The Carpathians - University of British Columbia
The Carpathians - University of British Columbia
The Carpathians - University of British Columbia
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est tradition <strong>of</strong> the ballad, always natural,<br />
never forced, due to a command <strong>of</strong> the<br />
rhythmic potentiality <strong>of</strong> vivid colloquial<br />
English.<br />
We can feast on Sean Virgo's powerful,<br />
precise prose, and Margaret Avison's<br />
poems, carrying such impact in their simplicity.<br />
<strong>The</strong>n there is an excerpt from Jane<br />
Urquhart's Changing Heaven, playing with<br />
intertextuality yet moving beyond, and the<br />
haunting Prophecy by film-maker and poet<br />
Pier Paolo Pasolini. But among the most<br />
superb pieces is the breath-taking extract<br />
from Timothy Findley's 1977 novel <strong>The</strong><br />
Wars., a stark portrait <strong>of</strong> war-time in which<br />
the author proceeds like a painter, through<br />
dabs, light brush-strokes, mere touches, to<br />
capture fragments <strong>of</strong> truth/ insight, bits <strong>of</strong><br />
reality like the ancient pictures that crumble<br />
under the narrator's gaze. T. Findley's<br />
minimalist technique is awesome, as he<br />
manages to telescope image and reality, to<br />
achieve perfect stasis, a time freeze in which<br />
the reader literally enters the snapshot.<br />
Not all the pieces are <strong>of</strong> equal calibre, <strong>of</strong><br />
course. <strong>The</strong>re are forgettable pieces like M.<br />
Atwood's Murder in the Dark or Claude<br />
Gavreau's <strong>The</strong> Good Life. Tibor Déry's <strong>The</strong><br />
Circus (Hungary) is laborious and flat, and<br />
Italo Calvino's If On a Winter Night a<br />
Traveller (Italy) is equally unconvincing,<br />
reading like a poor imitation <strong>of</strong> Alain<br />
Robbe-Grillet. Mainly translation getting in<br />
the way, you might argue. Not so. For<br />
throughout its 20 years <strong>of</strong> publication, Exile<br />
has systematically <strong>of</strong>fered the Englishspeaking<br />
public samples <strong>of</strong> the best Quebec<br />
authors, all respecting a tradition <strong>of</strong> fine<br />
translation. Ray Ellenwood's translation <strong>of</strong><br />
Jacques Ferron's Papa Boss is but one example<br />
<strong>of</strong> translation at its best, that is translation<br />
that does not privilege the referential<br />
system <strong>of</strong> the target text, and that rather<br />
than erasing or assimilating the foreign<br />
quality <strong>of</strong> the source text, aims at preserving<br />
the difference or otherness. Another<br />
success is W. Findlay and M. Bowman's<br />
translation <strong>of</strong> Michel Tremblay's Les Belles-<br />
Soeurs, which convincingly turns<br />
Tremblay's jarring joual into a vivid Scots-<br />
English working-class dialect.<br />
Don't miss this superb compilation <strong>of</strong><br />
high quality artistic production: indulge<br />
yourself and feast on it. Taking Houdini as<br />
the embodiment <strong>of</strong> magic, killed by a gratuitous<br />
act, B. Callaghan and his literary<br />
magazine have tried to be keepers <strong>of</strong> the<br />
magic: "If you want to know where Harry<br />
Houdini still lives," says Callaghan, "where<br />
he escaped before your eyes, from all the<br />
traps and locks <strong>of</strong> poetry and prose and<br />
painting and music, Harry Houdini is in<br />
Exile. Houdini is in the heart <strong>of</strong> every<br />
writer who appears in Exile."<br />
<strong>The</strong> Author Speaks<br />
Margaret Atwood<br />
"An Interview with Margaret Atwood." American<br />
Audio Prose Library n.p.<br />
"Margaret Atwood reading "Unearthing Suite."<br />
American Audio Prose Library n.p.<br />
"Margaret Atwood reads from A Handmaid's Tale<br />
and talks about this futuristic fable <strong>of</strong> misogyny as<br />
compared to Orwell's 1984." A Moveable Feast #17<br />
^P-<br />
Reviewed by Nancy Roberts<br />
When the scholars at the Twelfth Symposium<br />
on Gileadean Studies gather to discuss the<br />
tapes that make up <strong>The</strong> Handmaid's Tale,<br />
their document is about two hundred years<br />
old and its narrator has long since met her<br />
fate. <strong>The</strong> scholars are not, however, as<br />
interested in the narrator as they are in the<br />
identity <strong>of</strong> her Commander, whose power<br />
and public position compel their attention.<br />
While the tapes considered here differ from<br />
that archival material in a number <strong>of</strong> ways,<br />
an interest in identity and power remains.<br />
At the end <strong>of</strong> the twentieth century it is the<br />
public identity <strong>of</strong> the author and the<br />
sources <strong>of</strong> her power that fascinate us.<br />
<strong>The</strong> voice on these tapes is that <strong>of</strong>