In the discreet and passionate contribution of literary translators, who among French-speaking readers could know Kafka, Dostoyevsky, Virginia Woolf or Mordecai Richler? Hardly anyone, you have to admit.
Translators break down borders, they erase the distance between continents, cultures and languages. Which does not always go smoothly.
We remember that the novelist of Czech origin Milan Kundera, in The Betrayed Testaments (1993), dissected in particular the fate of Kafka’s work and recounted having been traumatized by his own unfortunate experience with certain couriers of literary “contraband”. To translate, is it necessarily to betray?
Not in the eyes of Lori Saint-Martin, professor of literary studies at UQAM, prolific translator, but also author (The closed doors). With A necessary gooda subtitled essay Praise of literary translation, it proposes to neutralize many falsehoods conveyed about the literary translation. Especially when it’s “constantly and unfairly linked to loss and betrayal,” and seen as just some sort of necessary evil.
“There are very few essays in Quebec and Canada on translation,” says Lori Saint-Martin, reached by telephone in Paris, where she was passing through. “There are a lot of very good translators in Canada, but not many who have commented at length on their practice. I thought it was missing. She also saw it as an opportunity to answer people’s questions about this shadowy work, while its craftsmen — who are now mostly women, she wishes to point out — would suffer from a blatant lack of recognition.
This essay is also a way of responding to the “attacks that translators suffer”, she will say. Especially when, in the media, their names are passed over in silence. “People act as if translation were a magic operation, something that happens all by itself, when it is very far from being the case”, she continues. A translation is the result of long hours, passion and investment in writing by someone who takes an already published text and renders it into another language.
Translate, she says
For Lori Saint-Martin, any translation, “even mediocre or incomplete”, of a work of universal literature offers a world that the original text could not bring us – because it would remain inaccessible to most readers. between us. “Translation offers us worlds”, she writes again.
The year 2022 will mark thirty years of literary translation for Lori Saint-Martin. Since that day when she fell in love with a book, which asked her to be translated, it is an encounter that is renewed each time. A meeting that she describes as a “magical and random moment”. As are all love at first sight.
Since then, it has been an activity, as she tells it in A necessary good, which she mostly performed in tandem with her partner Paul Gagné. A long-term work rewarded with three Governor General’s Literary Awards for translation from English into French (in 2000, 2007 and 2015).
At the same time, she believes, it made perfect sense for her to get down to translation. As she was born in Kitchener, Ontario in 1959, as she switched from English to French in her personal life, it was normal that this reality should also feed her professional career. Since the “initial love at first sight in fifth grade when, as a little English-speaking girl from southern Ontario, I heard a few words of French for the first time”.
A unique and fascinating trajectory that she recounted at length in the autobiographical essay who i think i am (Boréal, 2020, reissued in paperback for the occasion).
The Age of Suspicion
“We talk too much, in translation, about what is lost, and not enough about what is gained”, she believes. “There are bad translators and bad translations, recognizes Lori Saint-Martin, as there are bad writers, bad essays and bad novels. But nobody says: this person is a writer, therefore he cannot be good. Whereas there is a suspicion which passes permanently on the translation. »
He is a transmitter, interpreter, intermediary, of course, but is the translator himself a creator? “Absolutely, believes the essayist. All creators start from something. The novelist starts from an idea, from something that is already in his head. A translator also starts from an idea and words, but which are already on paper. She believes that there is also a real creative impulse there.
Glenn Gould is certainly not Bach, admits Lori Saint-Martin, but Gould’s interpretation will not be that of Pinnock, Tureck or Perahia. Translation goes a step further, she says. While the musician starts from notes and makes sounds — which are already in the score — moving from one language to another requires crossing a much greater distance.
Regarding certain issues of diversity, the essayist does not hesitate to address, in A necessary good, the international controversy that surrounded the translation of poems by the young African-American Amanda Gorman in 2020. Can a white translator translate a racialized author? The question of identity is not simple, she admits. “The world of translation is too white, it is too uniform, but I think translation should be a matter of passion and complicity. »
These are some of the questions that Lori Saint-Martin addresses in this essay. “I didn’t want to do an academic book. I wanted to make a book felt, rooted in experience and, like translation, like writing, entering into the pleasure of words and the pleasure of research through words. »