Language: French Canadian

From Two Solitudes to Quattro Books: An Interview with Bilal Hashmi

November 18, 2020  |  in Interviews  |  by Sarah Moses

Quattro will . . . shift the discussion so it’s no longer . . . English and French, but the multilingual nature of Canadian writing.

Quattro Books was founded in 2006 by Allan Briesmaster, John Calabro, Beatriz Hausner, and Luciano Iacobelli, with the aim of publishing established and emerging authors who represent the linguistic and cultural diversity of literature in Toronto and across Canada. As such, from the start, Quattro Books has sought to bring out works originally written in English alongside those translated from the multilingual voices of Canadians who have arrived in the country as immigrants or refugees. The press’s recent acquisition by Bilal Hashmi, president of the Association des traducteurs et traductrices littéraires du Canada / Literary Translators’ Association of Canada (ATTLC-LTAC), and a translator himself—from French, Urdu, Persian, and Hindi—has led to a shift in focus that favours the latter. This is evidenced by Quattro Books’s first catalogue since Hashmi took over as Executive Director and Publisher. Due out in the fall of 2020, it will feature English translations of Canadian works spanning six languages. Asymptote’s co-Editor-at-Large for Argentina, Sarah Moses, met with Hashmi in Toronto to discuss Canadian literature as international literature, works in translation as partnerships, and how he’s shaping Quattro Books into a translation-focused press.

Sarah Moses (SM): I’d like to begin by asking you about your involvement with the ATTLC-LTAC. How has it led to Quattro becoming what you’ve described as a translation-focused press?

Bilal Hashmi (BH): Beatriz Hausner is central both to the ATTLC-LTAC and Quattro. She’s one of the founding members of Quattro and was the president of the ATTLC-LTAC in 2017, when I joined. I had the privilege of being mentored by her in translation and advocacy work, and the one thing we all sort of agreed on is that there should be more international works in translation available in Canada. So the movement from the ATTLC-LTAC to Quattro was, in a way, organic—the work at the former led to the idea: now we have an opportunity, let’s see what happens. That’s the way I thought of it. I started off as membership secretary in 2017 and I’ve been the president since June. We continue to work through some of the same issues that we’ve dealt with in the past: translator visibility, proper recognition, and so on—these remain our goals. But I think what Quattro will possibly do in the future is shift the discussion so it’s no longer necessarily the “two solitudes” of English and French, but the multilingual nature of Canadian writing that comes through.

SM: Is this primarily how you see Quattro Books fitting in among publishers of translation in Canada and internationally—as a press that moves beyond translations between English and French?

BH: In our first catalogue we have translations from French, Serbian, German, Russian, Portuguese, Spanish, and then two titles that were written in English. We’re not going to do exclusively translation, but that’s the focus, which I think is unique in Canadian publishing. Whether or not that continues is something we’ll have to determine. We’re really hoping to find out if publishing majority translations is a viable activity.

Working with translation has involved a very international cast of characters, which is really what I find most exciting about Canadian literature as international literature. I think those who are very skeptical about translation’s profitability or potential for success kind of forget that you do have access potentially to other markets. Typically, Canadian books are marketed internally for Canadian consumption and the expectation is that Canadians will buy fellow Canadians. It doesn’t always work that way. My hope is that these books will be seen as Canadian literature, plus whatever other literature they’re referencing—let’s say the Portuguese-Angolan return novel, of which there’s now a sizable and critically acclaimed subgenre in Portuguese fiction. So the hope is that they’ll cross over into other markets, beginning in the US.

The catalogue started as kind of an exercise in fantasy, which I think I shared with you a couple of summers ago. It was an exercise in what works within the funding paradigm. Readers of Asymptote should know that in Canada the main translation activity is English-to-French, French-to-English, but the official requirement for funding from the Canada Council for the Arts is that the author be Canadian. There’s no limitation on the source language so long as the work is translated into French, English, or an indigenous language. I did a little bit of a research and I found a list of about twenty or so Canadian writers who brought in different literary histories with them. All of these works are technically eligible for Canada Council for the Arts grants, and we’re very lucky and grateful to the Canada Council for funding all six, which may be a first in Canadian publishing for one season, and probably unique in this part of the world. So that’s how it started. I think we have another half dozen languages already in the pipeline if not already under contract, also all Canadian authors. My hope is really to explore this lesser-known part of Canadian literary history, which tends not to see that much exposure in the current framework.

In the first couple of years, the focus will be on Canadian content, but we’re also starting to acquire from outside, including translations. That’s a challenge since I will insist that everyone gets paid at the Canadian rate, which is the determining factor. Because if it’s a five-hundred page novel and there’s no funding for it, then we’re probably not going to be able to pay the eighteen-cents-per-word rate—that’s the rate for prose. I believe the per-word rate remains at twenty cents for theatre and twenty-five cents for poetry. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: An excerpt from “Death is vertical (Pain: chanted)” by Normand de Bellefeuille

September 10, 2019  |  in Translations  |  by Hilary Clark

because there is no economy / of pain / nothing but thunder

These poems by Quebecois luminary Normand de Bellefeuille take the swelling rhythm of the sea as their guide. Translator Hilary Clark skillfully brings out the crash of waves beneath the verse, and this pulse of continuity is used to mirror the throbs of pain—and the bursts of poetry that spring from it. The tension between pain in life and the recording of pain is brought to the surface—a surface that is both the broil of the sea and the page, which covers and gives evidence to the drownedness of silence and the forgotten excesses of speech and sexuality that the poem can only trace. The impossibility of poetry to reify the body in pain is a hopeful one, though: as the poems give evidence of the subject, distilled, the inability to ever truly capture the depths of the body becomes the poem’s “inadmissibility.” The reader is tasked with trying to uncover the shining positive of that deficit.

7

There are other pains
even on the rivers
one thinks of Dante’s boat
or of the little crabs
in Ophelia’s hair
of the blind one’s swim
against the heavy wave
there are other pains
even under the sea
the seahorses’ grotesque gallop
the drowned women amorous
dead, still amorous
with breasts opened by the narrow teeth
of fat monkfish
for there are other pains
without screams, under the sea
one thinks of the children under the sea
lead at the ankles
mouth full of seaweed
anus full of seaweed

for there are also pains
that are unspeakable.

READ MORE…

Meet the Publisher: Book*hug’s Hazel Millar and Jay MillAr on French Canadian Literature in Translation

January 10, 2019  |  in Interviews, Publisher Profile  |  by Sarah Moses

"We realized that we were interested in risk."

Book*hug is an independent Canadian publisher based in Toronto. Since 2004, the press has been committed to bringing underrepresented voices into print and to pushing the boundaries of what literature can be. Book*hug’s first title was translated from the Danish and the press has gone on to publish numerous Scandinavian works in translation alongside French Canadian titles. Sarah Moses, Asymptote’s Editor-at-Large for Argentina, sat down with co-publishers Hazel Millar and Jay MillAr, to chat about their interest in works that take a risk, how translation fits in with what they’re doing as a press, and a few of the titles by French Canadian authors that they’re excited about.

Sarah Moses: How did Book*hug get started?

Jay MillAr: The first book that we ever published was a translation. The Toronto International Festival of Authors always has a country of focus and in 2004 it was Denmark. A focus of the festival that year was on Denmark and there were all these writers coming to Toronto that didn’t yet have books translated in English so the assistant to the director was calling publishers and asking them if they would consider applying for money from the Danish Arts Council and then producing a book in English by one of the authors coming to the festival. I was working at Coach House Books at the time but they didn’t want to do it so I asked if it would be okay if I did it with my imprint, BookThug, which was at that time more or less a chapbook press. They said sure, go ahead, so I applied for the money and received a grant to cover the translation of a book called Pencil of Rays and Spiked Mace, selected poems by Niels Lyngsø, which was translated by Gregory Pardlo, an American poet who had been living in Denmark for some time and was interested in translation.

READ MORE…

Meet the Publisher: Simon Dardick, Co-Publisher of Véhicule Press, on Publishing Translations of Francophone Literature and Social History

August 30, 2017  |  in Interviews, Publisher Profile  |  by Sarah Moses

It’s wonderful working with translators. I love the whole complex process and appreciate how translators must have a foot in two cultures.

Véhicule Press is a Canadian publisher of fiction, non-fiction, and poetry. Located in the city of Montréal, where French is predominantly spoken, Véhicule has been publishing francophone authors in translation since 1980. In recent years, half their catalog has been dedicated to works translated from the French. Véhicule started out in 1973 on the site of the artist-run gallery Véhicule Art Inc. with a printing press and equipment inherited from one of its members. In 1975, they became the only cooperatively owned printing and publishing company in the province of Québec. Nowadays, the press is run by Simon Dardick, who stayed on when the coop broke up in 1981, and archivist Nancy Marrelli. From the beginning, Véhicule has focused on titles that celebrate and examine Canadian culture and society. Asymptote’s Editor-at-Large for Argentina, Sarah Moses, stopped by Véhicule’s office in Montréal to chat with Simon Dardick about publishing francophone literature in translation and some of the titles he’s excited about. 

Sarah Moses (SM): I’d like to begin by asking you about the origins of Véhicule Press.

Simon Dardick (SD): It grew out of an art gallery called Véhicule Art. It was at a time when artists were renting large spaces—for performance art and for large-scale colour field paintings. Véhicule Art was an artist-run gallery—the second one in Canada; the first was in Vancouver.The artwork was interesting—it was very international but also showed work from local people from Montréal and Québec. The press was situated at the back of the gallery. One of the artists had bought a huge printing press and printed, I think, one or two copies of a magazine called Beaux-Arts. The apocryphal story is that the printer got his hand caught in the press and it stood silent for many months until some people gravitated around it and decided to learn how to use it.

That was six months before I arrived in 1973. I became typesetter and general manager. We were all middle class kids, lots of long hair, who were involved in literary stuff. We were painters, writers, dancers, and video artists who came together. There was at various times seven or eight of us. We were incorporated in Québec as a cooperative printing and publishing company. We really wanted just to publish, but we would print our books on offcuts, the paper left over from jobs we had printed for other folks. We were the popular grassroots printer in town. We printed posters and invitations for artists and flyers for demonstrations and community groups. So essentially we started publishing more and more books of our own although near the end we still did jobs printing for people. The end was really 1980, 1981. The technology was changing—printing was becoming more electronic, rather than lithographic. We did low-end printing, except for our own books. We didn’t envision committing to a life of commercial printing. So we dissolved the printing company and my wife, Nancy, and I continued the publishing end of things. In 1981, we moved to a greystone in central Montréal—we live above the office—and immediately eliminated tremendous overhead in terms of rent.

Our approach has been very much influenced by visual arts—I was a painter. So for me the look of a book is important: the cover art and the text of the book has to work together. To this day I still typeset all our books, with the odd exception. We’ve been doing it here since 1981. We have a poetry editor and a fiction editor. My wife and I do the non-fiction.

READ MORE…

Translator’s Profile: Peter McCambridge

July 7, 2016  |  in Translator's Profile  |  by Peter McCambridge

My first favourite writer was Roddy Doyle. I’d also enjoy sitting down for a pint of Guinness with Roddy.

Originally from Ireland, award-winning translator Peter McCambridge holds a BA in modern languages from Cambridge University, England, and has lived in Quebec City since 2003. He runs Québec Reads and now QC Fiction, which recently published Eric Dupont‘s Life in the Court of Matane, excerpted in Asymptote’s Translation Tuesday showcase on the blog and at The Guardian here.

Who is your favorite fictional character of all time?

At the risk of starting off a little lowbrow, I’d have to say Bernard Samson, the glass-half-full spy of Len Deighton’s “airport thriller” series. Nobody else comes remotely close, off the top of my head. I first read more or less everything Len Deighton had ever written when I was 11 to 14 and I’ve recently gone back to them in the new audio version. They go down perfectly after a hard day’s work. A hearty German meal in Berlin with Bernie and Werner and I’d be a very happy man, I think.

Who was your first favorite writer and how old were you when you discovered them?

In high school, the only thing I read and really loved was Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence. Thomas Hardy and a lot of other writers who were forced upon me left me cold. It’s funny: I’ve spent a lot of my life reading books that I’ve had to read. At university, I studied French and German literature, which didn’t leave much time for reading for fun. Looking back, a very small percentage of those books were ones that I really enjoyed and would happily read again. When I was younger, around 10 or 11, I remember reading The Secret Seven and a Hardy Boys adventure every night. To answer your question, I think my first favourite writer was Roddy Doyle. I’d also enjoy sitting down for a pint of Guinness with Roddy.

What is your favorite word in any language? Which word do you find most difficult to translate?

I’ve always liked tamisé in French, just for the way it sounds. I always think it sounds soft, like the lighting it describes.

What 5 books would you want with you if you were stranded on a desert island?

To the Lighthouse and The Age of Innocence were both amazing and really left a mark on me. I’d also bring Ulysses and finish working my way through it with the help of Frank Delaney’s wonderful Re:Joyce podcasts. The next two books on my hopelessly long to-read list would make up the five.

Which under-translated author do you think deserves wider recognition worldwide?

The obvious, truthful answer is Eric Dupont. He’s been compared in Québec to our very own Gabriel García Márquez and John Irving. I’m working hard to raise his profile through QC Fiction and Québec Reads.

Do you have a translation philosophy that guides your work?

I worked for a few years translating advertising copy, legal contracts, recipes, and healthcare leaflets before thinking about translating a novel. More importantly, I was revised the whole time and I learned a lot. My employer’s philosophy rubbed off on me and that was to write what the author would have put had they been writing in English. It’s harder than it sounds. “The original sentence tells the translator what the sentence should say but not how exactly to say it,” Lazer Lederhendler told me recently, and I think that sums it up well.

Which of the translations that you’ve worked on was the most challenging? Why?

I felt a lot of pressure translating Lori Saint-Martin’s The Closed Door. But Lori is one of Canada’s best and best-known translators into French so she was a big help along the way.

How did you learn your foreign language and how did you begin working as a literary translator?

I learned French and German in high school in Ireland, then studied French and German literature at Cambridge. But I like to say that I began speaking French when I moved to Québec City in 2003. Moving to Québec meant I forgot all my German. Only for me to meet and marry a German girl here. Which meant I suddenly had to relearn everything. And then try to understand Schwäbisch. Now we speak German at home and French to our friends and children.

If you could have been born in a culture other than your own which would you choose to be a member of? Why?

That’s an easy one: Québec. I moved here so that my children would have that chance.

If you hadn’t been a translator what profession would you like to have tried?

At the minute, I’m kind of switching professions as I try to devote more time to being a fiction editor. But otherwise I think I’d be writing for a magazine somewhere (since soccer goalie is probably not a very realistic answer).

Finally, in your bio, you mentioned that Life in the Court of Matane is the book that made you want to be a literary translator. Could you explain briefly why?

It’s hard to explain. I read Bestiaire, as it’s known in the original French, when it first came out and just fell in love with it. I still love it today—even after spending a year translating it! Now it’s like living with someone: you can’t quite explain what attracted you in the first place, you just know your life is better with them in it.

 

Translation Tuesday: An excerpt of “Life in the Court of Matane” by Eric Dupont

June 14, 2016  |  in Translations  |  by Peter McCambridge

"The funny thing about memory is that it always ends up chasing its own tail. The most important thing is to keep it moving."

Nadia Comaneci’s gold-medal performance at the Olympic Games in Montreal is the starting point for a whole new generation. Eric Dupont watches the performance on TV, mesmerized. The son of a police officer (Henry VIII) and a professional cook—as he likes to remind us—he grows up in the depths of the Quebec countryside with a new address for almost every birthday and little but memories of his mother to hang on to. His parents have divorced, and the novel’s narrator relates his childhood, comparing it to a family gymnastics performance worthy of Nadia herself.

Life in the court of Matane is unforgiving, and we explore different facets of it (dreams of sovereignty, schoolyard bullying, imagined missions to Russia, poems by Baudelaire), each based around an encounter with a different animal, until the narrator befriends a great horned owl, summons up the courage to let go of the upper bar forever, and makes his glorious escape.

***

From the first lot we lived on, if you went down a big grassy hill and crossed the road you’d find us by the river. In the summer, the sand could become burning hot in the sun, despite the glacial currents that flowed down from Labrador. Reels of dried-up seaweed revealed how high the tides rose and stretched out in arcs from east to west. We found green sea urchin skeletons, blue shells, and pink tampon applicators. Sometimes we would step on a piece of glass polished by the salt. It would slide so smoothly between our fingers that we could barely imagine its sharp past. When we held it up to the sun it would look like part of a stained-glass window washed up on the beach at Matane. Coke and Pepsi bottles produced translucent shards of polished white. The green bits of glass came from 7UP bottles. Beer bottles splintered into small, dark amber pieces. On this strip of beach, the waves deposited at our feet the shattered stained-glass windows of a church sunk off the Matane coastline. My sister and I picked up the pieces without ever beginning the impossible task of putting them back together. We knew that they had once been part of a whole, but that an earthquake had probably separated them. The sea salt had made them smooth so that their edges no longer fit together. They had taken on a shape all their own. They could be traced back to a family only by their colour. A distant kinship. They had ended up where the Gulf of St. Lawrence melts into the northern blue sky, leaving ships arriving from the Atlantic in July dangling from an invisible thread. The horizon gives way to a blue void that draws the soul northward. The trip is pleasant enough. When you really let yourself go, you soar high above the gulf, the taiga, and the permafrost, until you reach the tundra, where on a sunny January day you can drift off into the light of the north. READ MORE…