post-colonial_translation

66 Sherry Simon
writers. Translation has been recognized as particularly important to
feminist interchange in Canada and Quebec, and an important motor
of creation and cultural exchange. 7 To be sensitive to the gendered
aspects of language use is to understand the subjectivity expressed in
any act of rewriting. Translation can never be a neutral act of repetition:
mediation involves transmission but also displacement.
Like Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller, from which
Brossard draws her epigraph (‘Reading is going toward something that
is about to be, and no one yet knows what it will be . . .’), Mauve Desert
is about the complex network of emotional investments which create
the life of the book. Brossard and Calvino both underscore the active
role which the translator plays in this process. But they differ strongly
in the way they characterize this role. Calvino’s translator is a surly,
untrustworthy cosmopolitan polyglot – a character out of a Nabokov
novel. He takes pleasure in sabotaging the work of the author, finding
ever new ways of creating hitches in the chain of transmission of the
literary work. Calvino uses the most stereotyped scenario of sexual
relations to portray his vision of literary relationships: (male) Author,
Translator and (female) Reader are caught up in a triangle of seduction
and jealousy. Suffering from the impotence of his status – in comparison
to that of the Author – the Translator must resort to the most unworthy
tactics in order to attract the Reader’s attention. Brossard redraws the
lines of literary desire. The translator undertakes her slow, meticulous
task for quite the opposite reasons than those which motivate Hermes
Marana. No international intrigues here, no high commercial stakes,
and no motives of vengeance: rather, the passionate life of the word.
How are we to understand the triple structure of Brossard’s book
Like Calvino, Brossard clearly wishes to foreground the existence of
the book as a made object, as the result of complex financial and
emotional investments. Translation is not only a process of linguistic
exchange; it is work which enables a new book to come into being. The
three sections of the book mimic the stages of progression in the life of a
book. This life begins with publication, and continues through
fortuitous encounters with those who infuse it with meaning.
Why include, however, under the same covers a story that is told
twice, in almost identical terms We are reminded here of the wellknown
story by Borges, ‘Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote’. Even
if the texts produced by Cervantes and the much later author Pierre
Menard are verbally identical, Borges explains, their meaning is quite
different. Brossard serves us a similar lesson in Mauve Desert, showing
how temporal succession and intralingual displacement generate new