post-colonial_translation

Border writing in Quebec 69
However, there are also a few counter-examples where word associations
in French clearly seem to precede the English translation: ‘je suis sur le
pas de la porte, pas de pas de valse, pour céder le pas aux bêtes immondes,
leur permettre de passer’ (ibid.: 16): ‘I am standing in the doorway, no
waltz steps, to give the filthy beasts precedence, allow them to pass’
(Gagnon 1989: 10). The play on words around ‘pas’ in French is not
reproduced in the English text. In addition, there is some extra material
in the French version which does not exist in the English one.
In fact there is no way of declaring any one of these texts to be the
original. If indeed the English did come first, as clues seem to indicate,
it was written through and with French. Writing the text in English was
already an operation of translation which the printed French version
simply comes to confirm. In fact as Phyllis makes clear from the start:
‘do you understand me well excuse my so bad English, mister Smith
mon professeur d’anglais gave me your precious name, if it will cure
your pernicious anaemia, he said, and now I have my kindred soul’
(ibid.: 9). (‘O Phyllis, tu es ma chère soeur à Medicine Hat, en Alberta
au Canada, ne l’es-tu pas aren’t you do you understand me well
excuse mon si mauvais anglais, mister Smith my english professor m’a
promis de corriger mes fantes, il m’a donné ton précieux nom et
maintenant j’ai une âme soeur.’) English is already a language
deliberately infused with the alterity of an alien code. It is ‘so bad English’
which makes Jeanne ask her friend if ‘a boy [did] ever touch you
somewhere on your corpse Phyllis’ (Gagnon 1989: 10).
In the vocabulary of Brian Fitch’s study of Samuel Beckett’s bilingual
text, we must conclude that there is no linguistic prime instance; both
original and variants belong to the same megatype (Fitch 1988). Fitch
shows that when read together, the French and English versions of
Beckett’s texts become commentaries one on the other. Beckett writes
‘across languages’: ‘In whichever of the two languages Beckett happens
to be writing at a given moment, there is always the presence of the
other language with its wholly different expressive potential hovering
at his shoulder, always at arm’s reach and within earshot’ (Fitch 1988:
156). This awareness can only accentuate the false security of the mother
tongue. All language becomes denaturalized, distanced. The experience
of the bilingual writer becomes a heightened awareness of the
‘ambivalent status, for its user, of all language’ (Fitch 1988: 160).
Daniel Gagnon’s double text speaks to this modernist awareness of
the alienation of linguistic codes. It expresses an uneasiness with
language. But at the same time, there is a contradictory fascination with
the automatic phrases of idiomatic language. There is indeed in both