A coffee with… Dominique Fortier | awakening to the world

When a customs officer asks her her profession, Dominique Fortier has an astonishing answer: “translator”.

Paul Journet
The Press

After winning the prestigious Renaudot Prize in 2020 for paper towns, she could call herself a writer. But that’s not his main job. She spends more time with other people’s words.

“I would do translation even if they didn’t pay me! “, she says.

In the café, the noise of the plates muffles her delicate voice. I try to understand. Why this pleasure?

“It’s the joy of writing without the anxieties that come with it,” she continues. By writing a book, we jump into the void every day. There, someone else does it for us. No need to check if the plot is good and if the characters are believable. All that remains is to find the right word, the right phrase. »

Heather O’Neil and the other English speakers translated by Dominique Fortier can count themselves lucky. Their work is rendered by a pen of rare precision.

To realize this, nothing better than reading your own books. They offer both a writing of interiority and an awakening of the senses. Weeks after closing them, we see that something remains.

It was true for paper towns and The white shadowsand it is also for the brand new When will the dawn comedense and limpid like a rock crystal.

It’s more than style. It is a sensitivity, a relationship to things. Delicate and precise, his pen sharpens the attention and commits the reader to a total presence with the world around him. “I write to slow myself down, to be aware of what’s around me,” she says simply before taking a sip of her tea, with a smile that’s more embarrassed than mischievous. As if she didn’t measure the extent of her power.

With Rafaële Germain, she concluded a pact a few years ago: to save a moment a day, a little nothing like the light of the sky. The kind of moment you forget if you don’t write it down. “Still, it can be the most beautiful moment of the day, even if nothing happens! And if you look at your cell phone, you forget to live it. »

This quality of attention she shares with the poet Emily Dickinson, subject of paper towns. In the following, The white shadows, she also lends this gift to Milicent Todd. A teenager who, “over the immobile hours”, has become “a master in the art of perceiving the tiniest details”.

In her most recent book, Fortier does it herself. Here is one among many. She contemplates a sparrow “extended on the ground on its side, eyes closed, legs folded, beak tight”. Faced with wars and other human tragedies, this death may seem banal. But more than anything else, it’s this bird that grabs her heart. Because “it is difficult to conceive how so much death can enter such a small body”.

Grief is a recurring theme in this book, perhaps its most personal. There is his father’s. That of her “second father”, literature professor and essayist François Ricard, who took her under his wing at McGill University. And the death of her big sister – Dominique was then 3 years old, her only memories relate to the aftershocks that followed this earthquake in the family.

The title refers to his favorite time to write. She starts at the keyboard around 4 or 5 in the morning. “No one is awake in the house and the light is super beautiful,” she says. The dreaming part of us is not far from the writing part, and the spirit is still close to it. »

Words do not come out in torrent. She places a few on the page. After about an hour, it stops. It looks more like a vision than labor. She hardly reworks the sentences. “I mostly do pruning,” she says. I remember a documentary by Pierre Perrault with a sculptor from Saint-Jean-Port-Joli. We ask him how he makes a duck. He answers: I kid the wood by removing everything that is not a duck. That’s kind of how I do it. »

More precisely, she glues together the fragments of text, erases the superfluous and assembles them, like a bouquet of flowers.

Dominique Fortier admits today with a laugh, her path to writing has been winding.

Daughter of a school board librarian, she grew up in Cap-Rouge surrounded by books. At 14, she had read all of Sartre’s novels. However, becoming an author seems unattainable to her. Ahead of her, the future looms in a long, narrow corridor. “People all seemed predestined to two professions: civil servant or teacher. When I answered that I would like to become an architect, I was told: “Let’s see!” So imagine a writer…”

Despite everything, she enrolled in literature at McGill University. It was there that she met Professor François Ricard, friend and publisher of Gabrielle Roy, post-doctor of Milan Kundera and great essayist. He sees the potential in his young student. She herself is less certain.

She left the doctorate in letters to enroll in law. After one session, she quits to work at Hallmark. Yes, the good-feeling card dealer…

“It was a well-paid job, dozens of people applied,” she recalls.

The texts to be written or translated are sometimes oddly specific. “There was a card that was supposed to say, basically, ‘I’m sorry for upsetting you the other night, our friendship is important to me,’ but in three paragraphs. She will resign after a week.

François Ricard is amused to see his student looking for herself so much when in his eyes, her destiny seems simple. She will finish her doctorate on Gabrielle Roy before unfolding her sails.

Writers carry within them a limited number of images, she writes. In his two books on Emily Dickinson, we feel the earth and its plants and we see the white in all its lights.

His new work is under the sign of water and blue. She recounts one of her most vivid childhood memories. However, nothing happens. “The crash of the waves reaches me, with their emanations of iodine, kelp and salt, and suddenly I am traversed by a kind of fulgurance that cannot be expressed in words. At this precise moment, and in a way, I realize that my life is here […]. »

As a child, she dreamed of a house by the water. It is now done. She stays every summer in Maine, in a village spared from tourist occupation. It rubs shoulders with piping plovers, terns and other birds that peck in the salt water. They appear as so many characters in his new book, meditations on mourning, nature and literature. The result is difficult to classify. It basically belongs to the only category that should exist: that of works that deserve to be read.

Dominique Fortier does not hide it, she writes what she would like to read. Novels interest him less and less.

I point out to him that we recognize his from the first page. “But when I write, I don’t know exactly what I mean! It’s in the writing that I find it,” she confides.

Really ?

“I have no thesis to defend. I just try to bear witness to what I see, to report an emotion, to have a kind of conversation with places and things and to respond to them. It reminds me of a radio interview I heard with wildlife photographers. They had embarked on grand explanations to conceptualize their work and explain their process. But when the turn came to the great Vincent Munier, he said: “I press the button, I discover the result and when it works, I realize it by seeing it.” It’s the same for me. »

And what does success look like to her? To a sentence that “glows in the dark with a firefly brilliance”. Which, as Faulkner writes, helps “to better measure the thickness of the shadow”. Which accounts for these nothings where our existence is perhaps being played out.