post-colonial_translation

62 Sherry Simon
which he has selected the poems, but not the titles of the poems
translated.
Such moves clearly make the critic’s work difficult; the path to the
sources, ad fontes, has been obscured. Brault’s decision is hardly a
whimsical gesture, however. It is consistent with the role which he gives
translation in a context of unequal cultural relations. Brault’s theory
of ‘non-translation’ is explicitly located in the confrontation between
the strength of English-language culture in North America and the
fragility of Quebec’s French-language cultural production. Nontranslation
is directly inspired by poet Gaston Miron’s concept of the
‘non-poem’. Miron laid claim to the ‘non-poem’, the glorification of
alienation and linguistic poverty, in the same way that the novelists
rehabilitated ‘joual’ for literary use, aiming at reversing a tradition of
cultural self-deprecation and humiliation.
Brault’s ‘non-translation’ responds to the appealing otherness of
English-language culture by a double gesture of homage and
reappropriation. The complexity of his relationship to the otherness of
Anglo culture is to be contrasted with the traditional stances of Quebec
writers, which consists in either euphorically shouting the praise of
cultural bilingualism, or condemning any incursion outside of the fragile
linguistic base provided by the home culture. Brault explains rather
that translation is to be considered an exemplary process of
confrontation between two cultural realities.
Since I have been navigating in all sorts of foreign waters, which
sweep along all sorts of historical, cultural, social and symbolic
deposits, I feel more profoundly at home and I am cured of my land
sickness. Because it was as much the fact of my being a Quebecer as
my passion for poetry that obliged me to make a detour through
estrangement on my way home. Ill at ease with my language, as
one is uncomfortable with one’s body, I finally realized that in
practice the most vital relationship with oneself comes through
the mediation of others. This is the core of non-translation. I felt
aggressed by the English language Well, I resolved to traverse this
language until I came to my own (yet unknown) tongue, and that
during this difficult and salutary passage I would lose myself in the
other and the other would find itself in me. 5
Here Brault defies any easy assumptions about the writer’s ‘athomeness’
in language. Rather than setting out on a mission of cultural
counter-conquest, Brault uses translation to establish a new relationship