Crossing Town : Malcolm Reid and the Writers of Parti pris
Malcolm Reid’s the Shouting Signpainters (1972) is a cult classic recounting an initiatic journey across Montreal into the heart of Parti pris territory. The ethnographic voyage is also a work of translation and at the heart of The Shouting Signpainters is the question of equivalence. In linguistic terms, this is the question of how to render the specificity of Parti pris language in another tongue. If this language is so specific to the circumstances of its emergence, how can it be carried over into another context? Is the only solution a kind of bilingual commentary, a process of paraphrase that admits to the irreducible semantic charge of the original? Is the attraction of difference to be found precisely in its local and non-transferable nature?