What does it
matter now? What matters now? What is the matter now? What is now’s matter? All
possible transversions of Jean-Marc Desgent’s questioning title Qu’importe maintenant? The following
work of fourteen writers, presented in American and Canadian English
translations from the Quebecoise French by twelve translators, are possible
responses.
The selection of this work is based
on which poetries in Quebec’s Francophone literary weather feel vital right
now; which works seem utterly relevant and current to this moment (which is
always a multiple and refracted moment); which poetries are speaking, calling,
urging, moaning, crying to the reader in us; which works, in their lexicons and
syntax, their movements and music, wake us up, make us feel excited and alive
in language. In short, which poetries give a damn.
The selection is not historical,
generational, ideological, chronological. It is expansive, diverse, rigorous,
stretching and straying linguistic, poetical and genre boundaries. It is also
entirely contemporary, in the way that Giorgio Agamben thinks of contemporariness,
where one has an anachronistic and disjunctive relation to one’s time. Therefore,
the featured writers (and translators) represent a range of generations and
experience, approaches and interests; they are artists with thirty books or one
book to their name (even posthumous in one case), and their poetics touch on
other fields and media. (Oana
Avasilichioaei, “Now’s Matter: Work in Translation from Quebecois French”)
Out of Litmus
Press in Brooklyn, New York, comes the twelfth annual issue of the literary
journal Aufgabe, a journal with a deep, critical and abiding love for literary
works in translation, as well as a strong machinery in place for allowing such
works to be published, distributed and discussed (Litmus Press as a literary
publisher is well known, also, for producing numerous book-length translated
works). Issue #12 includes an opening section edited by Montreal poet,
translator and critic Oana Avasilichioaei, titled “Now’s Matter: Work in Translation from Quebecois
French,” including works by Geneviève Desrosiers, Benoit Jutras, Nicole Brossard, Chantel Neveu, Franz Schürch, Suzanne Leblanc, Steve Savage, Phillipe
Charron, Renée Gagnon, Daniel Canty, François Turcot, Martine Audet, Kim Doré
and Jean-Marc Desgent. Over the past decade or so, works translated into
English has become far more prevalent in Canadian writing generally, and
Canadian poetry specifically, thanks in part to a dedicated series of champions
and translators such as Avasilichioaei, as well as Erín Moure, Angela Carr, Nathanaël,
françois luong, Bronwyn Haslam and Robert Majzels. Through a hundred pages of
translated works, this is an impressive collection of writing, and, unfortunately,
highlights the oddity of the fact that it takes a foreign journal to show
Canadian work to other Canadians (apart from the generous, yet much smaller, recent section of same in The Capilano Review [see my review here]), akin to the one hundred page section that Chicago Review did a few years ago on poet Lisa Robertson [see my review on such here], long before an equivalent
critical exploration occurred anywhere in a Canadian journal. Why do such
acknowledgements not happen up here? Or are our literary journals simply not
large enough to encompass that amount of work in a single section?
Checkmated Chessboard
EXCERPTS FROM
PATIENCE
Nathaniel Hawthorne,
on a visit to Herman Melville, at the time employed with the U.S. Customs House
for the port of New York, gave him this chessboard, adorned with two whales, no
doubt to console his friend for the critical and commercial failure of his
masterpiece, Moby-Dick.
The two friends began a game that
resulted in a draw, in which the black king and queen could no longer pursue
the white king and queen. The final configuration remained in place until the
office moved. Melville’s colleagues say that he refused invitations to play a
match with the same retort that Bartleby, the Wall Street recluse walled up in
infinite refusal, gave to all that life offered him: “I would prefer not to.”
(Daniel Canty, trans. by Oana
Avasilichioaei, “from Wigrum”)
A note at the
end of the work (there are notes at the end of each of the translated works,
adding information to illuminate the pieces) that reads: “Romping between fact
and fiction, serial and document, neologism and collection, the misplaced and
the disappeared, erudition and invention, the encyclopedia and the internet, Wigrum is the account, catalogue and
legacy of Sebastian Wigrum’s (and his succcessors’) collections of surprising
and sundry objects, the stories imagined through the objects’ materiality.
Perec, Queneau, Borges, Pynchon, Ponge are some of the literary shadows
flitting above its webs. Following Canty’s/Wigrum’s maxim, if I can believe all the stories I am told, so can you, I translated
and wrote on the edge of invention.” Canty’s biographical note also notes that his
first novel, translated into English by Avasilichioaei, is forthcoming with Talonbooks. The wealth of work here is incredible, and there
is something about the poetic line that is entirely different done through the
Quebecoise French than by English-language Canadian writers. One can only hope
that all the writing covered here might possibly be available in trade form as
well, without too much of a wait for those of us who never managed to learn a
second language.
Chorale VII
The house was
as a book. I wrote through each of its doors to each of its floors. I circulated
in its syntax beyond the moulded words, the sculpted sentences. I spread my
thought throughout the house, hybridized it to the foreign shape. Henceforth,
its spatiality was added to my language. Through this philosopher’s house, I reflected
on the convincing work, on the admirable life.
South-west
servant’s bedroom
Second floor
(Suzanne Leblanc, trans. by Oana
Avasilichioaei and Ingrid Pam Dick, “from The House As P.’s Thinking”)
Even aside
from all of that, there is still nearly three hundred pages of other writing
which could easily be discussed on its own in another blog post or two,
including some two hundred pages of poetry by Rusty Morrison, Rachel Blau
DuPlessis, Claire Donato, Edric Mesmer, Karen Garthe, Emily Abendroth and a
whole ton of other writers.
THE CONFLICT
BEGAN WHEN, the conflict began when the tendency to discard what doesn’t fit
leads to narrative, Ahmed looked me in the eye before we drove so, to speak as
one would, one-third children, one million, refugee told me EVERYTHING’S OKAY doesn’t
mean it didn’t happen by its name
IT’S NOT THE
WORK OF A PROPHET to rate a person on a scale of one to ten by her ability to
call death death what’s the
difference for example between I’m thinking about her and I remember her I’ll
tell you Ahmed said but it’s a long story meaning’s going to change the way
this room looks (Emily Carson, “from Sleeping with Phosphorus”)
The end of
the issue includes a section of essays, notes and reviews, including a short
memoir by Pierre Joris, titled “The Idiot,” that begins:
In the
beginning were the words. And the words were double from the word go: the cool
black on white words in the book, & the loud, fast & hot words on the
radio. To begin with the word on the radio let me cold, while the word on the
page was what asked me to light up my nights with a flashlight under the
covers. This happened, age 5: I remember the room—it was dark & thus I do
not remember what was in it except for the bed in which I lay with covers drawn
up, trying to read. Later on, in daylight, this room became or had become a
living room, & I sat on the daybed & I watched the green eye of
Normende, the box from which the hot works came.
Another highlight
of the journal is an interview Nathanaël
(the Canadian poet formerly known as nathalie stephens) conducted with
Catherine Mavrikakis (translated into English by Nathanaël). Over the past
couple of years, Nathanaël has not only produced an incredible amount of writing
(the last few titles produced by Nightboat Books), but translated a great deal
of literature from French into English, including a novel by Mavrikakis, produced
in English as Flowers of Spit (Toronto
ON: BookThug, 2012). Nearly a dozen pages long, the interview digs deep into
the work and working lives of both writers. It opens:
N: Flowers
of Spit is well in the
distance now. It was published by Leméac in 2005 and again in English six years
later, which is more or less now, by BookThug. I am curious to ask you about
this dislocation. Which, it seems to me, is constitutive of the text itself
(historical disturbance especially, but not exclusively, on the part of the
Crackpot who has lost his share of the present—or at any rate, he reads in the
present a resolutely ineradicable past), but of our friendship as well. Dislocation
of places—you born in Chicago and living in Montréal, me born in Montréal and
living in Chicago. The exchange is, so to speak, inscribed in our respective
geographies.
C.M.: Yes, Flowers
of Spit is far. But oddly,
it represents a stumbling block in my life, something I think about often and
which remains present. There is in this book a relationship to time that the
Crackpot has in fact, a relationship in which different periods of time are
confused. The Crackpot can never mourn the past. I am like him. It is very hard
for me to understand that time has passed. I am sometimes in anachronic hours. It
isn’t nostalgia, it’s that I think the past has us by the throat. It torments
us. Maybe that is why I like Proust so much. My father who is at the hospital
right now and has gone mad (more mad, in fat, than he already was…) is now
completely mixing up all time periods. The other day, he wanted to take me to
his office which disappeared more than forty years ago and complained that a
friend who has been dead since the ‘70s wasn’t visiting him. I’m barely exaggerating
when I say that I inherited from both my parents this near impossible
relationship to the present. My mother is still caught up in the Second World
War.
Chicago is
far, it’s my past, my birth, precisely because of the Second World War, because
my aunt, my mother’s sister, went and married in Chicago an American soldier
whom she met during the landings. My mother was able to give birth at her
sister’s. But Chicago is your own present. As though you were haunting a time
that never belonged to me (I left as an infant), as though you were giving me
news of my history. I know, on the other hand, how difficult Montréal was for
you. That you had to flee. Sometimes I haven’t the courage to speak to you of
it. As though I didn’t want to trouble you with that city you didn’t know what
to make of … Me, I have settled there a thousand times, wanting always to
leave. Perplexed, like you … But I stayed, not knowing where I would be more at
home. Yesterday someone was telling me that he became Quebecois reading Hubert
Aquin, and I think he said something that is valid for me. It was in reading
certain Quebecois texts that I became Quebecoise. In addition to which, I published
here, which strangely anchored me. But you are from here also, from Montréal.
There is nonetheless a tie that the publication of your books creates, isn’t there?
And then between us, there is Chicago, Montréal, yes … but also France and
North Africa. Our imaginations have covered the same territories. Don’t you
find that strange?
