What is Stephen Harper Reading?

Inscription:

To Stephen Harper,
the splendid translation of a most entertaining Québec novel,
from a Canadian poet and translator,
Émile Martel

Letter:

The Right Honourable Stephen Harper
Prime Minister of Canada
80 Wellington Street
Ottawa ON K1A 0A2

Dear Mr. Harper,

In a democracy, it is a cherished privilege of the citizen to address directly the leader of his or her country. We all know in our hearts that it is the duty of the leader to respond to these efforts. Matters of interest or concern may need to be addressed this way and adequate responses often ensure an element of serenity to the citizen who has initiated the dialogue, as well as providing the leader with clues about the soul and the mind of his or her fellow citizens.

When Yann asked me to join in on the whatisstephenharperreading book club, I was positively elated because it gave me a role, as a poet and as a translator, in this campaign, which, you will have learned, has been noted and admired in many a country and matches a cherished belief I have in international cultural relations, a foreign policy your government absurdly dropped, to the great loss not only of Canadian artists and creators, but of Canada’s image abroad.

The novel I’m sending you today was published in French in Montréal in 2007 and received the Governor General Literary Award for translation to English in 2009; so you have two books here resulting from the special and exceptional talent of two artists: a novelist and a translator.

The book, Nikolski, by Nicolas Dickner was very well received both in Québec and in France; it won many prizes, and it was beautifully translated by Lazer Lederhendler.

The profession of translator is a discreet and humble one. We translators are seldom noticed and hardly anybody ever believes that we did our work right. There is always a nuance, always the shadow of an emotion which we missed, or there is a smell or a taste which we have exaggerated or understated. Whatever we do, we know that another translator in a few years will do differently, may even do better, just as a reader or a writer who understands both languages is likely to say that the original is much, much better than the translation. Of course, it’s better! Most of the time.

But the translator can sometime take some sort of a revenge. There is an anecdote I like to tell: Shakespeare wrote Hamlet at the very end of the sixteenth century. About one hundred years later, Voltaire was born in France. Two pillars of European and world culture. Naturally, Voltaire knew of Shakespeare and read his works. And one day, I would venture that he wanted to share with his readers and in French the most famous line uttered by Hamlet:

To be or not to be: that is the question.

How would these ten words be translated in a way that respected not only the desperate intensity of the original English, but adopted the common form of French verse in use at the time, the twelve syllable rhyming “alexandrins”? This way:

Demeure, il faut choisir, et passer à l’instant
de la vie à la mort, et de l’être au néant.

An interesting exercise would be to take Voltaire’s two verses without knowing Shakespeare’s original verse and translate it back to English. Translation can be a magical cave revealing beauties even the author did not know about…

Returning to Nikolski, whichever version you will want to read first, the French original or the English translation, your attention will be drawn to the cover illustration: three fish, the same three fish, actually, but swimming in different directions, horizontally and vertically. I believe there is a slightly different message there. I’m not sure which. What do you think?

The novel is a splendid construction of twisted and adventurous lives where various characters hover around each other in a dance of chance and luck, mostly around the Marché Jean-Talon, in Montréal, but also in other places in Canada—among them the Prairies and the North shore of the Saint-Lawrence—and in distant Caribbean countries. Piracy is important in this book, and navigation. And a fishmonger, and… and… You’ll love that crowd once you get to know Noah and Joyce and the narrator who sells used books on rue Saint-Laurent.

The French version has a dedication from Nicolas Dickner to our grand-daughter Catherine, encouraging her to “return to the novel”. She’d told us that she hadn’t read a novel in a while. But she already had a copy of the book. So allow me to encourage you too to return to the novel, fulfilling the wish of Nicolas Dickner.

With my best wishes,

Émile Martel

(Translation by Émile Martel)

encl: two inscribed trade paperbacks, one also inscribled by the author.

Reply:

Pending…