Translation, even at its best, is dubious business. Robert Frost once remarked, disparagingly, that what gets lost in translation is the poetry itself. Ezra Pound's translations can be seen as examples of his dictum, "make it new" as they are as much about his voice as the voice of the poet he is translating. In his anthology The Poetry of French Canada in Translation, John Glassco asks, "Why then…make the translations of poetry at all? If the result is a loss, a depreciation, a betrayal, surely the expense of effort, the dizzying labour of trying to transmute the essence of that most incommensurable thing, a poem, might be better applied elsewhere" (xxi). Glassco goes on to argue that, like the poet himself, the translator does not balk at the impossibility of the task because "when he wholly succeeds, as he sometimes does, the sense of achievement is that of the poetic creation itself. At the worst, he has made a bridge of sorts" (xxii).
We have a number of courageous translators, often poets themselves, to thank for succeeding in the poetic recreation and building timely bridges between English and French Canadian Literature — translators such as F.R. Scott, A.J.M Smith, G.V. Downes, James Reaney, Ralph Gustafson, Gael Turnball, A.M. Klein, Fred Cogswell, R.A.D. Ford, Louis Dudek, John Robert Colombo, John Glassco, D.G. Jones, and Nicole Brossard. As F.R. Scott noted, "translation is not only an art, it is also an essential ingredient in Canada's political entity."
In the Preface to Poems of French Canada, Scott states, "there is no better way of finding out how words can be put together to make a poem than by translating poems, and no better window opening upon a country than that which its poets provide" (i).
In 1972, Gerard Pelletier, Secretary of State, inaugurated a Canada Council Grants Programme to foster translation for mutual understanding and cultural exchange. Before this date, little translation had occurred in Canadian letters. Earlier, in 1969, The English Department of l'Universite of Sherbrooke launched Ellipse, a quarterly journal dedicated to the translation of poetry. Each issue featured work of two poets, one English, one French. The original poem appeared on the left, the translation on the right. In his essay in Literary History of Canada, Philip Stratford states, "the face to face format, the quality of the translations, the intelligent and provocative juxtapositions of poets made this a unique publication" ( vol. 4 100).
Ellipse was a major step along the road to translation in Canada.
A Literary Translators Association/Association des traducteurs litteraires was founded in 1975 and inaugurated the John Glassco Prize for first translation by a Canadian from any language into English or French. Two Canada Council Translation prizes were also created in 1974. In 1975 M. Newman and P. Stratford published a Bilingual Bibliography of Canadian Books in Translation to attempt to encourage and rationalize the formidable work needed to be done in translation in Canada.
Another critical step for translation was taken when the University of Toronto Quarterly's annual survey of "Letters in Canada" added a `Translation' section. John J. O'Connor and, then his successor Kathy Mezei, Stratford informs us, performed the formidable job admirably.
This section selects a number of poets of Québec who have been translated to represent the fine work that has been done, and to point to the work that still needs doing.
Emile Nelligan (1879-1941)
Todd Swift has a delightful page on the League website called Young Soul Rebels that you should check out.
Nelligan is one of the poets Swift recreates for young readers. Emile Nelligan is considered "le plus grand poet Canadien". He was born on Christmas Eve, in Montreal, in 1879, to an Irish immigrant father and Quebecois mother, a talented musician. Louis Dudek claims he was a "lagging student failing several times to pass his grades and obliged to give up his studies" (Poetry of Our Time 204). Nelligan dropped out of school at 17 to write poetry. But he joined a literary society, L'Ecole litteraire de Montreal, which met regularly to read manuscripts and discuss poetry. At 20, Swift tells us, Nelligan had a nervous breakdown after he gave his one and only poetry reading, although his audience carried him home on their shoulders in triumph. His poems were wildly popular. In 1904, his mother collected and published his 107 poems; they have never been out of print. But, for the rest of Nelligan's life, there is a terrible silence. He spent the next 40 years in and out of a hospital near Montreal.
Swift suggests we think of Nelligan as "one of the most tragic, and real, cases of poetic genius we have in Canada," our " …link to European romantic and symbolist traditions, our own voyager into the dark lands of the inner imagination". Le Vaisseau d'Or, Nelligan's famous sonnet, "is known to every schoolboy in Quebec", Dudek claimed in 1966, "as a poem that expresses his tragic fate in a single memorable image" (204). We can see in many of his poems how both Rimbaud and Edgar Allen Poe influenced him.
The Golden Ship There was a fine ship, carved from solid gold With azure reaching masts, on seas unknown. Spread-eagled Venus, naked, hair back thrown, Stood at the prow. The sun blazed uncontrolled. But on the treacherous ocean in the gloom She struck the great reef where the Sirens chant. Appalling shipwreck plunged her keel aslant To the Gulf's depths, that unrelenting tomb. She was a Golden Ship: but there showed through Translucent sides treasures the blasphemous crew, Hatred, Disgust and Madness, fought to share. How much survives after the storm's brief race? Where is my heart, that empty ship, oh where? Alas, in Dream's abyss sunk without trace.
Selected Titles: Selected Poems of Emile Nelligan; translated by P.F. Widdow, 1960.
Alan Grandbois (1900-1975)
Grandbois was born in Portneuf, educated at the Séminaire de Québec and St. Dunstan's University of Prince Edward Island. He studied law and was admitted to the bar, but never practised. In 1925, he left Canada to study at the Sorbonne, and remained in Paris until1939, when he returned to Canada, fleeing the war in Europe. During his stay in Paris, he became friends with some of the great writers of the time such as Paul Morand, Paul Valéry, and Ernest Hemingway. He travelled the world: Italy, Spain, Austria, Russia, Japan, China, Africa, India and Tibet. He wrote three books of poetry and two biographies of the famous travellers, Jolliet and
Marco Polo.
Louis Dudek stresses the influence Grandbois had on French Canadian poetry, "he brought the spirit of modern French poetry — its vast incantatory rhetoric and surrealist imagination — to Canada with the publication of Les Iles de la nuit in 1944, and French poetry in Canada has never been the same since" (Poetry of our time 260). Dudek argues that the poetry is difficult but recognizable: "An anguished idealism at odds with the world is expressed in a language of symbolism and visionary ecstasy" (206).
Forgotten Childhood Those high basilica bells Child tortured with hope My eyes were filled With the fine purple marvels Of the slow secrets of the stars And I saw sometimes Under my eyelids The great extraordinary triumph Of the archangels of tender snow And I hear sometimes still At the threshold of my shadow The sound of that violin Which played for no one
Selected Titles: Alan Grandbois: Selected Poems (1964) translated by Peter Millar
Anne Hébert (1916-2000)
Poet, novelist, playwright, screenwriter, Anne Hébert was born in Saint Catherine-de-Fossambault, a small village 40 km from Quebec City to a well-to-do Quebec family whose ancestors were some of the earliest settlers to New France. She was raised in relative seclusion and educated at home. Her early influences included her cousin the poet St. Denys Garneau, and her father who was a literary critic.
Hébert published her first book of poems, Les Songes en équilibre, in her early twenties to great acclaim. The collection won the Prix David. The Quebec publishers, however, rejected her second book of poems, Le Trombeau des rois, as too dark a dissection of the human psyche. In 1954, a Royal Society grant allowed her to move to Paris where she thought her work would be more readily accepted. She was right. A French publishing company accepted the collection and became her lifelong publisher. She remained in Paris for forty years. When she learned she was terminally ill from cancer, she returned to Canada where she died in 2000.
Hébert described Quebec as "a country within a country". She said that Quebec is the original heart of Canada, "The hardest and deepest kernel… all around, nine other provinces form the flesh of this still-bitter fruit called Canada."
Hébert won many national and international awards for her work. Although she was probably best known for her fiction (the director Claude Jutra filmed her acclaimed novel Kamouraska), Les Fous de Bassan won France's prestigious Femina prize, and Am I Disturbing You was a finalist for the 1999 Giller Prize), her small oeuvre of poems has, nevertheless, placed her among the very best of the Quebecois poets. Poemes, published in 1960, translated by Alan Brown and Poulin Jr., won the Governor General's Award.
We are indebted to Alan Brown for one of the few complete translations of a Quebecois poet's oeuvre, in The Poems of Anne Hébert.
Snow Snow sets us dreaming on vast plains, trackless, colourless Keep vigil my heart, the snow sets us on saddled racers of white foam Ring out crowned childhood, the snow crowns us on high seas, full dream ahead, all sails flying The snow sets us in magic, slack tide of white, swollen feathers where pierces the redeye of this one bird My heart; stroke of fire under frost palms marvelling blood races on its way
Selected Titles: The Poems of Anne Hébert
translated by Alan Brown
Hector de Saint Denys Garneau (1912-1943)
Cousin and mentor to Anne Hébert, Saint-Denys Garneau was born in Montreal. He attended College Sainte Marie, l'Ecole des Beaux Arts, Loyola and College Brebeuf. At 16, in 1928, "L'Automne' was his first poem to win a grand prize and start him down the road to becoming a poet. Although, as young man, Louis
Dudek tell us, Garneau was "active, athletic, and exuberant", he had to eventually drop out of L'Ecole des Beaux Arts because of heart problems. He retired to a small village, St Catherine-de-Fossambault, to write his poems and his journal. By 1934, he was active in a young writers' group that produced `La Releve', a provocative
and progressive literary magazine. Garneau's poetic life, however, was cut short when he died at 31 of cardiac arrest. He had published only one book of poems,
Regards et jeux dans l'espace. After his death, Poesies complete was published, plus a journal covering the years from 1935-1939. In 1975, John Glassco translated the complete poems of St. Denys Garneau.
It is, therefore, surprising to see the impact Garneau had on French Canadian poetry. Dudek claims that Garneau was the French Canadian poet most widely discussed and admired in the 20th century. Dudek describes the poetry as "reflective, concerned with the ultimate questions of reality and spiritual illumination…groping in a shadow land on the verge of the unknown. Yet (Garneau) depicts the human condition, in its spiritual state of deprivation, with great fidelity and insight" (Poetry of our Time 216).
Bird Cage I am a bird cage A cage of bone With a bird The bird in the cage of bone Is death building his nest When nothing is happening One can hear him ruffle his wings And when one has laughed a lot If one suddenly stops One hears him cooing Far down Like a small bell It is a bird held captive This death in my cage of bone Would he not like to fly away Is it you who will hold him back Is it I What is it He cannot fly away Until he has eaten all My heart The source of blood With my life inside He will have my soul in his beak
Selected Titles: Complete Poems of St. Denys
Garneau translated by John Glassco
Copyright (c) Heather Pyrcz 2001. All rights reserved.