New England to Quebec: From the suburbs to bohemia 

I turned twenty-one a month after I arrived in Montreal to resume my undergraduate studies. I had chosen Montreal and McGill because it allowed you to get credits towards your French licence at the Sorbonne. In my mind I would spend three years here and then continue on to France and later back to the US. Arriving in Montreal, I was smitten. That Montreal was a French-speaking city really appealed to me. And then Kennedy was assassinated shortly after I arrived and, with everything that I felt was very ugly about America, including the war in Vietnam, it became an embarrassment to be an American. What else is new?

       When I was at Westwood High School in Massachusetts, I spent my junior year in Germany as an American Field Service exchange student. My high school was very interested in international exchanges and I was chosen to make the trip partly thanks to a couple who lived on a fine estate in Westwood (we did not live on a fine estate), Colonel Philip Sherwood (the brother of screenwriter Robert E. Sherwood) and his wife, who helped finance the exchange. They took a liking to me and nurtured my interest in international affairs. My father had been to Europe with the US army during WWII and my mother’s grandparents had travelled extensively in Europe, but other than that, my family hadn’t really travelled abroad. So leaving my family milieu to go to Germany for a year, where I knew no one, was huge, and it changed my life. After high school I applied to Wellesley College (which was near my parents’ home) but was told that few commuting students were accepted and that my best chance was to spend a year at a sister college in Oxford, Ohio and then apply to Wellesley again as a transfer student the following year. I thought I was going to die in Oxford, Ohio, and after a year there I returned to Germany, to Heidelberg this time, auditing classes and reading Nietzsche and Heine, so my German was very fluent. But then I decided in favour of French, perhaps because of the influence of my mother, who was a real Francophile and very interested in the arts. German is still latent within me, and I do speak Spanish as well. It’s all layered in there. What I thought I was doing with all this language training was preparing for work in diplomacy or international affairs in the States. But I never went back. As destiny would have it, translation became my way of practising international affairs. Coming from the States and choosing to remain in Quebec and work in the arts became a vaguely political gesture. For me, practising literary translation here in the seventies meant ensuring that the distinct political and cultural reality of these writers was heard across the solitudes. Perhaps that way my language-learning could serve a kind of diplomatic role. 

THERE WAS A SOCIAL AND POLITICAL BASIS OF SHARED VALUES GUIDING ALL THE ARTS IN QUEBEC.

       In Montreal, I did my MA thesis in the French Department at McGill on the Para-surrealist group called Le grand jeu, a splinter group that rebelled against André Breton. The journal called Le Grand Jeu was preoccupied with issues like Oriental mysticism, consciousness-altering drugs, and political opposition. In fact, is it another coincidence? Le Grand jeu sounded like the kind of counterculture I would be part of in Montreal. Somehow I ended up as the all-night disk jockey at CKGM-FM, which has become CHOM. And when Jean Basile (the former editor of the cultural pages of Le Devoir, an incredible man, born in France of a French Mother and Russian exile father named Bezroudnoff, who is buried like his friend Ludmilla Chiriaeff in the Russian cemetery in Rawdon) and others were looking to found the counter culture journal Mainmise, they came to CKGM and invited me to join the founding editorial board as the rock music person. This was a far cry from Westwood Massachusetts. 

       The first year I was at McGill I went to a party at the flat of the late NFB filmmaker Tanya Ballantyne, who made a groundbreaking documentary called The Things I Cannot Change. Tanya was living with a dashing Scotsman named Alex Urquhart, the son of the Earl of Urquhart, who had a small castle in Banff in the north of Scotland. Years later, when my daughter Melissa and I visited the castle with Alex, he showed us the library, which contained the dictionary his ancestor used to translate Rabelais. A mini-epiphany for a literary translator! At Tanya’s party I met participants in many other layers of Quebec cultural life. Irene Kon, Tanya’s mother, was there. She knew Norman Bethune and she was close to people in the Communist party. She had been living with Jean-Paul Mousseau, whose ceramics decorate the Peel Metro, and she knew Pierre Gaboriau who was also invited to this party. Pierre was the son of the very well-known political cartoonist Robert Lapalme. Gaboriau was not Pierre’s legal surname. He had taken his father’s mother’s maiden name as his nom de plume because, as a painter in his own right, he didn’t want to be “le fils de Lapalme.” He was actually born in the States by a fluke, the year Lapalme was invited to be the cartoonist for a New York daily. Lapalme had met Salvador Dali, and I have a photograph of Pierre Gaboriau standing in a weird suit with Dali. This was heady stuff for a girl from suburban Boston.

       Pierre and I often went to hang out at the Bistro on rue de la Montagne, a popular meeting place for artists of all sorts. You went down a few steps and there was a zinc bar, very French, and then behind the bar was a restaurant with a mural on the wall by Robert Lapalme. Lapalme had a television show where people could call in and request a caricature on a topic of their choice. He took on Duplessis, which resulted in threats on his life. At the Bistro I met many artists including Mousseau, Armand Vaillancourt who became my neighbour on Esplanade, Claude Gauvreau. Writers, theatre people, sculptors. What struck me at the time was that there was a social and political basis of shared values guiding all the arts in Quebec. It was writers and painters and other artists who signed the Refus global. 

       These were the layers of my becoming truly involved in Quebec culture. I started working for CBC radio, on a national show called Quebec Now; I did the cultural segment. I did that for about a year. But before that I had done interviews as a spinoff from my work as a DJ—including a one-hour interview with Frank Zappa and a two-hour interview with Ken Kesey, which became documentaries for the CBC national network program Concern. I went out to interview Kesey on the farm in Oregon where he lived after the Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test years. Also, in the early seventies, for a year or so, I was the theatre critic for the Montreal Gazette, including reviews of French-language productions in my column.

From journalism to translation 

How did I get into translation? It was Jean Basile who asked me to translate an article he wrote for Place des Arts magazine on Tommy, the Who rock opera, and I had translated an excerpt from Les Belles soeurs for Quebec Now. Michel Tremblay recommended me to the Canada Council in 1975 for a job in the theatre section. My area was French-language theatre and theatre for young audiences across the country. I was at the Council for about a year and a half. I had an arrangement where I spent three days in the office in Ottawa. I wrote a policy paper for the Canada Council on theatre for young audiences. Because of my support of theatre for young audiences, some of those companies began to ask me to translate their work. Over the years I’ve translated a lot of TYA plays, and I’ve found that work really meaningful. 

FOR EACH WRITER, YOU HAVE TO HAVE A SENSE OF THE PRIMARY WELLSPRING OF THEIR CREATIVITY AND THEN RISING TO THE SURFACE, THEIR WORDS.

       I had no background in translation studies, though I did take one course at McGill, perhaps in 1967. It was taught as a part of the French literature program by one Mademoiselle Reverchon, who was from France and wore shabby long skirts. The classes were deadly. We were to translate Somerset Maugham into French. Had you asked me then whether I’d ever be interested in translating, I would have said no. 

       My first important experience was translating La Nef des sorcières, a play written by a collective of seven women including Martha Blackburn, Marie- Claire Blais, Nicole Brossard, Odette Gagnon, Luce Guilbeault, Pol Pelletier, and France Théoret, produced at the Théâtre du Nouveau Monde during International Women’s Year, 1975. I had worked as a researcher with Armande St-Jean for the Radio Canada series Nous, les femmes and met a lot of women in the arts and the feminist movement. So when it came time to translate La Nef des sorcières, I was contacted. That was the first major theatre piece I translated. I went on to translate two plays by Pol Pelletier and a memoir by Marie-Claire Blais about her years on Cape Cod, where Edmund Wilson had taken her under his wing. 

A love affair with Quebec 

Translating the work of Quebec writers, some over a period of 35 years, has certainly deepened my understanding and love of Quebec culture. Obviously having the privilege to translate plays and novels by Michel Tremblay has given me insights into the heart and soul of Quebec. Talonbooks just brought out the last two novels in Tremblay’s nine-novel Desrosiers Diaspora cycle, an epic undertaking I shared with Sheila Fischman. One thing I find particularly rich and moving in Tremblay’s work is his deep affection and admiration for the women in his world. Just this year, Centaur Theatre presented a new production of For the Pleasure of Seeing Her Again, Michel’s ode to his mother, a character as universal as she is quintessentially québécoise et canadienne française. I was recently struck by the similarity between Tremblay’s world and Colm Toibin’s. In their novels, the female characters are really incredible—such resiliency and heart and sly wisdom. There are many similarities between Ireland and Quebec, including the love of colourful language, the legacy of the Catholic Church, and a vibrating sense of belonging, of being rooted in a place.

       I’ve been translating Michel Tremblay for decades, along with Michel Marc Bouchard, Wajdi Mouawad, and Jasmine Dubé. These connections have been so nourishing to me. 

From Quebec to around the world 

But just as important as the deep dive into Quebec culture has been the discovery of the worlds within the worlds of the writers I’ve translated. I’ve learned so much. One perfect example would be Michel Marc Bouchard’s The Girl King, featuring a chapter in the life of the controversial Queen Christina of Sweden. He was commissioned to write the screenplay for a feature film to be shot in English and directed by Finnish director Mika Kaurismaki. Michel Marc became so fascinated by the historical figure he wrote a play that premiered in French at the Théâtre du Nouveau Monde before the movie was finally released. Working on the film and the play, I got to learn so much about that whole period in European history. At one point, I went with Anna Stratton, the co- producer of the movie, to visit the palazzo in Rome where Queen Christina lived after she abdicated and the pope welcomed her, because she was the daughter of King Gustav, the mortal enemy of Rome. We stood in the room where she died. An amazing moment. I was able to travel to Finland with Michel Marc for the filming of The Girl King, shot in Turku, which is just across the Baltic from Sweden. We filmed in the castle where Queen Christina was conceived when Turku was part of the Kingdom of Sweden. That is what I’ve loved about the work over the years—working with writers like Michel Marc Bouchard and Wajdi Mouawad, whose choice of subjects and whose cultural knowledge are so vast. Their scope is equally vast but results in very different brands of theatre. 

       Wajdi will take a principle, a concept, like the notion of identity in Birds of a Kind, where he explores how our religious background shapes our identity, or not—these preoccupations drive his work. Two of the last three plays I’ve translated for Wajdi were multilingual productions. His last play was written to be performed in French, English, and Greek. I travelled to France to work with him and the cast at the Théâtre national La Colline, and on to Greece for the world premiere of Europa’s Pledge at the 4,500-year-old amphitheatre in Epidaurus. During rehearsals, Wajdi invited wonderful scholars he’d met while giving a series of lectures at the Collège de France to come speak to us about Greek tragedy and politics in the Middle East. This production was a truly crazy undertaking. Wajdi changed some lines the night of the premiere. And it worked, the actors pulled it off. Juliette Binoche and Israeli theatre and television star Leora Rivlin, and Violette Chauveau and Emmanuel Schwartz from Quebec gave extraordinary performances. In a very different vein, I’ve just finished the translation of his earlier play called The Square Root of the Verb to Be, which runs six hours and explores notions of quantum physics and parallel realities. 

       Michel Marc Bouchard’s work focuses more on interpersonal relationships and the wrenching conflicts between the individual and society. In addition to more than two dozen plays (three of which also became movies in English), Michel Marc has written the narrative, the storyline for several very successful interactive exhibitions. In Old Montreal, for instance, there’s the ongoing Cité Mémoire. For the Musée de la civilisation in Quebec City, there was On the Heels of Temptation/ Talons et tentations, a fanciful take on the Cinderella story, but inspired by the grim reality of the shoe manufacturing business in Quebec City in the early twentieth century. Working on those projects, I learned a lot about shoes, Quebec City, the history of Montreal, and some of the darker chapters of Quebec society. Our work as translators takes us down avenues we would not have discovered otherwise. That’s what I love most about it. 

WHILE I’M TRANSLATING THEATRE, I’M MUMBLING UNDER MY BREATH ALL THE TIME.

Creative process 

Especially when you work with a writer over time, translation is a window into the creative process. I loved translating The Queens by Normand Chaurette. I entered it and it just flowed. Normand took Shakespeare’s queens, who are never developed in the original plays, and he imagined them trapped in a snowstorm in a castle. The play is written almost like haiku: no punctuation, short lines written as they are being breathed. When a word didn’t make sense entirely, I would wonder why the word was there and he would say, I like the way it sounds, and that’s a big clue, the musicality. He was a music lover; he had a grand piano in his apartment. I found that within the very different worlds of different writers, of course you have to find the right words, but also capture the individual styles and rhythms, so it’s an exploration of the creative process of each writer. How exciting to get to figure out what has shaped their styles. 

IN CANADA THERE IS A NEW CONSCIOUSNESS OF BEING PART OF WORLE LITERATURE, ACTIVELY TRYING TO GET OUT OF THE FRENCH-ENGLISH DICHOTOMY.

       Maybe 60 to 70 percent of my work has been in drama translation. It’s just the way it turned out. I don’t really prefer theatrical writing to prose. What I do enjoy about theatre is its physicality. As a drama translator you have to remember that your words will be performed, like a score for music. The instruments are actors. You want to avoid tongue twisters. But the translator also has to give the actor words that have a fighting chance of communicating emotion and having an impact on the audience. It’s very physical in the way the text supports and shapes body language. I enjoy that aspect of it. While I’m translating theatre, I’m mumbling under my breath all the time. The other thing that’s fun about theatre is that once you have a solid draft, there is a brief moment of team activity that takes you away from the solitary work at your computer. You can learn a lot from actors. Sometimes an actor will challenge you, saying, I don’t believe the character would say that. As a drama translator you learn what filters you should be using so language will resonate with the actor. The brief time that the translator gets to interact with the actors and director, usually just a few days, is very informative for the ongoing work, knowing what different actors look for. My experience with Gratien Gélinas is a great example. The last play he wrote and performed with his wife Huguette Oligny was a two-hander. He and Huguette toured Canada and even played at the Victory Theatre on Broadway, performing the play sometimes in English, sometimes in French. And because Gratien was beginning to have memory problems, he was very fussy. We sat around my dining room table in Montreal and he said, “Ma belle Linda, ici en français je tape du pied. Faut que je tape du pied en anglais aussi.” Because these were the signposts for him. This is such a clear example of the way actors need to take the words into their body. Understanding these needs—the priceless feedback you get from actors—helps hone the tools for drama translation. I enjoy that aspect and the teamwork, but I also enjoy translating prose. Theatre and especially poetry are the most demanding genres. But for fiction and essays, the responsibility remains just as great, finding the writer’s voice, doing justice to the style. Though translating long books, like my good friend Edie Grossman did, means months alone in your study, no actors and no travelling to the film shoot.

Finding the right fit 

Over the last 35 years I have rarely if ever had to go after a translation. I am now reluctant to take on new writers. I think it’s rewarding for writers to have a longer relationship with their translators, something I can’t offer at my age. One exception was the play by Evelyne de la Chenelière called Une vie pour deux (La Chair et autres fragments de l’amour), based on a novel by Marie Cardinal (the author of Les mots pour le dire). In the novel, the husband discovers the corpse of a woman who washed ashore. That’s the knot around which the novel is written, and Evelyne took this as an entry into the relationship between Marie and Jean-Pierre Ronfard. In the final scene, the Marie character is trying to speak to the Jean-Pierre character as she becomes aphasic. I knew both Marie and Jean-Pierre, and was devastated by Violette Chauveau’s performance, and I told Evelyne I would love to translate the play. The translation was published by Playwrights Canada Press and produced at Tarragon Theatre in Toronto.

Looking back 

What has changed over fifty years? The translator’s name is increasingly on the cover of translated works. This is a battle that was won in part through LTAC. The literary world has come to acknowledge the importance of making literature available in translation. In Canada there is a new consciousness of being part of world literature, very actively trying to get out of the French–English dichotomy. When I founded the Banff International Literary Translation Centre residency program, which attracted translators from all over the world, I insisted that the parameters not be limited to a French–English duality. I insisted that it be a trilingual North American program with the three major languages and a component of Indigenous languages from all three countries. This was clear to me 22 years ago. The Banff residency was unfortunately cancelled after COVID, and certainly not for good reasons. Although I hadn’t been affiliated with the centre for over a decade, the end of this program still hurts for me. It had an international profile and was truly innovative for Canada. 

       Words of wisdom? You have to love words, be sensitive to voice. For each writer, you have to have a sense of the primary wellspring of their creativity and then, rising to the surface, their words. You must discover where the throbbing heartbeat is, their need to write. Lydia Davis has said that she loves translation for the mental exercise, like solving a puzzle. Some people are obsessed with crosswords, I’m obsessed with le mot juste.