post-colonial_translation

Border writing in Quebec 65
house) is a rewriting of the first chapter, in French ‘translation’. The
same story is repeated in these first and third sections, both times in
French, but the second version contains changes in rhythm, intensity
and phrasing.
Mauve Desert, the first part of the book, tells a story of love and
death against the backdrop of the Arizona desert. An adolescent,
Melanie, speeds along the desert roads in her mother’s Meteor. A man,
whom we understand to represent science, power and violence, kills a
woman whom he perceives as threatening to that power. The lines of
the narrative are clean and brilliant, at the same time transparent and
mysterious.
The second part is written by the translator, Maude Laures, who
discovers Mauve Desert by accident in a bookstore and becomes
impassioned with it. The chapter that she writes, ‘A Book to Translate’,
is an outgrowth of that reading, and is a kind of preface to the translation
which follows. In the imaginary dialogue which is part of that chapter,
the author explains to the translator: ‘I remember one day buying a
geology book in which I found a letter. It was a love letter written by a
woman and addressed to another woman. I used the letter as a
bookmark. I would read it before reading and after reading [ . . . ] I
imagined the face of the woman for whom it was meant. It was during
that time that I started writing the book you want to translate’ (Brossard
1990: 83). The translator fleshes out the skeleton of the narrative,
imagining details which were barely suggested in the original, exploring
hypotheses for unexplained enigmas. We see the translator here as an
independent agent, adding new life to the narrative.
This does not mean that the translator takes liberties with the text.
On the contrary, when the time comes for her to set about the meticulous
task of ‘reading backwards in her language’ (ibid.), she proceeds with
painstaking care. The result, as we see, is practically identical with the
original. Despite – or perhaps because of – the long reveries which have
allowed the translator to enter the imaginative world of the text, the
translation looks surprisingly just like the original.
The triple structure of the book is striking. Translation becomes a
mode of generation of the literary work, the means through which much
of the book is generated; translation is also the thematic subject of the
work, in that the considerations of the second section are attributed to
the subjectivity of the translator and considered to accompany the
translation process.
It is particularly appropriate that this foregrounding of the translation
process be at the heart of a work by the best known of Quebec’s feminist