Translation as Reception: Quebec Women Writers in English Canada
Drawing on Pierre Bourdieu's theorization of the violence of the internal stratification of the "field of cultural production" and André Lefevere's theorization of the hegemonic mediation of patronage in extending the life of literary texts, this essay examines the re-writing of Quebec literature in English Canada through practices of translation. Toronto (and New York ) participate in the legitimation of Quebec literature: their publishing houses select what is translated and who translates it — processes which have feminized Quebec culture as an alternative to American materialism. Fiction by Gabrielle Roy, Anne Hébert, and Marie-Claire Blais has been fully integrated into the English-Canadian literary system where, rewritten to appear realist and offering an image of a Quebec unilingually English-speaking, it circulates in the field of general or restricted production oriented toward the middle-class. Despite the claims of Carolyn Perkes, however, writing by a younger generation of feminists such as Nicole Brossard, France Théoret and others has not transformed the cultural norms of English Canadian literature. While a new genre of "fiction-theory" has emerged in English Canada, it circulates only in the field of marginal production of small feminist and avant garde literary presses without recognition from other positions in the cultural field. Indeed, its language-centred writing, foregrounding the political asymmetry between English and French, has been criticized negatively for violating the restricted field's norm of linguistic purity and transparent meaning. A dialogue among feminists across languages has in turn had an impact on Quebec women's writing where the motif of translation structures a number of recent fictions. Responding to symbolic and gendered violence of subordination in a play of variations, these fictions undertake the work of mourning around the lost object — the absent mother, a singular language — using translation as a figure of working -through. Translation in these works entails not a tragic loss of language, but the carnivalesque excess of repetition in many potential languages. Translation becomes then a new model for creativity as re-working.