post-colonial_translation

64 Sherry Simon
them, making them further unrecognizable as products of their
authors’ hands.
This double gesture is essentially what turns Brault’s translations
into non-translations. By cutting the works off from their sources, by
signing his own name as ‘author’ of this book, Brault creates a new
poetic order in his own image. This gesture, as Annie Brisset explains,
is fully characteristic of emergent literatures, which use translation as
a means of self-affirmation (Brisset 1996). The author’s name is effaced;
the name of the translator identifies the new functions of the work,
giving it the legitimacy of naturalization. The primacy of the author, of
origin, is undermined. Cut off from the poetic series to which they
belong, the poems are forced into the shape of a literary project for
which they were not originally destined. They will conform now to the
topography of Brault’s literary landscape.
Non-translation concerns, then, the meaning of the poet’s signature.
By substituting his own name for the list of authors whose work he
rewrites, Brault is not simply signalling a triumphant act of
appropriation. He is emphasizing the fragility of the relationship
between name and work, between subjectivity and writing – fragility
which he situates at the heart of all creativity. As a reader of Maurice
Blanchot, Brault is aware of the silence at the centre of poetry, of the
radical insignificance of the poet’s name. ‘I speak in order not to speak;
my signature escapes me’ (Brault 1975: 68). Brault uses his name to
situate his translations within a new cultural order, that of the language
of Quebec. The name refers to this collective origin, to the relation
between languages and poetic universes, more than it does to the
selfhood of the poet. ‘I float in an interlanguage, vaporous words veil
my eyes; a text, belonging neither to me nor to another, takes on the
form of a chiasmus. I lose . . . and find . . . myself in it’ (ibid.: 50).
TRANSLATING THE DESERT
With the work of Brault, Nicole Brossard’s Mauve Desert is surely the
most self-aware and fully achieved reflection on translation in
contemporary Quebec fiction. What is most unusual about the novel is
its shape. The text is divided into three parts, physically separated in
the volume. The first is a dramatic story of murder and betrayal, entitled
Mauve Desert; the second is a section called ‘A Book to Translate’ in
which the translator discusses and fleshes out aspects of the initial story;
and a third section entitled Mauve, the Horizon (given its own book
cover, complete with title, name of author, translator and publishing