post-colonial_translation

70 Sherry Simon
texts an extremely liberal, even profligate, use of idiom. It feels
sometimes as if the author has been ransacking a dictionary of idiomatic
expressions and then savouring the pleasure of trying them out: ‘rivers
wet their whistle, nothing ventured nothing gained, so they take the
plunge, jump and pole vault with coated tongue, I skip meals’ (Gagnon
1989: 13). This ludic and exuberant use of idiomatic expressions
declares the affiliation of the text to specific linguistic traditions, and
expresses what Marjory Sabin has identified as the essence of the English
modernist tradition: the dialogue between linguistic affiliation and
alienation, between the idioms of common speech and suspicion of the
vernacular (Sabin 1987).
Gagnon’s broken language carries, in addition, meanings which are
specific to the socio-historic context of Canadian bilingualism. Jeanne
conveys the fascination of a Sherbrooke schoolgirl for the West; this
unknown territory offers the possibility of a secret language of escape,
a personal language of revolt. But English is also the language of Jeanne’s
schoolteacher, whose presence in the narrative always carries a threat
of violence. English figures both as the source and as the possible remedy
for Jeanne’s oppression.
Gagnon’s double text uses linguistic plurality in ways which are richly
suggestive of ‘interlanguage’ as defined by Régine Robin. This is ‘an
imaginary relationship which the writer maintains with his or her mother
tongue and with the other languages which make up his or her linguistic
universe: a relationship of love, fixation, hate, rejection, or ambivalence’
(Robin 1990: 171). It is dominated by the strangeness of Freud’s
‘unheimlich’: in a perpetual movement away from his/her ‘own’, ‘proper’
language, the writer introduces into the very body of the work a trace of
what is different, what lies outside. The frontiers between here and there
therefore become unstable – ‘here’ being, through a process of permanent
and always incomplete translation, a permanently uncertain place.
POETICS OF TRANSLATION
The three texts considered in this chapter can be said to offer successive
adumbrations of a poetics of translation. These texts bring to realization
an aesthetics of cultural pluralism in which the literary object is
fragmented, in a manner analogous to the contemporary social body.
We should note, though, that the manner in which this fragmentation
is enacted in the double work of Daniel Gagnon is quite different from
Brault’s somewhat more conventional ‘non-translations’ or Brossard’s
serene internal translation. The idiom of Gagnon’s Marriageable