The publication of Hugh MacLennan’s Barometer Rising in a French translation by Jean Simard under the title Le Temps tournera au beau marks an important stage in Canadian literature and in the mutual recognition between English and French Canada.
This is the first Canadian translation of a novel by Hugh MacLennan, considering that his first novel in French, Two Solitudes, a few years ago, was published in France. The present undertaking, by HMH in Montreal, is a sign of growing interest on both sides in the dual‑language character of literature in Canada and in the immense possibilities that this fact presents.
La Presse recently devoted the entire front page of its entertainments section to a reproduction in large type of the opening of the novel, with a photograph and the name Hugh MacLennan bannered across the page. The magazine contained an impressive interview‑article on MacLennan by Gilles Marcotte analyzing his relation to French Canada.
The publishers HMH are also preparing a translation of The Watch That Ends the Night, so that Hugh MacLennan will very soon be as easily available in his best books in French as in English. The usefulness of this kind of interplay can hardly be overstated; as French books in Canada pass into English and vice-versa, the two cultures remain autonomous yet they communicate and enrich the common fund.
I note that in a comment on Canadian books in Poetry (Chicago) an American critic dismisses the translation of Alain Grandbois’ Selected Poems by Peter Miller as “painfully exact translations.” Even our virtues are described as faults by unfriendly critics (“Listen to the fool’s reproach—it is a kingly title”); but exact translation is what we need, and this is what we are now getting.
The majority of translations to date have been French into English. But this can change. To keep the integrity of French, it is very much to the advantage of French Canada to translate into the French language, and so one can predict that there will be more translation as time goes on and as translators of goodwill appear to do the work.
It’s hard to generalize, but I think that exchange between the two literatures has matured and increased naturally with the growth of Canada; and it has also fluctuated in the past, now producing a flurry of translations, now shrinking almost to the vanishing point. One high peak came at the turn of the century, in the period of William Henry Drummond and the translation of Kirby’s The Golden Dog by the French-Canadian poets Pamphile Lemay and Louis Fréchette. The laureate of Canada, Louis Fréchette, wrote a friendly Introduction to Drummond’s The Habitant and Other French‑Canadian Poems in 1897. And The Golden Dog of course deals entirely with the fate of French culture in Canada—attributing the fall of Quebec “less to the power of the English than to the corrupt misgovernment of Bigot and Vaudreuil, and the neglect by the Court of France of her ancient and devoted colony.”
The French version of Le Chien d’Or is no longer in print, nor is the original English for that matter, although second‑hand copies are still fairly easy to come by. It’s quite an amazing novel, and very thoroughly researched (it took about eleven years to write). It contains one very striking paragraph on the relations of French and English literature in Canada:
“English poets were in those days an unknown quantity in French education, and especially in New France, until after the conquest. But Wolfe opened the great world of English poetry to Canada as he recited Gray’s Elegy with its prophetic line—‘The paths of glory lead but to the grave.’
“As he floated down the St. Lawrence, in that still autumnal night, to land his forces and scale by stealth the fatal heights of Abraham, whose possession led to the conquest of the city and his own heroic death, then it was the two glorious streams of modern thought and literature united in New France, where they have run side by side to this day—in time to be united in one grand flood stream of Canadian literature.”
I have always assumed that “one grand flood stream” means a literature in two languages interrelated but separate in their character and traditions. This is still always possible, and far more interesting than any single strain of preserved mediocrity. The history of literature proves that international influence creates a flourishing art, while cultural isolation leads to inevitable sterility. Translations in Canada, like those of the present, point to the better of these two choices.
Dudek, Louis. "Translations Enrich French & English Literature."The Gazette, 21 May 1966. Rpt. in In Defence of Art: Critical Essays & Reviews, Ed. Aileen Collins, Kingston, Quarry Press, 1988, pp. 198-200.
Copyright the estate of Louis Dudek.
