Avant Desire: A Nicole Brossard Reader. Nicole Brossard
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describes this subversive and playful approach to translation as ‘transformance’: ‘a mode of performance’ that ‘emphasize[s] the work of translation, [and] the focus on the process of constructing meaning in the activity of transformation.’12 This is the same period in which Nicole Brossard and Daphne Marlatt collaborated on two chapbooks, Mauve (1985, included in this reader) and Character/Jeu de lettres (1986), that were themselves collaborations between the French magazine La Nouvelle barre du jour and the English publication entitled Writing. Indeed, this was a prolific and empowered period in the history of collaborations between experimental Québécoise and English Canadian feminist writers and literary translators. In their linguistic experiments, these feminist writers/translators used several para-textual strategies (footnotes, introductions, diaries) to underscore the fact that bodies – beautiful, aching, anxious, aging bodies – were ensconced in the translated text rather than the invisible, equivalence-producing translators that the cultural imaginary had relegated to the oubliettes of cross-linguistic literary production. Feminist strategies addressing the invisibility of the translator simultaneously sought to address the invisibility of women as subjects, and the collaboration between Marlatt and Brossard in Mauve captures the subversive spirit of that era.
As we’ve mentioned, few writers have such an active base of translators as Brossard, an exponentially translated author whose corpus continues to be read and circulated in many more languages than the English translations gathered here: they include German, Spanish, Italian, Japanese, Slovanian, Norwegian, Romanian, and Catalan. Those who have translated her comprise a strong, loyal community of writers and thinkers. Poiesis, which derives from the Greek, means to make or to bring into being what did not exist before. Making. Brossard’s thinking is poiesis if we take the word at face value; it makes and remakes a way of engaging with the world, and we could not conceive of a Brossard reader that did not acknowledge these rich collaborations.
Her collaboration with her translators is an example of what we mean when we say world-making. Kate Briggs’ beautifully decanted address to the art of translation is illuminating:
Translation operates, then, as a kind of vital test: an ever-renewable demonstration of the literary value of the novel in [its original language].13 Which is one way of saying that literature, that quality we call the literary, simply cannot do without translation as a means of repeatedly reaffirming it.14
In a world where utopia seems an impossible dream, Briggs’ understanding of translation as repeated affirmation is chlorophyllic. Translation works to energize and circulate thinking. Here, translation is acknowledgement, recognition, engagement, and affirmation across differences in languages, temporalities, and contexts. Indeed, there are rich resonances between Briggs’ understanding of translation and Brossard’s own reflection on the process:
There are certainly many ways of approaching translation: for me, it involves examining the gears of words, thoughts, images, and meanings and immersing myself in the dreamy meanderings generated by any literary reading. It also involves tackling the cultural contours of language, identity, and a certain kind of thinking practice. Simply put, it involves valorizing the constant virtual state in which we live, a state that increases the possibilities of approaching life with intelligence and wonder.15
This reflection comes from a new essay (included here) which Oana Avasilichioaei and Rhonda Mullins have translated as ‘And Suddenly I Find Myself Remaking the World.’ That this long essay is included in the Reader in full, albeit in the ‘Futures’ section, is itself a result of the literal and figurative dynamism of translation, and the generosity necessary to move a text through language to reach a range of readers. In it, we encounter affirmation, reaffirmation, and wonder. Wonder, ‘not because life is necessarily wonderful,’ writes Brossard, ‘but because life is complex, diverse, and mysterious enough for us to develop an attraction for it that is something other than instinctual.’16
Here, dear reader, you will find an excerpt from Barbara Godard’s translation of L’Amèr, ou Le chapitre effrité (1977), entitled These Our Mothers, or: The Disintegrating Chapter (1983), alongside a brand new translation of the same piece by Erín Moure and Robert Majzels entitled SeaMother, or The Bitteroded Chapter (2019). In pairing the works together, we want to foreground the way in which translation is an ongoing and active impulse. It is a generous and generative series of conversations that occur over time and through texts. We also see rich and discursive conversation occurring in Norwegian/French poet Caroline Bergvall’s English translation of ‘Typhon dru’ (1997) which we have placed alongside Moure’s and Majzels’ ‘Typhoon Thrum’ (2003). This generative energy is discernible in the intervals and repatterned rhythms of Brossard’s mutating texts through their retranslations. Mutations, which invite us to look more closely at ways a poem written in the 1980s, for instance, might be read in 2020. As Moure and Majzels remind us in the context of their re-translation of L’Amèr ou Le chapitre effrité, ‘[e]very translation reflects not just an original text, but also a reading. We chose to translate the “figural” series of poems from SeaMother, or The Bitteroded Chapter to see what voice and tenor would arise from a reading of these texts in 2019.’17
In the spirit of celebrating and highlighting the dialogue between the works, we have also included moments when we see Brossard in conversation with others as well as with herself, most notably in a rare piece of self-translation (‘Polynésie des yeux/Polynesya of the Eyes’) as well as a homolinguistic or French to French translation in a work called L’Aviva, which we have placed alongside Anne-Marie Wheeler’s English translation entitled Aviva. This particular work is interesting in that it is not quite a literal nor a normative translation but rather a dialogue between fragments that face each other in a format that recalls the layout of bilingual editions. With Wheeler’s English translation we get the complex interaction between the fragments that Brossard orchestrates in her original, and in addition to this textual play we also see the way the translator senses her way through the text as she recreates – indeed rewrites – the links and drifts that are (mis)aligned in the original.
Brossard has also inspired decades of what we’re calling transcollaborations – with Fred Wah in the transcreated ‘If Yes Seismal/Si Sismal’ and Mauve with Daphne Marlatt, both included in this book – where original and translation are offered together, face to face on the page. These two works offer examples of translation as a transformative reading practice. In Mauve, for example, Brossard has written a short poetic sequence in French that Marlatt converts into English as a creative counterpart. It is less useful here to think in terms of original and translation, or source and target text, than it is to think in terms of two languages, two minds converting the electrical impulses of language, as Marlatt herself observes in her essay on the work: ‘Translating Mauve became a remarkable illustration of this process, a reading of the depths of the drift, a writing running counter to it, so that i felt as if, in the process, my own cerebral cortext were being marked or written on. Mauve stands as a commentary on the act of reading and especially the act of translating’.18
Then there are the texts that walk across the tightrope of translation and straddle the line between translation and something else. We conceive of these as creative responses in an attempt to capture the creative and discursive engagements. Included here is Charles Bernstein’s response to Brossard’s self-translated piece ‘Polynésie des yeux/Polynesya of the Eyes,’ entitled ‘Polynesian Days,’ where familiar words and turns of phrases from the originals appear in drifts and collusions that capitalize on polyphonic and poetic inventiveness. Beyond Bernstein, Bronwyn Haslam’s ‘Silk Font 1,’ an anagrammatic translation of Brossard’s French prose poem ‘Soft Link 1,’ seemed an essential addition to the reader. Here is a text that operates with the (almost) impossible constraint of only using the same letters found in the original. In many ways, Haslam’s text captures something of the importance of poiesis to translation and, similarly, to Brossard’s work.
Mauve desert, mauve moods, mauve modes of movement. That’s the thing about horizons – we move ourselves to their shimmering potential. Desiring, we cross generations, inhabit cities and horizons beyond them, and, if we are fortunate, we translate