There is a world and the Atlantic Ocean between the French language of Jack Kerouac, learned from the mouth of his Quebec mother Gabrielle, in Lowell, Massachusetts, and the polished French of Gallimard’s translation of the famous On the roadby the Franco-American writer.
This varnish of French from France, plastered on the rhythmic American of the icon of the beat generation, the team of the New Experimental Theater (NTE) invites the public to blow it up, to bring French-speaking Kerouac back to America. For three weekends, Kerouac, 100 years on the go ! offers to reclaim the Francophonie of Kerouac through a translation workshop, but also through cabarets deploying a different line-up of artists each week, including Ariane Moffat, Joe Bocan, Jérôme Minière and many others.
The idea came from playwright Jean-Marc Dalpé and Guillaume Martel Lasalle during a drunken evening, and in light of the publication, first in 2016, of Life is of homage, a collection of texts that Kerouac had directly written in French. “I am French Canadian, he wrote, I was born in New England. When I get angry, I often swear in French. When I dream, I often dream in French. When I bawl, I always bawl in French, and I say I don’t like that, I don’t like that! »
Too wise a translation
“We said to ourselves: ‘The French translation of Kerouac is so wise, one-dimensional'”, says Jean-Marc Dalpé, in comparison with the language of Kerouac.
During the days of the weekends, the NTE has therefore designed a workshop, with an armada of typewriters and a printing machine, where everyone is invited to translate an extract from Kerouac into French, or to write a short text on the subject. Everything will be collected in small notebooks. Kerouac’s father, who was originally from Rivière-du-Loup, while his mother came from Saint-Pacôme, was also a printer.
The NTE also offers a series of short films inspired by Kerouac, directed by Francophones from different parts of Canada. “These are Francophones who can be affected by wandering, by Francophone migration,” explains Daniel Brière, co-director of the NTE with Alexis Martin. He himself invites us, for example, on a journey in the footsteps of the writer, visiting on the way places where he imbibed the French language, from the library to the social clubs of Lowell, passing by his school, Saint-Louis-de-France. “He spoke in French until he was six or seven years old,” continues Daniel Brière. He went to school in French until that age. »
A dream
“I never had a language of my own,” Kerouac wrote again in Life is of homage. The French patois j’usqua-six angts, and after that the English of the local guys. And after that — the big forms, the big expressions, of poet, philosopher, prophet. With all that today I’m all mixed up in my gum. In fact, Jack Kerouac would have liked to write in French, the NTE team tells us. “We now know that the work of his life, the vast unfinished fresco he planned to bring together under the title The legend of Duluoz, Kerouac wanted to write it in French. But for his literary career, he had to sacrifice his French patois”, they write in their presentation document.
We said to ourselves: “The French translation of Kerouac is so wise, one-dimensional”
Everything invites you to travel at Kerouac. Discovering this unknown polyglot America, mixed race, Creole, from Maine to California, from New York to Mexico. You get there with your hands on the steering wheel or badly seated on a bus seat, open to the wind and the unknown. Translating Kerouac is also experiencing its momentum, a sort of quest for identity in the midst of the American dream of a conservative middle class.
On stage, Maxime Catellier, in particular, will deliver excerpts from his translation of the book Visions of Gerard, of Kerouac, which is in progress. The poet has just dedicated a collection of poetry to the writer of Lowell, John says.
“This language in which Kerouac dreamed, this language in which he cried, it was the same as me. Me too, I dreamed and I cried in this language, even if I wrote in another , writes Catellier, who says to find flights of jazz in the playful conversations of French-speaking taverns.
This effort for the French speakers of America to reclaim Kerouac will not stop there. After presenting in Rouyn-Noranda and Montreal, Kerouac, 100 years on the go!Jean-Marc Dalpé dreams of showing him in Sudbury, Ottawa, Winnipeg, Saskatoon, Vancouver, Toronto and Moncton.