Canada, French

Le désert mauve
Nicole Brossard

As a Canadian, I was naturally curious to see what Ann Morgan chose to read for Canada. My country, naturally, has a few literary bigwigs of it own, along the lines of Margaret Atwood, Michael Ondaatje, and Robertson Davies. I don’t know why, but I just assumed she would pick one of them. It certainly never occurred to me that she’d stray from this well-trodden path, and much less that she might read a book by a French-Canadian author in translation. It just wasn’t the done thing.

Consequently, I was more than a bit surprised to see Le désert mauve by Nicole Brossard, and translated by Susanne de Lotbinière-Harwood as Mauve Desert, under the Canada entry. Reading Ann Morgan’s post about the book made me doubly intrigued because, as a translator myself, the book deals with the act and meaning of translation.

Le désert mauve is a bit confusing to talk about, actually. It’s one book, but three books. It’s a book and its translation, but both are written in the same language. The first book is about fifteen-year-old Melanie coming of age in the Arizona desert. The second book is about Maude Laures, who finds the first book in a Quebec bookstore and becomes obsessed with it, spending two years analysing its characters, events, and emotions. The third book is Laures’ eventual translation of the first book. (An imagined English-to-French translation, as the book in its entirety is French in the original – and wholly English in Mauve Desert). 

This imagined passage from one language to another was particularly interesting to me. I found myself flipping back and forth between the two books to see how Laures had translated passages that we ambiguous. Had a certain lyrical passage become dulled? Did clarity come into any darker corners? – As a technical translator, I don’t have to philosophise about these issues much, but I do constantly wonder what gets lost and transformed along the way despite my every best intention otherwise. It was fascinating to be able to see the translation process and its results in this way.

Guadeloupe

La migration des cœurs
Maryse Condé

When Ann Morgan started her A Year of Reading the World project, she came up against the tricky question of what to do about reading works in translation. She is able to read in French and German "slowly and with a very big dictionary" and felt that surely it would be better to read something in its original language. Yet she had quite the inner struggle about the actual importance of translation to her project and the unfortunately disadvantaged position of non-English writers who must both face the juggernaut of the English language's massive literary output and the disinterest of English publishers in publishing translations. 

In the end, she embraced translation, and you can read all about her process of making the decision here. As a translator myself, I certainly understand the importance of promoting work in other languages and ensuring that people are able to express themselves naturally and to the best of their abilities in their native language. I too am going embrace translation as I read the world, but I'm not going to shy away from reading books in French and Spanish when I can. It will open up more options to me, especially from further-flung places like Mauritania or Paraguay, and will help me keep up my skills in those languages.

I read Guadeloupean author Maryse Condé's book La migration des cœurs in high school and, to be honest, I don't really remember much about it. I did discover that it is now available in English translation under the title Windward Heights, an allusion to Condé's reinterpretation of Wuthering Heights in the colonial Caribbean. One thing I do remember is that the dialogue was often written in French Creole – a most disconcerting fact to high-school-French-reading me. It would be quite interesting to see how the translator approached this sticky wicket and whether he or she used analogous English West Indian Creole.

Mexico

La ley del Amor
Laura Esquivel

Softmore work from Mexican author, Laura Esquivel, which followed on the heels of Like Water for Chocolate, a wonderful book made into an equally wonderful film, which is the highest-grossing Spanish-language film of all time in the United States. Big shoes to fill indeed.

The Law of Love is quite an interesting concept for a book, a multimedia effort incorporating music and artwork, with a CD and illustrations. I felt, however, the multimedia aspect was more of a novel aside than a really integral part of the book. This story of New Age-sci-fi-magical realism and spirituality, stretching from the twenty-third century back to Montezuma's Mexico, fell a bit flat for me. The narrative was a bit forced at times and the characters hard to relate to. 

Perhaps when you start off so high, like Esquivel did with Like Water for Chocolate, it's difficult to go anywhere but down. Her latest book, Malinche, about has gotten some good press however. It's about conquistador Hernan Cortes' native Mexican interpreter and mistress, a real historical figure who is both scorned as a traitor and revered as the mother of the raza cósmica in contemporary Mexico. I'm interested in reading more about this engimatic contradiction, so Malinche might figure in the list of next Mexican book to read.

United States of America

Dune
Frank Herbert

By default, I've probably read more American authors than any other country. However, when it came time to draw up this list, I couldn't for the life of me think of the last American author I'd actually read! I racked my brain and my bookshelf, only coming up with non-fiction American titles. I finally remembered Dune, which I'd read just a few months ago! One would think this would be easier to call to mind than books I had read in high school, but the mind works in mysterious ways.

Dune, of course, has nothing to do with America, but with a a feudal interstellar society, set in the far distant future. In a way, however, it has everything to do with America, the rise and fall of empires, resource extraction, and the price of commercialism. The book sees the ascendancy of ecological concerns over commercial ones and we can be hopeful that this too will be the case for our own present world that we seem so keen to ransack.

Canada, English

The Year of the Flood
Margaret Atwood

With Viet Nam and Cambodia, the first two countries I read specifically for my Read the World project, now out of the way, I'm going to take a bit of time to go through my back catalogue. I'll list the the countries I've already read, revisiting the title I've most recently read from there.

As a Canadian, it's only fitting I start with Canada, and I doubt one could get more Canadian than Margaret Atwood. The Year of the Flood book doesn't have anything to do with Canada necessarily, but rather a dystopian near-future city that is not explicitly identified. This second book in her MaddAddam Trilogy describes the same events as the first, Oryx and Crake, but from two at-times parallel, at-times intersecting, points of view of the female protagonists in the lower-class "pleeblands" of this future gone awry.

I'm generally a big fan of dystopian and alternate future stuff, so I enjoyed this read very much. Am certainly looking forward to the last book in the series to see how it all pans out. For being a sober reminder of a world that really isn't that far off, I loved that there were so many puns and so much humour throughout. Dark satire at its best.