On Translating Nelly Arcan + An Excerpt from Hysteric

There were two major challenges in translating this novel, and both are perfectly represented by the excerpt below.

The first concerns the habit that literary types have of seeing the act of writing as one of salvation. The idea that there’s something noble about crafting words, be it in the context of creation, translation or otherwise, that Art should save, or so the fantasy goes. Yet in Nelly Arcan’s case, Art was no saviour. What’s more, it feels at times, when delving deeper into her writings, that her Art only aggravated her obsessions, her hysteria. And so, having had to face her obsessions as translators daily for months, with her disorders made worse by her describing them in every minute, painful, awful detail—with the conclusion forgone since she killed herself in 2009—we could be forgiven for losing hope in the idea that Art is salvation.

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Welcome to The New Biblioasis International Translation Blog

When the Biblioasis International Translation Blog was created in 2012, it was with the ambition of becoming an online forum for literary translation in Canada and beyond. Although we got off to a decent start, with feature articles from the likes of Douglas Glover, Alberto Manguel, Scott Esposito and others, a litany of minor priorities—running a press? editing a magazine? launching a brick and mortar bookstore? teaching university courses?—kept getting in the way. Go figure. Finite resources, limited energy, and ambition make for a precarious dance. We're still working out the kinks in our steps.

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Three Poems by Dariusz Sosnicki

BOA Editions characterizes the poetry of Dariusz Sośnicki by its ability to "open our eyes to the sublime just beneath the surface of the mundane." The Polish writer's poetic inventory includes a train that takes children away from their parents for summer vacation and turns into a ravenous monster; a meal at a Chinese restaurant that inspires a surreal journey through the zodiac; and a malfunctioning printer that reminds of the ghosts that haunt us no matter where we find ourselves. The World Shared, the bilingual edition translated by Piotr Florczyk and Boris Dralyuk in which the three poems below appear, forthcoming from BOA in June 2014, is a dream-catalogue of surrealist riffs and humble strangeness. "Earthly Delights" previously appeared in New Orleans Review, "Monster" previously appeared in The New Yorker, and "A Mouse in a Bucket" appears here for the first time.

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André Mathieu and the Lesson of Genius

The following is an excerpt from Of Jesuits and Bohemians: Tales of My Early Youth by Jean-Claude Germain, translated from the French by Donald Winkler and forthcoming from Véhicule Press in May 2014. Writer, playwright, director and actor Jean-Claude Germain is a Quebecois icon
whose memoirs are filled with a Montreal-centric Who's Who of 1950's and 60's Quebecois painters, musicians, composers, writers and politicians, evoking a rich cultural milieu of which few English readers are aware. The except included below focuses on a young bohemian Germain's idealistic pursuit of the notion of genius and his transformative encounter with the eccentric and volatile "Canadian Mozart" André Mathieu. Véhicule Press has published an earlier volume of Germain's memoirs, Rue Fabre, in 2012.

I was sixteen, and already too old to emulate Rimbaud. But I still had a chance to assert my genius by Orson Welles's age, when he directed Citizen Kane. He was all of twenty-four.

I don’t remember if it was at the Sainte-Marie film club or the System movie theatre on Saint Catherine Street that I saw his film for the first time. From the opening strains of music over the slow introductory travelling shot bearing down on the fence blocking entry to the castle of Xanadu, Kane’s spell was cast. “No trespassing!” Prohibitions are there to be ignored, muttered the camera, and the fence dissolved.

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"The Fragility of the Place One Calls Home": Benjamin Woodard on Mauricio Segura's Eucalyptus

Over at Numero Cinq, Benjamin Woodard praises the "breathtaking execution" and "strong cinematic elements" of Mauricio Segura's Eucalyptus, translated by GG winner Donald Winkler. The most recent title in Biblioasis's International Translation series, Eucalyptus is "an existential whodunit" that is part murder mystery, part dictatorial thriller, and part exploration of racial and identity politics in Chile and beyond.
As protagonist Alberto Ventura, a Chilean born writer living in self-imposed exile in Montreal, returns to his 'homeland' in order to attend the funeral of his father Roberto - a contentious man whose various legacies as student radical, hospital director, manual labourer and farmer provoke contradictory and occasionally hostile response from intimates and acquaintances - he comes to realize that the circumstances surrounding his father's supposedly natural death seem to be far more complicated that he initially bargained for.

What follows is Alberto's self-imposed detective hunt, mediated by a chorus of unreliable narrators whose accounts "seamlessly segue, à la a film dissolve, into representative scenes[...]luring the reader and resulting in a ghostlike journey: passing through bodies, into minds, and then back again."

Citing Segura's avoidance of "you can't go home again" clichés and his "fascination in more oblique questions: What is home? Who truly belongs to a parcel of land?" Woodward finds that Eucalyptus culminates in "an adventurous, hypnotic read." Hurrah!

- Jesse

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That Other Word: Stephen Henighan on Mia Couto, Mihail Sebastian and Translation in Canada

The Biblioasis International Translation Series editor Stephen Henighan was featured on The Center for the Art of Translation's podcast "That Other Word" with Scott Esposito and Daniel Medin.  Esposito and Henighan discussed his “deeply-rooted rootlessness,” the Canadian relationship to English and translation, and the challenges of procuring and producing translations for the Canadian market. He discusses Mia Couto’s “rural modernism,” his literary influences, and why the author travels well, despite being essentially “untranslatable.” Finally, Henighan tells the comical and haphazard story of how he came to learn Romanian, and describes the process of translating and trying to publish Mihail Sebastian’s The Accident.
Listen to the full podcast here

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