I have always loved languages, books and explorations. My family lived in a suburb of Chicago, and when I was young, my father used to read me classic novels of English literature, such as the works of Sir Walter Scott and Robert Louis Stevenson, and explain any words I didn’t understand. My mother was a dedicated Francophile who had lived in France for a year when she was young, and had majored in French literature at the University of Chicago. I was also interested in archeology and Spanish, especially in my teens, when my best friend was a Mexican American who lived in the city. When I went away to university, I majored in English, minored in French, and took Spanish courses every year, and I became increasingly curious about the relationships between all three, even though languages at that time tended to be studied discretely. As I wrote my essays, I began to realize that what really fascinated me was comparative literature, but that courses in that field were difficult to find. Octavio Paz believed that literatures should be viewed according to international literary and artistic movements that sweep over continents, intersecting and enriching one another rather than as isolated languages. Medieval tales moved in from Arab and Persian cultures, and all of Europe felt the Renaissance and subsequent literary and artistic movements of the Baroque, Neoclassicism, Romanticism, Surrealism, and Magic Realism spread all over the world.

       As graduation approached, difficult decisions had to be made. The revolt against the Vietnam war was strong at Yale, and our chaplain, William Sloane Coffin, was one of the most powerful voices against it. I became an activist, going to the great demonstrations of the time, and sending back my draft card to my draft board. Luckily, the board didn’t react immediately, and I was able to finish my studies. I had always imagined that Montreal would be a great place for languages and cultures to interact, and I decided to immigrate to Canada. At that time, a single interview was sufficient, and I passed it easily and became a landed immigrant. It was summer when I arrived, and the streets were full of people ambling about and talking outside in cafés, with a very pleasant feeling of relaxation. I lived in Montreal for a year, employed as a social worker, and then explored my new country, teaching French in Newfoundland and northern British Columbia, hitchhiking to the Yukon and working in street repairs and on moving vans in Vancouver. All the time I was saving money to take a major trip to Latin America.

       I travelled for two years over most of the area, speaking nothing but Spanish and a little Portuguese, reading key histories and the novels, poetry and plays of each country. I picked up slang and different accents, from Mexico to the Andes, including some terms in Quechua, and, after various zigzags into the Amazon, made my way down the west coast of the continent to Tierra del Fuego, and then back up from Argentina and across Brazil to Guyana. I kept a diary of poems, and a series of watercolours in my sketchbook.

       When I came back to Canada, I decided to settle down in Montreal, which had a growing Latin American population, as people fled northward from the wave of military dictatorships that completely covered the Southern Cone and then spread to Central America. There were national meetings, poetry readings, music and political sessions. I was welcomed, because I respected their cultures and could help them adapt. I began to translate news from Latin American countries into English and send it to newspapers here, then to translate poetry and short stories so the authors could put in for Council programs, and I read my own poems in Spanish or English and French at literary events. I enjoyed all this greatly and signed up with a friend for a course in Spanish translation at Concordia University, given by Catherine Vallejo. I excelled and afterwards passed the OTTIAQ exam for Spanish to English professional certification. I also took a master’s degree in creative writing at Concordia, with professors Gary Geddes and Henry Beissel, both of whom were interested in Latin America, and published Crossing the Chaco, a book of the poems I’d written as I travelled, all the while teaching English and Spanish in French-language high schools and CEGEPs and later as a lecturer at several universities.

       By that time, I was publishing prose and poetry in Spanish, sometimes with English or French on the facing page, for various friends’ work, with my own White Dwarf Editions / Les Éditions de la Naine Blanche / Las Ediciones de la Enana Blanca. Trilingual reading sessions were becoming increasingly common. I still wanted to go deeper into comparative literature, which I’d have to study part-time as I worked. I called the department at McGill University, but was told I’d have to take classes full-time; the program closed several years later. Then, by a stroke of luck, a CEGEP colleague told me to try the Université de Sherbrooke, where she had studied. We set up a meeting with Larry Shouldice, a friend of hers, who was a professor of literature and translation there, and was the author of Contemporary Quebec Criticism. Larry and I got along well: he was also interested in Latin America, and had taken two sabbaticals there, one in Lima and the other in Rio de Janeiro. The doctoral program in English was in comparative Canadian literature, that is, between English and French writing. This was wonderful, because I’d become interested in both, and wanted to take on something fresh and different. Furthermore, Larry and DG Jones were translators themselves, and the program had a distinctive review, ellipse, which specialized in literary translation between Canada’s two official colonial languages. I had a meeting with the professors, whom I found very encouraging and who shared many of my interests. Joseph Bonenfant had even translated Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” into French! I also presented my idea for my dissertation, Latinocanadá: A Study of Ten Latin American Writers of Canada. I chose the writers for the quality of their work, from a variety of countries, who had settled in different parts of Canada, and with a balance of men and women. At the end of each chapter, I would include translations of poetry or a short story by the writer. The professors heartily accepted it and welcomed me to the university. Everything was falling into place. My minor subject would be the history of Argentine literature, which I had started to study during the four months I’d spent in Buenos Aires.

       The following year I began my courses with Larry, Doug Jones, and Ronald Sutherland. The university and indeed the whole area was relaxed and pleasant, with beautiful lakes and mountains, and I felt uplifted by my new field of study. I read previous issues of ellipse and found them wonderful, with the very best translators in French and English. After a few months, I started receiving a poem or two to translate for each edition from Patricia Godbout, who was also on the editorial board. I had to turn in my translations early, in case the professors found rough areas or difficulties in interpretation that they thought should be revised. The poems sent to me were gradually more sophisticated and challenging, and I took them on happily, along with the suggestions and search for precision. Eventually, in the fall of 1997, the Board asked me to be the guest editor of the fall edition, which would be dedicated to four Latino-Canadian writers who wrote in Spanish or French. This was the first edition of ellipse to include a third language, other than English or French. It included a brilliant avant-propos by Patricia Godbout and an insightful foreword by the Chilean- Canadian author Leandro Urbina, followed by an essay I wrote called “Migrant Language: Latino-Canadian Writing in French and English” to present their lives and works. I chose Gloria Escomel, a French woman who grew up in Uruguay and now lived in Montreal; Salvador Torres, a Salvadoran who escaped his country during the civil war there; and two Chilean writers who left their country after the coup d’état against Salvador Allende in 1973: Carmen Rodríguez, who lived in Vancouver, and Jorge Etcheverry, from Ottawa. All four authors wrote eloquent, powerful work, but each one had their own distinct style and subjects. There were also photos of them and several beautiful drawings by the Salvadoran artist known as Bénces. I translated one of the poems, and the rest were translated into English or French by the very best of translators. I believe that my professors realized the importance of Latino-Canadian writers who, coming from deep literary backgrounds, were going to make their mark on Canadian literature, and I was honoured to present them.

       In the middle of writing my study, I received an offer from Gary Geddes. He wanted to publish a book of Canadian writing about Latin America and offered to share it with me: he would choose the works by Anglo- Canadians, and I would find and translate the works by Quebec writers, Latino-Canadians, and Haitians. I asked the university if I could have a hiatus for several years to work on it, and it was granted. I combed the library at the Université de Montréal, and found a deep interest in the area, with many poems and short stories about culture there, including by Nicole Brossard and Claude Beausoleil. I also reached out to Spanish-speaking writers from all over Canada, and discovered beautiful, wistful works by Haitians, many of whom had studied at the Université de Montréal and considered Montreal to be their main cultural centre outside of their homeland. The result was Compañeros: An Anthology of Writings about Latin America, which included the work of 87 English- Canadian, Québécois, Haitian-, and Latino-Canadian writers, of which I translated twenty-seven of many different genres, and vastly expanded my knowledge and translation skills. Afterwards I finished and defended my thesis and began to adapt it as a book for general readers, in the hope of having it published, which finally took place with McGill-Queen’s University Press in 2007. In the meantime, I received a Governor’s General Award in 2006 for my translation of Vétiver, a book of poetry by the Haitian writer Joël Des Rosiers, and was granted tenure at Concordia University, where I organized a program in Spanish/English translation. I also began to receive grants that would allow me to give presentations on my work, first in Canadian universities, then in the yearly event of the Celebración Cultural del Idioma Español (CCIE), founded by Margarita Feliciano of York University and Mario Valdés of the University of Toronto, a four- or five- day event that brought together Hispanic artists, writers and film-makers from all parts of Latin America. By then, I was translating books for various publishers, writing papers for literary reviews, and taking yearly courses in Portuguese at the Université de Montréal. I also was working with the Haitian-Canadian author Edgard Gousse, who, along with Jean-Pierre Pelletier, had established Ruptures, la revue des Trois Amériques, which dedicated each issue to the literature of a single country or area, in French, English, Spanish, and Portuguese, and included both new and well-known authors. 

       During this time, many of the professors I’d known at the Université de Sherbrooke had retired or passed away, and the new professors that arrived concentrated on other fields. In 2001, ellipse was transferred to Jo-Anne Elder in Fredericton. I knew her well, since Joe Blades, the founder of Broken Jaw Press, was also based there; he had published a book of my poetry and several of my translations of works by the Argentine writer Nela Rio, who was a local professor. Jo-Anne decided to open ellipse to other languages, starting with two editions about literary relationships between Argentina and Canada. I was the guest editor of the Argentina-Canada issue, and Patrick Imbert of the Canada-Argentina one. I included the work by three young poets I’d met after a conference in Buenos Aires, whose poems reflected their strength of spirit during the sombre times of life after the military dictatorship, as well as prose by two writers who had been disappeared and incarcerated after the coup. The two issues had a surprising reach, and I was pleased to have two of my watercolours on the cover of the first one.

       In the meantime, I had met Eloína Prato dos Santos, a professor of Canadian literature at the Universidad Federal do Rio Grande, the southernmost city in Brazil, at a conference in Ottawa on comparisons of the literatures of the two nations. She was also in contact with the state university in Porto Alegre, home of Zilá Bernd, author of over twenty books on transcultural translation and ethnicity and Indigeneity, and I discovered that Canadian literature, both in French and English, was greatly popular in their country. I joined the Associãço Brasileira de Estudos Canadenses and became active in their review, Interfaces Brasil/Canadá, which included writings from many other states of Brazil. I spoke to Jo- Anne about these discoveries, and she asked Eloína and her friend Sonia Torres, of the Universidade Federal Fluminense, and me to put together a Canada/Brazil issue, during which process we discovered a number of Canadian literary translators of Portuguese. In 2010 we produced a double issue of ellipse, “Contemporary Brazilian Writing in Translation,” in Portuguese, English, and French. It was 160 pages long and included poetry and fiction by some of Brazil’s best-known authors, including a lengthy story about the adventures of a man living in the Amazon, which I translated. Most programs in Canadian literature faded out after federal funding was discontinued in 2006, but Brazil and Mexico have maintained strong, well-developed university systems, and have been able to continue offering Canadian studies programs on their own.

       After I retired from Concordia, I was asked by the Banff Centre of the Arts to be the co-director, along with the American literary translator Katie Silver, of the Banff International Literary Translation Centre (BILTC). The program was founded by translators from Canada, Mexico, and the United States, and extended three-week invitations to eighteen candidates from all over the world each spring to work in Banff, Alberta, and exchange ideas, with special emphasis on the Americas. It boomed, until we were receiving well over a hundred applicants a year, and the three countries’ literary translation associations were in constant connection. I would go down to Mexico City in the fall to give a paper about Spanish-language works in Canada and a talk about the program, which was very popular, and seek government backing for students’ airfare. Unfortunately, the BILTC program was closed in 2020 due to dwindling backing from Alberta and other reductions at the Banff Centre. Nevertheless, it was a magnificent experience to have provided such fulfillment to literary translation and multiple comparations of literature.