetics, this literature was typically defined against other literary movements: “Expressionism, formalism or modernism that used new formal concepts like defamiliarisation, alternating pointsof-view or montage were the main currents against which the socialist realist concept of the work of art as a closed system, reflecting the

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whole of ‘reality’ in each of its components, was defined. Equally central were the construction of a partisan (‘parteilich’) standpoint, orientation towards the positive and construction toward closure.”12 Neither in content nor structure did Wolf’s book conform to these expectations. Editor Gelbin at Seven Seas seems to have promoted just such a cultural-political agenda. Her publishing venture had produced work in English by English and American authors “at the left end of the political spectrum”13 as well as her husband’s two-volume novel, The Crusaders, in 1958. But Gelbin soon introduced into her publication list East German authors translated into English. With these and a lengthy paper she submitted to the Ministry of Culture describing her intentions and seeking funding, she made her political position very clear. Seven Seas was to be “a propaganda project on an international scale,” similar to other projects such as “the foreign service on the radio” or “publications service of the Committee for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries.”14 Indeed, Gelbin assigned a high political purpose to Seven Seas publishing: the role of a “psychological warfare weapon”15 that would not only counteract the capitalist propaganda advanced through American and British paperbacks but also publicize the democratic nature of the GDR, all the while bringing in foreign currency through sales abroad. In this ideologically tinged atmosphere of socialist realist literature produced within a publishing house that pursued a precise culturalpolitical agenda, Joan Becker “creatively transposed” Wolf’s Der geteilte Himmel into English.16 The ambiance in which the translation was produced was doubtless also affected by the preceding six months of noisy public debate on the political correctness of the source text and the author’s supposed decadence. Today’s translation scholars would surmise that such a “horizon of translation”17 might influence the final product, and we agree. But there exists no specific document from which rules of socialist realist translation might be gleaned and which might help explain the thorough-going changes the text underwent, nor is there information on Joan Becker herself. Rebecca Jany notes that “official policies in the GDR seem to have been mostly concerned with what got translated and only to some extent how texts were translated,” but does refer to some attempts to tie the poetics of translation to Marxist-Leninist theory and promote a form of “parteiliches Übersetzen” (partisan translation). Yet, it appears that such partisan translation was never defined or clearly implemented as policy.

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Within Seven Seas there may well have been editorial interference to political ends. Gelbin, for instance, defined her job as follows: “The Chief Editor not only handles the jobs specified in her contract, she also re-writes manuscripts for books as require reworking, or such books as require the same, whether these are written in English or are translations from the German.”18 This mix of politics, of correct socialist thinking, of “required” rewriting of manuscripts and books by zealous editors, in the end led to the product known today as Divided Heaven. Ankum’s and Koerner’s assessments of that translation are spot on: it definitely provides a strong variation on the source text, at times inexplicably altered, at times adjusted according to a method of sorts. An analysis of the first few pages of the book and any random passage throughout shows that the narrative style of the source text has been completely changed. The most immediately striking difference is that the often hesitant, uncertain, questioning, subjective, and self-analytical voice of the protagonist has been replaced by that of a rather dry and dispassionate omniscient narrator. The intimate, emotional tone of the source text, the “intime Gefühle” aspect that the East German critics grudgingly admired, has been flattened, so that the English text reads like a neutral report rather than the slow, painful, pondering memories around a powerful love that has been disappointed and abandoned. The narrator’s sly comments on the “new” society in which these events unfold are often adulterated or simply eliminated. A wonderful example of this dulling of the narrator’s position, which undermines Wolf’s feminist position, comes very early on, in the third paragraph of the book, and presages the many adjustments to follow. Her scepticism in the face of science, and particularly in the face of arrogant scientific know-how espoused by men, is well known.19 An early and very direct expression of this scepticism occurs here: Rita, the heroine, has just awoken from her unconscious state. The nurse, seeing that the patient’s eyes are open, addresses her; Rita turns away in tears. She cries all night and is unable to answer the doctor when he questions her the next morning. The first line of paragraph 3 then reads: “Aber der Arzt braucht nicht zu fragen, er weiss ja alles, es steht auf dem Unfallblatt.” The important phrase here is “er weiss ja alles,” which Wolf boldly inserted in this opening sentence. Translated literally, it says “But the doctor doesn’t have to ask any questions, he knows everything anyway, it’s all in the accident report.” The irreverent

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implication is that the doctor is a know-it-all, an arrogant, overbearing man who abuses the power vested in his (male) status. This implication is carried by the German particle “ja,” which also transmits the narrator’s wry criticism of this arrogance. The particle “ja” in question here is difficult to translate – because it calls for and assumes the reader’s complicity with such an opinion, but also because it appears to be quickly mitigated by the next part of the sentence: “it’s all in the accident report.” The 1965 translation solves this problem by completely undoing this line, its emphasis, its position at the beginning of a paragraph, and also the implied criticism, integrating it instead into a nondescript bit of information about the doctor and his patient: “She wept all night, and she could not speak when the doctor came to see her in the morning. Neither was there any need to speak, for he knew about her case, and that she was a student and had only been working in the factory during the holidays” (8). This version gets rid of the doctor’s arrogance, and the narrator’s quick and sassy mention of it, wiping out Wolf’s nascent feminist politics. Is this a result of “partisan translation” specific to socialist realism? Who knows. It provides evidence of a deliberate stylistic change that removes a telling ironic moment meant to set a certain tone early in the text. Rita will have many more encounters with men dubiously (and often inadequately) filling positions of power, and this wink from the narrator prepares the readers for the young woman’s developing attitude. The translation’s tendency throughout is to excise remarks and interjections by the narrator that undermine what is supposed to be obvious, or that question excessive certainties and add an important ironic tone. But the excision actually begins on the first page, in the prologue, where four introductory paragraphs describe the city and its polluted industrial environment, and refer obliquely to the frightening political tensions that preceded and accompanied the building of the Berlin Wall. The text is heavy with allusions that an East German reader in 1963 would doubtless have picked up immediately. Again, it sets a tone: terror, exhaustion, difficult living conditions, expressing the people’s fear in the face of Cold War tensions, their irritation at the polluted and unpleasant atmosphere they live in, and their withdrawal into the private realm: “Die Luft legte sich schwer auf sie, und das Wasser – dieses verfluchte Wasser, das nach Chemie stank, seit sie denken konnte – schmeckte ihnen bitter.” Here the point is “dieses verfluchte Wasser,” set off in dashes und deploying

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the invective “verflucht” (damned). It carries a subjective reaction to the vile physical and political environment of the story. Predictably, the 1965 English translation reads, “The air weighed heavy, and the water, with its ugly smell of chemicals, tasted bitter.” The invective “damned” has gone, as have the dashes that mark the phrase as a personal aside. The strong and crude verb stinken has been refined, and the fact that the personification of the air – which lays itself/drapes itself – suffocatingly – on top of the people has turned into a mere adjective, “heavy.” A more literal translation might restore the power of the line as follows: “The air laid itself heavily upon them, and the water – that damned water that had reeked of chemicals for as long as they could remember – tasted bitter.” Koerner writes that the “deep emotional involvement” expressed in the German version of this prologue is meant to “lead the readership in a step-by-step process toward the desired sense of identification and agreement” with the heroine’s moral choice – to stay in East Germany. However, the various grammatical and stylistic changes in the translation obliterate this function. The effect is to annihilate the mood of the text before the story even starts. Koerner writes, “The ideological premises and the personal appeal of the German text are missing. Lost are ideologically and culturally significant connotations and symbols” (218). These are not only lost with the German adjective “verflucht” and the expressive proximity of “dieses verfluchte Wasser” but also in the refusal to translate numerous other words that imply forcefulness, movement, anger – leaving the prologue flaccid and grey.20 While Koerner’s analysis focuses on the prologue as a strong example of this kind of flattening of the text (217–20), many other descriptive adjectives and adverbs have been censored/excised. A mild example: the doctor who first examines Rita describes her as a “hübsches einfühlsames Mädchen” (a pretty, sensitive girl). The 1965 translation refers to her simply as a girl (9). Why? Was this a partisan attempt to perceive all young women as the “socialist” same? In another instance, in the first flashback Rita sees Manfred, her love interest, for the first time standing “halbnackt” (half-naked) at a pump, washing. The 1965 English version renders this as “stripped to the waist” (11), which may describe him correctly but leaves out the immediate sexual attraction the man’s half-naked body exercises on the nineteen-year-old girl. Worse, the descriptive details that relay information about relationships are often simply

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cut. When Rita moves into the city to study at the teacher training institute, she lives with Manfred and has supper with his parents every night. She is witness to and participates in a most fearful exercise of dinner-table conversation where both family and societal politics engender enormous stress and help explain the personality of the young man she is with. Again, the cuts are drastic, turning the direct speech of sour remarks, quarrels, and tantrums into thirdperson accounts and emptying the description of this family’s life of its emotional volatility and terrible discomfort. The German text provides a much clearer understanding of Manfred’s character and of his subsequent decision to abandon the country. But enough of the drawbacks of the East Berlin Seven Seas version of Christa Wolf’s first great novel: it is far easier to criticize a translation than to produce one. they divided the sky: t h e t r a n s l at io n of 2012 2 1

Interestingly, Suhrkamp Verlag, which holds the rights to Wolf’s oeuvre, did not know about the Seven Seas translation.22 It had presumably been discounted. Nonetheless, I tried to use some of Becker’s translation to help with mine. Becker knew the system much better than I ever will, and since much of Rita’s socialist development and moralism stems from her work within the brigade at the factory and the relationships she forms with some of the men – notably Meternagel – this aspect of the system is important to understand. Rita’s decision to abandon her love in West Berlin in order to return to the more wholesome, honest labours of East Germany is a direct result of her life within the system, and Becker’s translation serves to explicate some of its intricacies: those around worker politics in industrial production in East Germany, for example. This brigade has been slacking, as have the “new socialist” workers and bosses in most of the new Germany – a situation aggravated by the Cold War atmosphere as skilled workers go West, managers disappear overnight, and nothing is stable. Specifically, Rita’s brigade comrades are quite satisfied with the money they earn and therefore are unwilling to increase production, since this would establish a new “norm.” Meternagel, Rita’s foreman and confidante and a stalwart socialist, tries to mobilize them to work harder and more honestly for the good of the new socialist Germany. The details of this plan and of

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the brigade’s resistance are arcane; they mix hard political “union type” strategies and personal grievances with feelings of shame about war experiences and disdain for the almost feudal pre-war lives of some of the men, putting them all under pressure as the plant hovers on the verge of bankruptcy due to poor leadership and defections, to lack of know-how, materials, and skilled labour, and to systematic “blackmailing”23 by West Germany. The brigade is one place where the new socialist Germany could and perhaps should be developing; however, the stakes and strategies are not always obvious fifty years after the fact. Becker’s translation clarifies them, pitting the two main characters against each other in unionist versus “new” moralist attitudes. The translation, however, obfuscates or simply deletes the details of the other socialist event that Wolf builds into the text: the moment of public criticism that occurs at the teachers’ college when it is discovered that the entire family of one of the students has “gone West” – fled the country illegally – without the student reporting it. Mangold, the accuser, a dogmatic socialist who cites chapter and verse of socialist writings and insists on punishment for the student’s “crime,” produces reams of spiteful and party-prone tirades when the class meets to deal with the offender. This is, again and conveniently, deleted from Becker’s translation. To retain and reproduce in English the narrator’s summary that he “sprach über die Parteilinie, wie Katholiken über die unbefleckte Empfängnis” (130) (talked about the party line the way Catholics talk about the Immaculate Conception) was presumably beyond the pale of Seven Seas editorial politics. Perhaps the most important aspect of my translation (apart from the fact that it follows and seeks to reproduce every detail and nuance of the source text) is the title: They Divided the Sky. It is drawn from the last pages of the book, where the lovers prepare to separate at the end of Rita’s day in West Berlin. Gazing at the sky (which has been a constant element throughout the story) as the long northern twilight sets in, Manfred says, “Den Himmel wenigstens können sie nicht zerteilen” (At least they can’t divide the sky) (187). The reference to the generic “they” for the forces of evil and tension and oppressive politics struck me as key. “They” come up throughout the book to refer to all manner of powers that influence and control individuals. For Manfred, “they” are the forces of earlier Nazi politics that affected his childhood, and “they” are also at the source of the mismanagement and propagandistic idealism that

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have driven him into exile. For Rita, “they” are less present as a discursive item, though the term does appear at threatening moments – in the discussions at college around the Stalinist Mangold, and the fear the villagers demonstrate when she visits. “They” are the invisible forces evoked in the prologue, in the radio announcer’s neutral voice, in the threats hanging over the land. Turning around Manfred’s “spöttisch” (mocking) comment, which he makes at the very moment when the two are about to wrench apart, forced to go their own ways in East and in West, seemed to me a more appropriate expression of the book’s force than title of the original translation, Divided Heaven. Koerner, I think, would agree: though she sees Rita’s decision to return and stay in the East as “based on feeling and faith” (217), which might justify the reference to “heaven,” Rita’s is actually a “Marxist’s choice, and the concept of a spiritual heaven belongs to the Judaeo-Christian tradition” (217). Again, tradition and “new” society are in conflict, as is the double meaning of “Himmel” in German (sky and heaven), with any attempt to render this ambiguity in English. My solution points to the unnamed and powerful political forces that caused many deep and tragic post-1961 rifts between the two Germanies and in the lives of several generations of those living there. Perhaps it also evokes Wolf’s ongoing interest in how these nameless and irresponsible geo-political forces affect “die Leute” (the regular folks) she alludes to in her prologue and thoughout the book.

Not e s 1 Eithne O’Connell, Dublin City University, and also Marilyn Sibley Fries, University of Michigan, drew my attention to Charlotte Koerner’s text. 2 The University of Ottawa Press has launched a new series in literary translation of “world literature.” They Divided the Sky is one of the first volumes in it to appear. 3 Some funding was made available by the Goethe-Institut. 4 “Die ganze Diskussion beweist, daß ein ausserordentliches Interesse besteht, offen, freimütig und in echtem Streit über die Probleme unserer Gegenwartsliteratur zu sprechen.” 5 Gong, “Christa Wolf’s Roman,” 241. 6 Koerner, “Divided Heaven,” 214, 213; hereafter cited in text. 7 Ankum, “The Difficulty of Saying ‘I,’” 225; hereafter cited in text.

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8 A detailed account of the conflict of the 1990s is available in Schoeps, “Intellectuals, Unification and Political Change 1990: The Case of Christa Wolf.” 9 Cited in Koerner, “Divided Heaven,” 215. 10 Jany, Rewriting as Cultural Politics. 11 Ibid. 12 Ibid., section 3.2. 13 Jany, Rewriting as Cultural Politics. 14 Cited in ibid. 15 The CIA also used the term “psychological warfare” for its cultural and translation activities in Europe in the 1950s and ’60s. 16 She is also listed as having translated a number of other works: Wolf’s Lesen und Schreiben (1977), Anna Seghers’ Benito`s Blue and Nine Other Stories (1973), Franz Fumberg’s Conversations in the Night: Three Works (1969), Franz Fühmann’s Car with the Yellow Star: Fourteen Days out of Two Decades (1968), and Johannes Becher’s Farewell (1970.) This list may not be complete. 17 Term from Antoine Berman’s Pour une critique des traductions: John Donne (Paris: Gallimard 1995). 18 Cited in Jany, Rewriting as Cultural Politics, in the original English. 19 This scepticism was perhaps most emphatically expressed in Störfall, written just after the nuclear disaster at Chernobyl. 20 Unwittingly, the translator or publisher may have undermined their purpose here, creating a text that, due to the many omissions and changes, is somewhat unreadable rather than a convincing example of socialist realism. 21 The new translation was published by the University of Ottawa Press in January 2013. 22 Email communication with Petra Hardt, Suhrkamp Verlag, 13 July 2009. 23 A term used by the plant director to describe the West’s refusal to sell them required raw materials.

B i b l i ogr ap h y Ankum, Katharina von. 1993. “The Difficulty of Saying ‘I’: Translation and Censorship of Christa Wolf’s Der geteilte Himmel.” Studies in Twentieth Century Literature 17, no. 2: 223–41. Dietrich, Albrecht, and Hubert Wetzelt. 1963. “Die kritische Stimme der Arbeiterklasse.” Excerpts from Freiheit, 31 August 1963, 12 October 1963, and 30 November 1963, cited from Freiheit, 31 August 1963,

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12 October 1963, and 30 November 1963, cited from “Der geteilte Himmel” und seine Kritiker, by Martin Reso. Halle: Mitteldeutscher Verlag 1965. www.zum.de/Faecher/D/BW/gym/cwolf/rezens_ost.html (accessed February 2012). Gong, Seon-Ja. 2006. “Christa Wolf’s Roman ‘Der geteilte Himmel’ im Zusammenhang der historischen Entwicklung des sozialistischen Realismus.” http://kgg.german.or.kr/kr/kzg/kzgtxt/100-12.pdf (accessed February 2012). Jany, Rebecca. 2007. Rewriting as Cultural Politics: The Role and Function of the Publisher Seven Seas. Master’s thesis, Freie Universität Berlin, published as an ebook: http://www.grin.com/en/e-book/89052/ rewriting-as-cultural-politics-the-role-and-function-of-the-publisher (accessed February 2012). Koerner, Charlotte. 1984. “Divided Heaven – by Christa Wolf? A Sacrifice of Message and Meaning in Translation.” Germanic Quarterly 57, no. 2: 213–30. Schoeps, Karl-Heinz J. “Intellectuals, Unification and Political Change 1990: The Case of Christa Wolf.” In 1870/71–1989/90: German Unifications and the Change of Literary Discourse, edited by Walter Pape. Berlin/New York: De Gruyter 1993. Wolf, Christa. 1965. Divided Heaven. Translated by Joan Becker. East Berlin: Seven Seas Publishing. – 1973. Der geteilte Himmel. Unabridged edition. Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag. First published in 1963 by Mitteldeutscher Verlag Halle. – 2012. They Divided the Sky. Translated by Luise von Flotow. Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press 2013.

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To Foreignize or Not to Foreignize: From a Translator’s Notebook Mich a el H enry Hei m

The postmodernist concern with privileging alterity – “the other,” or cultural difference – comes down to us from romanticism. Postmodernists tend to view the Enlightenment’s exaltation of rationality and universality as the point of departure for the disastrous utopian experiments of the twentieth century; in the homogeneity of legal and cultural norms called for by the philosophes, they see a direct line to the totalitarianisms of fascism and communism. The romantics won over the postmodernists by looking beyond, even beneath “civilization,” and proselytizing heterogeneity.1 Just as there is a romantic school of literature, so there is a romantic school of translation. Translators in the romantic period would lard their texts with foreign cultural elements and even foreign words. Postmodern translators go their romantic predecessors one further by attracting attention to themselves, literally and figuratively – literally, in that they call for an end to their invisibility by insisting that their names appear alongside those of the authors, and figuratively, in that they deliberately defamiliarize the target language so as to remind their readers they are reading a translation. They wish to convey as much as possible of the “remainder”2 of the source language, the aspects that make it and its culture unique. Another postmodern innovation lies in the implicit political implications of the approach.3 A “smooth” translation lulls readers into the false security that “they” of the source culture resemble “us,” or, more insidious, that “we” of the target culture are the measure of all things. The result fosters a latent but powerful ethnocentricity. A

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consciously defamiliarized translation, however, alerts readers to the diversity – and therefore to the need for diversity – among cultures. The technical term for the former approach has come to be “domestication,” the term for the latter approach, “foreignization.” In other contexts, the use of the word “foreign” has recently grown all but politically incorrect, the tendency now being to substitute “international” for “foreign,” as in “international students,” “international literature,” and the like. But in the context of postmodern translation theory, “foreignization” has retained a positive connotation, and many theoreticians defend it tooth and nail. Practitioners, however, instinctively avoid relying for their sentence-by-sentence choices exclusively on one or another end of the spectrum – a spectrum, incidentally, that bears certain resemblances to the “free versus literal” spectrum translators have been working with for centuries. I maintain that the text itself can indicate to translators whether domestication or foreignization is in order when cultural references in the source language lack counterparts in the target language. As an illustration, I refer to passages from my translations of two contemporary German novels, Die Heimkehr (2006) / Homecoming (2008) by Bernhard Schlink and Alle Tage (2004) / Day In Day Out (2007) by Terézia Mora. I have expressly chosen works from recent German fiction because of the close paths that German and American culture have taken in the aftermath of World War II. The Americanization of the economy that buttressed the much-touted Wirtschaftswunder, the economic recovery that began with the Marshall Plan, necessarily entailed a certain Americanization of culture, which has only increased with the ubiquity of Anglo-American influence attendant on decades of globalization. Cultural difference would seem to be a minor issue for the Anglo-American translator of contemporary German fiction. Yet such is not case. My first examples come from Bernhard Schlink’s The Homecoming, a roman-à-clef that turns the Belgian literary critic Paul de Man into a Swiss legal philosopher, Peter Debauer (Bauer is the German word for “peasant”).4 Early in the novel, the narrator, who later learns he is Debauer’s son, approvingly quotes the Latin adage popularized by Kant to characterize the anti-utilitarian bent of his moral philosophy: Fiat iustitia, pereat mundus (Justice be done, even though the world perish). The novel’s author, apparently feeling that his German audience was up to coping with the admittedly brief and straightforward Latin, left it as is. I was a bit less sanguine about the current

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Anglo-American readership’s capabilities, and since the text is essential to the novel’s ultimate message – the narrator comes to feel the error of its assertion on his own skin, so to speak – I felt the need to render it into English. Leaving it in Latin would have constituted foreignization, while translating it and omitting the original would have constituted a degree of domestication I was unwilling to embrace. Lest we forget, foreignization occurs in originals as well as in translations. In the seriocomic El último lector by the contemporary Mexican novelist David Toscana (available as The Last Reader in a translation by Asa Zatz), the small-town librarian protagonist stamps withdrawn on novels with passages like “a splendid bottle of Château Certan-Marzelle ’98 to go with the Perigourdin salad, cocotte de porc à l’ananas, a Coulommiers brie, and crêpes aux moules prepared with an exquisite vin de paille” and relegates them to a storeroom to be devoured by insects. “With those foreign names,” he explains, “it’s all the same to me whether they are talking about food or car parts.”5 Reviewers sometimes react like Toscana’s librarian. One took me to task for leaving the word Gauleiter in German, claiming that it would baffle the English-speaking readership. The word is a Nazi neologism for the party leader of a Gau (“district,” a term the party ideologues revived from earlier times to stress the regime’s Germanic purity), and it occurs so widely in English-language accounts of the period that even medium-format English dictionaries include it; detailed definitions are available from any number of search engines. I felt – and, pace the reviewer, still feel – that a bland translation such as “district leader” would dilute the chilling impact of the German. And if I rejected the alternative of a translator’s footnote, it is because footnotes, unless intentionally inserted by the author (in which case they constitute an integral part of the text), distract the reader from the narrative flow. Moreover, preserving the original and translating it into English as I did with the Latin quotation was out of the question in this instance because the word occurs in direct speech (“You knew Gauleiter Hanke”). The next sentence in that speech exemplifies another common domestication-versus-foreignization choice facing the translator: how to deal with the source culture’s history. Here I felt the need to domesticate. Had I translated the German “die Verteidigung gegen die Russen, die Eroberung und die Vertreibung” literally, as “you were there for the defence against the Russians, the victory, and the

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expulsion,” the meaning behind the elliptical “expulsion” would have escaped much of my audience. I therefore inserted a few words of clarification (“you were there when the Russians surrounded the city; you were there for the allied victory, the expulsion of the German population”), taking care to formulate it in terms that Germans might conceivably use in conversation with one another. Literary references to the source culture represent a related challenge for the translator, related because they assume knowledge taken for granted by the writer. Any works or authors that a serious writer cites will have a metaphoric resonance for the source culture, whereas for the target culture they may be just so many disembodied titles or names.6 In Homecoming, nationality plays an integral role, and although I could not hope to reproduce the resonance inherent in the authors referred to in the following passage, I felt justified in domesticating it to the extent of inserting the word “Swiss” between “classic” and “writer”: “There was a better novel or a better novella on the subject by Conrad Ferdinand Meyer or Gottfried Keller or another classic Swiss writer (“Über seinen Gegenstand gebe es einen besseren Roman, eine bessere Novelle von Conrad Ferdinand Meyer oder Gottfried Keller oder welchem Klassiker auch immer”). A single inconspiuous word has brought source and target audience closer. Meyer and Keller come up again about fifteen pages later, together with a third, Gotthelf (“Grandmother’s Gotthelf, Keller, and Meyer”), but there I simply leave them, having already defined them sufficiently. When a literary or musical work figures in the source text, domestication consists of finding a counterpart word in the target culture. Faced with a reference to the US Air Force song “Off We Go into the Wild Blue Yonder” in David Mamet’s play Sexual Perversity in Chicago, the Italian translator chose to replace it with “Nel blu dipinto di blu,” a hit tune of the late 1950s, presumably because the titles shared the word “blue.” Unfortunately, the context in which the title comes up makes it clear that the sentimental Italian song (its alternate title, “Volare,” or “To Fly,” another reason why the translator may have chosen it) is inimical in spirit to the rousing war song. Here foreignization would have worked better: the actor could have sung a jaunty rendition of the title in English (the music is available online), and even if the audience failed to understand it or its provenance, the spirit would come across. My final example from Homecoming addresses the issue of local colour. An important element in most novels, it may make itself felt in

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words known even to the target audience. Few translators would feel compelled to translate the “foreign” word in “sitting in the métro” (though I believe its foreignness deserves to be given its due by retaining the acute accent). But what about “sitting in the U-bahn”? To keep the German – and my audience – I changed a single word: “people” (Menschen) to “passengers,” which makes it clear that the U-bahn is a form of public transport. The German text “als ich in der U-Bahn saß und die Menschen auf dem Heimweg sah” thus reads in English, “when, sitting in the U-bahn, I watched the passengers on their way home.” An additional advantage to leaving the word in German is that it saves the translator from being forced to decide between the British “tube” or “underground” (the U in U-bahn stands for “Untergrund) and the North American “subway.” Since each of the variants is heavily marked for its own culture, the reader will be subconsciously jerked out of the German context by either one. “U-bahn,” of course, only reinforces the German context. Since Terézia Mora’s Day In Day Out depicts a multicultural society, and since its protagonist works as an interpreter, it is no surprise that foreign words and phrases crop up now and then. One example is “Irgendwo, als sängen Sirenen: In heaven everything is fine. In heaven everything is fine. In heaven ...” This I translated as: “Somewhere sirens seemed to be singing: Au ciel tout est bien. In heaven everything is fine. Im Himmel ...” Given the place of English in a globalized world, the language that most frequently makes its way into contemporary novels is English. Translators working into languages other than English have an easy job of it: they simply leave the English as is. However, translators working into English must find ways to indicate that the author of the source text is using a foreign language in a given passage: using a foreign language is as much a stylistic device as using, say, a metaphor. Starting with the obvious “‘Terrific,’ he said in English,” there are myriad possibilities. I invite my colleagues who have had to grapple with the problem to set forth their various solutions in articles analogous to this one. Meanwhile, I have adduced just one: substituting another or languages for English or in juxtaposition to English. Seeing foreign words or expressions will, if nothing else, alert the reader to the fact that the narrator or character knows more than one language and is displaying it at that point in the text. An interesting case straddles the cultural and the linguistic. German – like, say, French – uses separate words to express “to live”

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in the sense of “to reside” – which is wohnen in German, habiter in French – and “to live” in the sense of “to be alive,” which is leben and vivre. English – like, say, Spanish, does not: thus, “We live in Venezuela / Vivimos en Venezuela” and “We live in peace / Vivimos en paz.” Translating the sentence “Omar ist so etwas wie Wohnen egal” as “Living left Omar cold,” would have seriously distorted Omar’s character: he is bubbling over with life. As a result, I took a bit of licence and said: “Living somewhere – as opposed to living life – left Omar cold.” A similar kind of licence is in order if the translator wishes to help the target audience out of a puzzling situation. “‘Where’s the key?’ asked Janda. Some people wanted to leave.” (“Wo ist der Schlüssel?, fragte Janda. Es wollen welche gehen.”) Readers of the translation would be rightly nonplussed: why does someone at a party need a key to leave it? Unless those readers have lived in Europe, they are unlikely to know that the main door to an apartment building is locked at night for security reasons. If guests want to go home, their host must accompany them to the entrance and unlock the door. The problem is solved by expanding the second sentence to read: “Some people wanted to leave, and the main entrance would be locked by then.” The added but unobtrusive words help the target audience to make sense of an otherwise bewildering situation. When supplementing the text to clarify differences in everyday life as here, or to insert bits of historical and literary information as in “the expulsion of the German population,” or “Swiss writers,” translators can perform a small experiment to ensure that their modified text does not deform the original. If they translate the modified text and insert it into the original, it must ring true: the explanation must not sound like an explanation of a phenomenon that members of the source culture take for granted. Thus, “the main entrance would be locked by then” is acceptable, while “the main entrance in German apartment houses is locked at night” is not. From my practice of translation over the years, some of which I have distilled into the examples given here, I conclude that translators who decide a priori that either domestication or foreignization is the valid approach do themselves a disservice. Dogmatic domestication can lead to a bland outcome, one that may stem from a desire for a text “that does not read like a translation” but fails to do justice to the peculiarities, the vagaries of the original. In the worst case it can provide translators with an excuse to take an easy way out,

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that of retelling the original, circumlocution. One of the joys of translation, after all, is to induce the target language to stretch, to do things its own writers have not yet required of it. But dogmatic foreignization can lead to texts so cantankerous they put the reader off.7 In the worst case, it can provide translators with an excuse to take another easy way out: that of dictionary-like servitude to the original. Again, one of the joys of translation is to enrich the target language, not to enchain it to another. In the end there is no rule for when to foreignize or not. There is only a sensitive eye and ear ready to judge each case on its own merits.

C o da To help develop that eye and ear, I recommend that translators occasionally put themselves in the shoes of their counterparts who translate from English. What sort of references do these Spanish, Italian, German, or Chinese translators of the Anglo-American cultural landscape need to recognize and convey? Let me illustrate what I have in mind with a simple example, the title of the American movie All the President’s Men. The title has three clear intertexts: first, the bestseller from which the movie was adapted, also entitled All the President’s Men, a chronicle of the Watergate scandal by the investigative journalists Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward; second, Robert Penn Warren’s novel All the King’s Men, a roman-à-clef depicting the rise of Louisiana governor Huey Long; and third, the ur-source, the nursery rhyme “Humpty Dumpty”: “All the king’s horses and all the king’s men / Couldn’t put Humpty together again.” Two of the translators give a straight word-for-word rendering: “Todos los hombres del president,” and “Tutti gli uomini del presidente,” while one omits the “all”: “Les Hommes du président.” The latter indirectly indicates knowledge of the intertextuality involved, because neither the film nor the book deals with all the president’s men; the “all” figuring in the original title functions merely to evoke the earlier texts. The German title, Die Unbestechlichen (The Incorruptibles, or, literally, those who refuse to take bribes), ignores the intertextuality issue completely, opting instead for what the translator (or the sales representatives) calculated would pull in an audience. In so doing, however, it shifts the emphasis from the “bad guys” (the president’s corrupt advisers) to the “good guys” (Bernstein

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and Woodward), with the result that the audience comes to the film with skewed expectations. To my mind, the Chinese title – (The president’s pack, or The president’s band) is the most successful. Inevitably the intertextual references to Warren and the nursery rhyme fall by the wayside, but the fact that the meaning comes through intact leads me to believe the translator was aware of at least one or the other.

No t e s 1 In a brilliant reinterpretation of the Tower of Babel text in Genesis, the Belgian philosopher François Ost argues that the diversification of language into languages was a gift from God rather than a curse: if everyone on earth spoke the same language, the possibility for iconoclasm, for divergent opinions, would decrease, and the danger of total thought control would correspondingly rise (Traduire, 23–66). 2 Venuti, The Scandals of Translation, 10. 3 Venuti, The Translator‘s Invisibility. 4 De Man taught for many years at Yale, where he expounded an approach to literature that privileged rhetoric in ways resonating with Derrida’s doctrine of deconstruction, according to which meaning is invariably unstable. When de Man’s frequent contributions to the Belgian collaborationist press came to light after his death, some were moved to consider his use of deconstruction, with its sceptic attitude toward truth, as a strategy to whitewash his past. Peter Debauer’s biography is more sinister: he writes propaganda for the Nazis throughout the war, and later, as a professor of law at Columbia, he inculcates his students with the belief that laws are mere linguistic constructs with no meaning. Schlink, who divides his time between Berlin and New York teaching law, clearly wants his readers to perceive the dangers of such a precept. 5 Toscana, The Last Reader, 13. 6 For an insight into the interplay between translation and the part of the remainder represented by cultural tradition, see Venuti, “Translation, Intertextuality, Interpretation.” Venuti argues that translation involves recontextualization not only of the source text but of the target text as well: once the target text – that is, the translation – makes its way into the world, it becomes part of the target culture and begins to influence it. The essay thus furthers Venuti’s ongoing campaign to encourage the reading of translations as independent texts. It also reinforces his preference for

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foreignization by proposing a technique of “abusive fidelity” for difficult genres like poetry and philosophy. 7 That said, it behooves me to point out what recent studies of the King James Bible published in commemoration of its four-hundredth anniversary have amply documented, namely, that this most influential translation into our language of all time is in the Old Testament section as foreignizing as translations come, imposing myriad elements of Hebrew syntax and myriad literal renderings of Hebrew expressions onto English. See, notably and passim, Robert Alter, Pen of Iron: American Prose and the King James Bible (Princeton University Press 2010) and Harold Bloom, The Shadow of a Great Rock: A Literary Appreciation of the King James Bible (Yale University Press 2011).

B i b l i ogr ap h y Heim, Michael Henry. “Function as an Element in Conveying Cultural Difference in Literary Translation.” Yearbook of Comparative and General Literature 54 (2008): 74–82. Mora, Terézia. Day In Day Out. Translated by Michael Henry Heim. New York: Ecco/Harper Perennial 2007. Ost, François. Traduire: Défense et illustration du multilinguisme. Paris: Fayard 2009. Schlink, Bernhard. Homecoming. Translated by Michael Henry Heim. New York: Ecco/HarperCollins 2008. Toscana, David. The Last Reader. Translated by Asa Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press 2009. Venuti, Lawrence. The Translator’s Invisibility. London/New York: Routledge 1995. – The Scandals of Translation. London/New York: Routledge 1997. – “Translation, Intertextuality, Interpretation.” Romance Studies 27, no. 3 (July 2009): 157–73.

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A Handful of Metaphors: What I Do When I Do Literary Translation Lo r i Sa in t- Marti n What does it mean to translate a work of fiction? For me, as for all translators, it means a series of encounters with the other – the other language, words, culture, voice – that ultimately reveals the otherness of your “own” language and even your “own” self. But in my case, since I always translate (except, very recently, from Spanish, which I am doing alone) with Paul Gagné, I am directly confronted, within my work space and the space of the work being translated, with sameas-other: his knowledge and mine, his words and mine. He is an intimate other who accompanies me (and I him) all along the way. Two names, one signature; two translators, one voice. I will return at length to this question, the heart of the heart of the matter for me. That said, what happens when I, alone, sit down at my table to translate? My temperament, training, and experience – as a professor of literature, a reader and writer of fiction – are such that I have only metaphors to offer. At the outset, I emphasize that translating is the closest, most loving reading there is. You see the beauty; you see the flaws, which are sometimes inseparable from the beauty. You see that the bridge that was made of oak on page 117 is made of maple on page 242 and the author wants to hire you then and there as an editor for the next book because none of the eighty-seven people who read this one before publication saw the mistake. Unlike when you read for pleasure or even to analyze a work of fiction, you can’t skip an unfamiliar word, a dull description, or a vague or obscure passage (even the best novels have a few). Every sentence, every word requires all your attention; you have to be everywhere at once and sequentially as

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well; everything is important, essential. Then reading becomes interpretation, rewriting, performing. And now we shift to metaphor. Metaphor number one, and this one is about movement: translation is music. Every text has its music, its rhythm, its tonality. Sometimes the song is the same from cover to cover; sometimes the author can sound many notes, from opera to melodramatic silent film music to jazz. You make it sound, make it sing. Or not sing, as the case may be. The author may adopt a deliberately flat voice, with all the depth turned inside – think of Margaret Atwood’s poetry. The music of a novel can be a note sounded again and again, a single human voice with all its irony or faith, a young girl playing a harmonica, the pounding of someone’s heart, a jazz band, a symphony orchestra, a screaming train whistle, or, in the case of Ann-Marie MacDonald’s Fall on Your Knees, all of the above and more. Metaphor number two, and this one is about truth: translation is finding the voice. This image speaks to me for two main reasons: because I write fiction myself, which means “saying” things you yourself would not say, and because I have worked as a simultaneous interpreter, which means passing other speakers’ words on through your voice, your body leaning into the microphone, their words in yours, your words in theirs. In any case, in fiction or non-fiction, firstperson or third-person narrative, I rely on the truth of the voice. When translating or revising, I often speak a sentence or even a passage aloud in the original, and then in our version. Often I find myself closing my eyes so I can hear better. To link this to the musical metaphor, we are playing the same song on a different instrument. Is it the same or different? Both, of course. Metaphor number three, and this one is about passion: translation is what in French is called a corps à corps. Literally “body to body,” this expression means both “hand-to-hand combat” (notice the French expression is more intimate) but also close and tender physical contact, lying down alongside someone, for example. I have seen metaphors likening translation to appropriation, almost to sexual possession. I am not comfortable with these images, not because they suggest intimacy but because they shut it out, preferring conquest to closeness. Translating someone is a way of being close, of following every line and curve of their language, breathing when they breathe, turning when they turn, lying your words next to theirs. The French word épouser, or the English word “embrace” (to follow, adhere to, join, and caress), comes to mind.

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Metaphor number four, and this is about intimacy: translation is a meeting with the other. This is both metaphor and reality, concrete and abstract: everything is here. This is the idea I will delve into most deeply, because it sheds light on all the others involved in translation. Of course, it isn’t necessary to work with another translator, as I do, to experience otherness on multiple levels. Otherness is everywhere; perhaps there is no such thing as sameness. When our son was learning to talk, I remember teaching him: this is your hand. And this? Oh, that’s your other hand. My hand, my other hand. My other hand, my hand. It took him a long time to realize that if you start with the right hand, the “other hand” is the left, and vice versa. Otherness is a shifting property, and nothing makes that clearer than translation. First of all, there is the other text, the other words. They are a curtain, but also a door. Behind them, the other writer, the creator of the story, the voices, the characters. And you have to become that other, slip into that other’s way of looking at the world and then speaking about it. I would again use the French word épouser here: to follow, to mould oneself to, but also to wed. You marry that other’s text, you slide into it, you make it yours. It’s ventriloquy as well: look at me swearing, or waxing lyrical, things I would never do without that other. But the other is also language. The other language, perhaps equally familiar – I cannot distinguish between French and English as my “real” or closest language,” though one of them was my “first” language – but with a mind of its own, ways in which it will bend and others in which it will not, at least not without violence. Meeting the other text means confronting everything you know and do not know about “your” language and the “other” language. Both are yours, neither is yours. Which one is really the other anyway? Then there is the otherness of your own language as it comes up against the so-called original, and becomes other to you. Other, because there are things it won’t or can’t do, because you can or cannot find the words you are looking for. You see it as if from a distance; an aerial photo comes to mind. Its wealth, its pithiness or lack of it, its shortcomings and the peculiar ways it sings are all clearer to you than ever before. If you speak more than one language well, you are more than one person. As you translate, those other parts of you and of your languages are thrown into relief. You are another as you write, no longer yourself; the language changes, and something about you too

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slowly shifts shape. And this changing, this shifting, is the end point of the journey, if there is an end (but really there is no end): these multiple others, changing them, changing you. Finally, for some authors who know the language and are open to the process, reading the translation changes them too, and leads them to change wordings and even passages in their novel, and so the cycle continues. Reading, writing, corps à corps, music: no wonder I feel the passion that I do. One fascinating issue with translation is the sheer variety of words in one’s own and the “other” language. The novel is by far the world’s most voracious and variegated form; it absorbs slang, scientific language, literature, myth, biblical echoes, not to mention the vocabularies of various fields and professions. In the fiction we have translated, we have covered iron-ore mining, boats and the sea, glacier formation, the opera, psychoanalysis, medicine, the plague, Custer’s last stand, civil war, classical antiquity, and crow colonies, to name a few. It also happens that, among a slew of technical terms, the author will slip in an invented expression. Joan Clark talks about “latitudes of melt” – that is, the latitudes of the coast of Newfoundland, where the novel is set, where icebergs begin to melt (and where the Titanic sank). We spent hours looking for the term, only to find out that she had made it up – but as she says, “it should exist,” and therefore it now does. That is the privilege of the novelist. So we made up a term too – that is the duty of the translator. As far as lexicology is concerned, the hardest things are geographical realities and vegetation. When the terrain is very different, we simply borrow the word: steppes, fjords, and so on. But plants that are indigenous to one area and no other are a nightmare. In our first translation, Daphne Marlatt’s Ana Historic, there are many references to plants that grow only on Canada’s West Coast, or in any case nowhere where they have been named in French. This is appropriate in a sense, since one of the themes of that novel is naming, bringing things into existence through the written word – but each time, you need a practical solution. Sometimes, after all your research, you have to decide between sound and sense: the technical name can be ugly, a popular name more evocative, even if it refers to a slightly different plant. And now we are back to music again. Another example of “otherness” is taking on another voice. So far, we have “spoken” as Sigmund Freud, Sherlock Holmes’s Dr Watson, a neurotic Victorian girl, a cynical Serbian psychiatrist, a female

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Rabelaisian explorer of the New World, Victor Frankenstein, a rebellious Mennonite teenager and her manic-depressive father, a black activist and writer, an old Anglo-Montrealer, and a young upperclass killer, among many others. Following the voice into the wilderness is one of the most exciting things about literary translation. Yet another kind of otherness is another language within “your” language, the language of the original. The French in War and Peace comes to mind; so does the English in French Quebec novels, with its very different connotations of economical and cultural colonization, alienation, and so on. In Fall on Your Knees, Ann-Marie MacDonald uses Lebanese phrases throughout. As a translator, you simply transcribe them and rely on the same “strangeness” coming to bear. But what if the “other” language used in the novel you are translating is the language you are translating into? In David Homel’s The Talking Cure (L’analyste), one of the characters, a Gypsy musician from Serbia, uses French words, and his friends chide him not to think he is somebody just because he lived in Paris for a year or two. The usual solution here would be to add italics and a footnote, “en français dans le texte.” But then what about the other musicians’ comments, which no longer make sense? In this case, David Homel, who is also a distinguished translator, told us he hates footnotes, and we decided to use a more pretentious tone for Mister I-Lived-in-Paris so that his voice stands out from those of his friends; they then say that just because he is more educated than they are doesn’t mean he’s better. In this case, cooperation with the author was essential. Any Quebec translator could go on for days about the differences between Français-de-France and Quebec French, another form of “otherness.” Abstract words – beauty, justice – are always the same, but concrete ones often different. Think of boot versus trunk, fall versus autumn, cardigan versus sweater and so on within English. If you are translating for both markets at once, the “universal,” i.e., Parisian, word usually wins out. Of course Quebec readers sometimes get annoyed to read “sur le parking” instead of “dans le stationnement.” I have seen a three-storey house translated as a three-room apartment, and Mac’s Milk (a convenience store) as la crèmerie. There are certainly no “cream shops” in Alice Munro’s small-town southern Ontario. So the “other” culture often ends up being absorbed into the translating culture, which is certainly an argument for translating North American novels in North America, where we know the references and the terrain. In this case, the question goes far beyond

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terminology and becomes ideological, economic, and political (colonialism is not yet dead). A final metaphor, and this one is about adrenalin: translation is a tightrope dance. You are high above the ground, and there is no net. No one has ever come this way before. You know nothing of what lies ahead, except that there is every chance you will fall. You are standing on this tightrope, swaying slightly, but always pushing on. Is that sure-footed figure far ahead the author? Or just a mental projection of where you want to be? The ground is there, of course: the anchor, the footing you need, is the original. You reread it, respeak it, return constantly to it. And yet you cannot cling to it; you cannot look only down. The original is the ground, yes, but it is not a safety net; it will not catch you if you fall, it is indifferent to your failure. You must also be far above it, on that tightrope, walking on a path uncharted in your language, looking backwards and forwards at once, hovering. But you cannot creep along in little cautious steps, no matter how thin the wire, how high. You must dance: move, invent, sway in the breeze you have just created. Caution is not rewarded here; daring is all. Dancing is all. One foot on the wire, one foot in the air, you float or fall. More often, I think, you float. Floating, in any case, is what literary translation is all about.

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Edouard Roditi: A Polyglot in the Twentieth Century Sh erry S i mon

Part of a translator’s task is to be a literary talent scout. Some have been brilliant at it – Baudelaire made the unknown Edgar Allan Poe a celebrity in France; Saul Bellow’s English version of an Isaac Bashevis Singer story kick-started Singer’s American career. Benjamin Crémieux, by introducing the Italian novelist Italo Svevo to France, created a wave of enthusiasm for the writer at home in his own country. Max Brod is less known today as the hugely popular novelist he was than as the “discoverer” of his friend Franz Kafka, and of two other giants of twentieth-century Czechoslovakia, the composer Leoš Janácˇek, whose opera Jenu˚fa he translated into German, and Jaroslav Hašek, whose drama The Good Soldier Schweik he also translated. Because Brod was a well-known literary figure and because the German language brought Czech works to general European attention, his translations put Czech authors on the map of international modernism. It seems insufficient to talk merely of mediation – Brod’s translations created connections among the active cultural forces of the times. To look back over these careers is to realize how influential translators can be. Translators are not only mirrors for their times; they are actors in literary history. Yet the monolingual national accounts of the literary past are indifferent to this kind of literary role. And so a figure who had talents similar to Brod’s is today quite forgotten. Edouard Roditi (1910–1992) was a polyglot poet, essayist, art critic, and translator who created links across continents and languages. He published some thirty books – Dialogues on Art (1960) is his best known – and countless reviews, essays, and translations. His contributions to little

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magazines over a span of some six decades include the first translations of writers who later became well known. Among his authors are Fernando Pessoa, C.P. Cavafy, Saint-John Perse, André Breton, Yashir Kemal, Paul Celan, W.H. Auden, Stephen Spender, René Char, LéonPaul Fargues, Alain Bosquet, Raymond Roussel, and Alfred Jarry. Roditi was widely admired during his lifetime, but few could appreciate the range of his activities. His biography, if it is written one day, will draw a rich portrait of twentieth-century literary life, a chronicle of the connections and networks, the ongoing discoveries and judgments, that enlarge the world of letters.1 Roditi’s access to multiple literary scenes was to some extent a product of circumstance but also the result of a relentless strain of curiosity. In Paris in the late 1920s, a very young Roditi published his first poems and fell in with avantgarde circles that included the expatriates Joyce and Eliot and the French Surrealists. During World War II, when he found himself in New York with André Breton on the French desk of the Voice of America, he produced the first English translation of Breton’s poems, Young Cherry Trees Secured against Hares (1946). Stationed in Berlin from 1947 to 1950 as part of the Allied forces after the war, Roditi, along with Alain Bosquet and Alexander Koval, set up Das Lot (The Plumbline), a journal translating major American writers and poets into German. Travels as an interpreter for various United Nations agencies took him to Turkey in the 1960s, where he was able to delve into his own rich Sephardic heritage to write the ingenious and funny stories that became The Delights of Turkey (at least one of the stories first appeared in Playboy). In collaboration with his cousin Thilda Serrano, he published the immensely successful Memet My Hawk (1961), a translation of a novel by Yashir Kemal, and The Wandering Fool, poems by the medieval Sufi poet Yunus Emre (1985).2 In the course of his wanderings, Roditi met and befriended many of the eminent writers of his time. He had an unerring sense of the literary scene and a talent for making connections. His most successful work combines his knowledge of languages with his scholar’s insights into the ways that stories, styles, and ideas migrate across communities. He was a scout with a never-ending mission: to reveal the multiplicity of the world.

P o ly g l ot “Tall, suave, and polyglot” is how Paul Bowles recalled Roditi when they met in London in 1932.3 “Polyglot” has an arcane ring to it today,

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and though Roditi died a mere two decades ago, he seems like the product of an earlier era. He had the aura of an Ottoman dragoman, a learned translator who was also a diplomat. He began his career when he joined American military intelligence during World War II and became part of the team of simultaneous interpreters at Nuremberg. But as could happen to the Ottoman dragoman, Roditi was suspected of disloyalty (in his case, because he was gay) and demoted without warning. In 1954 he was suddenly dismissed as a security risk and in 1958 was expelled from France. These experiences (the expulsion order was only rescinded in 1960) confirmed his sense of marginality to the state and reinforced his in-between identity as a translator. It made him sensitive to injustice and a critic of the French government – especially in its persecution of Algerians in the 1960s. Subsequently living between Europe and the United States, and travelling widely around the world, he was the perfect embodiment of the homme de lettres whose horizon was not bounded by any single national literature. In contrast to famous polyglots like Roman Jakobson or Richard Burton, who could rack up impressive numbers, Roditi’s accomplishments were relatively modest: he wrote in French and English, spoke some seven languages fluently (English and French from his parents, Spanish and Ladino from his grandmother, German from a stay in Germany early in the 1930s, Italian, and Portuguese), and translated from more than ten. But he was less interested in language as such than in the literary sensibility and tradition that he translated. His early experiences with Surrealism in Paris had made him sensitive to the difficulties of transferring what seemed like an alien style into English-language literature. Could room be made for Surrealism in the English language? Was Surrealism a kind of irrational, unstructured assemblage of words that would simply not “take” in English? Roditi struggled with this question, both as a translator and as a poet. He is least successful as a poet when he tries to import Surrealist modes of thinking into English. His use of other forms of poetry are much more convincing (for instance, in Thrice Chosen when he looks back to the poet Jehudah Abravanel), but he is at his best as an analyst of literary traditions, as someone who has an intimate understanding of the territory – from all sides.

In t e r n at ional Roditi came by his internationalism naturally. Born in 1910 into a wealthy family in Paris, his ancestry included Sephardic Jews of mixed

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Greek, Spanish, and Italian origin on his father’s side and Catholic and Jewish Ashkenazi connections on his mother’s side. Both parents were American citizens, though they lived in France. Roditi describes a childhood in a milieu of Jewish quasi-nobility made up of luxury cars, art collecting, and summer excursions to the neighbouring homes of wealthy Jewish families. One of his finest pieces of writing (“Camondo’s Way,” published in Grand Street in 1987) recalls childhood holidays spent at his family’s summer home outside of Paris, about halfway between the Rothchilds and the Camondos (also known as “the Rothchilds of the East”). This universe of Jewish wealth and collecting has become more familiar through the recent publication of Edmund de Waal’s The Hare with Amber Eyes, a memoir of the fortunes of yet another family of Jewish nobility, the Ephrussis. There are evocative connections among these families (the Ephrussis and Camondos both had elegant mansions on the rue de Monceau), in particular their common passion for art collecting. Roditi’s father was good friends with Nissim de Camondo, the handsome son of Moise de Camondo, and, before his death in World War I, an acquaintance of Proust. Another of Roditi’s father’s friends was René Gimpel, considered to be, along with Charles Ephrussi, one of the models for Proust’s Swann. Roditi writes his essay “Camondo’s Way” not only to document a childhood of conspicuous wealth now disappeared, not only to reconstruct the rich history of the Camondo family in Constantinople, but to recall a moment in the history of French Judaism that came to an end at Auschwitz – the Camondo family perished there, putting an end to the family line. Roditi experienced anti-Semitism in Germany in the 1930s and began then to explore a Jewish heritage of which he had been ignorant. The fine poems of Thrice Chosen are the record of this interest, but he continued throughout his life to study the intellectual sources of Judaism and in particular to promote Sephardic literature and culture. Roditi’s internationalism was stimulated by the spirit of postwar Europe. He was part of the new United Nations from its beginnings at the San Francisco conference of 1945 and worked as an interpreter in many of the UN agencies in the following years. Christine Brooke-Rose’s multilingual novel, Between, set in Europe of the 1960s, gives some sense of this opening of boundaries. The novel’s heroine is a German-French interpreter, flying around the world as a member of the new glamorous profession of conference interpreter. Flowing from English to French, to German, Italian, or Romanian,

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the novel calls up an existence of hotel rooms distinguishable only by the labels on water bottles and the kinds of “wishes” that the waitresses might be able to satisfy. The airplane, the hotel room, and the interpreter’s booth fuse into one liquid space: “Mesdames messieurs. Air France vous souhaite la bienvenue à bord de cet énorme problem devant lequel cependant le langage flows into the ear and comes out into the mouthpiece over waves and on into the ears of the multitudes or so in simultaneous German.”4 Roditi was very much part of this world, as a freelance multilingual simultaneous interpreter for Unesco, the European Common Market, and other international agencies. The voluminous correspondence on literary matters that Roditi kept up is now available as part of his collected papers in Special Collections at UCLA. The many systematically typed carbon copies of his articles and translations are also included, all corrected by hand before submission. Sifting through these acres of paper, one comes up with the image of a gentle and respectful correspondent, a gracious mentor, a careful analyst, occasionally frustrated by lack of recognition and occasionally indulging in scholarly one-upmanship. Above all, however, one encounters the daily productions of an eclectic mind, whose network of correspondents can be visualized as a lost literary map of Europe and North America. Roditi was also a memoirist. He wrote detailed accounts of his meetings with literary figures, even ones he was too young to have recognized as famous (Joseph Conrad), ones with whom he had very fleeing encounters (a one-night stand with Federico Garcia Lorca), ones he admits he found boring (Walter Benjamin), and ones he found unpleasant (Paul Celan whom he knew well but found self-centred). With a great number of other figures – Joyce, Dylan Thomas, Eliot, Breton, Paul Bowles, Paul Goodman – he had more sustained and long-lasting interactions. In his daily life, as in his literary transactions, he was gifted at making – and maintaining – connections.

W r it in g at t h e In tersecti on: P e s s oa , S v e vo, C e lan, Emre When Roditi was only seventeen, he translated Saint-John Perse’s poem Anabase into English (during an illness), only to discover that T.S. Eliot had already acquired the rights. He was put into contact with Eliot and shared his translation with the older poet; this led

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to  a friendship between the two. He recalled, “Eliot continued to encourage me to undertake translations, whether into English or into French, of difficult poets. I remember, in particular, an occasion when Eliot remarked that translating poetry can be, for a poet, like practicing five-finger exercises for a pianist, and it has long been my experience, as a translator from some ten languages into English, French, and very occasionally German, that this kind of task can enrich vocabulary and limber up syntax.”5 Roditi continued to consider translation, in part, as a poetic exercise. One of the most consequential of these exercises was his involvement with the poetry of Fernando Pessoa. Roditi was the first to introduce the Portuguese writer to readers in the United States: “Pessoa was well-served in the 1950s with Roditi’s thoughtful, knowledgeable and penetrating work on his behalf.”6 In 1955 Roditi published a pithy article on Pessoa in Poetry and included translations of several of his poems. Later, with Paul Celan, he would translate some of these same poems into German. It is not surprising that Roditi was attracted to Pessoa’s work. Here was a poet who wrote in two languages (English and Portuguese) and who within Portuguese spoke in the voice of five heteronyms. Roditi also wrote poetry in two languages and wrote under numerous pseudonyms (among them Nissim Bernard, Jacqueline Rosiers, Margot D’Aurs, Charlotte Fernand, Edouard Andreas, Athanese Besmertny, Terence Riordan), perhaps under the influence of Pessoa. For Roditi, one challenge of translating Pessoa was in trying to capture the voices of the heteronyms in distinctively different styles. Pessoa’s distanced and ironic voice would have appealed to Roditi, whose sensibility was similar. What he writes about Pessoa might have applied to himself: “Denied any Wordsworthian spontaneity of expression because always forced to choose whether to express himself in English or Portuguese, Pessoa thus made a virtue of the selfalienation imposed upon him by his having to hesitate between either of two languages that remained, through this very choice, both equally familiar and foreign to him … All poetry, in Pessoa’s eyes, was indeed simulation.”7 In a longer article in the Literary Review in 1963, Roditi analyzed Pessoa’s English poems. He noted Pessoa’s predilection for the theme of the mask, and explained the learned diction of his English poems as a way of expressing his metaphysical considerations and erotic fantasies in a highly personal idiom: “He was indeed one of the

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hermits of our language, a kind of Trappist of English poetry who wrote a language that he often read or imagined but rarely spoke or heard … he expressed as an English poet a personality as distinct as that of any of his Portuguese heteronimos.”8 Suggesting that, had Pessoa written more regularly in French, he would have achieved a considerable reputation, Roditi allowed himself a personal note: “A kind of post-dated Levantine, I can only claim to feel great sympathy for all poets who as I have tried to remain linguistically as versatile as Dante or Milton.”9 Roditi’s translations of Pessoa stand up well today. They are simple yet artful. His translation of the well-known “O guardador de rebanhos” (“Herdsman of a Flock”), a poem subsequently translated by many hands, remains a readable, sober version. Similarly, he translates “Autopsychography” with economy and elegance, avoiding the slanginess introduced in some more recent translations. In his translation of “Odes” by heteronym Ricardo Reis, he changes word order, enhancing the lyricism and creating a voice more exalted, more florid. These choices are clearly a result of his wish to express the distinctive features of the heteronyms’ various voices. As Rosas amo dos jardins de Adônis, Essas volucres amo, Lídia, rosas, Que em o dia em que nascem, Em esse dia morrem. A luz para elas é eterna, porque Nascem nascido já o sol, e acabam Antes que Apolo deixe O seu curso visível. Assim façamos nossa vida um dia, Inscientes, Lídia, voluntariamente Que há noite antes e após O pouco que duramos. Of the gardens of Adonis, Lydia, I love Most of all those fugitive roses That on the day they are born, That very day, must also die. Eternal, for them, the light of day: They’re born when the sun is already high And die before Apollo’s course Across the visible sky is run.

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We too, of our lives, must make one day: We never know, my Lydia, nor want To know of nights before or after The little while that we may last.10 Another great favourite of Roditi’s, and a writer that he championed in the English-speaking world, is the Triestine novelist Italo Svevo. In his essays on Svevo, particularly on his greatest novel, La Coscienza di Zeno (translated most recently as The Conscience of Zeno), Roditi was able to illuminate the ways in which Svevo was a product of his Triestine Jewish background. The question of Svevo’s literary identity and relationship to the Italian tradition has been for many years a source of lively debate, and Roditi was perhaps the first to insist on Svevo’s Mitteleuropean sensibility. Trieste was for four centuries a Habsburg city and the gateway for German ideas and literary styles into Italy. How was Svevo an “Italian” writer, and how was he a “European” or a “Mitteleuropean” one? Rather than placing him in the tradition of late Italian regional realism, or in the general category of postwar European literature (Proust, Joyce), Roditi argued that it “might prove more profitable and conclusive to place Svevo in a context of Austrian literature and compare him to those Austrian novelists whose culture was not strictly German and who often wrote in one or the other of the many languages spoken within the polyglot empire.”11 As examples, he mentioned Schnitzler, Robert Musil, and Franz Kafka, in particular. “It seems as if the empire, though not always strong enough to impose one language on all its subjects, yet diffused a common Austrian culture among the various peoples within its boundaries.”12 Roditi pointed in particular to the “prosy” nature of Svevo’s work, his use of technical terms, and his use of a kind of elevated jargon of the bourgeoisie that subconsciously parodies a previous style. An overcoat “condizionata in quanto a colore” (conditioned as to colour) is an example of this kind of commercially tinted language, and Roditi links this mannerism to Kafka and his combination of fantasy and matter-of-fact language: “[Svevo’s] language, far from being the literary Tuscan of classical idealists or the colourful dialect of the realists or Veristi, is rather the sophisticated and nerveless jargon of the educated Triestine bourgeoisie that spoke Italian neither as a literary nor as a national language, but as a convenient and easy affectation of local patriotism.”13 Roditi emphasizes that the society Svevo describes is not typically Italian; his characters illustrate many qualities and

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faults of the Austrian bourgeoisie. Characters are described as speaking Triestine or Friulian dialect, or mixtures of Italian and Croatian. Roditi recalls that in several of Svevo’s stories, elderly gentlemen attempting to seduce beautiful young women offer to teach them not correct Italian but German – a language that (before the end of World War II and the “redemption” of Trieste by Italy) offered more opportunities for advancement.14 Roditi’s evaluation of Svevo as a writer belonging to the Mitteleuropean tradition stands up these many decades later, in particular after recent detailed research into Svevo’s education in Bavaria has revealed the extent to which he was a reader of the German classics. And so Roditi’s understanding of Svevo’s prose as informed by the stylistic oddities of a German-educated speaker of Italian, and by the sense of alienation and marginality gleaned from Austrian modernity, is now a widely accepted view.15 Roditi’s understanding of Paul Celan’s background in Czernowitz has many of the same elements. Roditi was probably the first to point out the importance of Celan’s early years in multilingual Czernowitz, of his work as a translator, in particular of Romanian writing, and of his own poems written in Romanian.16 Roditi was attracted to writers like Svevo, Celan, and Pessoa, who wrote at the intersection of cultural traditions. This same attraction was at work in relation to the medieval Turkish poet Yunus Emre, who wrote at the intersection of the Persian and Turkish traditions. “His synthesis of the spoken Turkish of his own peasant contemporaries and of a more refined, learned literary and urban Persian tradition,” Roditi wrote, “indeed endows his poetry, at times, with a particular ambiguity which distinguishes it clearly from the poetry of many other Islamic mystics of the Middle Ages, who write either in Persian or Arabic, languages which, unlike Turkish, already had a well established literary tradition.”17 Roditi’s long essay on “western and eastern themes” in Emre’s poetry suggested that striking affinities between eastern and western poetic sensibilities had yet to be tracked across the centuries and the continents.

T r a n s l at in g f ro m Beyond As a writer deeply aware of the separate histories through which poetic forms develop, Roditi recognized that much would be lost in translation. Consider the “sprung rhythms” of G.M. Hopkins: how could they be translated into French, as he himself attempted to do? This was clearly impossible, but he argued that the ideas of Hopkins’s poetry

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could be couched in poetic diction that might approximate that “of the French prose poem as it had developed since the publication of Rimbaud’s Illuminations.”18 Most translation of poetry, Roditi admitted, is “metaphrase” or “paraphrase,” adopting Dryden’s vocabulary. “It helps you to understand, or conveys to you the essential part of the meaning of the original, but still misses a lot. Occasionally, translation can reach ‘imitation’ the highest form, through which very gifted poets (like Rossetti imitating Dante) can make the work their own. In imitation, there’s always the risk that you put in something of yourself to replace that which you were unable to translate.”19 Roditi was a translator of the humble sort, one who was attached to revealing the sources of meaning rather than attempting imitation. Indeed, for him, the most important part of translation had to do with understanding the traditions of literary forms and the possibilities and impossibilities of transferring these across time and language. Like Pessoa, Svevo, and Celan, he was himself a product of many cultures and was able to use his literary sensibility as both an essayist and translator. But it is Roditi’s devotion to the internationalist ideal of literature that remains foremost. He saw the task of the translator as the same one that drives both reader and writer: the commitment to a literature that knows no boundaries. In an unpublished memoir written in French, Roditi suggests that it was perhaps his knowledge of two languages from an early age that led him to an appreciation of art. The Canadian writer Mavis Gallant has similarly argued that “having two words to say the same thing” was the beginning of her literary career. Roditi went on to have more like ten words to say the same thing, and as many ways of seeing reality. Translation was a condition that he claimed, one that he imagined would inform his death as well as his life. In his memoir he wonders if “death might not be another language that I will one day learn to speak with the eloquence demanded by declarations of love and scenes of jealousy … a volapuk from beyond the grave.”20 This translation would ensure the final border-crossing of a life lived as a literary passeur.

no t e s 1 The closest to a biography of Roditi is the transcript by Richard CandidaSmith of his extensive interview of Roditi, available in UCLA’s Special Collections.

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2 Roditi’s translations of Emre were admired by the authoritative Turkish scholar Talat Halman (“Yunus Emre,” 505). 3 McFarland, Edouard Roditi, 2. 4 Brooke-Rose, Between, 10. 5 Roditi, “Corresponding with Eliot,” 44. 6 Monteiro, Presence of Pessoa, 28–31. 7 Roditi, “Several Names of Fernando Pessoa,” 40, 44. 8 Roditi, “Fernando Pessoa,” 373. 9 Ibid. 10 Roditi, “Several Names,” 27–8. 11 Roditi, “Novelist-Philosophers,” 345. 12 Ibid. 13 Ibid. 14 Ibid. Roditi also translated into French a charming memoir by Svevo’s wife of the couple’s life together. 15 Simon, Cities in Translation. 16 Roditi, “Paul Celan,”15. 17 Roditi, “Western and Eastern Themes,” 29. 18 Roditi, “Corresponding with Eliot,” 40. 19 Candida-Smith, Inventions and Imitations, 300. 20 From Le Mal sacré: “La mort ne serait-elle qu’une autre langue qu’il me faudra un jour apprendre à parler avec cette éloquence qu’exigent les déclarations d’amour et les scènes de jalousie, pour accuser et me défendre en un volapuk d’outre-tombe qui demeure, aux oreilles des vivants, aussi silencieux que le cri de la chauve-souris?”

B i b l i ogr a ph y Brooke-Rose, Christine. Between. London: Michael Joseph 1968. Candida-Smith, Richard. Inventions and Imitations: Tradition and the Advanced Guard in the Work of Edouard Roditi. Los Angeles: Oral History Program, University of California, ca. 1986. De Waal, Edmund. The Hare with Amber Eyes: A Family‘s Century of Art and Loss. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2010. Edouard Roditi Papers, 1910–1992. UCLA. Finding aid, http://www.oac. cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/13030/ft5j49n8ft/admin/#bioghist-1.2.3. Halman, Talat. “Yunus Emre.” World Literature Today 62, no. 3 (1988): 505. McFarland, John. Edouard Roditi, 1910–1992. Glbtq literature encyclopedia online: http://www.glbtq.com/literature/roditi_e.html.

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Monteiro, George. The Presence of Pessoa. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky 1998. Roditi, E. “Camondo’s Way.” Grand Street 6, no. 2 (1987): 145–66. – “Corresponding with Eliot.” London Magazine 28, nos. 5–6 (1988): 33–44. – “Fernando Pessoa, Outsider among English Poets.” Literary Review 6, no. 3 (1963): 372–86. – Le Mal sacré. Unpublished memoir. Edouard Roditi Papers, 1910–1992. UCLA. – “Novelist-Philosophers I: Svevo.” Horizon (November 1944): 342–58. – “A Paris Memoir.” James Joyce Quarterly 28, no. 1 (1990): 169–78. – “Paul Celan and the Cult of Personality.” World Literature Today 66, no. 1 (1992): 11–20. – “The Several Names of Fernando Pessoa.” Poetry 87, no. 1 (1955): 40–4. – “Western and Eastern Themes in the Poetry of Yunus Emre.” Alif, Journal of Comparative Poetics 5 (Spring 1985): 20–37. Simon, Sherry. Cities in Translation: Intersections of Language and Memory. New York and London: Routledge 2012.

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pa rt t hr ee

Words of Sheila Fischman

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Water

For R.H. and M.E.F. my sisters

These prose poems were published in a handprinted edition by Pierre Filion et les Éditions du silence. Permission to reprint is gratefully acknowledged. The quotation in “The River / Le Fleuve” is taken from Le Vieux Chagrin by Jacques Poulin.

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The Well The pump stood outside the front yard, across the fence from asparagus and hollyhocks. Too stiff for a six-year-old to operate. The pail on a counter just inside the back door. Cream enamel, chipped red rim. A wire handle, wooden handhold. And the taste, the taste of that water … Old, mineral, nearly alive. Sweet and cold and smelling like copper.

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The Creek It only existed for three days in spring, cloudy with tadpoles, soaking the roots of marsh marigolds. Then it evaporated, leaving behind dry grass, a ditch.

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The Lake Above its surface swallows stitch the sky. The heron poses, staggers, takes flight. Ducks are born, and insignificant fish. All night, the loon ululates. Once, afraid to show pain, I turned my back on it. Looked away until I disappeared. The season is ending and the sun, huge and orange against the deep rose sky, drops, vanishes. Until next year.

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T h e R iv e r / L e F l e u v e At night we drive past houses that line its bank. Lights reflected in water are the most melancholy sight I know. Le fleuve, tout à côté de nous, le vieux fleuve qui, pendant trois siècles et demi, avait entendu les confidences de tout un peuple … “Of course I know it,” I tell the incredulous woman, “it is also mine.”

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The Sea Looking, only looking. The first sensation, a warm rough boulder against my back. I watch the water shift and ripple, lose track of the choreography of waves. Feel my breath matching theirs. A gull rises. Red sand.

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T h e S wa m p A drowned forest. Dead trees doubled in the water. Today, in August, its surface is dulled with pollen. New colonies will grow here, from seeds blown by wind or floated on water. Even though the old birches may never return, may persist only as a memory of shadows, of a gold glow in long ago October light.

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The Anguish of the Heron* G aéta n Soucy Translated by Sheila Fischman

I met the Actor once, I witnessed his strange performance. I say “the Actor” because that was what he called himself, how he defined himself. When the doctor asked, that was the answer he gave. He didn’t say, I am an actor, which in fact he was not, having worked in buildings throughout his youth. What he said was, “I am the Actor.” He was as mad as a hatter. I attended his performance in a famous institution dedicated to the care of his peers, where I suppose he still is, if he isn’t dead. It’s not unusual for people like him to live to a ripe old age. That longevity is a refinement, in a way; it refines the horror of their fate by stretching it out like a thread of gold. He had been labelled catatonic, with abrupt and unpredictable explosions of rage. Which had brought him the honour of his photograph in the newspapers. The members of his family (in the anatomical sense of the term) like the limbs of his three little brothers and his two sisters and his mother, it took weeks to find, one by one, scattered about the garden adjacent to the family house somewhere in the vicinity of Saint-Aldor. He was not exactly the sort of person you’d want to hang out with. But he was the Actor. He officiated invariably in the same setting – the big room known as the salon – and I do mean “officiate” because one

* This translation was published by Aliquando Press in a handprinted edition with block print illustrations by Will Rueter. It is reprinted here with kind permission from Sheila Fischman, Will Rueter, and the Press.

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had only to have seen him perform, with such disturbing intensity, his immutable act, to know that what had happened there – for us, for him – was something verging on the sublime, on the sacred. The salon then was all there was by way of a set. Nothing but chairs riveted along the baseboards, bare tables bolted to the floor, barred windows through which no daylight entered, endless off-white walls, and nothing – no sharp object, no ashtrays, no glasses – to tickle the urge for self-mutilation which is common in such circles. Of the vast space, our man used only a minute portion, the size that a coffin on end might occupy, or a phone booth, if you prefer. The Actor was not the Thespian, of whom more later, you’ll soon see why; he did not stride across the stage like a voracious conqueror. His small standing coffin was all he needed. The source and the power of his art came from contraction, from the exercise of contraction. I could enter the room only if accompanied by a doctor, of course, as well as by a “patient attendant” with a gentle face, with quiet eyes, with the physique of a good-natured gorilla. Aside from us, there must have been, oh, twenty people. Some riveted to the chairs riveted along the baseboard, others at the tables bolted to the floor, still others talking among themselves, playing Queen of Spades, kidding around as if nothing were amiss. I’ll pass over the strange sensation of being dressed in business clothes, without armour or arms, in the midst of twenty individuals recognized as murderous lunatics. Without specifying who had actually done what, the doctor had given me an idea of the acts that warrant a stay, all expenses paid, in such an institution. Not that one feels threatened, that’s something else. A very strange sensation. The Actor was standing in his corner, always the same one, unchanging. If you can call standing a posture that was the beginning of a fall, a fall that was frozen at its inception, an unkept promise of a forward collapse. The head leaned to one side, the shoulders sagged under an invisible but certainly very real burden, the knees bent, bent – and then stopped in mid-bend. His long, flapping hands, the hands of an old lady pianist who is bleeding to death, aimed at the floor, fingertips tremulous with the imperceptible trembling of a blade of grass. As if they wanted to touch the ground but had stopped along the way, like the knees. His entire person motionless save for that quavering. Anorexia had made of him a death-camp survivor. The doctor had told me with suave irony: “He feeds himself like a philosopher, on a little bit of almost and on nearly nothing.” (The

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irony was meant for me as, at the time, I was up to my neck in the Heideggerian pond.) The fact is that at best they could only feed the Actor by tube, if that. When his back was arched, his vertebrae stretched the thin fabric of his nightshirt, his collarbone protruded at the neckline like a wishbone, it could have produced the tones of a xylophone. His skeletal appearance may have been part of his act, who knows? Maybe he assumed the posture of an interrupted fall to accentuate the various parts of his frame that stuck out. His nightshirt fell to mid-thigh. He had on paper slippers and so forth. His legs were bare, utterly hairless, as smooth and pale as loaves of stone. You’d have said he was thirty years old. The doctor confirmed that he was actually forty-seven and that he’d been institutionalized for twenty-eight years. He wasn’t called the Actor for nothing. And he’d held that posture for what? Three-quarters of an hour? One hour? More? Mustn’t rush. This isn’t the Cirque du Soleil. In the end you might have thought that the act was only that, that nonfall, and that nothing else happened or would happen, that strictly speaking there was no act at all. The dramatic element consisted, in a pinch, of his gaze. His mobility, his intensity. His panic. The gaze of someone immured, before whose eyes a slit has been cut. He saw the world outside his body, that extremely small fragment of the world that was offered to him in the same way we perceive something through a spyhole. He was alert to the reactions of what was to him his audience. The man was obviously playing a role. The doctor engaged some patients in conversation. For my education, I imagine, my edification. I half paid attention, sneaking looks at the motionless and panic-stricken Actor who had spotted me too, and sometimes our sidelong glances met. My presence, which was not familar to him, which must have seemed incongruous to him, had no doubt added a singular touch to that day’s performance. I did not suspect after those long, catatonic quarter-hours that something extraordinary was suddenly about to happen. You might have assumed that the event had been triggered by the logic of a strange timing device that was private, urgent, and temperamental and had no direct relationship to the elements around him. But the doctor drew my attention to a man sitting on a riveted chair, whose animated, grimacing features betrayed extreme inner agitation. One striking detail: his eyes were the same colour – the colour of blown fuses – as the Actor’s. He was dressed in the same way too but unlike him was inclined to gesticulate uncontrollably,

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suddenly flinging his arm in the air for no apparent reason and apparently unaware of it, like a gun going off on its own. This man was the Thespian. He was, as the saying goes, laughing in his beard, which was thick and bushy, the moustache drooping halfway to his chin like Nietzsche’s. He had pins and needles in his pants and legs and they too were agitated, clamouring for attention. He murmured into his facial hair, he snickered, he cast sidelong glances at the Actor – the kind of look, to be precise, that cliché calls a twinkle in the eye. As if he was about to pull off a good one. The Actor and he kept an eye on each other, like wrestlers before the match. The amazing event was this: the Actor’s right foot suddenly left the ground. With no change to his posture, he had lifted his foot off the linoleum. The slightest bit, just barely, oh, let’s say, five centimetres at most. He froze like that in a new immobility. At that moment, synchronically, the Thespian straightened his torso. He punched his knees with his fists, in the manner of a determined man who intends to take his idea to its logical conclusion. He got up and with a resolute stride walked straight ahead. It would be an understatement to say that he seemed determined. He was Determination in the flesh, the perfect embodiment of a man bound unshakeably to the object of his will, who realizes, who acts; the man whose destiny is to shake up the world in order to infuse it with his own indelible signature. But the Actor, following him out of the corner of his eye, didn’t want to be outdone. He too could act, he too could take action. And his foot rose some more, slowly, quavering, till his ankle was level with his left knee. And then, with extraordinary dignity, he straightened his chest, his shoulders, his forehead. He was as upright as a candle on an altar. His arms ran down his sides with the impeccable rigidity of a soldier at attention. The Actor had become the Heron. The Thespian, however, was pursuing what he had started, striding resolutely down the long room until he came to the wall. Before which he spun around abruptly, in one go, like a school of fish. And off he went in the opposite direction, with the same determination, towards his original seat, on which he had no sooner set his backside – just long enough to punch his knees with his fists – than he got up and took off again. It took me a while to understand the reason for his action. Because it was obvious that he was getting ready to stage something. At that moment he was unquestionably the busiest man it had been my privilege to see in my whole life. I don’t know how many times he crossed the room from one wall to the

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other, meticulously repeating the same moves, the same steps, the same contemptuous snickers, so that it could have been a film started over and over and over again, except for the fact that he sometimes stopped abruptly, looking in the direction of the Heron, then bent his back a little, and for a few frenzied seconds shook his hair and beard, with a snorting sound like a mare. After that brief display of triumph, he was off again. (Seeing only that one individual would have given a Jupiterian a very strange memory of our species.) You see, Victory seemed nigh for the Thespian. The Heron was getting wobbly. As the numbness spread to his calf, as the muscles ran out of something or other, as his blood grew congested, the Heron’s features expressed an anguish that has no name, that is catatonia itself: the corrosive, absolute anguish of having to remain in an impossible posture, on pain of provoking a cataclysm that will smash the world to pieces. The mad-as-a-hatter man was playing the Heron, his performance was his own person transformed into a Heron, to keep the universe from being smashed to pieces. He did it as best he could. He was the Actor saving the world. As for the Thespian, he was the building contractor who transforms it, modifies it. The world is a fearsome leviathan that must be grabbed by the throat, an inferno whose deceitful décor must be turned upside down, an enemy that is incumbent on the hardened individuals we are to disfigure. For ten minutes now I had been closely following this extraordinary, singular rivalry that was also, in a sense, pathetic and superhuman; I’d become the privileged spectator, the one on whom depends the outcome of the joust, whose respect and gratitude are fought over, the only, the ultimate spectator. All eyes went from the rival to me and from me to the rival. I was still waiting to be enlightened as to the nature of the task being accomplished with such resolution by the agitated stroller. It seemed to me that some deed was inevitably about to be done. That he had hesitated to do thus far, but would, eventually. The reason for this unending movement finally came to me in something like an illumination. The Thespian’s project was to get to that wall. Just that. It was not a symbol. Or if it was, I don’t know of what. That’s the way it was. Walking to a wall filled his life, gave his itchy feet something to do, gave him a meaning, transfigured his need into action. What defeated the Heron was the meaning of things. Grimacing in pain, he set his foot back on the ground. Resumed his initial posture

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– the fall that came to nothing, that had seemed to me so enigmatic in intention but was in essence merely the natural posture a body adopts after it has spent some ten minutes on one foot, suffering with cramps in one’s calf. And so much for the meaning of life. Words lumped in the Actor’s throat. His solitude was that of a bulging eye exiled into the interstellar void. After a series of uncontrolled gesticulations, of triumphant airs, the Thespian went back to his original seat and sat down, in a huddled pose. Legs twisted, hands in beard, biting his nails. “The Actor,” he snickered. “That’s the Actor.” By which he meant that the other was merely that and was merely acting, whereas he had undertaken, he had acted, and indeed he had taken action: the exploit of going to the wall he had indeed accomplished. He hadn’t stood there tight-assed, one foot in the air, miming a pink flamingo. I observed the Actor who I suspected, with compassion, had a feeling of failure. And yet. Gazing at him more closely, I saw a glimmer deep in his spyhole that had not been there before. For as I could tell from that one detail, he knew that he too had acted. He hadn’t pretended to play the Heron, he had truly taken action. He had done his duty as an actor, he had endured with his every muscle the catatonic anguish of saving the world from the crash. Also, his head had moved in a very discreet nod. He bowed to the northeast, he bowed to the northwest, then he bowed due north. Very softly and for his ears only, his mouth imitated the sound of applause. Some thirteen years later, circumstances far removed from those just reported offered these pages the opportunity to make their way to you. I was burying a friend. He had put on a hood, he had pinned a note to the doorstep: “Do not enter, call police.” Poignant, that sensitivity, it was just like him, yet in the end vain, because they’d had to break the door down, just in case. He had bought the rope I don’t know where. It doesn’t really matter, but a guilty conscience often wraps its rings around insignificant details as firmly planted as posts, and that detail, that benign ignorance has gone on for years and even in my dreams to mock me (in the hardware store, we stand in line together at the cash register; I ask what he’s hiding under his jacket; and he has on a blue tie.) There weren’t many of us, maybe ten or so, in a suburban graveyard devoid of ghosts. I had anticipated his act in the way that, when you’re playing a record you know very well, in the silence after a piece you can already hear the

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first bars of the one to follow. But I hadn’t moved. Now, “the eye was in the grave and the eye looked at Cain.” On the still soft earth I placed my copy of Dark as the Grave Wherein My Friend Is Laid, by Malcolm Lowry (my famous knack for doing the right thing). Of the sensitivity that came naturally to him, he gave me new proof that last time we saw one another. You may object to the sordid nature of the story. Yet the small gesture that he made, the only one necessary, as far as that goes (what could he have done but clean it up himself?), in an unsavoury situation that would no doubt have discredited him in other eyes than mine, the memory that I’ve kept of it, that I cherish in a sense, is for me steeped in the painful and incisive clarity that memory confers on the decisive shocks suffered by most uncommon relationships – the ones that amid the pointless disorder of our meetings and our friendships have mattered most – those our hearts will mourn forever, those we paid for with our blood. And that’s an example of fine phrases that are meaningless. I had invited him to my place for supper, knowing the tunnel he was going through, knowing in particular that he would not get to the end of it, and that the only thing he had left that still had some appeal to me were those private meals with someone he had long been close to. We had eaten fairly well and drunk very well, especially him. For weeks, maybe months (we were no longer seeing anything of each other), Coco was allowing himself without restraint to slide down the slope of alcoholism; disregarding the time of day, he started in the morning and he kept on through the last labyrinths of the night, a punch-drunk boxer limp on the ropes. That evening, calmly and objectively, with a calmness and an objectivity inspired by a terrible and perverse honesty as well as by the genuine and profound goodness that was his hallmark, that in spite of everything kept us unshakeably fond of him, he listed for me the failures that had undermined, infested, rotted him – those are his words. Music, where his ship had stalled, medicine, mathematics, theatre (a disaster: just thinking about it will make me turn over in my grave), his affair with a waitress, his affair with a dancer, his passion for a harp which he’d preferred to the harpist, just as he preferred the idea of a harp to the harp; I nearly forgot his attempts to adopt a little black boy, and finally, painting – the fucking painting that had been his final craze, and in the end, what did him in: visiting his past, his own life, was for him to walk barefoot in a flourishing garden of failures abloom with thorns and shards. Had he been twenty years old I

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would have known what to retort. But how can you lie to a man of forty, who despite his weakness for pipe dreams, had always seen himself, in the final analysis, under the clearest and the harshest light? I knew that he knew that I had nothing to reply. I knew that he knew that I knew that there was nothing exemplary about his life aside from his sustained failure, aside from his constancy at wasting it in culs-de-sac. “Yet my desires were simple: glory, wealth, the adulation of women and crowds,” accompanied by a cynical and rather vulgar grin. At cognac time, he still defined himself as “The Angel of Dismantlement” (what a stroke of genius). The seconds fell, drop by drop. The atmosphere did not inspire a cancan. So, about this small deed, which I’m still reluctant to mention, which for me is still associated so incongruously with my very last images of him. We were in the living room, I got up for some reason or other and went to the kitchen. He joined me shortly and asked for a rag, detergent, a bucket. He cleaned up his unfortunate mess by himself, with a lack of shame. I would even say with a candour that still touches me, just as when I was a child, I was touched by how naturally my aunt would go on with a conversation while she pulled up her skirt to inject insulin into her thigh. Coco said something like: “Oh yes, I’m at that stage, and the last thing I’m asking of our friendship is that you not make a big to-do about it.” And I do believe, I believed right away, that he had just had confirmation of a hunch that he had overstepped the final limit, that he was certain now there was no possible turning back; he must have told himself that for him, it was high time. It is that frankness which in my memory still has such a poignant tone, which I call “his act,” or his attitude. In fact I can’t think of exactly the right thing to call it; a sign of his trust in me, a final one, which honours our friendship. I used the first pretext to go outside. I think we went to the corner store to buy some smokes. And that was it. A taxi pulled up. He took off the way he usually did, apparently optimistic. Bye, Gaetan love, pecking me on both cheeks. I was deeply moved by the cragginess, the bluish-purple puffiness of his face. He crossed the pavement nimbly. I knew I would never see him again. Years later, in November, we got together again, I mean five or six of us who were his closest friends. Coco’s creations had been put in storage – drawings, canvases, sculptures, montages, other things too that I’m not sure what to call – in a sheet-metal shed in the backyard of his sister’s suburban house. The sister had divorced, lost her job, sold the

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house; now the premises had to be cleared out and what to do with it all? We had been invited as legatees actually, in the moral sense of the term. Of those few friends, no one had kept ties with anyone. That what he called “the family,” to which he attached such importance, had not survived his death is doubtless another on the long list of Coco’s failures. We felt a little like bulls in a china shop. Whatever we might have had in common at a particular time had long since fallen like hunks of plaster. What remained was that from having loved Coco, from having maligned him a little, the way people do without its having any repercussions. Having loyally encouraged him at certain dark moments, from having been exasperated by him even more often, from not knowing when we should have how to deflect his impulse to do away with himself, though we don’t decide to commit suicide any more than we choose our sexual orientation – it’s not the task of the compass needle to turn away from the North. Having finally washed our hands of the fate inflicted on what without too many illusions he had hoped was a work that would sink into nothingness less quickly than he himself. The only thing we shared that morning was a wish to be somewhere else. To stick together, certainly, to be kind and considerate even, but mechanically, at once familiar with and indifferent to one another. Had the impulse to be done with it won over any one of us, not a single little finger would be lifted very high. In the time it takes the mummy to sink down, to disappear, the time for the mud to stammer one little burp before the surface became smooth again, we have for hearts, for memory only quicksand. As for the worth of the canvases, what can I say? Coco hadn’t hanged himself for no reason. On that we were quick to agree. For my part I didn’t want to take away even a trinket. Not of course that it would be all that hard, but still … To preserve what? And to what end? I would have felt as if I were lying, betraying him once again … So the others helped themselves, rather politely and without much enthusiasm, it must be said, one taking a drawing, another a plaster cast, yet another a tiny painting. We learned that one of the dauber’s aunts would stow some of the lousy paintings in her basement. Et cetera. We only talked about how we would dispose of what was left. Someone suggested quite simply the side of the road. Finally, we decided that the most humane solution would be to consign it to the fire. Coco had spent his life “getting to the wall.” We were ready to take our leave, thankful to be finished, depressed, too, and ill at ease. We avoided each other’s eyes as we dressed, each

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of us tucking his shame inside his coat, inside his tuque or his woollen scarf, filled with suppressed cynicism towards the others and himself. He does what he can, the bespectacled, large-brained anthropopithecus. Then the sister, taking me off to the side, tells me: “Take this anyway.” And adds: “I think he’d have wanted you to.” So I accepted the proffered sketchbook, slipping it under my arm. I was impatient to get back to the city (Air! Give him air! Undo his collar!) and pretty well everyone offered me a lift. But I wanted to be alone, right away. I had nothing to say – about the weather, about what I was up to after all these years, even less about Coco the Smearer of Paint. Then, the hugs, the kisses, the promises of this, of that; the harp had tears in her eyes. Finally, the farewells, the dispersal towards the respective cars. The comfortable opinion that each of us, with his own person, with his own loyalty as a friend, had just suffered a serious attack of the grave. About a half-hour walk separated me from the bus station. I went along streets that looked like nothing, streets without faces or memory, which suited me perfectly. I had no need of either the good old days or memories (enough of them come back to us on their own). Trees, which are a thigh extended by arms, fingers without hands welded to multiple elbows, frozen and shivering in their catatonic anguish to save the world, of trees, in a word – maples or willows, for instance – there were none: there were small businesses; there were small garages; there were small, safe, ossifying bungalows. Chance took me past a nursery school; baboonlets were recessing in the yard. Snow was falling, softly, like feathers when you shake a hen. The school was called Happy Little Coco (just what I needed). I still had the sketchbook under my arm, not yet opened. I got to the bus station three-quarters of an hour before the next departure. What can I say about the small bar adjoining it where I sat and waited? Another time. (No danger, in any case, of being bitten by a dictionary there.) A tall blond girl brought me a tall blond beer in a bottle, which she set down in front of me. The sketchbook was on the table next to it and – half-weary, half-bitter – I didn’t dare risk opening it. I was annoyed with the sister for subjecting me to that moral dilemma. To be allowed to drink my beer – with a good-sized head, nice and warm, drawn directly from the bladder of the horse – I had to pretend to be eating, hence the healthy serving of cardboard fries reheated under neon lamps that was staring up at me (for some local colour). A little girl of six or seven, with Asian features,

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sitting on a bench next to her adoptive mother, was staring at me too; she was bundled up to the ears in her mother’s fur coat, which bestowed on her the extremely adorable look of a baby seal. I moved my hand to the sketchbook, slowly, as if for a trial by fire. I opened it at random, turned pages. I imagine you can see me coming: at that very point in the adventure I would discover, contrary to all expectation, a series of drawings that were astonishing, overwhelming; question marks would fly out of my head like Tintin before a mystifying riddle, and my sudden emotion, my regrets, my remorse, Coco saved at the eleventh hour, no less, and my story would conclude neatly, with no loose ends. (How great is our anticipation, our thirst for everything to be tied up neatly, the way we like our fictions, and how long a future is promised to the inanity of the novel! “Meaning,” “coincidence,” memory, suffering, the silence of the stars, our childhoods and our fears, mommy-daddy, at the end of the day, miraculously reconciled!) But no. The sketches that my doleful eyes were skimming displayed with placid obstinacy the same unshakeable mediocrity that could no longer cause me pain. I took out just a few pages that had arrested me and inserted them, carefully folded, in the inside pocket of my overcoat. I knocked back the rest of my beer. I considered leaving the sketchbook where it was. But I went over to the cute little girl and offered it to her. “To make pretty pictures,” I said, a true gentleman. The little girl, timid as they are at that age, hid her face against her mother’s chest. The woman – this I’ll never forget – was kind enough, magnanimous even, not to take offence at my innocent stupidity. As the little girl didn’t peel her face away from her mother’s lap, she gave me what I thought was a smile of complicity. I left the book on their seat and went out – naive, not suspecting for a moment the cruel gaffe I had just committed. I felt free, my memory had dumped some ballast. And so, I thought, that was the end of my relationship with that sketchbook, the final object bequeathed to me by one of the individuals I loved most on earth (but just like that, while thinking about something else, and without making me feel obligated to remember him all the time). Here I am in the bus now, forehead against the window that was vibrating gently under the drone of the engine. It was still snowing feathers. I let the usual questions float inside me, the ones that ask themselves without our needing to think of them (what use is it to linger on if it’s only to forget, to force the meaning of the world in the way we force open a door, to love as well, to flay our hands on

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tombstones, to curse, above all to remember, what good is it to weep), which make up in a way the underlying sound of things, like the ticking of a clock of which one becomes suddenly aware, calm and “inexorable,” as the saying goes. Giving in to a facile burst of poetry that was entirely worthy of him, I told myself that after all, Coco would have liked the thought of his sketchbook ending its days covered with a little girl’s scrawls … Who boarded the bus in turn, still buried in the thick maternal fur that hung down to her ankles. She responded to my smile by turning her head away, brisk and unflinching (a sign that her eyes had fallen on me). And at last we were on our way. I took the five loose pages from my pocket. There is nothing more heartbreaking than the handwriting of a loved one who has died (a drawing he has done, or a photograph, does not produce the same dizziness) and I would have recognized Coco’s out of a thousand: careful, conventional, full of lyrical curves – the writing of a depraved schoolgirl. The margins were hatched with hasty sketches relating to the meaning of the text – fortunately, as it happens, because without the words it would have been hard to recognize, in the midst of those hesitant, overabundant lines, something like a murderous lunatic who was mimicking a heron. And I began conscientiously to read: “I met the Actor once, I witnessed his strange performance.” Et cetera. You know the rest. And that’s it, Miss. I still don’t understand the reason for your interest – which seems strange to me – in my dead friend. In any case I wasn’t eager to tell you any more than I’ve said here, you’ll have to be content with that. And you’ll get nothing more from me but these pages that he wrote some fifteen years ago (the presumed date, deduced from all kinds of cross-checking that I’ll spare you) about the catatonic Heron. As well, I no longer have in my possession anything that belonged to Coco, not even those sheets of paper, I didn’t even photocopy them. Let me be clear. I loved your “father” as I’ve loved few individuals in my life; this may explain it. In any case, young as you are, do not scorn this opportunity to contemplate what lies in store for the most firmly rooted human relations. I insist, while I claim nothing, that in these few hastily written pages, I have not failed too badly at shedding some light on it for you. Now, Miss, don’t think that I’m unheedful of your wishes. You tell me in a rather touching way about your regrets – no doubt legitimate – not to have known the man who was, one night, the

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biological opportunity for your conception. You would hope, you told me in your letter, to meet his friends, to question them, to find out from them who he was, to “know” him. I think you’re deluding yourself. We know only through presence, and every being is closed up again in his tomb. It doesn’t take much to make a corpse resemble what he was. All that’s lacking is life. Coco was and he is no longer. That’s all there is to know about him. By dying, he became as unknowable as God. The sorrow that I felt at losing him, that I still feel when I think about him, does not concern you. Turn away from the ghost who doesn’t belong to you, do not expect any comfort, any warmth. That ghoul would eat you alive. One last thing. You tell me about a dream you had, one that when you woke up, left deep inside your heart “a shower of happy butterflies.” Apparently you were surrounded by his friends, it was a party, you were accepted, you were laughing during an emotional commemoration of your father, and you sensed his presence, smiling and warm: he was there among us, he saw us, he loved us, it was Beautiful and all was Music. From the way you talk about God in your letter, I suspect that for you it could be a fully plausible image of what Paradise will be – that place where our desires would finally be in tune with the setting. But be careful. When I got off the bus, shaken by my reading all the same, I decided to console myself with an expensive cigar. At the tobacco store in the station I saw the little Asian girl again. Her mother smiled at me, then looked down, blushing; she was ashamed of my shame. The little girl had given the fur back to her mother, and now I could see her spindly torso and the two appendages of flesh, pathetic and poignant, like two white sausages hanging from her shoulders. With the tip of her stump she was pointing to a chocolate bar, looking very angry, and her incensed expression would have sent a pack of doggies running. But her mother held firm, reminding her softly that in this life, “We don’t always get what we want,” which showed her to be an excellent mommy. For hell must surely resemble this, Miss, that initially all our wishes seem suddenly to come true. The Devil can quietly attend to other things. He just has to let them follow their course.

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Interviews with Sheila Fischman* Sh erry S i mon 1 9 9 4 : E s t h e t ic Affi ni ti es Q: If anyone in Canada knows anything at all about translation, they will know the name of Sheila Fischman. What, in your mind, has this name come to represent? A: It is difficult for the person whose name is part of the question to answer. How has it come about that my name is recognizable? I suppose it is partly because in the early days of the Literary Translators’ Association, of which I was a founding member, we agitated a lot for recognition of translators – of our work, of our role, and also of our names. So I suppose I was one of the first in Canada to kick up a fuss about publishers putting my name on the front cover of my translations, and having them print a blurb about me as well as one about the author. Also, we wrote angry letters to book reviewers and other journalists if the fact that a book was a translation was not taken into account. I’ve been translating books for about twenty-five years now, which is a long time. And, except for a brief stretch when I was the book review editor of a Montreal newspaper (while continuing my translation work), I have been working virtually full time at literary translation. I look at my shelf now and see about sixty books there, and three or four more are with publishers. Quite literally not a week goes by that I do not receive a call from a writer asking me to consider translating their work. * The first of these two interviews was conducted in 1994 for the volume Culture in Transit, published by Véhicule Press (1995). The second interview was conducted in 2012 for this volume.

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Q: I learned that your papers have been acquired by the National Archives. Is this not a gesture expressive of the cultural and literary significance of your work? A: There is in my papers quite a lot of documentation in the form of  exchanges with writers, and even more significant, I expect, of exchanges with publishers, both English and French. Q: Is there much material in these exchanges relating to particular translation questions, like the problem of translating joual or particularly québécois expressions? A: In fact, no. You’re referring to the ecclesiastical swearing for which there is no equivalent in American or English Canadian English. I suppose, looking back twenty-five years later, I could say that I took a coward’s way out in dealing with these expressions in my first translations. I hadn’t lived in Quebec very long; I didn’t know Quebec French or Quebec society well enough, for the meaning and intent of the ecclesiastical curses to have entered my nervous system. In fact I can remember reading La Guerre, Yes Sir!, which was literally my introduction to that kind of cursing, and having no idea what the word vierge was doing in the middle of a sentence. And I wasn’t yet familiar with the names of the vessels of the altar in any language. If I had been living in Quebec for longer, or if I had been a more confident translator, I suppose I might have tried to find some sort of equivalent, using the bawdy words we use in English. Looking back, I’m very glad I didn’t. Because introducing unilingual Englishspeaking readers to that way of expressing anger and frustration opened, I think, a tiny window onto certain aspects of the reality of French Quebec. From time to time I have seen English Canadian fiction, written by people probably not conversant with Frenchspeaking Quebec, using French expressions. I’ve seen French-speaking characters given the kind of language to express themselves in anger that is given to them in French. I’m thinking of Margaret Laurence’s novel, The Diviners, in which the Métis character uses expressions like câlisse and hostie, and I know Margaret Laurence did not swear fluently in French. This is a tiny example of a cultural exchange which I suspect my choice had something to do with. Q: The problem of translating these kinds of local and oral expressions was probably more prevalent in the first books you translated. Has it disappeared entirely?

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A: Yes, I think it has for me, because it was particularly in Carrier’s earlier books, which were set, by and large, in the county, that those questions arose. I think they may have arisen in the one novel of André Major’s that I translated also, The Scarecrows of Saint Emmanuel. Carrier seems to have abandoned that kind of expression himself now, but if future novels are set in the recent past and in the country, I daresay it may recur, and I have no idea how I’ll deal with it then. It’s a matter of finding a form of expression that strikes me as being appropriate for a character at a certain place and at a certain time. Q: I remember your once making a remark about how difficult it was to translate Jacques Poulin’s work – despite the apparent simplicity of his writing. You’ve translated all but one of his novels. A: Yes, and it’s still demanding. The last one I translated, Mr Blue, took more versions and revisions than usual. I suppose it’s because I have such tremendous respect for that writer. I know how he sweats and bleeds over every fragment of a sentence, how he strips away and strips away and strips away. That’s much more difficult to do in French than in English, simply because English lends itself more readily to a certain compacting than does French. And it’s partly my awareness of how much creative effort has gone into the making of these perfectly limpid sentences that encourages me to strive and strive again to come up with something that reflects what he has done. Q: Does having a special affinity for a writer make your task any easier? A: I approach each new work in a state of awe, even with writers like Carrier and Poulin of whom I’ve translated a great deal. I’m still intimidated each time by what I’m about to do. Sometimes I wish that would change, because it would be more comfortable, but I’m not sure it would make my work easier, or improve it. I think affinities are more significant in the case of a writer translating another writer. I don’t see myself as a writer; I’m purely a translator. And so I can find affinities in such widely different writers as Jacques Poulin and Anne Hébert and Michel Tremblay. What most attracts me to a writer are aesthetic affinities; there are kinds of writing I especially enjoy trying to replicate. Q: What kind of reader are you? Can you tell from reading a book once if it will stand up to translation? Have you made any major mistakes?

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A: No, you can’t tell from a quick reading. And no, I don’t think I’ve ever made a mistake in choosing a book to translate. There was one novel, way back, that wasn’t really a mistake, in the sense that I had been asked to translate it. I simply realized partway through that we were really not compatible. It just wouldn’t work, and I was able to stop – and return the advance. I don’t think it’s happened since; perhaps I’ve become more self-aware, and perhaps my interests have broadened. Or my desire to test myself has grown. Q: Over the twenty-five-year span of your translating career, Quebec literature in English has taken on impressive stature. It is now widely read in universities and by the general public. What is your sense of your role in the creation of this body of work? A: I know, because people have told me, that I have played a fairly significant part in making a body of a kind of literature available to people who otherwise would not have access to it. One of the testimonials that I value most is a three-page handwritten letter from a librarian in a small town in Ontario. She just sat down one day and decided to tell me what she had learned from specific writers and books that I had translated. Most moving to me are unsolicited letters from strangers. One of the things that I most like doing in life is putting people together, the way that a matchmaker or a host does – or a literary translator. I confess that in my earlier days there was a naive political component to what I thought I was doing. I thought that creative writers are better placed to give a sense of a culture, of a society, of a political movement, than are the various analysts or “logues.” Their take on society is more immediately accessible perhaps to people than is the work of specialists. There was a time, long ago, when I thought that being instrumental in bringing contemporary writers to the attention of non-French speaking readers might perform a kind of political function. I don’t think I’d be so naive as to use that kind of language now. Q: What about cultural specificity? A: What’s important is to be clear in one’s own mind about the significance of cultural difference, then find, to the best of one’s abilities as a translator, the most appropriate way to render the elements into a language that first of all makes good sense in English, and only secondarily emphasizes the sociological point. For me the emphasis is first and foremost literary. What I’m doing is producing another version of a book. If it is a novel, then I’m setting out to produce a

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novel written in a language that is comparable to the original. And I hope that in both the original and the translation, the social and political elements of the work would emerge from the text, rather than being set forth in black and white. Q: These questions must have plagued you in work with Michel Tremblay’s novels. A: Tremblay is a real dilemma for his North American English-language translator. In his prose, particularly in the earlier novels, there was a kind of tension between French and English words, between French and English sentence structures, that could not survive the transfer to North American English – to Montreal English, in fact. These novels take place in Montreal, which is not an exotic locale; people here speak in a recognizable way, so I couldn’t play funny little games. There are possible typographical solutions (like the use of italics for words that are in English in the original), but this interferes with reading and conflicts with my esthetic concerns. In the case of such specific uses of English, both structure and vocabulary, I have to acknowledge that part is “lost in translation.” If his novels rested only on that, they’d be pretty thin works and probably not worth the effort. But they’re not. They are extremely rich; for one thing, their character studies are astonishing. And that, fortunately, is translatable. Unilingual English-language readers who know these novels only through translation will miss something, but I haven’t yet been able to devise any other solution. Q: Would you agree with Jacques Godbout’s remark that, having largely abandoned its emphasis on a specific language (the joual phase), Quebec literature has become more translatable? A: Normally I wouldn’t dare to disagree with Jacques Godbout, but I believe there are some novels published in the last three or four years that are so intimately tied to a particular kind of French-speaking Montreal experience that I just don’t see them being able to travel. And these are novels written in a fairly standard kind of French. They are not so much too “local” as they are too “inward.” Local can be very good. It’s the inwardness, the shared references, a certain complaisance, that I think cannot survive the transfer to another culture. Q: You have a special experience as a reader of Quebec literature. It has been said that the age of the Quebec novel is over and the excitement has moved to the theatre. Do you agree?

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A: French-language theatre is indeed exciting in Quebec. But that doesn’t mean there’s not wonderful work being done by emerging writers. Today I’ve just finished my first draft of a first novel by a stunningly gifted writer, Hélène Lebeau. Elise Turcotte is exciting as well. François Gravel has a brand-new kind of voice and is writing very well-crafted, entertaining novels. These are only three writers I’ve named, whose work I know well because I have translated them. I daresay there are many others. Q: The writing of Anne Hébert is probably to be placed in category by itself because of the very special challenges it offers to the translator. I was very impressed by a remarkable demonstration you made (in a July 1983 interview with Alberto Manguel in Saturday Night) of the complexity of translating one of her sentences, in fact, the first sentence of Les fous de Bassan, “La barre étale de la mer.” You describe the process that led you from the very pedestrian “The slack bar of the sea” to the extraordinary “A strand of sea poised between tides.” A: Anne Hébert is first and foremost a poet, and this is most obvious in virtually every sentence of her novels. That makes translating her a tremendous challenge. What I seem to do is to take, say, four or five words, spread them out into a shower of English words, and then condense them again. It’s quite daunting. When it works, there is nothing more gratifying or exciting. When I translated her most recent work, which I’m calling Burden of Dreams, I recited the whole thing out loud, sentence by sentence, through each of the five or six versions. I don’t mean that I stood in front of the mirror and intoned, but while I was working on it, I could in a sense hear it in my ear, but I had to hear it spoken aloud too. While it’s prose and not poetry, it’s written very much for the ear as well as the other senses. Q: Translators outside of Canada have tremendous respect and admiration for the “institutions” of Canadian translation. We were tremendously fortunate to have had literary translation in a sense tied into the political structure of this country and understood to serve as a link between the two main language groups. But you would probably agree with Wayne Grady, I think, that this arrangement has also had its limitations. A: The Canada Council program has been essential to the development of literary translation in Canada. And all literary translators

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must be grateful to the institution that has allowed our profession to develop. However, the Canadian political situation has evolved, and it seems to me that the official view of our craft has not kept pace. Literary translation as such has not had the recognition that it deserves. Here’s just one example: the Governor General’s Awards recognize only English to French and French to English translations. This means that internationally acclaimed translators like Paul Wilson, translator of the Czech Josef Skvorecky, George Johnson, translator of Scandinavian sagas, and Leila Vennewitz, translator of Heinrich Böll, are not eligible for their own country’s most prestigious translation prize. I think we must continue to express our dissatisfaction with this narrow view. I wish that grants were given to translators rather than to publishers, as is now the case. It is understandable that the grant structure has to be tied to publication, but the current structure also precludes the possibility for an individual translator to spend a stretch of time working on non-Canadian authors. If I want to stretch my translator’s muscles by trying something different, I have to do so at my own expense. Q: Who are the translators you like to read? A: Obviously I’m particularly drawn to translators who bring to me languages I wouldn’t otherwise have access to, like Paul Wilson and William Weaver. Richard Howard’s translations of Baudelaire are stunning. Francis Steegmuller’s Flaubert is a towering accomplishment. George Johnson’s work on Scandinavian languages is exceptional. Betsy Rosenberg, the translator of the Israeli novelist David Grossman’s See Under, Love, did a spectacular job because she was able to maintain the reader’s awareness of different levels of language, from biblical Hebrew to the somewhat sloppy contemporary speech. Without her, I could not have read that novel. I haven’t mentioned my Canadian colleagues, many of whom have done exceptional work. F.R. Scott and John Glassco were important influences for me. Glassco’s anthology of French-Canadian poetry was essential, and Scott was instrumental in bringing together French and English Canadian writers, as well as producing that excellent Dialogue sur la traduction with Anne Hébert. For me, personally, Joyce Marshall has brought me more than I could ever acknowledge, both through her own brilliant work and through her work many years ago as an editor of one of my translations.

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Q: Do you feel that you have received adequate or interesting feedback on your work? Reviews, even if they are flattering, usually refer only in passing to the translator’s work. Is this a source of frustration to you? A: Several reviewers of my translation of Lise Bissonnette’s novel Following the Summer, which is, admittedly, a strange and difficult work, claimed that the reason that they couldn’t understand the work was that it was a translation. That sort of feedback is ignorant and very annoying. It’s rare that a book review is written by someone who is able to compare original and translation. Occasionally someone in a publishing house who knows some French will say something insightful about my work. Most gratifying of all is when the writers themselves are able to judge the English well enough to appreciate some particularly successful passage. But even if a reviewer says something as simple as “it reads well” or “this translator is up to his or her usual standards,” I’m pleased enough, because at least they’re acknowledging the fact that it is the translator who has produced the English text. We don’t ask for much more than that! Just an acknowledgment that this is a job that has been done well is satisfying. 2 0 1 2 : No B o un dari e s Q: You have devoted your translating career to Quebec writing, but within Quebec literature there have been absolutely no boundaries. You have translated the garrulous Michel Tremblay, the terse Jacques Poulin, the lyric and mystical Anne Hébert, the dramatic Elise Turcotte, the powerfully virtuosic Gaétan Soucy, and the humorous François Gravel. And in many cases you have established personal relationships with these writers. Has one of the advantages of the Quebec scene been for you the possibility of being in dialogue with authors? A: I can’t imagine not working with authors. What I’m working with is the product of their imagination and their intelligence. And obviously there are times when there will be things I cannot comprehend, and that’s when I appeal to the author to explain or give context. I enjoy meeting with writers. I learn about why they are writing, and all the private stuff too. I often say to my authors that the author has no secrets from his translator, and we laugh. I can tell one story. After one meeting with an author, when I came over to ask some questions, he turned to me and said, “Je suis mal à

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l’aise avec toi,” and I thought, “Oh God, is he going to make a pass?” and I quickly asked why, and he answered, “Tu me connais trop bien,” and he was right, because I did know him very well at that point. I knew that his marriage was in serious trouble, and in a matter of weeks he told me that he was separated. All this had burst out of his novels. Translating allows you to get deep inside the head of a writer. My career has been centred on Quebec, but I have rarely regretted not translating international writers. The one writer I would adore to translate is Patrick Modiano. I was put onto him by Jacques Poulin, and the two are similar in the way they are able to establish a mood, a character, with very few words. The kind of writing I like to read and that I would like to write is the kind that uses the fewest words, and so of course Jacques Poulin is one of my favourites. It is purely accidental that I haven’t translated many works by Quebec’s postcolonial or diasporic writers, known as écrivains migrants in Quebec. I had some chances, but unfortunately they did not come through – I would have liked to have translated Ying Chen and Aki Schimazaki – and I have translated several works by Naim Kattan. Q:You’ve played a very active role with publishers over the years – by remaining very close to the scene of Quebec writing and being a very privileged kind of informant. How has that role changed over the years? A: That role has changed quite radically because a new generation of editors has taken over, children of Trudeau who can read French, and some can even speak French, and this was hardly the case when I started out. So that the role of this translator has changed pretty drastically, because I no longer need to try to sell a publisher on a particular book or writer because their acquisitions editor has already read the book or even met the author before approaching me about it. I still do it reflexively, but I don’t really need to. I miss that a little. The situation of Canadian publishing is tragic. There are small literary houses that keep popping up, and a lot of them are doing very good work, both in French and in English. It was the sale of McClelland & Stewart that brought home to us how perilous the state of publishing is. The big publishers are disappearing like flies. As for translation, the money that’s paid to literary translators comes from the Canada Council, which does not award grants to publishers that are not Canadian owned. M & S is going to have to find

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another source of funding or simply stop publishing translations. Jack McClelland believed in Canadian writing, and he believed that writing from French Canada had to be part of that, and he was a great supporter. He is greatly missed. There’s more translation to French now. I think it may be because of the plethora of small presses like Héliotrope and Alto as well as Boréal and Leméac. That’s a sea change, and it’s a great thing. Q: Several writers have described the humbling experience of being translated, the kind of pitiless examination of their words that translation requires. Anne Hébert, in her exchange with Frank Scott, described this experience more positively as returning to the “night” that precedes creation, a chance to relive the creative experience. Are you sometimes surprised at the reactions of writers to the process of being translated? A: I’ve translated the works of staunch indépendantistes; all of them have been thrilled at the prospect of being translated. Simply put, it means that they are going to have many more readers. I think it all depends on their own knowledge of English. If they have sufficient acquaintance with the language, they can get closer to the translation as a text, and this often takes them into the process. I have not been surprised by any of these reactions simply because of the people they came from. One reaction came from Gaétan Soucy who after I translated The Little Girl Who Was Too Fond of Matches realized that the book was funny. He hadn’t realized that before. Q: There are many extraordinary literary translators today, whose names are slowly becoming known to the public – Lydia Davis for her translations of Proust and Flaubert, Edith Grossman for Don Quixote, Michael Hofmann for his translations of Joseph Roth, Anthea Bell for W. G. Sebald, Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky for Tolstoy. Do you have occasion to meet other translators, and do you enjoy comparing notes with them? What have you learnt from other translators? A: I am curious to read other translations, but I have so much work to do that I don’t get around to reading as many translations as I would like. But I did read the Lydia Davis translation of Madame Bovary. It seemed to me artificial in places. I had the impression that I was reading an invented language. I don’t have any special training as a translator, and I’m not a scholar, and I don’t take a tremendous

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interest in the academic side of translation. The decisions of the everyday are instinctive rather than analytical. In my meetings with other translators, we usually end up talking about contracts and copyrights and editors rather than translation. Occasionally another translator will ask how I arrived at this metaphor, and I do the same. Learned from other translators? Pat Claxton, Alan Brown (my go-to person), Phil Stratford, John Glassco, Joyce Marshall. The ones who definitely influenced me are older. I knew them when I was just beginning, and they helped steer me to or away from catastrophe. I asked Michael Henry Heim what it had been like to translate Kundera, and he said, “As you may imagine.” And I said, “That bad?” And he said, “Worse.” I thought that was an eloquent exchange. I’m a solitary person. Now that Don [Winkler] has more experience as a translator, we talk together. I have a couple of friends, Finnish, French, with whom I discuss translation questions. Q: Do you think that the feeling of being an outsider had something to do with your desire and ability to translate? Is there a Jewish tradition of mediation? A: My experience of being Jewish is utterly unlike others’ experience, having grown up as part of the only Jewish family in my small town. When we moved to the Jewish neighbourhood in Toronto, I felt like I was on Mars. I do, however, think that being an outsider is very helpful in the context of Quebec and French-English relations, historic and abiding. I am seen or see myself as someone who doesn’t have an enormous stake in either of the political or linguistic options. It’s by chance that my grandparents ended up in Canada and not in Bolivia. The languages I know best are a fluke. I’m not seen as a big bad Anglo, and when I am accused of being responsible for the defeat on the Plains of Abraham, I can explain what my family was doing at the time. I have had a couple of experiences of authors of mine who took it for granted that I lived in Westmount and that I had something to do with McGill … But francophones usually see me as not belonging to the wrong side, though Anglos sometimes do. Q: What would you like critics to say about your work? Is there something to be said about the work of translation – that is, more than artisanship?

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A: In a perfect world, anyone who wrote about translations would be able to read the original. More and more reviewers do know French well enough to be able to comment intelligently, know what the original was. I’d like them to be able to make informed statements on the translation after having compared it to the original. I want them to be enthusiastic and laudatory. I would like them to know what translation is – “This paragraph made no sense, but that’s not because it’s a translation.” The one perfect review that I can remember was by the poet and translator Emile Martel for the Globe and Mail. He reviewed my translation of Gaétan Soucy’s The Little Girl Who Was Too Fond of Matches. Because he was familiar with the original, he was able to explain what I’d done. Michel Tremblay has been very generous in recent years with remarks about my translations. In The Red Notebook, which is set around Expo 67, one of the events is a mock royal visit in which he has given dialogue to the people playing the king and queen, and I had a lot of fun putting that into English and he thought I’d done a particularly good job. I feel permeated by Tremblay’s way of writing dialogue. I miss Anne Hébert, I loved her descriptive writing, glorious but very spare. Christiane Frenette also has beautiful descriptive writing, as does Poulin, of course. Q: This is an account of Lydia Davis’s method of translation: “But later she told me about the experience of translating – how she, unlike many others in her profession, did not reread a book before she started to translate it. Instead, she said, she tried to keep her eyes on each word, rebuilding each sentence to be as close to the original as possible. If she reread the text, she said, she worried that she would get bored – and also that her own interpretation might seep into her work.”1 How do you react to this account? A: I have a different approach. I read the manuscript and I read it with a pencil in hand. And often in the course of that first reading, a word or phrase will come to me and I note those, because in my experience 95 per cent of the time that idea is the right one. I read it once because I have to decide whether to translate it or not. I give it this one reading. There is only one part of the translation process that I find tedious, and that is the first draft. It’s the putting down of words, I take a handful of words and throw them at the screen and hope that many won’t fall off. Then the real work begins, and that is

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the fun part. It’s with the succeeding versions that I start to burrow inside and try to find out what works and what doesn’t. One has to be tactful about changes, meaning that it is not really necessary to tell the author that she has screwed up because she really meant to say that. If they are major, then we have to talk. For me at any rate, the first draft is almost purely mechanical, and the trouvailles mostly come after the first draft. Translation as salutary gymnastics? Sometimes the mind emerges from it bruised. I think of Aquin and Neige noire, which was so hard. There was such horror and violence in it. But I’m wondering – if I were starting to do it today, I think the violence would bother me even more. I had nightmares when I was translating that novel. Q: You’ve written about the early days in North Hatley – the disastrous attempt at a bilingual poetry reading, your great luck in discovering Roch Carrier, the mythical beginnings of what has become a legendary career. Are you a very different person from the one who tried to make bilingualism work in North Hatley? A: I should clarify: I wasn’t trying to make bilingualism work. My ambition was much slighter than that. I just wanted there to be an evening of poetry that would present poets who lived in or around North Hatley. I was encouraged to do that because in North Hatley earlier that summer there had been two pottery shows, one anglo, one franco, so I thought there must be a better way of doing this. How have I changed? For one thing, I’ve become a Montrealer by choice and by inclination. I see my work as a translator as another expression of the sorts of things I like to do. If I read a new book and love it, I see it as a way of sharing my enthusiasm for a particular book and eventually my enthusiasm for a particular writer. I love the idea of following a writer from a first book. Most of my authors and I have developed together.

No t e 1 Emily Stokes, “The Poetry, Translation and Fiction of Anne Carson and Lydia Davis,” Frieze 134, October 2010. http://www.frieze.com/issue/ article/books2012.

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pa rt f ou r

Témoignages

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My Translator, My Sister ... G aéta n Soucy Translated by Donald Winkler

Sheila came into my life late, I was over thirty-five, and I had missed her all that time. I would have liked to have had her as a big sister when I was seven years old, to be the little boy indulged by her and her tenderness, and then in my twenties, my difficult twenties, to have profited from her advice, her wisdom. Fate finally righted itself and compensated for all those lost years by making her my translator. Our relationship is rather unique. I do not know what the connection usually is between writers and those who translate them. For me, among the twenty or so translators whom I have been privileged to know in the world, and with whom I have often interacted in a spirit of friendship and mutual respect, Sheila nevertheless occupies a privileged and pre-eminent place. She is not just one of my translators – she is my translator. And that, in various ways, is what I would like to briefly explain here. To start with, she was the first to want to transpose one of my books into her language (it was L’Aquittement, which became Atonement in English). It is no small thing when a translator takes on a work by a still unknown author. This was not a contract that had been offered her. For her, it was an affair of the heart. (She has of course known many such, with many other books that she has translated.) But it was instantly reciprocal, both for us as writers – for Sheila is first and foremost, like any true translator, an authentic writer – and for us as persons. From the start of our collaboration, our work

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sessions were more than simple technical exchanges concerning the meaning of such and such a word, the usage of such and such an expression, for which she always found in English the precise equivalent. Of course, there was also that, this surgically exact work at which she is so expert; but above all (for me, at least) there was a community of mind and heart, of sensibility and imagination, where I sensed the closest possible communion on her part with what I wanted to do in my work. Presuming too much, perhaps, and hoping that such an admission will not elicit smiles, I regard her as the sister of my work, without whom it would not have assumed the aspect it has today. To someone who once asked me the classic question, why do I write, I remember replying that it was primarily “to have the pleasure of rereading myself a year later in Sheila’s translation.” Call it a jest if you like, but the truth is that in Sheila’s English versions of my books, there is a density, sometimes a sumptuousness, that I am not far from thinking are absent in the original. You have doubts? Reread her translation of Atonement. One might say as much of her version of The Anguish of the Heron. And then, of course, there was the adventure of The Little Girl Who Was Too Fond of Matches. I am clearly not in the best position to judge, but it seems to me that Sheila has never laid out a more beautiful garden, that her language has never been so brilliant and nimble. I would even assert that it is one of the translations most dear to my heart. It may seem that I am tossing myself bouquets in saying so, but I assure you that (independent of my pride as a writer that such virtuosity could of course only inflate) I hold this translation to be a model of the genre, a classic. Knowing all too well the difficulties inherent in such an enterprise, I remain dazzled by the informed and sensitive way in which Sheila brought it to completion. And she can confirm the number of translators who have sought her advice on how to deal with the difficulties they encountered in undertaking versions in their own languages. One might accuse me here of talking only about myself. That would distress me. It’s that my (so fervent) desire to pay tribute to Sheila, to express my admiration for her work, and my affection for the person she is, must find its limit in her own modesty and discretion. There are moments of friendship and deep complicity that are best to preserve in the pure silence of memory, and that could not in any case be translated into words. Sheila’s engaging smile, the mischievous goodness of her gaze, can alone express the tenderness of an attachment such as ours.

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What I Learned from Her Lise B isso nnette Translated by Donald Winkler

Having come late to the writing of novels, I was experiencing my first dizzying book launch: flowers, speeches, champagne, colleagues, family, close friends, distant acquaintances. The commotion was all a blur to me out on the terrace, where, still finding it hard to believe I was there, I was dutifully signing copies of Marie suivait l’été. Sheila Fischman was present; I know that because she later related to me the rather baroque circumstances under which she had to buy the book, when the public relations people refused her a copy. It’s true that in worldly circles it’s more advantageous to flaunt one’s credentials as a minor-league columnist than to show up in all modesty as Canada’s best translator. This copy of the book brought good fortune. Just a few days later, I received from the highly respected House of Anansi an offer to publish the book in English. Sheila Fischman had brought it to their attention, saying she was prepared to undertake the translation, which for Anansi, as I later learned, represented a valuable endorsement. The episode, an utter and enchanting surprise for me, is typical of Sheila’s commitment to our writing. One can read something and love it, and one can read something and support it as she immediately did. There are those, and I am among them, who would equate the privilege of her mediation to the winning of a literary prize. But here we are confusing a transient honour with a true distinction. Sheila’s choices are for the duration. They come with tomorrows.

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She has translated all my fiction, both novels and stories. In doing so, she has introduced me to an astonishing exercise, an unexpected immersion in the inner workings of my own writing. Once my books are published, I never reread them. In fact I detest doing so; they vanish from my radar. A native of Abitibi with shallow roots and a corresponding memory, I prefer to move on. And so months after their appearance, Sheila would appear with an early draft of her translation, bristling with yellow stickers marking the places where she was querying a meaning, a term, a turn of phrase. In practice I endorsed all her suggestions. I marvelled at the way she was able to make her way through my circumlocutions, daring to distance herself from one image while proposing another that in English was limpid and just as effective, and I found myself relishing my reacquaintance with this half-forgotten text. I did find myself stumbling over the odd line or expression, and I invariably discovered, returning to my text, that I myself was the source of the ambiguity, the risk of misinterpretation, or the confusion. Style is and will remain for me a supreme priority, even if today, in the industrialized world of the book, it has taken on secondary importance. I could have been a bit humiliated by this exercise that challenged my own skills, but, on the contrary, it made me curious. There is no perfect form, not in literature, not in the arts. A translation that is also a work of literature leads us to acknowledge as much without its causing us any distress. Certainly, I could not perform the same exercise for a Finnish or Amharic translation of my writings; I could be made to say anything and its opposite, but it so happens that English is my second language, and the passage from one expression to the other also offers rich opportunities for a play of words. And I remain convinced, after having spent considerable time with literatures translated from many languages, that awkwardnesses will out. With Sheila, we may be assured that there are none, that we are being presented with the truth and with the authentic fountainhead of what the writer wanted, or tried, to say. From this particular and intense pleasure there stems another, grown stronger with the years. Twenty years ago, when I first began to write fiction, English was for me only a utilitarian, functional language. As a political journalist, I hoped to write correctly when invited by the English media, and I laboured to express myself in an acceptable fashion during the endless constitutional debates that preoccupied us from one sea to the other. What does Quebec want?

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The question offered endless possibilities; I sharpened my verbs and enriched my vocabulary by reading little more than an Atwood or a Laurence for their affinity with my former stomping ground, along with P.D. James for the road. But if I am a better reader today, I owe it to Sheila Fischman. Without our talking about it at length, she led me to at last appreciate the beauty and subtlety of her own language, heightened, and of registers that transcend the day-to-day. All languages are subtle and beautiful once we gain access to their genius, and it is not acceptable for a second language, freely employed, to be made light of. I even find myself feeling sorry for English (!) when I hear Montrealers and Parisians who have been smitten by it giving voice to the simplistic, utterly insignificant hodgepodge of globish that has irreversibly deformed it. If I have learned that, it is also because my translator is a poet, luminous and thoughtful. Now that I have become a student of literature able to pass theoretical writings through a fine-tooth comb, I know there exists such a thing as translation theory, and that it gives rise to works as erudite as they are indispensable to a world where multilingualism is both a problem and a promise. I see weighty questions, hard-fought and passionate debates, especially in our lands, Quebec and Canada, where languages face off against each other in an open-air laboratory, beneath the enduring political clouds and their attendant suspiciousness. Translation, between us, is not theory. But, happily, that is not my subject, and above all it is not my argument when I think of Sheila Fischman. Rather, I hew to the poetry – hers, and what she offers to our fiction.

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Translations D o m in iq u e Forti er Translated by Donald Winkler

Translator by chance and by circumstance, but above all by inclination, I never studied translation and have at times regretted it. I am aware, however, that the discipline, like all those taught in universities, has to its credit a large body of theoretical and critical texts that at its best sheds light on the practice and helps us to consider it more thoughtfully – and at its worst creates such a muddle that we are left perplexed. This body of knowledge is utterly foreign to me, but I know that its practitioners and professors may be divided, more or less, into two schools that could be defined, in legal terms, as partisans of the letter of the law on the one hand and of the spirit of the law on the other. The first school favours a respect for the words that make up the text, and the text’s rhythm, its form, its material nature, while the second seeks essentially to transmit the “content,” if need be through a process of adaptation. As one of the essential properties of a literary text is the form that itself imparts meaning, it is easy to see that things can become a trifle complicated, and that the two schools are not as far apart as one might first think. In fact, although it is relatively simple to determine whether the operating instructions for a hair dryer or a recipe for chocolate cake have been properly rendered into another language, it is much trickier to judge the quality and appropriateness of the translation of a novel, or, even more so, of a poem, invariably strewn with pitfalls.

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“Poetry,” said Robert Frost, “is what gets lost in translation.” But one might claim the exact opposite (some have done so) – that poetry is in the end the only thing that survives the test of translation. All the rest disappears: the words are of course not the same following the transition from one language to another; the syntactical structures have often been modified significantly; the sentences are different, as are their sounds and their rhythms. What remains is indeed the poetry – and I mean by that the spark that makes for the magic of a literary text, that endows it with its own irreducible character, to be found not only in the arrangement of words on the page but in the voice, in the author’s gaze, as meanings unfold in the mind of the reader, through a web of connotations and evocations created by the act of reading and the experience it offers. It is the survival of these elements that determines a translation’s degree of success. In his introduction to a work in which he discusses the experience of translation, Umberto Eco, falsely naïve, offers this definition of the process: “To translate is to say the same thing in another language” – before observing that every word in this sentence poses a problem. What exactly is the meaning of “same” when the words, the sentences, the entire text has changed? What is this “thing” that one claims to be expressing, and finally, what does the verb “to say” signify in this context? Eco soon shifts his ground, and modifies his definition by introducing a new element that is both more problematic and more interesting. To translate, he suggests, is to say almost the same thing in another language. For the world of translation is indeed that realm of “almost,” that intrusion of difference into what is alike. Translation is irrevocably an art of compromise, since the only way to render in their entirety, intact, the multiple meanings, connotations, echoes, and subtlest nuances of a text would be to faithfully transcribe it in the language in which it was originally written. (Now that I think of it, that has in all likelihood been the subject of a master’s thesis at some point. It would be worth checking out.) As soon as one abandons the original language of a text, one takes leave, as it were, of the world where it saw the light of day, the only world that could have given birth to it. Of course, there are some translated works whose authors affirm that they have the same ontological status as the original – notably, those of Milan Kundera, who claims that the French translations, supervised by himself, of his

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books written in Czech are in a certain sense second originals. It can even happen, infrequently, that the translation unseats the original. When I gave my fiancé the first pages of Sheila Fischman’s English translation of my fictional diary of Francis Crozier, one of the main characters of my book Du Bon usage des étoiles (On the Proper Use of Stars), he exclaimed (innocently, it would seem), “It’s even better than the French!” What he meant to say (as he later tried tactfully to explain, and I do give him a Brownie point for the “even”) is that since the real Francis Crozier on whom my character is based, second in command of Franklin’s last expedition in 1845, expressed himself in English and not in French, the words Sheila lent to him seemed not only appropriate but deeply natural. The translator had, beneath the French voice, uncovered the character’s English voice, as “true” as the one that I had invented, and in so doing translated that poetry I mentioned earlier on, and which in the end is the only thing worth preserving. The translator is a kind of super-reader, at times spending hours wrestling with a passage before appealing to the author, who will perhaps reply, “Oh, that paragraph! I don’t know why I wrote it like that. I should have split the idea in two,” or again, “That sentence doesn’t exactly say what I wanted to say; what I had in my head was more like … ” if not, bluntly, “I’m sorry I wrote those sentences. Cut them out.” As translator and novelist, I’ve known both sides of that conversation, which always astonishes me, given that novelistic creation and translation are such distinct arts. A translator may approach a work as if to some extent he sees it as a puzzle. Opening the box, he spreads the pieces out on the table, tries to reconstitute as best he can the image whose likeness he has in front of him, and has a sense of lèse-majesté when the author admits that this image can be changed, that it is neither entirely perfect nor entirely complete. That is why it is tantamount to treason for him when the work and the author disagree. In such an instance, most of the translators I know choose to be faithful to the work and consider that their first loyalty is there, and I cannot blame them, books being in general more coherent than the writers who have composed them. But if the translator is a super-reader, it is not only because he must read with maniacal attention but above all because he must labour to reproduce his experience in reading the original text in order to pass on the equivalent to whomever will read the translated work. To

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return to Eco’s definition, to translate is not so much “to say almost the same thing” as to “give someone almost the same thing to read,” which is completely different. What is important is no longer what the translator says but what the reader understands. And so the task is now dizzying: who is this unknown, singular, numberless reader for whom we are working? How to be sure that we are providing the necessary tools to arrive at the same understanding we had when reading the work in its original language? How to be sure, in certain cases, that we are not giving him too much? How to know whether our reading itself, our standard of measurement, is in fact valid? I have already described elsewhere my first lesson as a translator, but I would like to repeat it here, because it is an episode that altered forever my way of looking not only at translation but at writing. In a scene from “Gambler’s Fallacy,” a short story that lent its title to the collection of the same name, the author, Judith Cowan, describes a scene in which a man and his mother find themselves alone in the family house after the father’s death. The mother comes downstairs carrying in her hands something that Pierre does not see but assumes belonged to his father. To avoid confronting her or affronting her, he turns toward the television screen, “where a woman with a longhaired dog in her arms was waving to the camera.” The reader is then given access to the character’s thoughts: “Whatever his mother was holding in her hands was something she was going to try to give him. He noticed the dog was wearing a barrette between its ears.” In my first draft I translated the last sentence as “Le chien était affublé d’une barrette entre les oreilles.” The author instantly pointed out to me that the inescapable connotation of the verb “affubler,” with its disparaging implications, was absent from the English text. That did not mean that my “ironic” interpretation was mistaken; quite simply, it was implicit in what was left unsaid in the text, which was crucial, as it contributed to the scene’s tension where the character seems to be seeking a response and only finds a dog with a barrette. I had to provide the French reader with a scene that would give him this same impression without my imposing it; I had, in other words, not to substitute myself for the reader. A few months ago I experienced something similar, but in reverse, when working with a translator (no, it was not Sheila, she was on vacation; even translators have the right to take vacations) on the English text of a short story I had written some years earlier. In it a woman is waiting in a restaurant for her husband. In the original

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French: “Il y avait plus de deux ans qu’ils étaient mariés, ils s’étaient fréquentés près de trois ans auparavant, et pourtant elle continuait d’éprouver, en l’apercevant, une sorte de sursaut de joie, de surprise, presque.” The translator had rendered this as “They had been married for over two years and had dated for about three years before that, and still, every time she saw him her heart did that funny little somersault, almost as if she was surprised he was her husband.” The translator was right, of course, in that her reading was correct; the woman indeed marvelled that this man was her husband. But in a certain sense she was also wrong, since this interpretation ought not to have been handed to the readers; it was something for them to discover, to decode, to interpret on their own. In that context it is interesting to note that the word “interpreter” refers both to the person who “translates a text from one language to another” and the person who “explains, seeks to elucidate a text, a thought,” when these are two radically different activities. The art of translation consists wholly in knowing how to interpret without interpreting – in other words, in serving as the author’s representative without ceding to the temptation of being his commentator, in allowing readers the freedom they require to participate actively in the text without trying to decode it for them as though solving a problem. On the contrary, the text must remain the problem, or question, so that with it each reader may embark upon that dialogue wherein resides what is crucial to literature. As for the term “translation,” if we may easily grasp that, both in the language of Molière and that of Shakespeare, it can refer to the displacement of a geometric figure in space, it is less well known that in French it also refers to the movement of the planets about the sun, to the transferring of the body, the remains, or the ashes of a dead person from one place to another (or similarly, the transferring of a saint’s relics), and, finally, according to Pierre Riffard, to a curious occult phenomenon consisting in the “transport of the soul or a soul of a man into another body ... in a conscious and voluntary fashion, fractional and discriminating.” This operation, conscious, willed, and discerning, leading to a result that is necessarily incomplete, is not so far removed from the realm of “almost” that for Eco is the rightful domain of translation. And in the words “the soul or a soul,” we may of course hear the echo of that elusive poetry of which Frost spoke, both the only thing one cannot translate and the only thing one can truly translate. However that may be, it seems to me to offer a definition of translation as valid as any other.

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In a few words, their simplicity that of a poem, Virginia Woolf one day described the difficulty of writing as follows: “Never to be yourself, yet always.” It seems to me that this injunction, which is also a warning, applies to the translator as much as, or even more than, to the writer. He who translates can indeed never be wholly himself; and yet he must be, absolutely. He cannot forget himself and let himself be swept away by his desires, his impulses, or (what can I say?) inspiration, as an author has the freedom to do, but must on the contrary, like an actor portraying a character, have an acute awareness of his self, so as to shape it as he would some external material in order to breathe life into someone who is not him. In so doing, he must also preserve an essential part of his authenticity, the perfect pitch of his own voice, perhaps, that will serve him as a guide, and thanks to which the text will not be only a copy, a simple transference, but a new work. And doubtless the real test resides not in the first part of this statement but in the second. It is not so hard not to be oneself; it is in order to cease to be so for a few moments that, from time immemorial, people have written and read books. It is another matter entirely, when in the other’s world, speaking through the language, the mind, the imagination of this other, to be oneself still.

 I do not count myself among Sheila Fischman’s close friends, but we have shared a few meals together, in the course of which I felt her, most discreetly, observing me with her sparkling blue eyes, and attending not so much to my words as to the way I pronounced them, to what Proust called the “little music” unique to every writer. She was like an actor studying the model for a character she was preparing to embody on stage, and into whom she hoped to melt to the point of seeming to disappear. Last winter she told a journalist from the National Post, who was writing an article on literary translation, “If I have a voice of my own, it absolutely must not appear,” meaning that she works rather to transmit, as clearly as possible, the voice of the author. It is a goal she achieves brilliantly, whether the author is Michel Tremblay, Kim Thúy, Sylvain Trudel, or Anne Hébert. As for knowing whether she herself possesses a voice: it is clear to all that Sheila Fischman has not one voice but a hundred, those she has lent and continues to lend to writers who for some forty years have had the good fortune to see their books take on a second life, thanks to her genius.

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All You Read Is Love Jean Paré Translated by Donald Winkler

Forty years ago, when the Literary Translators’ Association was created at Carleton-sur-mer in the Gaspé, its founding members included the late Philip Stratford, Patricia Claxton, Naïm Kattan, Michelle Tisseyre, myself, and among a few others, a young woman, Saskatchewan born, who had already translated Roch Carrier and would in due course be rendering into English Hubert Aquin, MarieClaire Blais, Victor Lévy-Beaulieu. Sheila Fischman’s translations were soon being acclaimed for their great fidelity not only to the letter but to the spirit of both the writers and the French-Canadian − or Québécois, as one was beginning to say − reality. Not only was her work of the highest calibre but the range of Quebec literature that she was about to make available to EnglishCanadian readers was unprecedented. Her bibliography of translated work contains “around 150 titles,” a short-hand that absolves one of having to update it each year. To this Herculean production must be added articles, debates, and talks that have contributed to Quebec literature’s being recognized throughout Canada and also internationally, wherever English is spoken. Wherever Canada’s French-language literature is studied, the English texts bear the name Sheila Fischman. She is less well known in Quebec, which is natural, as we read the books in the original, but she is a celebrity in English Canadian and American literary circles.

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Fischman, who writes and speaks an impeccable French, has done more than anyone else to disseminate French-language Quebec literature beyond our borders. Especially where there is a modest population base, a literature is born not only thanks to the quality of the work but through its distribution. Quebec literature today is alive in the outside world, in French, of course, but also in English, and Sheila Fischman has been an important factor in making that happen. And one may also add in other languages, because it is often through the English translation that foreign editors come to know these works. We would do a disservice to the work of translators and their influence if we thought that their task was only to transpose words, sentences, texts, novels, poems, essays, biographies, from one language to another. The role of the translator consists also, and even primarily, in exploring an entire literature, following its evolution, selecting its landmark works, alerting publishers to them, and developing a good working relationship with those publishers in order to exert influence in the long term. Translation is not a restful occupation, whatever amateurs may imagine. We write nicely in our own language, and we know another − but never as well as we think. And because the publisher offers us a contract, or because we like a book, we embark. And we produce a pleasant book, enjoyable to read but not always faithful to the author’s intents. And even less to the world and the culture he is describing. I am not familiar with the challenges that a translation from the Chinese, Japanese, Russian, or Finnish might entail, but I know that English and French are two languages that are closely related in terms of syntax and vocabulary but use the same words to describe different and sometimes opposite things. I am tempted to see there an explanation for the political conflicts between the two Canadas. A Quebec politician gets people’s backs up when he “demands” things one can discuss more calmly when we “ask” for them. We must one day analyze the disastrous set-tos provoked by words as simple as “spécial.” Faux amis, false friends are, in translation, traitors. Reading translations by writers who know the language but do not know the ins and outs of the society, the institutions, or the customs described in the work, I always find myself trying to reconstitute the original! When I was asked to render The Gutenberg Galaxy into French, what concerned me the most was not the scope of the book with its leaps across centuries, literary genres, and a number of

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sciences, nor its hundreds of quotations from different authors that had to be translated as well, but the fear of making the sorts of gaffes that professional translators collect in order to add spice to a conversation. Dozens of translations later, I am still haunted in the same way by those “gems” that I continue to unearth in many translations. No, a pound cake is not a half-kilo of gâteau, and a Rhodes scholarship is not a degree from the University of Rhodes. If the “press” in the eighteenth-century Royal Navy sparked wars, it was not because of a recrutement urgent. It is not surprising that a Parisian translator discovering daims (fallow deer) and lapins à raquettes (for snowshoe hare − lièvre d’Amérique) in the Témiscouata woods would also have Grey Owl, who was tortured by love, saying “le Fleuve du Tendre roula pour nous des eaux désespérément plates.” Archie Belaney had certainly not read Madame de Scudéry’s Clélie – at least not in the original. More recently I discovered that an English snob wanting to contemplate the Elgin marbles was, in the French translation, looking to purchase a sculpture by Elgin. We cannot translate Parisian argot by resorting to cockney or slang, or “québécois” by using Provençal or berrichon. We must guard against idiomatic expressions that have resulted in so many tasses de thé (not my cup of tea) and canards boiteux (lame ducks, but not necessarily limping), and a French that is pouilleux (lousy, but not, I daresay, with lice). How to translate Céline, Genêt, without making mistakes in casting? Or Joyce, or Gauvreau? Just try the title La charge de l’orignal épormyable, or names like Laura Pa or Beckett Bobo. There are doubtless things there that cannot be translated, where the reader would be better off learning the language! And yet the Italians have tried. A great translator, La Harpe, wrote in a 1773 preface to his Suetonius: “If the first requirement of a translation is that it be a faithful copy of the original, then it is safe to say that only writers without genius can truly be translated.” And yet we immerse ourselves in Tolstoy without knowing Russian, in Goethe or Kafka without knowing German, in Cervantes without speaking Spanish, thanks to the patient work of research and revision by famous translators. We must not forget that among the foot soldiers of literature that we translators are, there have been great writers such as Philippe Jaccottet (Mann, Rilke, Musil) or Yves Bonnefoy (Shakespeare), or in this country, Jean Simard. Even Voltaire tried his hand at Shakespeare, with the prejudices of the time and the obligation to

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write in alexandrines. If writers are often good translators, it is because “writing is for them a requirement of the soul, and not a craft of convenience”: so said La Harpe. How to avoid the worst? There is the context, Frank Scott instructed us in his introduction to a translation of Anne Hébert. But what is the context? Many things: it is the culture, the period, the social status of the characters. But also the level of language, the regional variations, the nature of the work: a drama, a comedy, a satire. The rhythm: French alexandrines, English iambs. The characters, the images, the oral fabric. The translator is a factotum: he must know his language, of course, and the original language, something not always obvious, the author if possible, his culture, and that of the work’s setting; he must avoid anachronisms, paraphrases, facile shortcuts. He must be a virtuoso to render all styles, all voices, all rhythms, despite the differences in language structure, to render at all costs the author’s style, while staying in the background so as not to interfere. A text can be too well groomed as well as badly groomed. To have something read, to have something loved. We cannot get around a problem by writing something else: for the author, it is possible, but the translator does not have the right. The author does his skating freestyle. The translator is restricted to the compulsory figures. McLuhan told me to adapt Understanding Media or Counterblast, to “appropriate” the book. It is a feasible and acceptable approach for theatrical experiments or multimedia, but not for the book, not for what I had in hand. His readers had the right to read McLuhan’s McLuhan, not that of some Tom, Dick, or Harry. Rereading himself in French, would McLuhan have experienced what Jorge Semprun called “the ineffable sadness of something lacking, a feeling of helplessness”? Would he have discovered, like Kundera twenty-five years after The Joke, that in French the book was not the one he had written and had doubtless merited him the regime’s persecution? What to think about those bestsellers chopped into a dozen parts and handed to as many pieceworkers to get them on the market more quickly (the first translation of Doctor Zhivago)? The translator does more than transpose: he passes on knowledge and is a bridge between cultures and across ages. It is through Jacques Amyot that the French who did not know Greek and Latin read the Ancients. It is through Thomas North, translator of Plutarch and Marcus Aurelius, that the actor Shakespeare discovered the ancient heroes.

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And yet translators are the great forgotten ones of literature – perhaps because the craft is of relatively recent vintage. Up to the Renaissance, when all the philosophers and “sages” spoke Latin, all of Europe knew the same things. It was the revolt against Rome, the fragmentation of religions, the rise of nationalisms, and the growth of so-called common languages, that, by isolating the centres of knowledge, made possible diversity and differences, a rejection of the past, allowed for progress. The only institution that remained loyal to Latin was the one that did not evolve. The decline of Latin created translators. The translator’s task became crucial. Previously, not much more than Hebrew and Greek had been translated. Henceforth facilitators would become necessary, links between cultures. Sheila Fischman is one of those links. A writer as well, she masters her own language, but she has an impeccable command of the one whose culture she translates. She is immersed in it, lives with it, lives from it. She does not write from Vladivostok, Edinburgh, SaintGermain-des-Prés, or Canberra.

P o s t S c r ip tum In Quebec we translate more from French than from English. Our writers reap the benefits of that. Thank you, Sheila and your colleagues. Less from English into French: of course, many cultivated readers can read in the original language. But that does not rule out the likelihood of a quasi-atavistic resistance. It’s unfortunate, because our country is positioned to be a great translation centre, and not only between its two mutually suspicious halves. Some translators have succeeded in making a career in France, a private reserve, like many intellectual domains. But the power of publishers also counts for a lot. Perhaps one is wary of the most visible translation activity in this country, that of the appalling language to be found in operating instructions, the labels for foods and medicines, in product names (especially) and their slogans, in government reports. Translations whose quality is endorsed by merchants and politicians as long as there are two parallel columns of exactly the same length, where one finds the same words, the same faux amis. Ah! English is so much shorter than French, I’ve been told a thousand times. Yes, of course, shorter than bad translations …

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Sheila’s Bridges and Cuisine Lo u ise D esjardi ns Translated by Donald Winkler

I knew her before knowing her, from having heard her mentioned often by Léon Bellefleur, my painter father-in-law of the 1970s, who himself knew her through his merry friends in North Hatley, where Sheila lived at the time. We doubtless rubbed shoulders during one of those well-oiled and convivial post-vernissages. Later, toward the end of the 1980s, when I was enrolled at the University of Sherbrooke, my professor in comparative Canadian literature was her ex-husband, the poet and translator of poetry D.G. Jones. Sheila was known in our circles for being the translator who forged links between French-language Quebec novelists and their English Canadian readers, and who, in so doing, built bridges between the two communities. I had to wait until the end of the 1990s before we met in person, and it was the singer Pauline Julien who was responsible. Pauline had a house in North Hatley, and, along with the Giguères, was part of the high-spirited Eastern Townships band. “You should talk to Sheila Fischman,” she managed to tell me, despite her aphasia. And the contact was made, I think, during a cocktail party thrown by Leméac, my then publisher. Sheila introduced herself between two hors d’oeuvres, and set up a meeting at her home. “I have a good story to tell you,” she declared, her eyes sparkling, her French impeccable. And so it was that a few days later I passed through the front door of her warm house on Clark Street, which she shares with her

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husband, Don Winkler, and which I immediately baptized la maison du bonheur, the house of happiness, because of the aroma of jam-inthe-making that greeted me as I stepped inside. This was almost fifteen years ago, and since that first encounter, many books and meals have flowed under the bridge of friendship. Because Sheila is first and foremost a loyal friend whose generosity, frankness, humour, and intelligence always charm me. During the intense period of research for my biography of Pauline Julien, I was still living in Rouyn-Noranda, and to conduct my interviews I had to travel back and forth on a regular basis between Abitibi and Montreal. Generously, Sheila offered to have me stay with her during my long visits. What I did not then know was that, in welcoming me into her maison de bonheur, she was making me part of the family. And so I was showered with kindness and rewarded with some very stimulating chats. She talked to me at length about Pauline Julien, whom she had known in North Hatley, and told me an anecdote she had already recounted in a literary magazine, so much had it impressed her: Pauline, during a party, had danced on the table in a North Hatley dining room! I included this anecdote in the biography I was writing. And then we moved on to other matters, to the writers we knew, to their books, to our childhoods and our teen years. And above all, something that always gives writers pleasure, Sheila told me she liked my novels. Because Sheila is an avid reader of everything written in Quebec. Books form part of Sheila and Don’s hospitality, and without hesitation they threw open to me their personal library. Everything published in Quebec and the rest of Canada, whether novel, poetry, or non-fiction, is arranged in alphabetical order on their bookshelves. There I discovered a whole swathe of Quebec writing that had escaped me: English-Quebec literature. I realized that east of Saint Lawrence Boulevard or in my distant region there were very few anglo-Québécois books on the shelves. From the moment Sheila opened up her house, her heart, and her bookshelves to me, I began to appreciate this reality: Quebec literature is “also” to be found in English Montreal. Leonard Cohen, for example, is a Quebec writer, something one does not often recognize. Is Gabrielle Roy, born in Manitoba, more “Québécoise” than Leonard Cohen? As we talked, we happily laced our bookish exchanges with recipes for pasta or rabbit. Sheila talked to me about her sisters, I talked about my brothers; we sometimes grappled with translation problems that

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we only halfway resolved, because real translation problems always stay afloat in the air like clouds that are stalled in the sky, insoluble. There are sometimes coincidences and complicities that surprise us, to our delight. I am an enthusiastic fan of Margaret Atwood, of the poet Atwood in particular, whose collections Power Politics and The Door I translated, as well as the snake poems in Interlunar. Sheila, who knows Atwood, told me anecdotes about Peggy and complemented my reading with Red Shoes, the Atwood biography that I devoured, thanks again to a loan from the Winkler-Fischman library. We discovered one day that we both loved Johnny Cash, and I was given as a gift the DVD of Walk the Line, which we had gone to see together, breathless as teenagers. Despite our different origins and cultures, I have never felt like an outsider in Sheila’s company. Always her own person, with her own convictions, she has the ability and the intelligence to be able to feel her way into the worlds of others. One day she served me, as though it were the most natural thing in the world, a delicious traditional meal (with Sheila there is always a meal) for the Jewish New Year, and I felt as if I were eating a fantastic Christmas supper minus the log and the tourtières. Sheila is a generous translator who is always happy to lend a hand to apprentices like myself. When I translated Margaret Atwood’s collection The Door, she agreed to do the revision with me, word for word, lending the French text greater exactitude in tone, more in keeping with the original version. And in the same vein, I can confess that although I always wanted my books to be translated by Sheila, I never dared ask her directly. From time to time she told me that she had proposed my texts to publishers but with no result. But last year the miracle happened. She has translated my novel So Long, which is appearing with Cormorant, to my great delight. She came to my house, and we spent an entire afternoon going over her translation. She asked questions, made suggestions, and before my eyes revealed to me a book that I was seeing from a different angle, as though the story I had told in French had become deeper and clearer in another language. To translate, one sometimes has to understand things the author herself has not completely understood. Sheila, with her bridges of translation, is endowed with this marvellous capacity to grasp the impalpable. And to bring everything together around a bountiful table on certain winter evenings ...

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Dear Sheila, translation and cuisine are good companions, two complementary ways to open oneself to the world, to embrace the unknown, to bring people close. Human beings need these bridges, not only in politics and economics but also to share the thoughts and feelings that drive literature around the world, literature that is at our beck and call thanks to the magic of translation.

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In the Moon’s Wings M élan ie Géli nas Translated by Donald Winkler

Reading the translation of Anne Hébert’s Burden of Dreams1 was like falling in love. First because of the title. And then I wanted to meet the woman who was so skilled at translating “this confused discourse of ours, as yet but a murmur in the darkness.”2 Unpoetically, I wove my way between glasses and canapés at a Canada Council prize-giving. I felt naked. I was wearing Kickers on my feet, like a clumsy child ready to kick goals. I did not have a pretty dress, I had prepared no speech. I simply wanted to meet the translator of Anne Hébert to ask her to read my first novel. I was on the verge of melting into the floor in a swoon before the honoured guest. A hostess, alert to my discomfort, asked me kindly, “Would you like to meet Madame Fischman?” (Cold sweat.) I said yes. The hostess headed off, scurried left, right, like an ant. At the end of the evening, I was told that Sheila Fischman knew I was there, waiting.

 A writer secretly dreams that her book will revolutionize the universe, that it is the fluttering of a wing that will determine what the future will hold.

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A great dreamer, I am not immune to this sort of optimism. Before the publisher had even signed my contract for the book, I was already thinking ahead to the translation,3 which for me was like wishing for the moon, for the decisive wing beat that would guarantee me a writing career. Obviously, my first opus, in coming into the world, only disturbed a bit of dust, and I had to concede that it would take many more before the language of Shakespeare came courting. And yet, despite that, I wanted to go the limit with this book, on my terms: I wanted it to be translated into English as a symbolic gesture, because I had dedicated my novel to an individual whom I refer to in the book as the “executioner,” and because I had been forced to plead, in a language that was not my own, not to be killed. It is in English that I cried out my desire to live, and I could never deny that being able to speak English literally saved my life one particular day. In my unhappiness, it became clear to me that the compassion I was able to elicit from that foreign other, a monster, had something to do with my command of his language. And this experience marked me deeply.

 As promised, she arrived, surrounded by her family. She was slight, elegant, without pretension. A great lady with no glass slippers. She said, “I adore your shoes.” And, without dissimulating her fatigue at having talked so much, she looked me straight in the eyes. I felt truly naked. And it was not easy to be naked before someone you revere, before so many canapés, Canada Council hostesses, and members of the Fischman family. I had to say something intelligent; my good-luck shoes could do nothing for my existential dilemma. This is how it came out: “I’ve written a book and my dream would be for you to translate it.” (Cold sweat ...) “Well, I’ll read it.” Her smile was still there. She took my padded envelope, and then she asked someone nearby to take a photo of us. She also had nerve!

 Translation is the precocious child who imitates you.

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He is a pest, but if he is excellent, he tells you something about yourself. He strips away masks, coverings, disguises. He finds the word’s true essence and reveals it, he is inventive, and he reproduces the same magic in another language. Translation inspires in oneself a humility beyond understanding, so much is one stripped naked before the other narrative, which one could not oneself have written in any other way. And it is easy to imagine how humiliating it might be were the original text distorted. The gap between humility and humiliation is no wider than a word, and the translator in her way is a tightrope walker whose tour de force is to negotiate a straight line along the tightwire of fidelity. Fidelity to the author, to her language, but also fidelity to the translator, to her language. It is great art. It is reading taken to new heights. What is the translator if not a utopian reader? This is what disorients the writer when he meets his translator: that the utopian reader exists. The writer who can read in the language of the translator, his other author, feels an uneasy strangeness creep over him, of almost Freudian dimensions, when the door of translation half-opens onto his nakedness. He will say that it is as though someone were there, in the night, watching him write! The translator reinvents a universe that the writer has worked to create in solitary secrecy, with the only words at his disposal. Unable to do anything else. The translation process is a tour de force allowing for a confrontation between what could have been said and what was impossible to say. It is the most democratic of exercises, a perfect emulation: with translation the world opens, literally, onto the primal truth of the writer. A gaze of thousands of eyes, beamed through the doorway, onto the word made work of art. The translator carries the word, as the mother carries twin children.

 There is the translator Fischman, but there is the woman Sheila, as private as a great writer, whom I have learned to know over time, and who charms me. If my imagination were to turn her into a character, she would straddle the figures of godmother and muse as friend. Sheila loves the arts and our artists, because she has great admiration for the work of writers, and I would say, to quote Octave Uzanne, that

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Sheila is here “the poet’s Friend,”4 a perfect allegory for an amicable pact between the solitudes. In order to translate them, it seems that Sheila must know her writers, must enter into their lives to hear the texture of their voices. That is what she surreptitiously did with me: enter my life, never to leave it. But Sheila has not translated my book. She has become a friend. And our friendship developed once the question of the novel receded.

 My singular experience of the Canadian linguistic duality, the great “national” paradox, has shaped me, despite myself. It even seemed, as I was writing, that it was still coursing through my body. In other words, to ask an anglophone not to kill me, and to find myself caught between two languages in doing so, made for a most interesting metaphor, and I believe Sheila instantly understood this and that it was for that reason she said my novel was “dangerous.” Of course, I do not consider English to be my executioner, not even in my imagination, but in a play of crossed meanings, I deliberately connected my story in the novel to that of my linguistic homeland. Translation into English seemed to be a crucial question, linked to the very fate of my writer’s voice in America: would translation help me to overcome that sense of solitude so wedded to my identity? Putting all that together was a literary and philosophical game. And I do not see it giving me any answers. I do, however, find it remarkable that Sheila lent herself to this exercise, if only in her enunciation of a pious hope. Certainly, the enemy is not English. I am all the more persuaded of that since writing my book: the enemy is within us, it is the French we do not know, like a knowledge to which we are blind, and eats away at us despite ourselves. The enemy is the wounded language against which I have battled with all my strength, through writing, and which appeared before me in all its obscurity, as though it were a stranger. The clash between these inner forces taught me that one must passionately love one’s mother tongue in order to learn to know it supremely well, and that this truth is more important than the shameful lie of fearing the other at any price. Translation was for me a utopia of the word. It would bestow upon me what I had been missing in my unhappiness: the intercession of a witness, an interpreter.

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Sheila, as a friend, would have liked to lend her voice as a translator to my work, to help me, in her way, in my quest for peace.

 She has always stipulated: “Please, I’m Sheila, not Madame Fischman!” We are worlds apart, and yet our mutual sympathy is unconditional. She is my friend through letters, sometimes electronic, sometimes postal. She shares her enthusiasms and is curious about my own. Between opera festivals in New York State and summer correspondences in the beautiful village of Eastman, we inveigh, with the same impotence, against the proliferation of red insects that mercilessly gnaw at the leaves in our gardens. Between two computer crashes and the need for silence, we go on at length about lectures, exhibitions, or marriage. We are “gastro-cultural” accomplices, to borrow one of her apt expressions.

 It is in one’s mother tongue that one expresses oneself most truly. And yet, in the very fibres of my being, nothing changed: from its first appearance in 2008 I wanted my book translated. Why? If telling this story was central to healing my divided self, it had to be done in my mother tongue. But to tell it properly presented a sizable problem: that chapter of my life took place in English. The knotting of violence and peace was there. How to undo that knot? I wanted to talk about my FrenchCanadian identity, my language, the role of women in society. Out in the open. And when I was told to be patient and to wait my turn, I nodded my head but did not listen to reason. Translation was important to this book and had nothing to do with its commercial success. Writing my novel, I sought a truce between my executioner’s mode of expression and my own. I thought: if our survival depended on it, would it not influence our desire to live in the English language? To keep our memory as a people alive, must we not also live in English? These are questions I addressed in writing my novel, because I wondered if one day my words might reach my executioner. Would he hear me one day, in my language, would he see me such as I am? Such as I was? Such as I survived him?



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If one were to unearth one day, in the great virtual dumping ground of correspondence, Sheila’s emails, one might read there the following fragments, an extraordinary potpourri: “Films at the Cinéma du Parc. An editing5 session in the garden, when the plants take over everything. I cannot imagine you doing such a thing. Soupe au pistou, in industrial quantities. I also have some jars of borscht and asparagus soup. I’ll talk to D. and we’ll pick a date for the four of us to have dinner together. Do you make the famous beer can chicken? I don’t eat beef tongue (or that of any other creature). I don’t like tripe either. D. eats everything, but he’s not crazy about beets. Honesty trumps protocol. Did you read my Christmas story? We’ve closed the cottage. If a human being could remain in his armchair with a good book and a glass of red wine, everyone would be safer. I tripped (shoelace). It is torture, recognized by the court at the Hague, to send photos of yourselves in the south of France! A postvacation BBQ? Of course, I’ll throw a penny in the lake! What a beautiful gift; I’m very moved. I like your moth very much, in which one can see other images, of almost naked women, for example. Quite a bestiary! What is important is to be together and to talk.”

 We wished each other a “happy spring” while griping about the gloomy days of rain, except for the garden, relishing the pleasure of sleeping and reading and making jam to relax, a very zen exercise, according to Sheila: “Strawberries first, then peaches or plums or whatever comes next.” More photos exchanged of my lilies full of phytophagous beasties or of “cottage cats.” “I particularly like the one of a chubby cat stretching, his claws planted in the window screen.” “That’s Lilu, the big cat, less photogenic than his sister Lili.” Often, after periods of silence, I find myself answering, “It’s hard, Sheila. This novel is giving me trouble, it’s an ordeal and I’m afraid in my gut of not being able to make it. But I throw myself into it every day, hoping for the saving breakthrough. Thank you for your friendship, it encourages me.” If I think I am alone at my table, she reminds me that she is there where the door is ajar, or perhaps taking a peek through the keyhole. My metaphysical Sheila, who answers “present!” in all its truthfulness: “I have nothing intelligent to say about your novel, your ordeal, but I have confidence in you, especially because the writing is so

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difficult at the moment.” She talks to me of reading: “To read is never work, it’s as essential as oxygen.” She says of the craft of translation, “Not a very literary occupation.” And on each side, we believe in something unifying, the book, in its potential for changing the ailing, melancholy, and divided world, one word at a time. In any case, she has me believing that one must try to touch as many hearts as possible, “the heart of man,” “the heart of the target,” as Gaston Miron said, with what is most simple in oneself, even if it remains a “broken solitude.”

 To pay homage to you, I had to talk about how you listen, about your humour. Your way of entering into the lives of those who write, and of leaving an indelible mark. For you are an exceptional woman. Your work is rich, a product of your kindly nature. Whether it be an established writer or a novelist at the start of her career, you read your authors with the same attention, with the same devotion. It is this contact that binds you to the books, contact with people and with lives, and not with contracts. Whatever our books say, from the moment they are exposed to the light, you defend them as if they were your own children, and it is your great generosity toward artists that made me want to believe that there was a place for me within my country’s literature. That is your talent: you make a gift of the arts, a gift of your words from one language to the other.

 Finally, Sheila, if my translation has no future in the firmament of literature, it is the irrefutable proof of your great generosity, your radiant spirit, and your commitment to writers as expressed through your language. For me you are the person who is able, better than anyone, to inhabit our most secret solitudes, and to make each book, in a gesture full of humanity, an impossible gift.

Not e s 1 Title of the translation of Hébert’s novel L’Enfant chargé de songes.

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2 Hébert, “Poetry, Broken Solitude,” in Poems by Anne Hébert, translated by Alan Brown (Don Mills: Musson 1975), 48. 3 Compter jusqu’à cent (Montreal: Éditions Québec Amérique 2008). 4 Octave Uzanne, Son altesse la femme (Paris: A. Quantin 1885), 33. 5 Italics in English in the original.

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Editing Sheila Fischman James P olk

I realized I was living a bilingual lie when I began editing literary translations from the Quebec French into English at House of Anansi Press in the early 1970s. Like most Ontario anglophones, I thought my French would do, thank you; I had, after all, minored in French literature in university, where I had an inborn, pointless gift for memorizing grammar charts. By graduation, I could parse the pluperfect and conditional perfect in varying unexpected, possibly illegal positions, and I had written stately essays on Racine’s prosody and Baudelairean evil. None of this qualified me for working with the experimental, wild, liberated, glowing, often zany prose style of the Velvet Revolution, and I read my first Aquin and Ducharme novels with mounting terror. What was I getting into? But this was the Golden Age in CanLit, with the primitive, raffish, no-money Anansi riding off in all directions, a communal gathering where the staff shunned business expertise, smoked up, and charged $1.85 for books for The Good of the People. I’d be editing the translation. French word for English word, eh? Hey man, how hard could it be? Fortunately, Sheila Fischman, though born in Moose Jaw and raised in Ontario, knew the Québécois language like a native and wrote a fluent, crystalline English to boot. As it turned out, all I had to do was read the beautifully produced Quebec originals, with their big type and glossy French flaps, and then try her translation, and occasionally look up things in Larousse to make sure. If I sussed out anything wooden, or off, or just plain wrong in the English, I flagged it, and Sheila either revised or explained her reasoning, giving me an education in the translator’s craft that no university could equal. Our Anglo-French partnership lasted decades and embraced such now-classic authors as Roch Carrier, Jacques Poulin, Anne Hébert,

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Michel Tremblay, and many another. In fact, Anansi’s bestsellers were Sheila’s work: La Guerre, Yes Sir! and of course, The Hockey Sweater, with that little Englished phrase now on the Canadian fivedollar bill, translation as national currency. Specific problems could be bizarre. In Poulin’s wonderful “Jimmy” trilogy, the young protagonist uses zouave to mean “cool,” which we left as is, but then there was crotte de chat, recurrent slang, which was a tough call. “Catshit” seemed too visceral for a good boy to say, “cat doo-doo” too jejune. Cat droppings? Dirt? (Perhaps just leave it in the French? But what is translation for, then?) Would a kid or anybody ever say “excrement of cat”? After months of Socratic dialogue on this, Sheila pointed out that no one in Canada would believe two of the nation’s literary minds were so engaged – but step by grotty step, thus is a solid translation achieved. (Our choice, “cat crap” still makes me uneasy: a bit too hardened and young-offender for the context. Some things just get lost in translation.) Of course, the translator’s art is not only about needle-stitching the right words onto a blank muslin context. French and English are worlds apart in tonalities, sounds, undercurrents, and nuances. Try feeding a foreign text into Google Translation, and you can get a slab of machine-made Martian gobbledy-gook. I have looked at many a reconstituted text by aspiring Fischmans, even by linguistic adepts or native speakers, and have come to believe that translating is a gift, a talent as rare as writing a readable, living, breathing novel. You just know, sometimes, that the original is much better, more alive beneath the translation’s beige shroud of boring word choices. A real translation is a symbiosis, the original shape recognizable but transfigured into a new living organism. It should work, but on its own terms. Take, for example, Sheila’s many translations of Roch Carrier: the droll humour is always there, but also the dark edges and the steely satirical veins lurking underneath are strategically suggested in an alien language. It’s scary, sheer alchemy. We often discussed the vexed question of lapses in the French originals. Had author or editor simply stepped out for a Montreal smoked lunch? Should the translator rewrite, and with luck, improve? The argument is classic: recently I read in the TLS about some translations of the latest Nobel Prize winner, with charges of “arbitrary changes” by the translator “in a language he does not seem to understand.” The accused one shoots back that everybody takes liberties; should we not go for the best possible version for the

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British reader? What if one rewrote, or cut something in the French, I often commented, nudgingly, for who would ever know? Sheila, to her credit, would not be tempted. A genuine translator does not improve, but recreates. It’s an iron rule. Over the decades, book by book, some 150 titles, Sheila has produced by now a unique Quebec literary saga for us anglophones, a stand-alone work on its own, a Fischman roman fleuve that should be seen as a national epic. She recreates the French version, yes, but also transforms it into our version. Translation is a difficult and evanescent art, and only the very best emerge with versions of the classics that become classics unto themselves: Constance Garnett’s Dostoevsky is still the real Dostoevsky for me, although Victorian and occasionally inaccurate. But in her versions alone does the Russian original spring into a new but faithful life, though Slavic scholars quibble. Many translators keep hammering away at Proust, but Scott-Moncrieff’s early manifestation still haunts, no matter how many more “accurate” accounts of the French, with proper pluperfects and more precisely rendered perversions, are brought forward. Few translators can instil their own voice into the restricted corset of a set text, while retaining the echoes and music of the original. Sheila is one of these magicians, and when you see her byline on a book, you know you are getting a real read, not the zombie substitute. Sheila and I soon became close friends, even quasi-family. There was no choice, really, given our absorption in the texts and our deep knowledge of the once-minuscule Canadian literary community. I often visited the Fischman family cottage near Kingston and admired the modest Victorian general store that her father, Sam, had operated for many years, a Jewish force in the tiny, W AS P y Ontario town of Elgin. I spent many a weekend by their lake, reading, editing, gossiping with drop-in guests (Al Purdy, no less), drinking vin rouge, and dishing the crotte. I once helped an uncle search for his false teeth underneath the furniture as we sat a family shiva. I got to know the other amazing Fischman sisters, Rheta-Helen and Marilyn (Minnie), accomplished and brilliant and creative in their own fields. This is not the place to track the complex relationship of the three Fischman sisters – where is Chekhov when you need him? – but there is no question that the triumvirate has been essential to Sheila’s well-being throughout her life. Another solid strength is her longtime partner, Don Winkler, filmmaker extraordinaire, known for his NFB documentaries about our cultural greats – Irving Layton,

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Ralph Gustafson, Frank Scott, Robert Lepage – and a prize-winning translator in his own right. Translator, friend, educator – and, also, I have come to realize, a political figure, Sheila has been indispensable in fostering real cultural understanding in our often fragile and bewildered Confederation. She has purveyed Quebec’s literature and culture to the Other Solitude like a literary Laura Secord bringing the word to the English about what’s really going on over there. For decades she has introduced, praised, and promoted, cajoling English-Canadian publishers to try out a new Quebec talent. She has brokered agreements and forged cross-cultural liaisons, and generously given a boost to talented newer translators: Larry Shouldice, David Lobdell, David Homel. She was co-founder, with Doug Jones, of ellipse, the distinguished translation journal out of Sherbrooke; she founded the Literary Translators’ Association; she has won surely every possible relevant award, often several times, and publicized her constituency in reviews and articles. I sometimes meet her at the Giller Prize events, where, amidst the glitz and TV cameras, she enthusiastically tells me of the latest must-read, the quintessential new if quixotic Montreal literary press. What would Canada be without her? Her spirit, her élan (there is no English for this one) have fired these amazing achievements, and I am reminded of the first time I met her, in Montreal long ago (we were but children), at one of those grey literary events of acid wine, teeny sandwiches, no heat, and terse literati anxious to escape to a thermostat. It was a formidable group: John Glassco, Earle Birney, Margaret Atwood, Michael Gnarowski, Clark Blaise, George Bowering, Doug Jones, et al. Sheila shone. She, almost alone, was full of plans, energetic, bright, articulate, and at ease with this chilled and chilly crowd. When introduced, I asked her naively if she was a translator, or an author or some third kind of literary celebrity, and she said, with that dazzling Fischman smile, that she didn’t quite know yet. Now I know. Everybody does. All three.

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Sheila Fischman and the True Nature of Federalism: A Fable Ka r l Siegler

Talonbooks started publishing English Canadian translations of the work of the father of the Québécois language, Michel Tremblay, beginning with Les Belles Soeurs in 1975, the year after I joined the publisher as its business manager and partner. Back then, I thought it a mistake for us to publish under its francophone title an English translation of this seminal play, the one that had legitimized joual and thereby the whole culture of all those who spoke it. Why? Because the French title lent the book a patina of foreignness, I asserted.1 From a business point of view, this would hurt the sales of its English translation in anglophone bookstores. From a political point of view, it substantiated the prejudice, crafted so exquisitely by Hugh MacLennan in his eponymous 1945 novel, that Canada as a country was an admonitory national exemplum of Greek tragedy – that it consisted of “two solitudes” that, through circumstances dictated purely by Euripidean fate rather than Aristotelian justice, would remain forever irreconcilable. Having read Two Solitudes as a teenager, taking due note of the fact that it had been written two years before I was born and was considered “important” by my father as well as my teachers at school, I found the novel as circumstantially suspect as its characters, who thought and acted in as obviously “old-fashioned” a way as the authority figures who had recommended the book to me. And as with all adolescents, only one thing was important at this crucial juncture of my life: to adopt an unshakable degree of certainty about my own nascent identity as an adult that would be as far removed as possible from that of my neither francophone nor anglophone immigrant parents’ generation.

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The progressives among us were, after all, proudly living in what was then the newly minted postcolonial Canada of Pierre Elliott Trudeau, and by “postcolonial” we meant, out here on the West Coast, liberated from the modern imperialist threat of the American doctrine of manifest destiny, the racism and classism of the British Empire, and the last remaining vestiges of antique French colonial elitism. And besides, wasn’t Trudeau a good friend of Fidel Castro, hadn’t he promised officially bilingual and multicultural Canadians a just society based on national unity and participatory democracy? And hadn’t John Lennon assured us, on our very own Canadian soil, that “if all politicians were like Pierre Trudeau, there would be world peace”? I mean, sure, he’d also invoked the War Measures Act to deal with those nasty FLQ terrorists, but wasn’t that the sworn duty of all heads of state governing under an explicit people’s mandate of “peace, order and good government”? Even our new metric system touted the fact of our “difference” from our feudal past. Henceforth, we Canadians, confirmed in our freshly forged urbane and cosmopolitan bohemianism, would take our own measure of the emerging global village in which we, and no one else, were to own the resources under our sovereign feet. No more imperial British or American pints for us – we now proudly drank our beers in centilitres and measured our strides in metres, thank you very much. But Trudeau had pulled the wool over our eyes. The new “national identity” that sly old fox was selling wasn’t new at all. It was the same old hegemonic nationalism that led to the two great wars of his century: a fantasy of national unity symbolized by a bundle of sticks, the fasci, that all Roman magistrates carried. How had Trudeau deceived our nation? By dressing his patrician politics in the pure laine of sheep’s clothing. As old as my father, he courted my former square-dance partner and schoolmate Margaret Sinclair, proving himself thereby, or so I thought, the exception to the cardinal rule of our generation: don’t trust anyone over thirty. So when Maggie asked my advice on Pierre’s marriage proposal to her in 1969, I said, “Go for it,” which is without question the worst counsel I’ve ever given anyone in my life. It did, however, foreshadow the ubiquity of Henry Kissinger’s famous remark years later that “power is the ultimate aphrodisiac.” It seduces one, however impermanently, with the passions of the mind. But I digress.

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Les Belles Soeurs was translated into English for Talon not by Sheila Fischman but by John Van Burek and Bill Glassco. While the cover of the book has always clearly explicated its francophone title with the English phrase “A Play by Michel Tremblay,” it did not feature the names of its translators (although they have always been found clearly acknowledged on the copyright page and elsewhere throughout the book). This design decision was made with full conscious intent, and for a very specific reason. To us at Talonbooks, the work of Michel Tremblay represented a Canada finally liberated from its French colonial past, just as we were in the process of attempting to liberate ourselves from the British Empire. As such, we wanted to establish solidarity with Tremblay on the barricades of an emerging, unified Canadian nationalism – with the construction of a new collective identity on the vanguard of which we clearly identified the example of the Québécois. Tremblay, we felt, was “one of us” in those days – the real and present danger of any ongoing Canadian colonial servitude now coming from the rampant and escalating American imperialism to our immediate south, not from our old British and French colonial masters across the wide Atlantic. And in those pre-digital times, when roughly 80 per cent of Canada’s population lived within a hundred kilometres of the American border, that kind of geography made a real difference to people’s lives. The outcome of the national sovereignty referendum in 1980 seemed to lend credence, out here on the far western fringes of the nation, to our feelings of political solidarity with the people of Quebec. The question had been extensively debated for years by the two most charismatic, articulate, intelligent, ideologically opposed yet democratically committed politicians in Canada, René Lévesque and Pierre Elliott Trudeau, both of whom were, after all, from Quebec, whose people had now finally made a clear choice for an ongoing unity with a new, postcolonial Canada. While Pierre was off in England trying to repatriate our constitution, an act intended to reify both Upper and Lower Canada’s status as a unified independent nation at something other than the colonial pleasure of the British Crown, we at Talonbooks were preparing Sheila Fischman’s translation of the first of Michel Tremblay’s semiautobiographical novels, Chroniques du Plateau-Mont-Royal, which we published in February 1981 as The Fat Woman Next Door Is Pregnant – A Novel by Michel Tremblay. This time, and once again with intent, the cover not only concealed by omission any indication

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that the book had been translated, and therefore by whom; it also bore an anglophone title. Prospective anglophone readers had to look inside to discover this was in fact Sheila Fischman’s English translation of the Québécois novel La Grosse femme d’à côté est enceinte. We had consummated our attempt to disguise the book by its cover. We had wanted “Michel Tremblay” to become a “household name” not just in Quebec but in all of Canada. We wanted anglophones to read him as “one of us.” It was, in retrospect, despite our very best and noblest of intentions, despite our fervent desire to achieve solidarity with the Quebec independence movement (the sort of intentions and desires that most often underlie such misguided public ambitions), in the politically correct hindsight of what was to follow, an act of outright, shameless cultural appropriation. As soon as the novel was released, Talonbooks found itself in the proverbial bottomless pit of merde. Not only had René Lévesque adamantly refused to sign on to Trudeau’s repatriation of Canada’s constitution on Quebec’s behalf but Sheila Fischman informed us that she’d never again translate a book for Talon that did not acknowledge her prominently as its translator on the cover. The great irony of this story is that I, of all people, should have known better. Before joining Talonbooks, I too had been a published translator, of my own first language, German. My proudest literary achievement had been the translation of Rainer Maria Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus into English. In my blind embrace of the new Canadian nationalism, I had forgotten it was Rilke who said, in his Letters to a Young Poet, “Love consists in this, that two solitudes protect and touch and greet each other;” and that “All partnerships can only survive as a mutual shoring up of two adjacent solitudes,” with each partner a solitude “that wants to move out of itself.” And as to the obvious Freudian aspects of this tale, the great psychoanalyst said it best: “Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.” So indeed does politics make fools of us all. Or as Michel Tremblay has said of his own work, “I know what I want in the theatre. I want real political theatre, but I know that political theatre is dull. I write fables.” The rest, as they say, is history. Since the 1980s, Talonbooks went on to publish a wide range of translations from Canada’s francophonie, including all of Michel Tremblay’s work, but now identifying them on their covers as translations from our nation’s “other language.” And no translator has contributed more to our two solitudes “protecting and touching and greeting each other” than Sheila Fischman.

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No t e 1 Les Belles Soeurs has been translated and published in the Scottish vernacular as well, under the title The Guid Sisters (translated by Martin Bowman and Bill Findlay), and toured from Edinburgh to Moscow and, of all places, to Montreal’s own Centaur Theatre.

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Pure Memory J. Ma rc Côté

The following memoir is an attempt to render a twenty-nine-year friendship and a twelve-year working relationship in nineteen scenes.

I The first time I met Sheila Fischman was in Lynn Valley, on the North Shore of Vancouver, in early 1979. We met in the pages of Floralie, Where Are You?, the novel by Roch Carrier. I was reading it for a first-year English course taught by Bill Schermbrucker at Capilano College (now university); the other works we read that semester included Ladies and Escorts, a collection of short stories by Audrey Thomas, Albino Pheasants by Patrick Lane, and Esker Mike and His Wife, Agiluk, by Herschel Hardin. What I discovered in Roch Carrier’s novel was the world of my French Canadian grandparents, who were married in June 1917. In class, the discussion on the book took what I found, as a first-year student, to be an unexpected and unusual turn. We didn’t talk about the characters and plot as much as we did about the world in the novel – and how the translator had rendered it. Up to this moment, I had not considered the art of the translator. Growing up with both languages, I understood that a translator merely restated in one language what was being said in another; I gave no consideration to the need to shape meaning by articulating the “how” of what was being said. The question centred on the translator’s decision to leave hostie in French, typeset in italic; why had this not been translated as “host”? The class discussed how the word “host” would not mean anything,

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given that it had no power as an expletive in English; such words were culturally based. In Quebec in French they used words from the mass and the church to swear; in English we used sex. What these parts of the language revealed about a society was powerful. Fischman’s decision to leave hostie and other mass-related words in French led to a better understanding of the time and place in which Anthyme and Floralie had just been married, in which they were about to experience their honeymoon.

II In the autumn of 1979, Sheila came to Capilano College with Donald Winkler, the documentary filmmaker. They were there to film Earle Birney reading from his poetry. She was holding a microphone, into which Earle was speaking. She was just outside the range of the camera, essential to the production but unseen.

III The third time I encountered Sheila was in the fall of 1981, at McGill. P.K. Page had just given a reading in the meeting room in the Arts Building – a dark, wood-panelled place, with a portrait of Frank Dawson Adams in scarlet robes at its west end, one of James McGill at the east, and a large walnut conference table with holes under the top where once there had been buzzers for servants. Sheila and P.K. were talking about F.R. Scott, the poet, essayist, lawyer, and professor about whom Donald Winkler was making his next documentary. The conversation was clearly intense. I hovered on the perimeter for just long enough to realize that I would not be able to interject myself and that if I had, such interjection would not be well received.

IV Sheila and Donald were among the guests who came to dinner to celebrate the launch of Timothy Findley’s novel Not Wanted on the Voyage in November 1984. My friend Sally Todd Nelson and I had been asked by Penguin to host an evening for Findley and his partner, Bill Whitehead. We were sent a guest list that included among others Elizabeth Spencer and her husband, John Rusher. After dinner, Sally entertained Findley, Whitehead, and the other guests with

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stories about growing up in New York and her mother, Bunny, described by Margaret Mead as the quintessential flapper. I was in the living room, with Sheila and Don. We talked about a variety of things – including the details of the dinner and who made the apple spice cake, where the recipe had come from, and the ingredients in Nina’s Chicken, our main course that night. Along the way, Sheila asked me what I did. I admitted to having written several plays, all of which had been performed by fellow students at McGill. With surprising certainty, she asked to read one of the plays. I obliged, retrieving one of two copies from my bedroom up the stairs.

V In May 1985, I received a telephone call from Sheila. She was very gracious and apologized for having not contacted me earlier. She hoped I was well, and we engaged in very little small talk before getting to the reason for her call. She was sorry to have taken a long time to get back to me about the play I had given her. Both she and Don had read it and liked it very much. Paris in the 1920s was a period they liked to read about, and they thought that I had rendered Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Stein very well. I thanked her, thinking this would be the end of the conversation, but it wasn’t. “I’ve done something I shouldn’t,” she said. I sat down on the pine stairs, fearing she was about to tell me she’d lost the manuscript. “I sent it to a friend of mine in Toronto, who directs plays.” I imagined a PhD student at U of T. “I wanted to wait until I heard back from him. He loves your play and would like to meet you. His name is Bill Glassco.” I was in shock. Not only was I familiar with Bill Glassco, whose translations with John Van Burek of Michel Tremblay’s plays I had read, I admired Glassco for founding the Tarragon Theatre in Toronto and for producing many of Canada’s playwrights. My play included the line, delivered by Zelda Fitzgerald, “I’ll have tarragon dressing on the salad. I love tarragon. It has such dramatic flavour.” Bill had liked my play. He hoped I would come to Toronto and meet him. He was looking forward to reading my next work. Sheila provided me with Bill’s phone numbers and addresses, and encouraged me to contact him immediately. “He doesn’t say these kinds of things often, you realize.”

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VI That summer – 1985 – Sally and I were invited to dinner with Sheila and Don several times. The first time, Sheila served a wonderful cauliflower soup. She described the recipe as “easy” and quickly gave me the list of ingredients and method. The subject of the conversation turned to theatre, poetry, and novels, and, not quite out of the blue – but the context for which I cannot remember – I made an impassioned plea for the teaching of Canadian-authored books in schools and universities. Sheila put down her spoon and said, “I hope this doesn’t sound too pretentious, but I won’t go to my grave until I see Bonjour, Là, Bonjour performed on the main stage at the Stratford Festival.” I could not have agreed more. Such a production would be a turning point for Canadian culture, I thought; it would signify that as a country we were finally paying necessary attention to our own playwrights, poets, and writers.

V II By November 1985, I was living in Toronto, and Bill Glassco was talking to me about adapting Memoirs of Montparnasse for the stage; he would be the director. Sheila and Don came to town and took me out to dinner at one of Sheila’s favourite places, Café des Artistes on Carlton Street at Parliament in Cabbagetown. There I told them my news – they were encouraging, and very pleased – and Sheila told me hers. She had been asked by a Québécois publisher to be the editorial director for a line of English-language Canadian books to be translated into French and published. Her first choice was Black Robe, Brian Moore’s excellent novel. She didn’t tell me her second and third choices, but it was clear that she had a number of English-language Canadian authors she was looking forward to having translated into French.

V III In 1992, my partner, John Pugsley, and I bought our house in Cabbagetown; the restaurant we sat in, while the offer to purchase the property went back and forth, was Café des Artistes. When the

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negotiations were sufficiently concluded and the offer had been accepted, the owner of the restaurant asked us if we had been the buyers or sellers. We told him we were the buyers and that our new home was here in Cabbagetown. “Bienvenue au quartier,” he said, and sent us a bottle of wine. That fall, John and I attended the Stratford Festival to see Bonjour, Là, Bonjour; it was not, however, on the main stage. By this time, I had left playwriting and the theatre behind. I was working in publishing and, from the bird’s-eye view of the directorship of the Literary Press Group, I was able to see Sheila’s frequent contributions to Canada’s literature, including translations for Talonbooks, Véhicule Press, House of Anansi Press, and Cormorant. Of these, one particular book stood out: Felicity’s Fool, Sheila’s translation of François Gravel’s novel, Bonheur fou. It’s a delightful novel, beautifully translated; this was my first introduction to a great Québécois author who would, in the coming years, open many windows for me.

IX In 1996 I coordinated the Governor General’s Literary Awards. Among the nominees that year was Sheila Fischman, for her work on Ostende, a novel by François Gravel. There was an extra copy in the office of the novel, which I took home; Ostende is about growing up in a suburb of Quebec in the 1960s and early 1970s. Although it was different from my youth, I recognized in Gravel’s characters fellow travellers, the baby boom children of the mid-twentieth century suburban family. In the 1990s, staff from the Canada Council called the nominees in advance of the public announcement to inform them of the good news. I called Sheila, who was pleased; she asked if I might tell her if she had won. With reluctance, I told her she had not. “Who did?” she asked. “Linda Gaboriau,” I responded. “Oh, good. Linda’s a fine translator, and this recognition will confirm that” was Sheila’s instant reply.

X When the jury announced the finalists for the Giller Prize in October 1999, Am I Disturbing You?, Sheila Fischman’s translation of Anne Hébert’s Est-ce que je te dérange? was called out. This was the first

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time a novel in translation had made it to this glittering list. One of the jurors, Alberto Manguel, talked about the importance of including Canadian authored and translated works of fiction. Since that day, only four more novels in translation have made the short list of the Scotiabank Giller Prize; of the total of five, three were translations by Sheila Fischman.

XI In January 2001, I became the publisher of Cormorant Books, the literary press founded by Gary Geddes in Dunvegan, Ontario, and run for the previous five or so years by Jan Geddes, in association with Stoddart Publishing. The Monday of my second week on the job brought two envelopes addressed to me instead of Jan. The first one I opened was from Sheila Fischman. It was a card, congratulating me on assuming the helm of an important publishing program and suggesting that we talk about a few projects. Up to this point in its history, Cormorant had published the occasional translation – no more than one every other year. While Sheila was not the only translator whose work the company published, she was the translator whose authors appeared on the list most frequently, chief among them François Gravel. I waited a week before calling Montreal. I had not spoken to Sheila since 1996, not for five years. Nothing untoward had happened to cast a pall over the friendship, but we had drifted apart in the way of so many of my friendships. I was nervous. I need not have been. The conversation picked up in tone and subject exactly where it had left off. The previous night, Sheila and Don had entertained friends, and Sheila had struggled with her difficult oven to produce a leg of lamb that miraculously turned out to her satisfaction. Her guests were delighted and she was relieved. I told her about the three new shareholders in Cormorant, one of them the pharmacist I had been living with for fourteen years. Sheila told me that her sister was a pharmacist. Then, remembering that I was calling her in my new capacity as the publisher of Cormorant Books, Sheila quickly shifted gears, and we moved from a personal conversation to a professional discussion. Her proposals included the newer works of a few Québécois novelists and the reissuing of Volkswagen Blues, the masterwork by Jacques Poulin, which had gone out of print. After an hour of lively

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talk, it was decided that February morning that Cormorant’s annual list would include no fewer than two translations a year and that we would open up the list to more Québécois authors and attempt to publish their works in English as close to their original publication in French as possible. I agreed with all of Sheila’s suggestions and set about making them happen. Later that year, Jacques Poulin was awarded the Molson Prize in the Arts, an award that recognizes the extraordinary contribution by one artist, chosen from many nominations from among all artistic disciplines. It is the highest honour the Canada Council for the Arts bestows and the list of its recipients is a list of the outstanding actors, architects, writers, painters, dancers, filmmakers, and musicians of our time.

X II When Sheila’s draft of her translation of Gravel’s Fillion et frères arrived, I read it immediately, loved it, and passed it on for copy editing. The copy editor – believing the vetting of Sheila’s translation had been vested with her – went beyond the usual corrections of punctuation and occasional questioning of word choices. Unfortunately, I was not aware of this because the copy-edited manuscript was returned to Sheila directly. Soon after reviewing it, Sheila called me. “I have not arrived at this point in my career and age to be subjected to what I can most charitably call a philosophical edit of my work,” was how she explained her concerns. She gave me but one example of this “philosophical edit” and would have given me plenty more, but I heard in that one moment three important facts: the copy editor had gone far beyond the requirements of the task she was set to do; she was not qualified to do so, no matter how misguidedly wellmeaning she believed herself to be; and if Cormorant Books was going to build the kind of relationship between a publisher and a translator that had been discussed and agreed to earlier in the year, we had to find ourselves a new copy editor. I asked Sheila to put the copy-edited manuscript away and to send me a fresh one. I promised that I would edit the translation. Three weeks later, Sheila and I talked on the phone. She had in her possession my edit. The discussion was wide-ranging; what I learned from it – from its substance and manner – has stood me in good stead ever since. Begin by respecting the work of the translator, edit

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the English-language novel, and don’t try to second guess the translator’s decisions. Do not run back to the original French, leave the dictionaries alone. Edit the novel as though it was written in English. If a sentence or a paragraph is confusing, it’s confusing in English; point this out to the translator, discuss it, and let the translator do her work in polishing the English. A week after this discussion, Sheila returned the manuscript. Again, we talked. She had two titles she liked, but neither of them captured what she believed the English-language title had to convey. Fillion and Brothers, Fillion and Family, Fillion and Company were accurate, but they weren’t true. (The novel, which should be required reading in high schools across Canada, is about a son’s coming to understand his father’s life; as a social study, it’s about the new middle class in Quebec.) After a few minutes more in discussion, Sheila said, “I think I’ve got it. Give me a moment and I’ll email it to you if I like it after I hang up.” A short while later, an email from Sheila appeared on my computer; the subject line read A Good Life. The email went on to explain that although she knew this was the right title, she wanted to check with François before we listed it in our catalogue.

X Iii When General Distribution Services and General Publishing collapsed into bankruptcy in the spring and summer of 2002, they took Stoddart Publishing with them. Stoddart owned 40 per cent of the shares in Cormorant Books, and through this affiliation they provided it with all the necessary infrastructure a publishing company requires. Cormorant was moved out of the corporate headquarters and into my home; what had once been my home office and library became Cormorant Books. That present was among the worst of times, and the future looked particularly dismal for what so many people had come to believe was an important literary house. In the remaining weeks of that summer and well into the fall, Sheila called me once a week. She was cheerful, kept a reluctant conversationalist on the phone, and provided assurances in many forms. She spoke of projects and prospects. Her focus was almost entirely the future, and when it wasn’t, she was promising to send recipes – for the best chili, made with ground lamb, or for the best brownies, from her cousin Alice Adelkind. She encouraged me to bake, to make dinners, and to read submissions, pick books, build a list, edit manuscripts. She

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reminded me that Jacques Poulin was still writing, as were François Gravel, Élise Turcotte, and Christiane Frenette, and there were others, so many others, yet to be discovered and enjoyed. I read and I baked and I told Sheila about a particularly good date cake and caramel sauce that was a hit when I served it to guests. She wanted the recipe.1 The following week, she called to tell me that she had made the cake and sauce and that “after we had all finished our desserts, one by one, each of us like children dragged a finger through the remaining caramel on the plates. You should have been there.” That dark late-November morning, with the fallout from the General Publishing bankruptcy settling still, there was an unaccountable joyousness for me in picturing Sheila Fischman, Don Winkler, François Gravel, and Michèle Marineau with sticky caramel sauce on their fingers and mouths.

X iV In 2004 the stars aligned, and Cormorant Books had its first title on the CBC’s “Canada Reads”; chosen was Volkswagen Blues, Sheila Fischman’s translation of Jacques Poulin’s novel, published under the same title in French. The book’s defender was Roch Carrier. For me this moment was particularly rich – Cormorant was still climbing out of the very deep hole created in 2002, but for a moment the great cultural spotlight of the national broadcaster was shining on a book that meant a lot to me. I had bought my copy in 1988 in hardcover at the wonderful bookstore the Double Hook on Greene Avenue in Westmount – one of two stores in the country that sold only Canadianauthored books. I loved this story of a man who goes in search of his brother. The journey he undertakes in his personal pursuit becomes a retracing of the early French explorers of North America, while simultaneously mapping out the character’s – and, possibly, author’s – literary imagination. (The brother, Jack, of whom the narrator is in search is found at Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s City Lights Booksellers in San Francisco. The reader might be forgiven for inferring that Jacques Poulin is pointing out that the “founder” of the Beat movement of writers, Jack Kerouac, was really Québécois, displaced by the economic diaspora of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when hundreds of thousands of French-speaking people from Quebec moved to Massachusetts and other New England states.) But now, not only was a favourite novel about to be given the greatest publicity a book can be given in our country but the book chosen was a

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translation by Sheila, and it was to be championed by the man who wrote Floralie Where Are You? No matter that Volkswagen Blues was knocked off the list on the third day of the “competition” – it had been brought to the attention of thousands of new readers, a significant number of whom turned out to be college and university professors.

XV Also in 2004, Élise Turcotte was invited to read at the Eden Mills Writers’ Festival. When I talked to Sheila about this, she asked if Élise would be asked to read in English. I checked back with the organizers, who hadn’t thought of having the work of a Québécoise author read in English. Sheila’s point was that the translator should read the same passage in English as the author read in French; she also suggested that having an actor read in place of the writer or the translator wasn’t true to the writing. After an exchange of emails and phone calls, Sheila was invited to read. From that time since, translators have been part of the Eden Mills Writers’ Festival.

XVI In 2006, Sheila called me about something completely different. D.G. Jones, with whom she had founded the translation magazine ellipse and to whom she had been married, had been nominated for the Order of Canada. The process seemed to be taking a while, and she feared that time was of the essence: Doug had emphysema. Would I please call the Chancellery at Rideau Hall and make discrete inquiries as to the status of the nomination. I did. I called Sheila back. I repeated that the nomination was in process, but that the woman I spoke with at the Chancellery was “grateful” for knowing that Mr Jones had emphysema. Sheila was relieved. “He deserves this recognition, Marc. If only for ellipse, but when you consider his poetry, his own translations, the role he’s played in our literary culture, the contribution has to be recognized.” D.G. Jones was made an Officer of the Order of Canada the following year, 2007.

X V II That same year (2006) of Sheila’s call about Doug Jones and the Order of Canada, The Perfect Circle, her translation of Le Cercle

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parfait by Pascale Quiviger, was a finalist for the Scotiabank Giller Prize. The Doris Giller Rabinovitch Foundation, which runs the prize, flew Pascale to Canada from her home in Tuscany, for readings, promotion, and the gala. Sheila was invited to read with Pascale and participated in much of the promotion of the book. At the dinner in the ballroom of the Four Seasons Hotel, I sat at the table between Pascale and Sheila. Moments before Jack Rabinovitch announced the winner, Sheila leaned over to me and said, “I really hope for all of us that he calls out Pascale’s name.” I hoped the same. My reasons were simple: I wanted a novel by a Québécoise to win this prestigious and best known of all Canadian literary awards, because it would fulfill my nationalist cultural vision and because it would be a career-capping moment for Sheila. But these were not the only reasons: I wanted this novel to win for the same reasons Sheila had wanted to translate it in the first place: it was beautifully written and it had something to say. In a world dominated by Oprah-picked novels that fit a particularly narrow social agenda, The Perfect Circle is a novel that stands in exception to this niche and makes an artistic statement of enduring value. And here I would like to explain how Cormorant Books has come to publish so many Québécois writers of exceptional merit. Every now and then, Sheila calls me to discuss a writer she has just read and whose work she believes fits the publishing program at Cormorant. If her description interests me – and it always does – I then ask the originating publisher for a copy. Upon receipt of such, I struggle through the first chapter at most, and then I talk to Sheila again. My decision on whether to publish one of Sheila’s suggestions has always been in the affirmative.

X V Iii Although John Pugsley and I married in June 2006, we did not hold a reception until April 2007. The party was largely organized to appease my father, who had not been invited to what was essentially a city hall wedding. The event was well attended, and among the guests were Sheila and Don. That evening a close friend held a small dinner for us; the only guests were my father and my stepmother and Sheila and Don. When dinner was over, my father raised his glass and toasted Sheila. “Without your translations,” he said, “I would not have read any writers from Quebec. The only books by Roch Carrier available

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in Vancouver in the 1970s were in English. Thank you.” My father spoke not only for the Québécois who lived outside of Quebec but for anyone interested in the writers of that province or, actually, just good writers. Sheila had made available to a wide range of readers many of the great works of literature produced in French.

X iX In 2008, at a ceremony held at the Centre d’archives de Montréal in the aftermath of a blizzard, Sheila was awarded the Molson Prize in the Arts. She is the first translator to receive this distinction. The process for nominating an artist for this award is somewhat difficult. As with the Order of Canada, it’s meant to be done without the nominee’s awareness but requires, among other things, proof of Canadian citizenship (which takes the form of a photocopy of one’s passport) and an up-to-date curriculum vitae. To round out the nomination, letters of support are necessary. Among those contacted to write such letters were Roch Carrier, Sally Todd Nelson, Jacques Poulin, Pascale Quiviger, Patrick Crean, and James Polk. The letters, each very different from the others, all spoke of a great literary talent and an honourable dedication to the culture of the country. Of all the people asked to write such a letter, Roch Carrier’s response was the funniest. He agreed quickly and promised to set about writing his immediately. The following day he called back. He had thought about the matter overnight and, while he was convinced Sheila was indeed a worthy nominee for the Molson Prize, he was concerned that perhaps he would be seen as having a vested interest – after all, she was his translator. And, worse, he had been the director of the Canada Council, and might his letter be seen as carrying a lot of weight? Before I could respond, he answered his own questions. He would write the letter, and for the very reasons he had worried about writing it. In reading over all the support material for the Molson Prize nomination, one letter in particular stood out. I realized that my publishing career, with respect to working with Sheila and issuing Québécois writers of exceptional merit, was a latter-day parallel to that of James Polk, who had been managing editor of House of Anansi Press in the 1970s and 1980s. And then I thought about the other publishing houses that had published many of Sheila’s translations. Had their editors had the same intellectual and emotional engagement?

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Had they shared the same cultural and literary goals? Had they benefited, both as editors and readers, to the same extent I believe I have? The letter James Polk wrote was proof that he and I had a shared experience, a pleasure that was at least partially shared by thousands of Québécois living outside the province, by readers of literary works, and by students in high schools, colleges, and universities across our country.

not e s 1 Legend has it that Queen Elizabeth herself makes this cake – it is her recipe. She gave it to a girls’ organization to raise money for charities. This version is based on the one in The Harrowsmith Cookbook, vol. 1 (Camden House 1981). I’ve made a number of changes, including dispensing with the topping in favour of rum-caramel sauce. (1) Mix together in a large bowl 2¼ cups flour, 1¼ t. of baking powder, ½ t. baking soda, and ¾ t. salt. (2) Place in a large blender ¾ c. unsalted butter, 1½ c. pitted dates, 1½ c. brown sugar, and 1½ c. boiling water. Let stand until butter is mostly melted. Blend ingredients until smooth. Add 2 t. good vanilla and two eggs. Blend well. Stir into dry ingredients until just combined. Pour into a heavily buttered angel-food tin; bake at 350 degrees, 50–60 minutes. Let cake cool, turn out. (3) For caramel sauce, melt 1 c. unsalted butter and warm up 2 c. whipping cream; put to one side. Pour 4 c. white sugar into a heavy saucepan. Pour 1 c. boiling water over, swirling to dissolve sugar. Place saucepan over medium heat for about 15 minutes, swirling occasionally. Raise the heat and bring sugar mixture to a boil. Caramelize the sugar – the darker it becomes, the richer the flavour will be. Be careful not to over-caramelize. Remove pan from heat and stir in butter (mixture will bubble up). Add warm cream, 2 t. good vanilla, and 1 T. or more dark rum. Cool. (4) Slice cake, plate with warm sauce. (Extra sauce will keep in the refrigerator for up to four months. It’s also good on ice cream.)

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The Language Alchemist Ivan Steenhout Translated by Donald Winkler

I have, for thirty years or so, spent time with Sheila Fischman on an irregular basis. In the beginning, at a time when my mastery of English was inferior to what it is today (which says a lot), she helped me in my translation of certain novels, including those of Trevor Ferguson. We were even colleagues, after a fashion, at Éditions Roseau during the mid-1980s, when she was the general editor of the Calliope collection (English-Canadian novels translated into French), and I was general editor of the Garamond collection (Quebec francophone fiction). I admire her patient work in bridging languages, work that is long and exacting. In 2004 I received the Governor General’s Literary Award for my translation of The Accidental Indies by Robert Finley (a book that Sheila had strongly urged me to take on), published in 2000 by McGillQueen’s University Press, and in its French version by the Éditions de la Pleine lune in 2004, under the title Les Indes accidentelles. When the book in question is extraordinary to begin with, the literary translator’s work is all the more difficult, exalting, and gratifying. And Finley’s book is a masterpiece, a “gem,” according to John Casey, himself a winner of the National Book Award, bestowed on the year’s best American novel. Robert Finley is a writer whose “humour, creativity, and exceptional skill with words” was recognized by Alberto Manguel, whose own books include A History of Reading and The Dictionary of Imaginary Places.

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Here is a short excerpt from the speech I gave when this prize was awarded: “I ask you, ladies and gentlemen, to forgive me today for being so visible. The literary translator should always, in fact, be absent, dissimulating himself behind the author and the work he has just translated. “I know that Robert Finley would not hold it against me for his not being the one invited today, he who wrote that all, ‘except the sea itself and the sailors’ yearning, is an illusion.’” Our work is, certainly, the labour of a writer – but of a very particular writer, one who has forgone plot, characters, and all the rest, to apply himself in all fidelity solely to the text’s luminous, indispensable music. We literary translators, in all modesty and in all our pride, are only transparent – and at times splendid – masters of words, preserving our own language first but echoing, giving voice to those sublime, fraternal reverberations of otherness, to this other who is so near but who so often seems, alas, so foreign, so distant and inaccessible. And so my respects to Sheila. That is all that I have to say.

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Merci, Sheila! R o c h C a rri er Translated by Donald Winkler

In 1968 I rented an apartment for my small family in North Hatley, the most beautiful village in Quebec, so it was said, spread over hills that surround a lake. What is more, there were poets there, a historian, writers of prose, potters, painters, university professors, an art photographer, an architect, “and a raccoon,” as in Jacques Prévert’s poem. What was called the Quiet Revolution was also causing a lot of excitement in the village. Alcohol flowed in the evenings. Discussions on the future of Quebec, on the future of the French language, on the future of French Canadians, on the emergence of the Québécois, were animated. Everything ended very late. In the end, all were in agreement: the discussion would be continued the following week. Those present included F.R. Scott, John Glassco, Hugh MacLennan, D.G. Jones, Ron Sutherland, Roland Giguère, Gérald Godin, Louis Dudek. There were others. Many were then unknown to me. Some I knew only by name. Is that where I met Irving Layton, Mordecai Richler for the first time? Each participant, I imagine, will remember guests I have not named. The conversations took place in English, in French, in a combination of languages. They were lively. To describe the situation, I will resort to a clumsy metaphor: we were all in the same boat and the lake water was rough; some insisted on rowing, others were resolved to be patient until the storm abated; others, philosophical, situated the storm in the context of the governing of peoples; still others wanted to persuade the rest to throw themselves

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into the water and swim to shore, where happiness and equality awaited us; and for some the solution was to blow up the boat along with its passengers. It was a time of unshakable convictions. During one of these evenings, my then wife mentioned to a young woman she had just met that her husband, me, had just published his first novel. The young lady was passionate about literature. She wanted to know more about my novel. I learned that she was born in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, and that she had grown up in Elgin, Ontario. Soon afterwards, she surprised me by asking if she could translate my novel. Two years later, not only had La Guerre, Yes Sir! been translated into English, but it had been published by the House of Anansi, and I learned that, according to an influential Toronto critic, I was “Quebec’s Faulkner.” That’s what happens when you are lucky enough to have Sheila Fischman managing your affairs. In my case, it was only a beginning. Many years have passed since then. And I am told that Sheila will soon be seventy-five years old. Ah, yes? How has that happened to her? I am then informed that I too am going to be seventy-five. I am asked if I would be so kind as to write a text to celebrate Sheila’s birthday. Of course. I accept gladly. I owe her so much. She has done so much for Quebec writers. She deserves more than a text – she should have a statue raised in her honour. Then, in the months that follow, I am so busy that I forget my enthusiastic promise to celebrate Sheila in dithyrambic prose. I have to finish a book that I hope will interest her enough that she’ll want to translate it. The person in charge of Sheila’s celebration asks me if my article is finished. Oh! It’s not even started. And I am still so busy that I don’t see how I can find the time to express my appreciation to Sheila for all that I owe her. If I am so pressed for time, it’s Sheila’s fault. Forty years ago she translated a little text I wrote, The Hockey Sweater, which will soon be presented on stage accompanied by Abigail Richardson’s beautiful music, performed by the Toronto Symphony Orchestra. I want to read this text as if it has never yet been heard. And if my homage to Sheila is more clumsy than dithyrambic, it’s because I am spending hours rehearsing this text that I’d like to perform like a Pavarotti of the spoken word, and I am trying to muster the flexibility that will enable me to insert my text into the music

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that is making it resonate so magnificently. Plus, I am replying to journalists who have been able to read The Hockey Sweater because Sheila translated it. Sheila, a woman of action, is an extraordinary ambassador. We were, in Quebec, a few young novelists and poets who dreamed of creating an original, national literature; it is through her that I was privileged to meet in Toronto a group of young writers who had the same dream. Sheila made me the great gift of putting me in touch with the publishers of these young writers who wanted to invent a literature wherever they lived in the country: the Prairies, British Columbia, the Maritimes, Newfoundland. I still have the bottle of Screech that Al Pitmann gave me the last time I saw him, telling me that he would soon be obliged to say goodbye to Newfoundland and this planet. Sheila has helped so many other writers besides myself to be published; as she did with me, she opened doors for them, made contacts, established links with the media - and all that discreetly, as though there were nothing to it. Tirelessly, she promoted Quebec literature in English Canada. She did it her own way, without politics, without prejudice, honestly, tactfully, simply because she loved those books she had chosen to translate or that had been brought to her attention. So often I heard “Sheila told me that ...” No one questioned her seal of approval. And she never failed to bring news from the English Canadian literary scene of some interesting book or some author who, like all of us here, was working hard to invent a better world for his readers. So often, graciously, for me and so many other writers who had no other tie to her other than that of belonging to the literary family, she answered questions, helped to get us on our feet, made contacts, vouched for us, opened doors to various networks. Sometimes she provided (with the greatest of discretion) phone numbers and addresses – efficiently, modestly, and with a smile. Sheila in Canada was, and remains, an extremely powerful literary agent. That has never been her profession, but she plays this role because she loves literature. Going on like this, I have forgotten to mention that Sheila is a remarkable translator. But before talking about that, I want to mention a very small book, a chapbook, the most discreet publication I know. It is called Water. For years, I have kept this collection on a shelf in my poetry collection, near where I write. I open it from time

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to time and cannot stop thinking of all the books Sheila might have written, had she not devoted her life to translation. During the first years of our collaboration, we had intense telephone conversations. I will never forget the one concerning a character in La Guerre, Yes Sir! who at the end of a chapter s’évanouit in the snow. Sheila had translated this with the word fainted. It was possible, and logical. The end of the chapter was a dramatic one. But I, the author, had wanted to indicate that the character disparaissait (disappeared) into the storm. I held my ground, and explained to Sheila, who at the time was just getting to know the French language, the subtle nuances involved. And yet I couldn’t help thinking that her interpretation was perhaps more interesting than what I had written. We have had many such conversations since, but she has mastered her second language so well that they’ve become fewer and farther between; they are no longer so necessary. We have arrived at the point where Sheila knows my writing better than I do. During my years as a writer, I have had wonderful conversations with authors such as Miron, Ionesco, Hubert Aquin, John Fowles, William Golding, Antonio Skarmeta, and so many others. The memories I have of them are for me treasures that I do not often share. I place the same value on the conversations that Sheila and I have had; she was my translator, but I’ve always had the comfortable feeling that I was talking to a writer. Sheila is endowed with a serene feminine strength that makes it easy to talk man to man! As an adolescent, I did a lot of translating. For six years, I laboured over translations of Latin, Greek, and English writers. One basic principle was drummed into our heads: however magnificent a translation, it could only be inexact and clumsy, because, said our teachers, “traduttore, traditore.” Yet even under torture I could never claim that Sheila has betrayed my texts in translating them. And I even have a witness who, on Cape Breton Island, declared during one of my public readings, “I’ve read your book in French and in English, and I found it much better in English!” Thank you, Sheila! Later, to shore up my self-respect, I have often said to myself: “The novel couldn’t be that bad, because the fellow did want to reread it.” Now to show off my culture a little, I will quote Samuel Butler, whose introduction to his translation of the Iliad and the Odyssey it has given me great pleasure to read and reread. He writes: “The genius of the language into which the translation is being made is the first thing to be considered; if the original was readable, the translation

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must be so, also.” I believe that Sheila has applied this principle all through her career, but because she is Sheila, she has never feared to add a pinch of this or that so that the local flavour can be savoured and appreciated. To that may I add Sheila’s immense literary curiosity, which has led her to launch the translations of so many authors, so different one from the other. Years have passed with new writers appearing, and Sheila has always been present, still ready to share, through her work, books that without her would never have reached Englishspeaking readers. Quebec culture can only be strong if it is known. Who has done more than Sheila to promote Quebec literature? Sheila has translated twenty or so of my books: we have come a long way together. She must know me better than I know myself. At first, I was learning to write while she was learning to translate. If my first novel opened a path for her, she opened roads for me that I have taken in a spirit of discovery - a discovery of people living on this earth. Merci, Sheila!

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Poem D o n a ld Wi nkler

In the beginning, two words: “You’re prompt,” she said to the stranger on her doorstep. Thirty years on we prompt by phone, downstairs to up or up to down, raiding the tips of each other’s tongues: “What’s that expression ...” “How do you say ...” “What does this mean?” “Does this sound okay?” Until: “What should we have for dinner?” Putting a little more French into English. Putting a little more english on love.

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Complete List of Translations by Sheila Fischman*

L i t e r a ry T r a n s l at i o n s Aquin, Hubert. Hamlet’s Twin. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart 1974. Translation of Neige noire (Montreal: Éditions La Presse 1974). – Next Episode. New Canadian Library series. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart 2001. Translation of Prochain épisode (Paris: Cercle du Livre de France 1965). Beauchemin, Yves. The Alley Cat. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart 1986. Translation of Le matou (Montreal: Québec/Amérique 1981). – Juliette. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart 1993. Translation of Juliette Pomerleau (Montreal: Québec/Amérique 1989). Beaulieu, Victor-Lévy. Don Quixote in Nighttown. Erin, ON: Porcépic 1978. Translation of Don Quichotte de la démanche (Montreal: Éditions de l’Aurore 1974). – Jack Kerouac: A Chicken Essay (Toronto: Coach House Press 1975). Translation of Jack Kérouac: Essai poulet. Montreal: Éditions du Jour 1972. Benoit, Jacques. Jos Carbone. Montreal: Harvest House 1974. Translation of Jos Carbone (Montreal: Éditions du Jour 1967). Billon, Pierre. The Children’s Wing. Montreal: Robert Davies 1996. Translation of L’Enfant du cinquième Nord (Montreal: Québec/Amérique 1982; Paris: Seuil 1982). Bissonnette, Lise. Affairs of Art. Toronto: Anansi 1996. Translation of Choses crues (Montreal: Boréal 1995).

* Titles before 2007 are thanks to Pamela Grant.

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Translations by Sheila Fischman

– An Appropriate Place. Toronto: Anansi 2002. Translation of Un lieu approprié (Montreal: Boréal 2001). – Cruelties. Toronto: Anansi 1998. Translation of Quittes et doubles (Montreal: Boréal 1997). – Following the Summer. Toronto: Anansi 1993. Translation of Marie suivait l’été (Montreal: Boréal 1992). Blais, Marie-Claire. Anna’s World. Toronto: Lester & Orpen Dennys 1985. Translation of Visions d’Anna, ou Le vertige (Montreal: Stanké 1982). – A Literary Affair. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart 1979. Translation of Une liaison parisienne (Montreal: Stanké/Quinze 1975). – These Festive Nights. Toronto: Anansi 1997. Translation of Soifs (Montreal: Boréal 1995). – The Wolf. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart 1974. Translation of Le Loup (Montreal: Éditions du Jour 1972). Bouyoucas, Pan. Aegean Tales. Toronto: Cormorant 2008. Translation of Anna Pourquoi and and L’Autre (Montreal: Les Allusifs 2004 and 2001). Carrier, Roch. The Basketball Player. Toronto: Tundra Books 1996. Translation of Le joueur de basket-ball (Montreal: Les Livres Toundra 1996). – “The Bird.” ellipse, no. 4 (summer 1970): 8. Reprinted in Invisible Fictions: Contemporary Stories from Quebec, edited by Geoff Hancock, 149–50. Toronto: Anansi 1987. – The Boxing Champion. Montreal: Tundra Books 1991. Translation of Un champion (Montreal: Les Livres Toundra 1991). – “Bread.” ellipse, no. 4 (summer 1970): 30–1. – The End. Toronto: Viking 1994. Translation of Fin (Montreal: Stanké 1994). – “Fate.” ellipse, no. 4 (summer 1970): 10–11. – Floralie, Where Are You? Toronto: Anansi 1971. Translation of Floralie, où es-tu? (Montreal: Éditions du Jour 1969). – The Garden of Delights. Toronto: Anansi 1978. Translation of Le Jardin des délices (Montreal: La Presse 1975). – La Guerre, Yes Sir! Toronto: Anansi 1970. Translation of La Guerre, Yes Sir! (Montreal: Éditions du Jour 1968, 1998). – Heartbreaks along the Road. Toronto: Anansi 1987. Translation of De l’amour dans la ferraille (Montreal: Stanké 1984). – The Hockey Sweater. Montreal: Tundra Books 1984. Translation of Le chandail de hockey (Montreal: Les Livres Toundra 1984). – The Hockey Sweater and Other Stories. Toronto: Anansi 1979. Translation of Les enfants du bonhomme dans la lune (Montreal: Stanké 1979).

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– “The Ink.” Ellipse, no. 4 (summer 1970): 19–20. Reprinted in Invisible Fictions: Contemporary Stories from Quebec, edited by Geoff Hancock, 157–8. Toronto: Anansi 1987. – “The Invention.” ellipse, no. 4 (summer 1970): 17–19. – Is It the Sun, Philibert? Toronto: Anansi 1972. Translation of II est par là, le soleil (Montreal: Éditions du Jour 1970). – Lady with Chains. Toronto: Anansi 1984. Translation of La Dame qui avait des charnes aux chevilles (Montreal: Stanké 1981). – The Lament of Charlie Longsong. Toronto: Viking 1998; Toronto: Penguin 1999. Translation of Petit homme tornade (Montreal: Stanké 1996). – The Longest Home Run. Montreal: Tundra Books 1993. Translation and adaptation of Le plus long circuit (Montreal: Les Livres Toundra 1993). – The Man in the Closet. Toronto: Viking 1993. Translation of L’homme dans le placard (Montreal: Stanké 1991). – No Country without Grandfathers. Toronto: Anansi 1981. Translation of II n’y a pas de pays sans grands-pères (Montreal: Stanké 1979). – Prayers of a Very Wise Child. Toronto: Viking 1991. Translation of Les prières d’un enfant très, très sage (Montreal: Stanké 1988). – Prayers of a Young Man. Toronto: Viking 1999; Penguin 2000. Translation of Prières d’un adolescent très, très sage (Montreal: Stanké 1998). – “The Precious Stone.” ellipse, no. 4 (summer 1970): 21–4. – “The Room.” ellipse, no. 4 (summer 1970): 25–9. Reprinted in Invisible Fictions: Contemporary Stories from Quebec, edited by Geoff Hancock, 159–64.Toronto: Anansi 1987. – “Steps.” ellipse, no. 4 (summer 1970): 11–12. Reprinted in Invisible Fictions: Contemporary Stories from Quebec, edited by Geoff Hancock, 151–2. Toronto: Anansi 1987. – “The Telephone.” ellipse, no. 4 (summer 1970): 15–17. – They Won’t Demolish Me! Toronto: Anansi 1974. Translation of Le Deuxmillième étage (Montreal: Éditions du Jour 1973). – “The Wedding.” ellipse, no. 4 (summer 1970): 13–15. Reprinted in Invisible Fictions: Contemporary Stories from Quebec, edited by Geoff Hancock, 153–6. Toronto: Anansi 1987. – “What Languages Do Bears Speak?” In “English Literature and Littérature du Québec,” edited by Clark Blaise and Sheila Fischman. Special issue, Translation: The Journal of Literary Translation no. 20 (Spring 1988): 175–81. Cartano, Tony. Blackbird. New York: Macmillan 1986. Translation of Blackbird (Paris: Éditions Buchet/Chastel 1980).

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Demers, Dominique. Today, Maybe. Victoria: Orca 2011. Translation of Aujourd’hui peut être (Saint-Lambert, QC: Dominique et co. 2010). Desjardins, Louise. So Long. Toronto: Cormorant 2012. Translation of So Long (Montreal: Boréal 2005). Dupont, Eric. Sugar Thieves. Toronto: Cormorant 2012. Translation of Voleurs de sucre (Montreal: Marchand de feu 2004). Eddie, Christine. The Douglas Notebooks. Fredericton, NB: Goose Lane 2013. Translation of Les carnets de Douglas (Quebec: Alto 2009). Fortier, Dominique. On the Proper Use of Stars. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart 2010. Translation of Du bon usage des étoiles (Quebec: Alto 2010). Frenette, Christiane. After the Red Night. Toronto: Cormorant 2009. Translation of Après la nuit rouge Montreal: Boréal 2005). – Terra Firma. Dunvegan, ON: Cormorant 1999. Translation of La terre ferme (Montreal: Boréal 1997). Giguère, Roland. Miror and Letters to an Escapee. Erin, ON: Press Porcépic 1976. Translation of Miror et lettre à l’évadé. Extraits de La Mai au feu (Montreal: L’Hexagone 1973). Gravel, François. Benito. Toronto: Lester & Orpen Dennys 1990. Translation of Benito (Montreal: Boréal 1987). – Felicity’s Fool. Dunvegan, ON: Cormorant 1992. Translation of Bonheur fou (Montreal: Boreal 1990). – A Good Life. Dunvegan, ON: Cormorant 2001. Translation of Fillon et frères (Montreal: Québec/Amérique 2000). – Miss September. Dunvegan, ON: Cormorant 1998. Translation of Miss Septembre (Montreal: Éditions Québec/Amérique 1996). – My Life as a Crow. Toronto: Lorimer 1993. Translation of CorneilIes (Montreal: Boréal 1989). – Ostend. Dunvegan, ON: Cormorant 1996. Translation of Ostende (Montreal: Éditions Québec/Amérique 1994). – Waiting for Jasmine. Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre 1993. Translation of Deux heures et demie avant Jasmine (Montreal: Boréal 1991). Hébert, Anne. Am I Disturbing You? Toronto: Anansi 1999. Translation of Est-ce que je te dérange? (Paris: Seuil 1998). – Aurélien, Clara, Mademoiselle, and the English Lieutenant. Toronto: Anansi 1996. Translation of Aurélien, Clara, Mademoiselle et le lieutenant anglais (Paris: Seuil 1995). – Burden of Dreams. Toronto: Anansi 1994. Translation of L’Enfant chargé de songes (Paris: Seuil 1992). – Collected Later Novels. Introduced by Mavis Gallant. Toronto: Anansi 2003.

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– The First Garden. Toronto: Anansi 1990. Translation of Le premier jardin (Paris: Seuil 1988). – Héloïse. Toronto: Stoddart 1982. Translation of Héloïse (Paris: Seuil 1980). – In the Shadow of the Wind. Toronto/New York: Stoddart/Beaufort Books 1984. Translation of Les fous de Bassan (Paris: Seuil 1982). – A Suit of Light. Toronto: Anansi 2000. Translation of Un habit de lumière (Paris: Seuil 1999). Jacob, Suzanne. Fugitives. Toronto: Thomas Allen 2008. Translation of Fugueuses (Montreal: Boréal 2005). Kattan, Emmanuel. Love Alone: A Novel. Toronto: Thomas Allen & Son 2011. Translation of Nous seuls (Montreal: Boréal 2008). Kattan, Naïm. Farewell, Babylon. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart 1976. Translation of Adieu Babylone (Montreal: Éditions La Presse 1975). – Paris Interlude. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart 1979. Translation of Les fruits arrachés (Montreal: Hurtubise HMH 1977). Le Beau, Hélène. No Song, but Silence. Toronto: Coach House 1995. Translation of La Chute du corps (Paris: Gallimard; Montreal: Boréal 1992). Lemieux, Jean. Red Moon. Dunvegan, ON: Cormorant 1994. Translation of Lune rouge (Montreal: Québec/Amérique 1991). Leroux, Nicole. A Winter for Leo. Toronto: HarperCollins Canada 2006. Translation of L’Hiver de Léo Polatouche (Montreal: Boréal 2003). Major, André. The Scarecrows of Saint-Emmanuel. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart 1977. Translation of L’Épouvantail (Montreal: Éditions du Jour 1974). – A Provisional Life. Ottawa: Oberon 1997. Translation of Une vie provisoire (Montreal: Boréal 1995). Poulin, Jacques. Autumn Rounds. Toronto: Cormorant 2002. Translation of La tournée d’automne (Montreal: Leméac 1993). – The Jimmy Trilogy. Toronto: Anansi 1979. Translation of Mon cheval pour un royaume (Montreal: Éditions du Jour 1967; Montreal: Éditions du Jour 1969); Le coeur de la baleine bleue (Montreal: Éditions du Jour 1971). – Mr Blue. Montreal: Vehicule 1993. Translation of Le Vieux Chagrin (Montreal: Leméac 1989). – Spring Tides. Toronto: Anansi 1986. Translation of Les grandes marées (Montreal: Leméac 1977). – Translation Is a Love Affair. Brooklyn, NY: Archipelago Books 2009. Translation of La traduction est une histoire d’amour: roman (Montreal: Leméac 2006).

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– Volkswagen Blues. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart 1988. Translation of Volkswagen Blues (Montreal: Québec/Amérique 1984). – Wild Cat. Toronto: Cormorant 2003. Translation of Chat sauvage (Montreal: Leméac 1998). Quiviger, Pascale. The Perfect Circle. Toronto: Cormorant 2006. Translation of Le cercle parfait (Québec: L’instant même 2003). Savoie, Jacques. Blue Circus. Dunvegan, ON: Cormorant 1997. Translation of Le cirque bleu (Montreal: La Courte échelle 1995). – The Revolving Doors. Toronto: Lester & Orpen Dennys 1989. Translation of Les Portes tournantes (Montreal: Boréal Express 1984). Soucy, Gaétan. Atonement. Toronto: Anansi 1999. Translation of Acquittement (Montreal: Boréa1 1997). – The Little Girl Who Was Too Fond of Matches. Toronto: Anansi 2000. Translation of La petite fille qui aimait trop les allumettes (Montreal: Boréal 1998). – Vaudeville! Toronto: Anansi 2003. Translation of Music-Hall! (Montreal: Boréal 2002). Thúy, Kim. Ru. Toronto: Random House of Canada 2012. Translation of Ru (Montreal: Libre Expression 2009). Tremblay, Michel. Bambi and Me. Vancouver: Talonbooks 1997. Translation of Les vues animèes (Montreal: Leméac 1990). – Birth of a Bookworm. Vancouver: Talonbooks 2003. Translation of Un ange cornu avec des ailes de tôle (Montreal: Leméac 1994). – The Black Notebook. Vancouver: Talonbooks 2006. Translation of Le Cahier noir (Montreal: Coédition Leméac/Actes Sud 2003). – The Blue Notebook. Vancouver: Talonbooks 2009. Translation of Le Cahier bleu (Montreal: Coédition Leméac/Actes Sud 2005). – Crossing the Continent. Vancouver: Talonbooks 2011. Translation of La Traversée du continent (Montreal: Coédition Leméac/Actes Sud 2007). – The Duchess and the Commoner. Vancouver: Talonbooks 1999. Translation of La duchesse et le roturier (Montreal: Leméac 1982). – The Fat Woman Next Door Is Pregnant. Vancouver: Talonbooks 1981. Translation of La grosse femme d’à côté est enceinte (Montreal: Leméac 1978). – The First Quarter of the Moon. Vancouver: Talonbooks 1994. Translation of Le premier quartier de la lune (Montreal: Leméac 1989). – The Heart Laid Bare. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart 1989; Vancouver: Talonbooks 2002. Also published as Making Room (London: Serpent’s Tail 1990). Translation of Le Cœur découvert (Montreal: Leméac 1986).

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– News from Édouard. Vancouver: Talonbooks 2000. Translation of Des nouvelles d’Édouard (Montreal: Leméac 1994). – The Red Notebook. Vancouver: Talonbooks 2008. Translation of Le Cahier rouge (Montreal: Coédition Leméac/Actes Sud 2004). – Thérèse and Pierrette and the Little Hanging Angel. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart 1984; Vancouver: Talonbooks 1996. Translation of Thérèse et Pierrette à l’école des Saints-Anges (Montreal: Leméac 1980). – Thing of Beauty. Vancouver: Talonbooks 1998. Translation of Un objet de beauté (Montreal: Leméac 1997). – Twelve Opening Acts. Vancouver: Talonbooks 2002. Translation of Douze coups de théatre (Montreal: Leméac 1992). Turcotte, Élise. The Body’s Place. Toronto: Cormorant 2003. Translation of L’île de la Merci (Montreal: Leméac 1997). – The Sound of Living Things. Toronto: Coach House 1993. Translation of Le bruit des choses vivantes (Montreal: Leméac 1991). – “Vintage Clothes.” Matrix, no. 46 (August 1995): 37–9. Yaugud, Louar (Raoul Duguay). “Lettre damour à Toulmonde.” ellipse, no. 6 (winter 1971): 32–47.

Non- L i t e r a ry T r an s l at i o n s Barcelo, François. Introduction to Montreal. Photographs by Mia and Klaus. Montreal: Leméac 1983. Brault, Jacques. “Some Notes on the Translation of Poetry.” ellipse, no. 21 (1977): 11–35. Carrier, Roch. Canada. Montreal: Éditions Libre Expression/Art Global 1986. Translation of Canada (Montreal: Éditions Libre Expression/Art Global 1986). – Our Life with the Rocket: The Rocket Richard Story. Toronto: Viking 2001. Translation of Le Rocket (Montreal: Stanké 2000). Dumont, Fernand. The Vigil of Quebec. Translated by Sheila Fischman and Richard Howard. Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1974. Translation of La Vigile du Québec (Montreal: Hurtubise 1971. Dupont, Pierre. How Lévesque Won. Toronto: Lorimer 1977. Translation of 15 novembre 76. Montreal: Les Quinze 1976. Fournier, Pierre. A Meech Lake Post-Mortem: Is Quebec Sovereignty Inevitable? Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press 1991. Translation of Autopsie du Lac Meech: La souveraineté, est-elle inévitable? Montreal: VLB Éditeur 1990.

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Gros-Louis, Max. First among the Hurons. Montreal: Harvest House 1974. Translation of Le Premier des Hurons. Montreal: Éditions du Jour 1973. Hébert, Jacques. Have Them Build a Tower Together: About Katimavik, a Meeting Place, about Youth, about Hope. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart 1979. Translation of Faites-leur bâtir une tour ensemble, òu il est question de Katimavik,lieu de rencontre, et de la jeunesse, et de l’espérance (Montreal: Éditions Héritage 1979). – The World Is Round: A Long and Winding Letter on Canada, the World and Youth. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart 1976. Translation of La terre est ronde: Longue, interminable lettre, où il est question de la jeunesse, du Canada et du monde. Montreal: Fides 1976). Moisan, Clement. “The Contemporary Poetry of Quebec.” ellipse, no. 1 (1969): 6–15. Potvin, Gilles. MSO: The First Fifty Years. Montreal: Stanké 1984. Translation of OSM: Les Cinquante premières année (Montreal: Stanké 1984). Sioui, Georges. For an Amerindian Autohistory. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press 1992. Translation of Pour une autohistoire amérindienne (Quebec: Les Presses de l’Université Laval 1991). Tardivel, Jules-Paul. For My Country. Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1975. Translation of Pour la patrie: Roman du vingtième siècle (Montreal: Cadieux et Derome; Hurtubise HMH 1974).

S e l e c t e d T r a nsl at i o ns f o r t h e S tag e , Sc r e e n, a nd Rad i o Carrier, Roch. The Celestial Bicycle. Play. 1982. Translation of La Celeste bicyclette. – The Hockey Sweater and Other Stories. Sound Recording. Dramatized by Alexander Hausvater. Fredericton, NB: BTC Audiobooks 2001. Godbout, Jacques. A Hunting Lesson. Animated film. Directed by Jacques Drouin, produced by Thérèse Descary, Jean-Jacques Leduc. Adapted by Sheila Fischman. Hébert, Anne. L’île de la Demoiselle. Unpublished play. Lepage, Roland. Le temps d’une vie. Play. Commissioned by Bill Glassco for Tarragon Theatre, Toronto, 1978. Tardif-Delorme, Paule. Beyond the Sound Barrier. Children’s play. Translated for Theatre Beyond Words, 1983.

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– Tale of a Bird. Translation of Le conte de l’oiseau. Monologue set to music performed by André Prevost. Sound recording. Montreal: Société nouvelle de l’enregistrement 1982. Tremblay, Larry. Talking Bodies. Four Plays: A Trick of Fate; Anatomy Lesson; The Dragonfly of Chicoutimi; Ogre. Vancouver: Talonbooks 2001. Translation of Le déclin du destin (Montreal: Leméac 1989); Leçon d’anatomie (Montreal: Éditions Laterna Magica 1992); The Dragonfly of Chicoutimi (Montreal: Les Herbes Rouges 1995); Ogre. CarniéresMorlanwelz (Belgium: Éditions Lansman 1997). Anatomy Lesson also published separately (New York: Ubu Repertory Theatre 1995).

Wo r k s on T r an s l at i o n Blaise, Clark, and Sheila Fischman, eds. “Canadian Feature Issue: English Literature and Littérature du Québec.” Special issue, Translation: The Journal of Literary Translation 20 (Spring 1988). CBC. Arts Canada: Writing Quebec. “In Translation.” Interview with Sheila Fischman, 10 June 2003. Fischman, Sheila. “Esthetic Affinities: An Interview with Sheila Fischman.” In Culture in Transit: Translating the Literature of Quebec, edited by Sherry Simon, 185–93. Montreal: Vehicule Press 1995. – “French and English Texts in Tandem: The Editing of ellipse.” In Editing Canadian Texts, edited by F.G. Halpenny, 81–94. Toronto: Hakkert 1975. – “Leafing through the First Issue of ellipse.” In “ellipse a vingt ans/ ellipse: Twenty Years.” Special issue, ellipse no. 40 (1988): 13–14. – “The Literature of French Quebec.” In Quebec Literature in Translation: A Resource Guide for the Teaching of Canadian Literature, edited by Quebec Work Group, coordinator, Sheila Fischman, 49–55. Toronto: Writers’ Development Trust 1977.  – “A Night in August.” Matrix, no. 22 (spring 1986): 23–27. – “Témoignage: Hommage d’une traductrice à Anne Hébert.” Translated by Patricia Godbout. In Traductions d’Anne Hébert, Les Cahiers Anne Hébert 3, edited by Patricia Godbout and Christiane Lahaie, 15–20. Ville Saint-Laurent: Fides 2001. (Originally read in English at an evening of tribute to Anne Hébert at the Blue Metropolis festival in Montreal, April 2000.) – “Translation Matters / En guise de traduction.” Address given at the University of Ottawa on the occasion of the awarding of an honourary doctorate, 6 June 1999. Unpublished.

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– “The Watchdog Writers of Quebec.” Book Forum: An International Transdisciplinary Quarterly, no. 4 (1978): 113–18. Helman, Claire, dir. Talking Translation: Sheila Fischman and Roch Carrier. Producer, Tamira Lynch. National Film Board of Canada 1993. Homel, David. “Solving the Difficulties: A Panel Discussion with Alberto Manguel, Julia O’Faolain, Paul Wilson, Leia Vennewitz, and Sheila Fischman.” Translation Review, no. 20 (1986): 9–13.

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Contributors

Pier r e A nc t i l is a professor of history at the University of Ottawa. He was the director of the Institute of Canadian Studies at the University of Ottawa between 2004 and 2008. Previously, he was president of the Conseil des relations interculturelles of the Government of Quebec. He is the author of Trajectoires juives au Québec (Presses de l’Université Laval 2010) and, in collaboration with Ira Robinson, Les communautés juives de Montréal, histoire et enjeux contemporains (Septentrion 2010). In 2011 he co-edited Religion, Culture, and the State: Reflections on the Bouchard-Taylor Report (University of Toronto Press). His biography of Jacob-Isaac Segal was published by Les Presses de l’Université Laval in 2012. lise b i sso nne t t e is a distinguished journalist, publisher, and administrator. Between 1990 and 1998 she served as editor-in-chief and publisher of Le Devoir, a position she left to become the founding president of the Grande Bibliothèque du Québec. She is an officer of both l’Ordre national du Québec and France’s Légion d’honneur, a member of the Royal Society of Canada, and the recipient of nine honorary doctorates. She is also an acclaimed novelist. roc h ca r r i e r has written more than twenty-five works of fiction for adults and children, many of them translated into English by Sheila Fischman. In English he is probably best known for La Guerre, Yes Sir! and The Hockey Sweater. From 1994 to 1997 he served as head of the Canada Council for the Arts, and from 1999 to 2004 he was National Librarian of Canada. He is an officer of the Order of Canada and a winner of the Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour.

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j. ma rc c ô t é has been the publisher of Cormorant Books since 2001. In a remarkable publishing career, he has also worked for the Canadian Book Information Centre, Books in Canada, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Canada Council for the Arts. He has run the Literary Press Group of Canada, served as marketing manager for Stoddart Publishing, and been associate publisher of Dundurn Press. Apart from his duties at Cormorant, he is also the publisher of Thomas Allen & Son. lou ise d e sja r di ns has published twelve collections of poetry, six novels, a collection of essays, and a biography of the singer Pauline Julien. She won both the Prix du Journal de Montréal and the Prix des Arcades de Bologne for her first novel, La Love. As a translator, she has rendered into French the poetry of Margaret Atwood, among others. sheila fi sc hma n was born in Saskatchewan, grew up in Ontario, and has lived in Quebec for well over forty years. She has translated some 150 books from French to English, winning the Governor General’s Award for Translation, the Canada Council Translation Prize, the Félix-Antoine Savard Translation Prize, and the Molson Prize in the Arts. The holder of two honorary doctorates, she is a cofounder of the journal ellipse, a founding member of the Literary Translators’ Association of Canada, a member of the Order of Canada, and a chevalier of the Ordre national du Québec. lu ise vo n f l o tow is a professor and director of the School of Translation and Interpretation at the University of Ottawa. She has translated books from French as well as German and has edited such titles as Translating Women, Translating Canada, and The Politics of Translation in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. domin iq ue f ort i e r was born in Quebec City and holds a doctorate in literature from McGill University. She works as a writer, editor, and literary translator, with about twenty books of literary translation to her credit. Since 2008 she has published three novels of her own. The first, Du bon usage des étoiles (2008), was shortlisted for the Governor General’s Award for Fiction, the Prix des libraires du Québec, the Grand Prix littéraire Archambault, and the Prix Senghor.

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219

g r a ha m f r ase r is Canada’s Commissioner of Official Languages, a position he has held since 2006. Before that he spent nearly forty years as a journalist, working for the Toronto Star, the Globe and Mail, the Montreal Gazette, and Maclean’s. Between 1995 and 2000, he wrote a weekly column for Le Devoir. He has written five books, including pq : René Lévesque and the Parti Québécois in Power (shortlisted for a Governor General’s Award in 1984) and Sorry, I Don’t Speak French: Confronting the Canadian Crisis That Won’t Go Away (2006).  méla n i e gé l i nas is a doctoral candidate in literature at l’Université du Québec à Montréal and a teacher of French at Collège Jean de Brébeuf. In 2008, after completing a master’s degree in creative writing at l’Université de Montréal, she transformed her thesis into her first novel, Compter jusqu’à cent, which was published by Éditions Québec Amérique. patr ici a go db o ut is a translation professor at l’Université de Sherbrooke, her main field of research being the history of literary translation in Canada. She has translated several works of EnglishCanadian non-fiction into French. mic ha e l h e nry h e i m was a professor of Slavic Languages at the University of California in Los Angeles. He translated dozens of works from Russian, Czech, Serbian, Croatian, Dutch, French, Hungarian and German, including books by such eminent authors as Anton Chekhov, Milan Kundera, Thomas Mann, Hugo Claus, and Günter Grass. He also edited a translation series for Northwestern University Press. A Guggenheim Fellow and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, he died in September 2012. d.g . jo ne s is retired from l’Université de Sherbrooke, where he taught English and Canadian literature, including comparative Canadian and Québec poetry. He won the Governor General’s Award for Poetry in 1977, and the same award for translation in 1993 for Normand de Bellefueille’s Categories, One, Two and Three. He has translated twenty-four poems by Rainer Maria Rilke which accompany Lucie Lambert’s woodcuts in her livre d’artist Les Roses (Editions Lambert 2003). His most recent book is The Stream Exposed with All Its Stones: Collected Poems (2010).

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a lb erto ma ngue l was born in Argentina, grew up in Israel, and lived in France, England, and Tahiti before immigrating to Canada in 1982. He now resides in rural France in a restored medieval presbytery whose library is said to contain at least thirty thousand books. He has written or edited more than forty works, including A Reader on Reading and The Library at Night. k athy m e z e i is a professor emeritus in the Department of Humanities at Simon Fraser University and a life fellow of Clare Hall, Cambridge. She has published books and articles on translation studies, British women writers, Canadian literature, and domestic space. Her most recent publication is The Domestic Space Reader, co-edited with Chiara Briganti (University of Toronto Press 2012). jea n par é was the founding editor of L’Actualité, a magazine he edited for twenty-five years. He has also been a broadcaster for Radio-Canada, the chair of Canada’s National Magazine Foundation, the chair of Rogers Media Publishing, and the author of several books. His nine translations include works by Marshall McLuhan, Ted Allan, and Michael Ignatieff. An officer of l’Ordre national du Québec, he has also received many other honours including the Prix Judith-Jasmin, the Prix Olivier-Asselin, and the Prix Fleury-Mesplet. ja mes po l k moved to Toronto from the United States and became a key figure in the Toronto publishing scene of the late 1960s and ’70s, spending fifteen years as editor-in-chief of House of Anansi Press. He later served as publishing policy adviser to the Government of Ontario. He is also the author of several books. lor i sai nt- ma rt i n is a professor of literature at l’Université du  Québec à Montréal. With Paul Gagné, she has translated more than twenty-five novels and works of non-fiction into French. They have won the John Glassco Prize, the Quebec Writers’ Federation Translation Prize, and the Governor General’s Award for Translation. She has also published fiction and scholarly studies of her own. k a r l sie gl e r is a writer, translator, and the former publisher of Talonbooks. The author of the Manitoba Cultural Industries Policy, he is a three-time president of the Association of Canadian Publishers.

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Contributors

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Among the organizations he co-founded are Simon Fraser University’s Centre for Studies in Publishing, the Literary Press Group of Canada, and the Association of Book Publishers of British Columbia. He recently served as vice-president of policy for the Canadian Conference of the Arts. He lives in Powell River, bc. sher ry si mon is a professor in the Département d’études françaises at Concordia University. Her books include Cities in Translation: Intersections of Language and Memory, and the awardwinning Translating Montreal: Episodes in the Life of a Divided City. She is a member of the Royal Society of Canada and of the Académie des lettres du Québec. g a éta n soucy studied physics, philosophy, and Japanese literature at university before becoming one of the most highly acclaimed novelists in Quebec. He also teaches philosophy and writes plays. His books have won such honours as the Prix Ringuet, the Grand Prix du livre de Montréal, and the Prix du grand public La Presse / Salon du Livre de Montréal, and he has been shortlisted for the Giller Prize. iva n ste e nhoot lived in Belgium, Germany, France, Greece and Senegal before settling down on a goat farm in the Eastern Townships in 1986. Under the pseudonym of Alexis Lefrançois he has published about a dozen collections of poetry and a book of children’s tales. He has also translated about fifty English-Canadian novels into French. On two occasions he won the Canada Council Translation Prize, and for two other books he won the Governor General’s Award for Translation. don a ld wi nk l e r grew up in Winnipeg and, as a Woodrow Wilson scholar, did graduate study at the Yale School of Drama. For many years he worked as a director and writer at the National Film Board of Canada, making films largely about culture and the arts. His Moshe Safdie: The Power of Architecture was named Best Educational Film at the 2005 International Festival of Films on Art, and Ode to a Requiem received two Gemini nominations in 2007. Since the 1980s he has also worked as a literary translator, winning the Governor General’s Award for Translation on two occasions. His translation of a novel by Daniel Poliquin was shortlisted for the Giller Prize. In 2011 he married his longtime partner, Sheila Fischman.

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