Translating Montreal

Translating Montreal follows the trajectories of adventurous cultural translators such as Malcolm Reid, F.R. Scott, and A.M. Klein - pioneers of the 1950s and 1960s - Pierre Anctil, whose translations from Yiddish to French are emblematic of the dramatic reroutings now occurring across the Montreal landscape, and contemporary writer-translators such as Gail Scott, Erin Mouré, Jacques Brault, Michel Garneau, Nicole Brossard, and Emile Ollivier. Simon argues that translation is a dynamic and subtle tool for analysing cultural contact. An original take on cultural relations in the city, Translating Montreal explores the emergence of the "new" Montrealer. No longer "Franco-Québécois," "Anglo-Québécois," "immigrant," or "ethnic," the new Montrealer is a citizen of a mixed and cosmopolitan city.

The divided Montreal of the 1960s is very different from today's cosmopolitan, hybrid city. Taking the perspective of a walker moving through a fluid landscape of neighbourhoods and eras, Sherry Simon experiences Montreal as a voyage across languages. Sketching out literary passages from the then of the colonial city to the now of the cosmopolitan Montreal, she traces a history of crossings and intersections around the familiar sites and symbols of the city - the mythical boulevard Saint-Laurent, Mile End, the Jacques-Cartier Bridge, Mont-Royal.

The essays in Culture in Transit are by many of English Canada's most prominent translators, a group which has made whole libraries of Quebec literature available to English-speaking readers. Philip Stratford, Kathy Mezei, Ray Ellenwood, Betty Bednarski, William Findlay, Linda Gaboriau, Jane Brierley, Susanne de Lotbinière-Harwood, Luise von Flotow, Barbara Godard, David Homel, Wayne Grady, and Sheila Fischman. The history of Canada has provided an exceptional platform for the development of literary translation. Culture in Transit provides a lively and thought-provoking insider's look at this essential activity.

In 2008, Jaspreet Singh made a pact with his mother. He would gladly give her the go-ahead to publish her significantly altered translation of a story from his collection, Seventeen Tomatoes, if she promised to write her memoirs. After she died in 2012, he decided to take up the memoir she had started. My Mother, My Translator is a deeply personal exploration of a complex relationship. It is a family history, a work of mourning, a meditation on storytelling and silences, and a reckoning with trauma--the inherited trauma of the 1947 Partition of India and the direct trauma of the November 1984 anti-Sikh violence Singh experienced as a teenager. Tracing the men and especially the women of his family from the 1918 pandemic through the calamitous events of Partition, My Mother, My Translator takes us through Singh's childhood in Kashmir and with his grandparents in Indian Punjab to his arrival in Canada in 1990 to study the sciences, up to the closing moments of 2020, as he tries to locate new forms of stories for living in a present marked by COVID-19 and climate crisis.

An homage to Canada's pre-eminent literary translator and a tribute to the connections created through translation.

A.M. Klein has remained an enduring but elusive presence in the Canadian literary consciousness since his death in 1972. Klein's legacy has been mixed, his literary achievement sometimes overshadowed by his reclusiveness and withdrawal from the literary world.Failure's Oppositepresents a fresh perspective on Klein's reception and legacy, exploring why he has remained a compelling figure for critics and readers. His experimentalism drew upon strong traditions and fluency in several languages - English, French, Yiddish, and Hebrew - allowing him to develop a multilingual, modernist Jewish voice that is a touchstone for understanding Canada's multicultural identity. His struggle with the emotional and historical dimensions of diaspora is of considerable importance throughout his work and is investigated through the lenses of translation, voice, and his relationship to other Jewish writers. Contributors also re-evaluate Klein's connection to Montreal and the original ways in which he captured the atmosphere of his "jargoning city."Failure's Oppositereflects the many ways A.M. Klein is being remade, refashioned, and reconstructed in the twenty-first century, both as a bridge to the past and a model for contemporary critical and creative work in Canadian literature.

"Exploring a wide variety of examples from both the past and present, this collection defines cities as fields of translational forces, of languages in conversation and in tension. From the 19th century multilingual border city to today's metropolis, language fractures and connections shape urban territory, giving the city its distinctive sensibility. Like architecture and urban planning, like the creation of monuments, translation defines the memories which survive, the narratives which tell the story of the city. Choosing what to remember is always a conflictual process, and particularly in cities with histories with internal language strife, acts of translation are a crucial part of this struggle. The essays draw a variegated portrait of the translational city, highlighting spaces of accelerated exchange and heightened language awareness. The contributions discuss cities across Europe (with particular attention to its Eastern borderlands) and the Americas (Canada, the US, Brazil, Uruguay). Emblematic importance is given to the layered memories of the Central European and Habsburg city (Vilnius, Prague, Brody, Trieste) as well as the traumas of passage from empire to nation. Subsequent essays explore the broader fault lines which traverse today's global city: the new ways in which immigrants imprint their presence and their memories in today's material and virtual cities, the obstacles to translation in the experience of the refugee and the exile, the ways in which media networks enhance or limit possibilities of translation, and the active and performative character of hybrid languages as they emerge in the interstices of city life."--

Coming August 2019 A NOW Magazine Best Book to Read in Summer 2019 It's winter in Montreal, 2002, when a graphic design student's gambling addiction starts to drag him under. In debt to the metal band that's commissioned him to draw their album cover and ensnared in lies to his friends and his cousin, he takes the first job that promises a paycheck: dishwasher at La Trattoria, a high-end restaurant, where he finds himself thrust, on his first night, into roiling world of characters. A magnificent, hyperrealist debut, with a soundtrack by Iron Maiden, The Dishwasher plunges us into a world in which--for better or for worse--everyone depends on each other.