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Translation and Postnational Cartographies of Language in Twenty-First-Century Canadian Literatures by

Arianne Des Rochers

A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

Centre for Comparative Literature

University of Toronto

© Copyright by Arianne Des Rochers 2021

ii Translation and Postnational Cartographies of Language in

Twenty-First-Century Canadian Literatures

Arianne Des Rochers

Doctor of Philosophy

Centre for Comparative Literature

University of Toronto

2021

Abstract

Sherry Simon in Le trafic des langues. The border that translation is said to cross is, typically, linguistic: the dominant understanding and theorization of translation relies on the notion of linguistic difference and autonomy, whereby meaning is transferred from one bounded linguistic system to the other. This dissertation takes as its starting point the border between languages, recognizing that linguistic borders as we know them today are neither natural nor ontological, but the result of the sedimentation and naturalization of a specific kind of linguistic mapping along discriminatory (ethno)national and racial lines. Its premise is that the gesture of translation, rather than simply crossing a pre-existing linguistic border, constructs linguistic difference by drawing a border where there is not one in the first place. iii This dissertation thus problematizes the structural view of language that underlies the bulk of Western translation practice and theory by looking at the anticolonial, queer, and postnational linguistic cartographies that are drawn and imagined in contemporary literary works published in Canada between 2005 and 2020, and written by voices that are minoritized within linguistic regime. These texts are written in what we are used to recognizing as several , or , in other words they feature linguistic forms that overflow the containers of French and English, the two official, colonial languages of the Canadian state. I argue that this amounts to a refusal to be a good, monolingually intelligible national subject, and that translation must reenact that refusal. Consequently, these texts point to what I call a postlingual understanding of translation, which enables a move away from idealized, abstract, national languages and towards the specificity of linguistic practices, understood as fundamentally social, local and embodied. Framed as a series of relations, rather than as transposition from one linguistic system to another, translation becomes a decidedly localized practice that draws on the transla specific embodied and territorialized experience and on the subjective, deliberate and ethical relations she establishes in the process. iv

Acknowledgments

I thank for awarding me a

Doctoral Research Scholarship and making this research possible. I want to thank my supervisor and committee members, Neil ten Kortenaar, Monica Heller and Smaro Kamboureli, who guided this project and my trajectory in more ways than they will ever know. I feel immensely lucky to have worked with a committee that was equally challenging and rigorous, and generous and caring. Special thanks to Aphrodite Gardner and Bao Nguyen, whose support and kindness helped me make it to the finish line. Thank you to my student colleagues at the Centre for Comp Lit, especially to my dear friends Amelia, Matt, Nat and Rob for brightening my stay in Toronto. I also thank Leanne Betasamosake Simpson and Joshua Whitehead for pushing me to challenge my understanding of translation, and everyone most notably Rodney Saint-Éloi. I am forever grateful to have had all these precious people accompany me throughout this journey. Enfin, un merci tout spécial à Vincent, Paco et Jackson, my boys, mon équilibre. v

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments .......................................................................................................................... iv

Table of Contents ............................................................................................................................ v

List of Figures ............................................................................................................................... vii

Introduction ..................................................................................................................................... 1

0.1 Context, Corpus and Methodology ..................................................................................... 4

0.2 Outline of the Dissertation ................................................................................................ 13

Chapter One. Translation as Mapping: Undoing National Cartographies of Language ............... 20

1.1 On Becoming a Translator: Conventional Understandings of Language in the Field of

Translation ........................................................................................................................ 20

1.2 The Making of a Language: Linguistic Differentiation, Standardization, and

Appropriation .................................................................................................................... 31

...................... 32 daries: The Notion of Linguistic Abjection .......... 41

1.2.3 Owning a Language: The Concept of Mother Tongue ....................................... 49

1.3

Translation ........................................................................................................................ 59

1.4 Heteroglossia, Deterritorialization, and Postnational Cartographies of Language in

Contemporary Canadian Works ........................................................................................ 65

Chapter Two.

.............................................................................. 74

2.1 Belonging and Language in the Poetry of Gregory Scofield ............................................ 79

..................................... 79 ........................... 85

2.1.3 Mistrust of Translation i......................................................... 91

2.1 ..... 95

2.2 Pour sûr ................. 97

2.2.1 The Diglossic Distribution of Language in Pour sûr ........................................ 100

2.2.2 French qua Normative Institution in Pour sûr .................................................. 103

2.2.3 Chiac as Social Practice and Its Relation to Standard French........................... 111

2.2.4 The Incommensurability of French and Chiac in Pour sûr ............................... 116

2.3 Conclusion: Translation as Social Practice ..................................................................... 120

2.3.1 Potential Avenues for Translation ..................................................................... 124

vi

Chapter Three. Querelle de

Roberval full-metal indigiqueer and Jonny Appleseed .................. 132

3.1 Linguisic Abjection and the Political Potential of the Abject ......................................... 134

3.2 Queer, Class, and Cultural Abjection: The Violence of Normativity and the Limits of

Querelle de Roberval ....................................... 141

3.2.1 The Violence of Abjection ................................................................................ 141

3.2.2 The Rise and Fall of the Queer Abject in Querelle de Roberval ....................... 144

3.2.3 Exposing the Violence of Normativity: Language in Querelle de Roberval .... 149

3.2.4 Reclaiming Rural, Working-Class Speech: The Limits of Writing in a

Québécois Vernacular ................................................................................................ 156

3.3 full-metal indigiqueer and Jonny Appleseed .................................. 166 .................................... 166

3.3.2 Urine, Blood, Semen, Feces: The Lexicon of Abjection in full-metal

indigiqueer and Jonny Appleseed ............................................................................... 171

3.3.3 The Linguistic Ab .............................. 177

3.3.4 The Queering of Language ................................................................................ 184

3.4. Conclusion: Translating the Queer, Queering Translation ............................................. 189

Chapter Four. Motherless Tongues: Writers In and Out of Montreal Navigate the Waters of

Linguistic Identity, Affiliation and Belonging ....................................................................... 195

4.1 The Depropriation of Language ...................................................................................... 197

4.2 Translating Montréal ....................................................................................................... 203

4.2.1 Montreal Voices: Nicholas Dawson, Maude Veilleux, Oana Avasilichioaei,

Nathanaël .................................................................................................................... 208

4.3 Nicholas Dawson's Désormais, ma demeure: Making a Home in the House of

Language ......................................................................................................................... 214

4.4 Une sorte de lumière spéciale: Poetic, Vernacular and Virtual at

Once ................................................................................................................................ 223

4.5 Limbinal: Language as River, Language as Movement ............. 232

4.6 ..................... 242

4.6.1 Dissolving Identity through Sexual Encounter and Linguistic Encounter ........ 246

4.6.2 The River and The Translation-as-Bridge Metaphor ........................................ 251

4.7 Conclusion: Motherless Tongues .................................................................................... 259

Conclusion. Towards a Postlingual Practice of Translation: Notes on Translating Leanne Noopiming .................................................................................... 264

Works Cited ................................................................................................................................ 277

vii

List of Figures

Figure 1. The cover of La traduction raisonnée (2013) ............................................................... 23

Figure 2. Reproduction of the cover of the .................................. 108

Figure 3. Picture of pages 76-77 of Limbinal ............................................................................. 234

-03) ......................................................... 237 1

Introduction

This project started to take form in 2014, during the infamous sur le sparked by the publication of a think piece titled un by columnist Christian Rioux in Le Devoir, one of leading French newspapers. In this piece, Rioux deplores the degrading quality of the French language he supposedly observes in Québec, and most importantly points a finger at Dead Obies, a Montreal-based rap group whose lyrics are composed of what Rioux frames as a mix of French and English, or, as he also puts it elsewhere, a -langue handicapés en voie (Rioux, Radio According to him, users of Franglais, or Frenglish, and especially its representatives in the cultural and artistic sphere, are obliviously (or worse, willfully) contributing to the assimilation of the Québécois nation by contaminating French, its true and only correct mode of expression,

with English, which, of course, historically symbolizes the oppressor in the Québécois collective

imagination. This was not the first column Rioux wrote on the topic; he used the same tactic demonizing and belittling musicians who sing in a non-monolingual, im wayin 2013 and 2012 when he criticized Acadian artists Lisa LeBlanc and Radio Radio respectively for contributing to the lente mais certaine de la seule et unique matrice que possède le (Rioux, apparently forgetting that these artists are not even, in fact, Québécois. If the 2012 and 2013 columns had engendered few public responses, un was the straw that broke the back in 2014. Many commentators weighed in on the matter, including former Dead Obies member Yes McCan, who signed a scathing 2 response in Voir magazine titled Obies et le franglais: La réplique aux On one side, brand of cultural nationalism centered around the purity and prominence of French as distinct from and threatened by the English language of the oppressor; on the other, scholars, activists and artists interrogated what they saw as the exclusionary mechanisms of the unilingual model of Québécois nationalism. Even though the debate around linguistic normativity was not new in itself,1 this heated and passionate public debate about identity, language and culture was a profoundly transformative moment for me. At the time, I was finishing my Master thesis in Translation Studies at the University of Ottawa, which I pursued after completing a Specialized B.A. in French Translation back home, at Concordia University in Montreal. Upon reading controversial column, I remember reacting strongly to his attacks on the Dead lyrics not so much because I was a fan of the music, but because, as a young woman born and raised on the outskirts of Montreal, my everyday linguistic practices were closer to the lyrics than to idealized brand of French. Even beyond the fact of my own linguistic experiences and practices, something felt wrong, ideologically speaking, with R rhetoric and its focus on the sacrosanct purity of language, and on the constant victimizing of French as a precarious language

1 See Bouchard 1998, Bouchard 2011, and Beaudoin-Bégin 2015 for an overview of historical and current linguistic

debates in Québec; Boudreau 2016 for a discussion of the position of Acadian French in those debates; and Simon

1994 and Gauvin 2000 for an analysis of how these debates are thematized and represented in literature.

3 under threat in Québec, even though it benefits from tremendous institutional and state support as compared to, say, Indigenous languages.2 The dominant approach for the preservation of French in Québec, framed in terms of having to protect it from outside contamination at all costs, struck me as exclusionary especially considering the marginalized and/or racialized status of scapegoats. I remember siding with the responses of Yes McCan and the like, which I found to be more attuned to the contemporary cultural, social, and political realities of present-day Montreal. But I also remember pausing, in a kind of aha moment, when I realized that the crux of my training and everyday practice as a professional translator, as well as my research as an emerging

translation scholar, was at odds with the intuitive, albeit ideological, position I was taking within

the debate. In fact, I was becoming more and more interested in the kind of literary linguistic practices that Rioux deplored so aggressively, and it would not have occurred to me to describe the novels and poems of authors like Junot Díaz, Gérald Leblanc or Gail Scott as written in a - Whereas I instinctively rejected the kind of purism that underlies French nationalism in Québec, however, linguistic purism was at the very heart of how I had learned to see, understand and do translation. From the aux and the general condemnation of to the repeated observations on the of the or the of this or that expression, to the very prescriptive ways in which we evaluate,

2 A recent example of this support is the controversial announcement by the government of Québec of the allocation

of $5 million to enforce the French language charter, in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic in September 2020.

4 revise and correct translationssimply put, according to the number of they containI realized that professional translation training and practices as a whole were entirely articulated around the goal of attaining and maintaining linguistic purity. As Sherry Simon puts it, bonne partie de la traduction que cette première fonction: des Elle établit et confirme les normes du français (Simon, Le trafic 51). How could I apply the normative ideals of linguistic purity in my day-to-day tasks as a translator and translation scholar, when I thought the concept of linguistic purity to be reactionary and opposed to my idea of social justice? In the light of the 2014 public debate on Franglais and of my own, somewhat intuitive reactions to it, I felt a strong disconnection between my political convictions and the nature of the work I was doing daily. Though strongly averse to the attitudes displayed by curés de la I realized that I had become one myself.3

0.1 Context, Corpus and Methodology

This dissertation emerges out of that sense of disconnection, and poses the following question: how can one reconcile translation, a practice centered around linguistic normativity, with one own political conviction that linguistic gatekeeping and prescriptivism create an exclusionary mechanism that produces and reproduces social inequalities on the basis of language? It comes out of the realization that I should put, quite literally, the money I was earning as a translator 3 5 where my mouth was. I wished to explore and question the ways in which my own discipline and practice are involved in the production and the reproduction of unjust linguistic based on the policing of social hierarchies disguised as ahistorical and apolitical linguistic categories. And thus, I set out to explore how day-to-day micro decisions such as labelling a word an in a student assignment are connected to concepts that become disguised as linguistic (Bonfiglio 1). I was starting to understand that decisions we make every day as translators are both the products of these linguistic ideologies and the tools that serve to produce, maintain, and reinforce them. To explore the crux of linguistic normativity within my own practice as a translator, I have turned to contemporary literary works who are written in decidedly non-normative, non- monolingual ways. Whether these texts are written in what we tend to recognize as several , or , they all offer linguistic cartographies that do not correspond to the conventional, predominant mapping of languages along ethnonational lines. The notion of linguistic cartography refers to the mapping, onto linguistic practices, of relatively fixed linguistic categories, such as or but also American

Vernacular and even literary such

as and The concept of is useful here in thinking about the ways in which communicative practices come to index styles, identities, genres, dialects, and even languages. As Agha points out, speak of is to speak of a sociohistorical snapshot of a process of (27). Enregisterment is understood as a social process whereby linguistic items are reanalyzed and reorganized as cultural models of action, as capable of indexing stereotypic characteristics of incumbents of particular interactional (27). When I use the notions of or throughout this 6 thesis, I thus point to the naturalized products of a specific kind of enregisterment, or linguistic mapping. As we will see below, the dominant linguistic mappings with which we grapple today are intricately connected to the demands of the nation-state. Indeed, the nation, one model led to the creation of national languages through the conceptual mapping of sets of linguistic practices along national lines. This is what, I argue, makes possible the structural understanding of translation as happening from to The texts analyzed in this dissertation, however, contain linguistic forms and elements not usually associated with the national languages of French or Englishthe two official, colonial languages of the Canadian state, which also figure as the two dominant languages of (monolingual) literary publication in this country. What other kinds of linguistic mapping, outside of this colonial and national cartography of language(s), then, do these texts point to? And is it not possible, in fact desirable, for translation to follow these alternative, postnational cartographies of language instead? The Canadian linguistic context offers an interesting ground for this project, for several

reasons. First, Canada is known for its policies of official bilingualism at the federal level, which

grant official recognition, massive state support and institutionalization, and public visibility and

legitimacy to the French and English languages, despite the immense linguistic diversity the Canadian state hosts. As Eve Haque has shown, official bilingualism in the Canadian context is a policy that collective language rights only to official-language groups, justified through the purported openness of language and the [individual] of other ethnic groups to integrate by way of official-language (Haque 237). In that sense, it is a tool of 7 management of populations on the terrain of (Heller, Socioeconomic Junctures

38) central to the white-settler nation-building project. Furthermore, official bilingualism at the

state level does not translate, for the most part, into bilingualism at the provincial, local or individual levels: as Denise Merkle and Gillian Lane-Mercier observe (9), the local level is generally characterized by official and public monolingualism. We see this clearly in the context of monolingual (French) Québec, as well as in the monolingual logics that largely define the two distinct (French/English) cultural industries in so-called Canada. Almost all publishers, distributors and bookstores in Canada indeed operate monolingually, publishing a number of writers from different linguistic backgrounds and packaging a vast array of linguistic practices under the umbrella of either or . W more, official bilingualism (re)produces English and French as fundamentally, ontologically, naturally distinct. The notion of bilingualismor multilingualismconceives of languages as fixed, delineated, and mutually exclusive codes. This supposedly a priori linguistic differentiation is precisely what makes translation both possible and, in fact, necessary. It thus comes as no surprise that, with translation training in at least twelve universities country-wide, a federal Translation Bureau that employs dozens if not hundreds of translators, and a variety of translation grants, professional orders and publications, conferences and events on translation, Canada is one of the leading countries when it comes to translationtraining, technology, theory, professional activity, and so on. Thus, bilingualism and translation go hand in hand in Canada: on the one hand, as the focus on the coexistence of two bounded linguistic systems, bilingualism is what makes translation possible; on the other, translation, commonly understood as the rendering of an utterance from one language to another, in turn makes state bilingualism possible by (re)producing monolingual texts and, consequently, subjects. 8 Third, Canada is the (linguistic, cultural, social, political) context that I know and work within. I have indeed been formally trained as an English-to-French translator, an occupation I have been involved in for the past ten years, all within the Canadian context. Until recently, I have always understood what I do as a translator to be a transposition of some meaning, or content, from one language to a second language. However, the nature of some of the texts I have been called upon to translate in recent years started to challenge this commonplace, internalized understanding of translation. As a professional literary translator, I was extremely lucky to come across the works of two writers that would fundamentally alter the ways I think about my craft: Leanne Betasamosake Simpson and Joshua Whitehead. Simpson is an Anishinaabe writer from Alderville First Nation in Ontario, while Whitehead is an Oji-Cree Two-Spirit member of Peguis First Nation in Treaty 1 Territory, Manitoba.4 Their writings correspond to what is typically referred to as writing, i.e., texts that are written in more than one single, unitary language such as English. For instance, they both draw from Indigenous languages in their worksAnishinaabemowin in the case of Simpson; Ojibway and Cree for Whitehead - and they also draw from a range of expressive resources, moving between registers, voices and conventions we have come to think of as belonging to different linguistic categories.

4 I co-Islands of Decolonial Love 2018 for the

translation) and This Accident of Being Lost 2020 for the translation) with Natasha Kanapé Fontaine, aJonny Appleseed. I am currently working on the

Noopiming

poetry collection full-metal indigiqueer (Talonbooks 2017). 9 These texts struck me because they somehow refused to be tamed by and contained in the category of English, and yet, I did not know how to approach them otherwise, especially since I was supposed to translate them into French. I started to feel uncomfortable with applying conventional linguistic categories to these texts, sensing that such colonial categorizations probably would not sit right with these specific writers. What if or or or multilingual were simply one perspective on a more complex set of practices which draw on linguistic resources that have been conventionally thought of as belonging to separate systems because of our dominant linguistic (Heller, Bilingualism 15)? What do linguistic categories such as English and French hide when we apply them uncritically to texts that are, perhaps, not at all written according to these categori logics? What if these languages are the order translators impose, more or less successfully, on the linguistic forms and resources they work with, and not the other way around? It is no coincidence that writers such as Simpson and Whitehead challenged me to reconsider the monolingual logics of translation. As Indigenous writers, I believe that they are particularly attuned to the monologic, colonial mechanisms of exclusion and assimilation on which the settler state relies, including on the terrain of language, to justify its ongoing dispossession of Indigenous peoples. Something that struck me after the selection of my corpus is that the writers analyzed here are all, to different extents, marginalized in one way or another: Gregory Scofield is a Métis poet, France Daigle an Acadian novelist, Kevin Lambert a gay writer from rural Québec, Joshua Whitehead an Oji-Cree Two-Spirit writer, Nathanaël a genderqueerquotesdbs_dbs26.pdfusesText_32

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