As a girl growing up in Chile, I never did feel that there was such a thing as translation. Books were available to us in Spanish and that was that. I read Lewis Carroll’s Alicia en el país de las maravillas, Mika Waltari’s El egipcio. The same applied to movies: I saw and wept along with other girls in the cinema as the empress of Austria-Hungary, played by Romy Schneider, faced her challenges in the (dubbed) Sissi Emperatriz. 

       As a teen immigrant in Canada, I’d go with my parents and brothers to the Toronto Public Library, where we would borrow books in Spanish from the languages department (where I would end up working ten years later). It took me a couple of years (grades eight and nine) to learn English well enough to truly enjoy reading for pleasure, so it was a relief to read trashy fiction translated from English, as well as headier works like Sophocles’ Edipo Rey or Boris Pasternak’s El doctor Zhivago in Spanish translation. There was, of course, the constant mental translating that goes on in the head of someone learning a new language, coupled with the actual translating that immigrant children do for family.

       With time, during and after finishing a bachelor’s degree in 1981 at the University of Toronto, where I studied French and Spanish literature, I immersed myself in the writings of those that became my literary precedents, namely writers of the surrealist movement, or closely associated with it in terms of experimentation and spirit, especially the surrealist poets of Spanish America. They were usually artists and poets who made up the vast community of creators my parents were associated with. I immediately understood that works by César Moro, Enrique Molina, Olga Orozco, and so many others needed to exist in English translation, that their extraordinary voices should be available to my contemporaries and peers, the community of writers I was slowly becoming a part of. My parents (my stepfather Ludwig Zeller, and Susana Wald, my mother) published my first ever translation, a short essay by the Argentine poet Aldo Pellegrini, in the inaugural issue of The Philosophical Egg, a multilingual zine they put out for their friends in the international Surrealist movement, alongside the 40-plus books of living Surrealists from around the world, whose creations they published under the banner of Oasis Publications. From that exercise I learned Pellegrini’s important lesson: poetry, in its larger sense as poesis or creation, cannot and should not be a mere snapshot of reality; all art can be or can aspire to be a transformation of reality. This concept is entirely concurrent with what I understand Surrealism to be: a constant movement towards freedom of the mind and of the world. 

       Liberation is hard to achieve, and harder still when publishing, the principal mechanism for transmitting and communicating textual content that can illuminate our way to freedom, is closed to works originally written by foreign authors and translated into Canada’s official languages. I joined the Literary Translators’ Association of Canada in 1987, encouraged by Ray Ellenwood and the late Antonino Mazza. It felt wonderful to be accepted and encouraged by people who became close friends, like Jean Antonin Billard, Robert Paquin, Gérard Boulad, Patricia Godbout, and many others, who I would get to know over the years. I was elected to the first of the three terms I served as president of the association in 1994 (I was vice-president for Ontario before that) with the mandate to advocate with arts councils and other institutions to open up funding to publishers, in order to incorporate into their publishing programs works by foreign writers, Indigenous writers, and immigrant writers translated into one of the two official languages. It is hard to express the passion and effort I and those who supported this important project put into our endeavour, writing letters to powerful people, including directors of the Canada Council and members of parliament, meeting with people who administer programs, and others of the many ways advocacy and political action was practised in the past. We thought the establishment of the Banff International Literary Translation Centre, which came about thanks to the good offices of Linda Gaboriau, the help of Susan Ouriou, and the support of the Association under my leadership, would help in this regard. Nil. Nada. Nothing has broken through the resistance, and I should say, the outright refusal on the part of Canadian institutions to support the publishing of literature from other countries in English and French translation. My sense that there was and continues to exist a need for publishing international works in translation is well founded: It comes from being a translator, an author in my own right, a publisher, an editor, and, significantly where reading culture is concerned, a librarian, a living witness to what it is that people want and like to read. 

       My vision was always grand: Wouldn’t it be wonderful, I imagined, if Canada were a world centre of publishing of literature in English and French translation? Imagine what the hundred of silenced translators living in this country, who know or bring with them works of the imagination from other places, written in other languages, could contribute to our culture, were they published by Canadian publishers! Canadian publishers could play the big game, by exporting books and selling translation rights. Just imagine how transformative that would be for Canadian publishing! And wouldn’t it be great if we could have access to works of depth and breadth whose existence is simply ignored because translation publishing remains limited to categories established in Canada more than six decades ago? Some fine day, my hopeful thought remains…