post-colonial_translation

60 Sherry Simon
commercial transactions. But while these necessary efforts do repel
the agents of linguistic contamination, some Quebec literature
invites language interference and prefers to play on the drama of
language contact. The most celebrated episode of literary
transgression was the integration of ‘joual’ (or Montreal urban
dialect, heavily laced with English and ‘incorrect’ French
expressions) into the literature of the 1960s and 1970s. The literary
and cultural effects of this movement have been much discussed as
an expression of anti-colonialism, as the transformation of a
degraded and alienated form of language into a self-affirming figure
of national emergence (Simon (ed.) 1995). Still, to characterize
Quebec literature as the result of interlingual creation might seem
somewhat tendentious. After all, Quebec literature in French has
most often been treated as the expression of a singular cultural
identity, a conscious affirmation of difference in the context of Anglo
Saxon hegemony in North America. This linguistic and cultural
identity, however, can no longer be considered self-enclosed and selfgenerating.
As critic Pierre Nepveu has written, Quebec fiction seeks
to redefine the order of social identification, and construct
architectures of complexity reflecting the pluralism of Quebec
society (Nepveu 1988). Quebec cultural productions are indeed
increasingly explicit in showing the interplay and exchange which
are necessary to any process of creation. In other words, it is
recognized that the life of culture is not to be found in conservation,
but in the risky play of dialogue.
This chapter will discuss the work of Jacques Brault, Nicole Brossard
and Daniel Gagnon to illustrate modes through which language contact
and translation become generative of literary work. In particular I would
like to show how cultural productions in Quebec today play on language
relationships in ways which baffle and upset official images of
symmetrical dialogue, and how interlanguages become the basis for a
new cultural aesthetics. Brossard and Brault are two of the most
important writers in contemporary Quebec, having achieved the widest
recognition for a large body of work. 2 Jacques Brault uses the process
of ‘non-translation’ to produce poetic texts which carry few marks of
their initial provenance. Nicole Brossard’s novel Mauve Desert describes
and enacts the work of translation, giving voice to the translator and
finally integrating this translation work into the body of the book itself.
Daniel Gagnon’s short, lyrical texts are idiosyncratic and difficult to
categorize. 3 Gagnon writes on the frontier between languages,
producing double versions of texts which are written in a hybrid idiom,