post-colonial_translation

Border writing in Quebec 71
Daughter is mixed and broken. It expresses weakness and incapacity,
the inability to show mastery of a unified code of literary
communication. Devoid of the local strength and linguistic coherence
we often associate with successful works of literature, the text has many
of the characteristics of a ‘bad’ translation. What generally passes for a
bad translation, in fact, is a text which reminds its readers that it is
suspended between languages, suggesting the translator’s incapacity
to escape the influence of the source language and embrace the fullness
of the target language. Both in its French and English versions, Gagnon’s
book voluntarily adopts this uncomfortable intermediary position.
As a double text, traversed by linguistic plurality, La Fille à marier /
The Marriageable Daughter takes on an emblematic status. It becomes
suggestive of the language difficulties experienced by those who live
between two cultures, in the many contact zones of the contemporary
world. It takes aesthetic risks in foregrounding its own uncertainty,
breaking literary convention by forfeiting the security of a unified idiom.
The precariousness of the code in which Gagnon writes destabilizes
the very idea of translation. We have been used to thinking of cultures
and languages as autonomous singularities. One translates a text,
written in one language, emerging out of one culture. But what if, as is
here the case, the ‘original’ text is inhabited by more than one language
Can the transfer of these texts, as Derrida asks, still be called translation
(Derrida 1985: 215)
Inevitably, the mixing of codes – and of modes of literary generation
– brings confusion and disorder. Whether it be to disturb the contours
of literary property (Brault), the shape of the book (Brossard) or the
identity of literary language (Gagnon), all these writers use translation
to challenge categories of textual order. Their works show how
‘language contact’ can be put to imaginative use.
While all of these experiments involve the contact between French
and English, obviously the most frequent form of language contact
in the Quebec context, other productions, especially in theatre, could
be evoked, which interact with a variety of languages which are given
mythical powers (Chinese in Robert Lepage’s Dragon Trilogy,
German in many works by the dance/theatre group Carbone 14) or
immigrant languages (such as Italian in the theatre of Marco
Micone). And so translation and plurilingualism take on new
dimensions and meanings in contemporary cultural production.
What the poetics of translation confirms for us is that our
understanding of translation today as a reality and as an ideal has more
to do with discontinuity, friction and multiplicity than it has to do with