A typical Sunday usually starts out with a good coffee in hand and, if I'm lucky, a buttery croissant. Add to that Sunday issues of several newspapers and voilà, I'm good for a few hours lost in words. Sometimes, I hit the proverbial jackpot. It usually comes in the form of that one article that not only speaks to my Sunday-level neurons, but to what I have spent the better part of the last 6 or 7 years researching: how the field of literature functions within the national space (more specifically, Anglo-Québécois and Québécois literatures within Quebec's cultural field). And... Continue reading

The years of work required by a PhD are hard ones. And I'd like to share a few pages in honour of my being almost done. If you are up to reading some hard core theoretical translation studies material, hold on to your hats, ladies, because here it comes! Please click on this link to access the PDF of 20 or so odd pages of pure reading pleasure for those in the know or simply the very curious. Continue reading

The Women's Art Society of Montreal , an institution that has been around since 1894, honoured me with an invitation to come and speak to their members and the public at large about a topic very dear to my heart, Anglo-Québécois literature. I had the privilege to outline the topic and discuss its impact on Québécois literature today to a wonderful and welcoming crowd. Promise held, here are a few links to several publishers, groups, authors, associations, posts, videos and events that I mentioned during my talk. Sherry Simon and her books Translating Montreal. Episodes in the Life of a... Continue reading

Transletters. International Journal of Translation and Interpreting is a brand spanking new journal that is looking for submissions for its first issue. Deadline is April 30, 2018. María del Mar Ogea from the Universidad de Córdoba and Christiane Nord from Universität Heidelberg are its chief editors, and its advisory board is full of linguistics and translation studies super stars. Don't miss this opportunity to appear in their first issue. Continue reading

How thick should the middle be? Thickness in terms of pages is not the issue here. Thickness in terms of time is my problem. I feel like I'm wading in a forever ocean, with no shoreline in site. And I hate it. I have the perfect office, the perfect computer set-up, the best window, the most time ever... and it's all at a stand still. But isn't that typical? I keep pushing the work sideways in the name of "errands", "children" and such. Can you imagine? Analyzing my texts. Now on 148. By Friday, I want to be on 200. Continue reading

From the top of my very short blogging soap box, I tooted my horn yesterday. But what was perhaps less clear was the lack of original thought behind my rant. I am not alone in thinking the agrandisement of CanLit’s purview necessary, nor am I one of the first to think of it. Thinkers and researchers like Smaro Kamboureli, who have tirelessly pushed this literature beyond its own frontiers, hemispheric researchers like Winfried Siemerling, global connectors of the likes of Michael Cronin, all strive to look outward, rather than inward, to define literature. Those are the footsteps into which I... Continue reading

Canadian literature is wide, large and extremely beautiful when inclusiveness is the word of order. It is composed of different languages, many of them indigenous. It is open to a wide variety of influences, often contradictory. And it is understudied. I am not interested in going down that path, the one of why it isn’t taken as seriously as other major literatures, at least not now. Others before me have gone this route, brandishing various very thought provoking reasons, not the least being our lack of a strong (global/national?) identity. It is this ceaseless inward looking eye that bothers me,... Continue reading

This will be a quick and practical blog entry. The point is to provide links to a few pieces of literature that can help PhD students organize their first teaching gig here in Université de Montréal's Département d'études anglaises (ÉTANG). Having been in this position not too long ago, I know only too well how daunting this can feel. The mountain of information available out there in the cyber world is almost as disorienting as being on the other side of the desk on that first day of class. A few choice pieces of information can go a long way... Continue reading

I was just hit with the news that Mavis Gallant has passed away. She was truly one of the great dames of Canadian short stories, along with Margaret Atwood (duh...) and Alice Munro (super double duh...). At 91, she was one of those always present rocks of CanLit with a Québécois connection. She embodied, for me, someone who lived the foreign. "Now we're on my home ground, foreign territory," as Atwood wrote in her novel Surfacing. And that's exactly how I envisoned Gallant, just without the ensuing madness. She was like the white or black dot in the yin yang... Continue reading

For those of you who are wondering about my title, no, it has absolutely nothing to do with the nutritional content of potato chips or any sort of guide to dieting. It is the title of a poem, one written by R. M. Vaughan and originally printed as a chap book back in April 1999 for National Poetry Month by Ottawa-based Above/Ground Press. A few months later that same year, it came out in Vaughan's collection of poems Invisible to Predators, published by ECW Press. But more recently, in 2007, it was published in Barton and Nickerson's anthology Seminal by... Continue reading

Here's my little experiment in museum visits... The Saturday right before the Sunday Sandy hit New York, I was hanging out at the MoMA. And this is what I saw: iwentbacktomoma.org Continue reading

About a thousand years ago, back in high school, I had a plethora of real live friends and acquaintances. Unfortunately, the much older and wiser person that I am now (please insert giggle here) is left with very little time to dabble in the outwardly social. From this aforementioned "plethora" I have constituted a good solid base of Facebook friends. In comparison to some folks out there, the so-called solid base is microscopic. I don't collect them for show. I just do it so that I have something to do when stuck waiting somewhere and the only entertainment at my... Continue reading

So, as was made abundantly clear in my last post, Gail Scott's writing is not for the faint of reading…and I am not of the faint of reading. So I went hunting around to figure out what I was not getting. What "secret club" did I have to join so that I may start to grasp what was going on. The Obituary was my first Scott book. And my reading approach was just plain lazy. I expected the story line, the narrative, to grab me by the hand and walk me through the park of her novel. Ha! Was I... Continue reading

I have spent the greater part of my summer reading. A luxury I haven't had in a very long time. Now of course, by the very nature of what I do, reading is a daily task (and sometimes quite the chore...like what I'm reading now: Lawrence Grossberg's philosophical analysis of communications and cultural studies -- which I am stubbornly going to get through before the end of August... grrr). The difference is that I wanted to read these novels strictly for the pleasure, no note taking, no fancy literary analysis. Just me and the printed word, and the potential it... Continue reading

My M.A. is finally finished! Took two years, as planned. Now it's off to a PhD. If someone had told me five years ago, as I was starting that infamous summer ESL teaching diploma, that I would be undertaking a PhD in the near future, I most likely would not have believed them. The sheer amount of work I will have to accomplish represents my own personal Everst. Looking very forward to it. And needless to say, I am also on the lookout for good Sherpas... The plan is as follows: first, define the outlines and confines of Anglo-Québécois literature;... Continue reading

So yea, maybe not just a rock, but one that has become a sculpture... so I apologize in advance to the artist for having simply called it a "rock". Great view though, don't you think? Continue reading

The sky was simply fantastic and the drawbridge gave me the time necessary to grab the shot... with my iPhone.Too bad about the flaw in the clouds across the top. Continue reading

Great colour on a great walk by Lake Champlain last week, after much writing... Continue reading

So, I've been sitting on my balcony translating away some Klein for the past few weeks and I have been loving it. There is no small feat of strategizing involved as the kids, the impending end of school, work and a plethora of details (like laundry, for example) keep coming up. I do my best to promptly attend to them (cough, cough) and then book myself whole days of balcony translating. I have found a "stream-of-translating" kind of approach to translating these poems works rather well. I always have a photocopy of the original poem so that I can whip... Continue reading

I found some fantastic news in my inbox bright and early last Monday morning. My submission to the Translation and National Images conference in Antwerp and Amsterdam has been accepted! The topics fit perfectly within my research so I said "What the heck, looks good to me!" and it seems that the conference's scientific committee said the same thing. Here's the link to the conference itself hosted by Lessius University College and the University of Amsterdam, with the support of CETRA, University of Leuven: http://www.lessius.eu/transimage/ The title of my presentation is A Case of Transposing National Identity in Literary Translation:... Continue reading

A.M. Klein is a well-known Canadian modernist poet from Montreal whose writing had to wait over 40 years to be read in French translation. As wide as this gap in time may be, it is not a surprising one. However, what does prompt further investigation is the timing in the appearance of these translations. Klein’s poetry transforms him into a well-positioned and talented observer of his era. But upon closer inspection, his writing also takes on an unexpected relevance in Montreal’s 21st century. Applying the translation studies concepts of “translatability” and “furthering”, as defined by Sherry Simon, I will explore... Continue reading

I did not particularly enjoy restraining my analysis to Meschonnic. Not that I do not like him, on the contrary, what a hoot! He writes wonderfully and his cynicism is downright hysterical sometimes. Had me gafawing out lout on more than one occasion. He expresses his opinion in a rather "in your face" kind of way. Some may not be comfortable with this method, but it works for me. Cela a le mérite d'être clair! Continue reading

It's the beginning. Here marks the beginning of my next 12 months... La langue peut être abordée sous deux grands éclairages – soit, on peut la considérer de l’extérieur comme l’analyste qui veut découvrir le secret de son maniement et de sa « physiologie »; soit, on l’aborde de l’intérieur comme le fait l’écrivain, et de manière plus concise, le poète. Il s’agit de deux mondes à part, qui ne se touchent que très rarement. Une discipline qui a pour but de faire interagir la langue sous ces deux perspectives simultanément est la traduction littéraire. Le linguiste et l’écrivain se... Continue reading

This was our view on the way to the rented house on top of that hill at the beginning of our vacation...needless to say the view from the house was spectacular. We could see the Golden Gate bridge. Continue reading